In my last post, I pointed out that the
Nimitz contact was observed by the cruiser's radar and by the airborne E-2 radar. When pilots of aircraft were vectored to the location of the radar sighting, they visually saw both an object hovering in the air (Fravor) and/or water turbulence (Fravor and the Marine). Pilots of aircaft that were subsequently launched also visually observed the flying object, they chased it (it easily eluded them) and cameras on their aircraft recorded it in visual and IR.
And there's not only that Pacific Ocean sequence of events in 2004, there appears to have been another very similar sequence of events over the Atlantic in 2015, that seemingly also involved radar, visual sightings and camera images. The biggest difference communicated in the public accounts of the 2015 sightings seems to be that multiple objects were observed.
My personal opinion is that if something reflects radar energy, is observable both visually and by cameras, and seemingly has physical effects on its surroundings (the water turbulence), then it seems reasonable (to me anyway) to hypothesize that something was physically there.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT ACTUALLY WAS.
I have
NEVER argued that it was space aliens. (In this thread or any other thread.) I do hold that open as a possibility, but would give it a fairly low probability in my own estimation. My own speculations run towards some unknown and highly secret experimental aircraft type. (Although these things' observed performance seems to me to be far in excess of the current aeronautical engineering state-of-the-art.)
My argument in my last post was that arguments have repeatedly been made that each observational modality (radar, visual, cameras) might have flaws (however speculative and fanciful those flaws might be).
But the likelihood that all of those flaws coming together and co-occurring at the same time and place in just such a way so as the whole sequence of errors coheres into what appears to be a single physical event seems very remote (to me anyway). By far the simplest and most straight-forward hypothesis was that something was physically there that the radar detected, the pilots saw and their cameras recorded.
That's what I'm going with.
What I'm doing there btw, is an accepted piece of "scientific method". Corroborating evidence makes initial reports stronger (certainly it strengthens their objectivity) and that's even more so when different lines of investigation come to the same conclusion. For example, take evolutionary biology. Fossil evidence might give us some idea of when an extinct lifeform once lived (from stratigraphy). Now suppose that the molecular geneticists make their own estimate based on their own methods,
molecular clocks or whatever. If the two estimates, arrived at by very different means, end up reasonably close, we can say that they
confirm each other. Or suppose that visual astronomers observe what appears to be a supernova in a particular part of the sky. And suppose that the x-ray astronomers observe an x-ray burst in the same place at the same time, consistent with a supernova. We would normally interpret that as raising the probability that a supernova in fact occurred. Now we can obviously argue that stratigraphy, molecular clocks, and visual and x-ray astronomical observations are all subject to their own sorts of experimental errors. Errors that might be even more serious and likely than the kind of errors that might effect radars, visual sightings and camera images. My point is that
corroboration in multiple modalities tends to reduce the likelihood that an observation report is the result of a particular error in a particular observational modality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience
I think that's a very strong argument.
The response to it seems to be (at least in part) that the likelihood of multiple observational modalities suffering simultaneous faults (experimental errors) in just such a way that they all converge on what appears to be a single phenomenon is still more likely than the advent of "little green men".
Of course that's foolishness
if we don't know beforehand what the probability of alien visitations actually is. If aliens are in fact visiting the Earth, then the probability of them doing so would be 1, certainty (ex hypothesi). If they aren't, then it would be zero (ex hypothesi). Assuming a-priori in an argument that the likelihood is zero is simply an expression of the (grievously misnamed) "skeptical" premise that alien visitations can't be happening. Which is obviously a doctrine of one's own dismissive faith regarding such things.
It's also a red-herring since the thesis being defended here
isn't that aliens are visiting the Earth, it's the weaker proposition that some real physical unidentified flying object(s) were observed by these Navy radars and aviators. Aliens would only be one hypothesis as to what these UFOs were. Unknown aircraft types would be another. There may be more possibilities that I can't think of at the moment. A whole cascade of errors remains a possibility too (Joe Nickell's "comedy of errors" theory) though it's one that I'd assign a fairly low likelihood for the reasons outlined above.
Bottom line: I think that these reports are fascinating and point to a likelihood of real physical events out in the objective world that's high enough that
curiosity is warranted. Not a dismissive knee-jerk reaction of insults and little one line posts filled with nothing but idiot sarcasm. (No, that's
not "science". Science
isn't simply a matter of defending the faith.)
