UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

OK, in crayons then:

Don't post on science forums until you have learned grade school critical thinking skills.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Is that another made up rule? Since when are you the rule-maker for Sci Forums?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

You are expected to exercise critical thinking skills. It's in the site rules. Please review them.

It's up to you to learn up if you missed it in grade school.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

You have no idea what critical thinking is. It's just a made up term for thinking and believing like I think and believe.

“Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

 

And that misapprehension is why you are 60 infractions deep.
Facebook will suit you better.

We're done here.

 

You really are desperate to get rid of me aren't you? You really should ask yourself why...

 

To iterate, lest you think that's actually true:

 

The green light which lit up a helicopter with 4 people on board and apparently caused it to shift position at a speed which would have killed those 4 people, but didn't

Never did get any response, analysis, discussion, critical thinking, etc etc from you about that event

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

There was a time when I didn't post to you because of your trolling. As for that particular case, I remember discussing it thoroughly with several posters here. It stands as one the most compelling ufo/military encounters ever reported.

 

Strange never did get reported or warned about such activity

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I don't report trolling as some of the biggest offenders of that offense in this forum are the moderators themselves.

 

As I said earlier, MR (and Q-reeus) sometimes propose their own hypotheses as to what some of the things seen in the sky might be. I don't recall them ever announcing that they actually know that their ideas are the correct explanations. If they did, I would have to disagree with them. They seem to me to just be speculations that seem to have the advantage of addressing some perplexing aspects of the phenomena under discussion. I don't see anything wrong with proposing hypotheses, provided that it's clear that they are speculative.

That's precisely what the self-styled "skeptics" are doing, after all. For example, they imagine that the tic-tacs might have been cavorting whales, flights of birds, poorly performing equipment, operator errors, misperceptions... all without any knowledge that the events were attributable to any of those things. Just somebody's speculation that they might have been. With little or no explanation of how all of these various faults, each with very different etiologies, all came together and cohered so as to form the false perception of a UAP. And that kind of speculation somehow turns into an assertion (in places like Skeptical Inquirer or on Mick West's Metabunk website) that the original observation has been thoroughly "debunked". But again, I don't see anything wrong with "skeptics" proposing their own hypotheses (as long as it's kept in mind that they are merely their personal opinion, speculative hypotheses and not some kind of final truth on the matter).

Once again, I think that the most intelligent course to take is to simply say Something seems to have been happening and we don't know what it was. Simple, defensible, doesn't get out ahead of the evidence. Premature leaps in either direction (It's just familiar things in unfamiliar configuration!! It's paranormal or extraterrestrial!!) are simply that, speculative leaps at this early point. In my opinion that kind of premature speculation has very little persuasive force.

Though I have to admit that as I said in my response to Sarkus, my feeling that we understand far less about the reality around us than most people would like to admit, makes me feel affinity to those who want to think (with some justification) that there might well be new and interesting phenomena showing themselves in some of these cases. But my own pre-existing worldview (monist and metaphysically naturalist in a very broad sense) makes me shy away from many of the things Q-reeus and MR say. That's where I'm coming from. I'm not prepared to completely endorse either side in this little war. But I most decidedly want to promote intelligent open-minded discussion. (It's like spitting into the wind here on Sciforums.)

Where I think that this thread goes off the rails over and over is the abuse and invective with which other people's ideas are attacked. People who disagree are not only dismissed as being wrong (often with little justification for that dismissal), not only are they charaterized as being intellectually inferior and logically deficient, they are also being condemned in some moral sense. (Everything in our day and age has been moralized.) So we have the very peculiar concept of "woo", which apparently doesn't just mean ideas that we personally disagree with, or even ideas that are wrong in some more objective sense, but some kind of moral evil that must be driven from the face of the earth. (Video game first-person-shooter epistemology.) We never get an explanation for the underlying authoritarian impulse, for why it's so important that everyone think alike.

There's lots of talk these days about "diversity" making us stronger somehow (that's never explained) but if there's any underlying truth to it, then I'd say that intellectual diversity is the most important kind of diversity of them all. The openness to a range of different opinions about things. Today's intellectually intolerant climate is very reminiscent of the old religious missionary impulse and may have similar psychological origins. I suppose that's because these positions that people are taking are based not on intelligent open-minded examination of the available evidence, but rather in defense of their already-entrenched worldviews. That's what this thread seems to me to be about. It's why people seem to be so emotionally wound up by the fact that there are people here who don't think precisely as they do.

 

The argument against something because it is "woo" seems to me fundamentally tied to the fallacy of incredulity. That something seems so mysterious or unexplainable to you that it can't possibly be true. Afterall, who has ever heard of an unexplained phenomena? It must therefore be woo.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I would've thought that any serious student of science would know better than that by now.

 

↑'' I don't recall them ever announcing that they actually know that their ideas are the correct explanations.''↑

That ↑ was only 20 days ago.
Notice MR stresses the ''ARE'', there's no doubt for MR about what ufos are.

 

Why "unfortunately"? Admitting we don't know something is the first prerequisite to our learning more about it.

The case isn't closed as far as I know.

Hoax? Maybe, if the purpose of the "tic-tac" flap was to make potential enemies (China, Russia, whoever) worry that the US has lots of undisclosed technology up its sleeve.

We might learn more and we might not.

1. If the "tic-tacs" were some American cutting-edge technology "black program" (a program that officially doesn't exist) that was being tested against the radars and aircraft of a carrier battle group, then I doubt if we will hear a whole lot more. They might or might not be happy that this much leaked. Unhappy because it cast more light on the existence of their secret project than they might like, but happy because the very possibility of the US possessing breakthrough technology will have a deterrent effect on potential enemies like China.

1a. If they want the existence of this hypothetical thing to remain totally secret, then I'd expect heavier security classifications for encounters and tougher penalties for anyone who makes the encounters public.

1b. If they want to keep the technical details secret but want the possibility of these hypothetical things to leak to potential adversaries for deterrent effect, then I expect more tantalizing reports to leak.

2. If the UAPs turn out to be something potentially more threatening (actual aircraft with breakthrough technology from some as-yet unknown foreign or more exotic source) then we will see the military go to a higher threat posture if the things reappear.

3. If the UAPs turn out to be some as yet unknown natural phenomenon, we will probably see more attempts to study it whenever the things reappear. We would likely see efforts to collaborate with academia which would inevitably leak.

4. If they judge that unknown things in the sky represent a danger to air traffic, even if it's just drones and aerial junk, we will see the FAA taking a lot more interest.

5. And the "skeptics" might turn out to have been right (they can simultaneously be assholes and still be right) that nothing interesting was physically present.

5a. A great deal might depend on whether all this was indeed a hoax designed to make potential adversaries worry that the US has devastating new technology up its sleeve, in which case tantalizing leaks about exotic encounters will continue as in 1b. above.

5b. The Sciforums "skeptics" were right that anyone who took any of this seriously was intellectually inferior and logically deficient. In which case I'd expect a big "debunking" report and continuing ridicule and career damage for anyone making these kind of reports.

The UAP task force hasn't been disbanded. It just released a preliminary assessment of their findings to that point because congress told them they had to. It's operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and makes use of the military's and the various intelligence agencies' assets and capabilities as the need arises.

While they are unlikely to tell the public very much (these kind of people classify their own bowel movements) as I suggested above, we can probably discern a great deal about their thinking by how the military and civilian aviation agencies behave from here. Most of that won't be visible to the public, but some of it will be.

 

How does my belief that ufos are in the every least an otherworldly phenomena constitute a threat to me? How does it endanger me to reject the debunkers' assumption that all ufos are merely mistaken mundane objects like flocks of birds or the planet Venus? What's at stake for you here, that you should put so much energy and effort to prove ufos aren't real? Your emotional and moralistic reaction to me and Qreeus is well nigh sanctimonious and is way in excess of what it should be. Why all the melodrama James? What do you think you are saving us from? If we don't agree with you, so what? Life goes on, and everybody is happy. Right?

 

My bold above. ''ALL''
Your way (MR) is not to assume ufos are craft, but ''ARE'' craft with no assumption about it.

Others here, like to look at the offered evidence before assuming they ''ARE'' are craft.

 

I'm not prepared to go that far, MR. 'Anomalous', perhaps. That's my chosen word. "Inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected." They are obviously that. But calling them "otherworldly", if taken literally, gets too far out in front of the evidence and just provides ammo to your critics. Calling them "craft" creates similar problems for you.

I don't want to think of this as an either-or choice between just those two alternatives: otherworldly-craft or nothing-of-interest. To me the unknown is an unbounded set. We don't know how big it is (It contains most of the universe's facts and its deepest principles), we don't know where its outer limits are, and simply by definition we don't know what it contains (That's unknown). So there might be any number of possibilities making themselves felt that we haven't even thought of yet.

People in general don't like it when others believe things that they don't believe. Just look at the history of religions for abundant evidence of that (or contemporary politics).

And there's always been a psychological comfort in believing that one has reality all figured out, such that anything that at first seems surprising or anomalous can quickly be reduced to the familiar and assigned to an existing conceptual category. ('Oh, that's what it is!').

What's more there's undoubtedly a psychological attraction to talking down to people, to setting them straight, to assuming the position of superiority in interpersonal relationships.

 

So what? What do you think they are? Informed speculation is welcome with me.