Yazata,
(Did you read my posts #5396-8? If not, perhaps you should.)
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.
They are notoriously cagey about
their ideas. To tell the truth, I think they are secretly aware that their "theories" about what the UFOs really are come across as a bit childishly ludicrous, when exposed to the light of day, so they prefer to keep them hidden in the background. From time to time, they haven't been able to restrain themselves, though, so we have some idea about what their beliefs are, in a general sense. Another observation I would make is that they probably don't
want to solidify their own beliefs too much, because anything too specific becomes easier to debunk. There's a self-protection mechanism built into the way they think about the woo.
Don't forget, too, that regardless of how much they protest that they don't
know what UFOs are, they are quite happy to spend most of their time insisting on what UFOs
are not. First and foremost, UFOs aren't allowed to be anything "mundane". I've seen Magical Realist go (metaphorically) red in the face insisting that one of his UFO tales has not been debunked, even in the face of quite overwhelming evidence. Do you remember his song and dance tantrum about the Japanese ghost on the beach?
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.
Try to keep in mind what is being "debunked" by the skeptics. It is
not the general idea that UFOs could be alien visitors. That idea is impossible to debunk and no skeptic worth his salt would attempt to do it. What is being debunked, case by case, are unsupportable claims that
this particular UFO is an alien spaceship, or, more generally, that this particular UFO
must be something other than a mundane object, a natural occurrence, a mistake in perception, etc. It is the continual
over-reach by the True Believers that is being "debunked". The breathless wide-eyed credulity to any and every claim of the "paranormal". The foundationless belief that all UFO cases are "compelling" proof of whatever woo the Believer has already decided to believe is real.
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).
Skeptics tend to use scientific language and methodology. In science, there is almost never a "final truth" on any matter, so scientists typically couch their language in terms of levels of confidence, and so do skeptics. The conclusions that skeptics often come to, following an extensive investigation into a UFO sighting, is that the
most probable explanation is such-and-such, from among the various
possible explanations (which necessarily include all the "woo" explanations, by the way). Typically, the most difficult "paranormal" cases involve very poor data, or just a lack of relevant data points. That can mean that skeptics have to settle for listing
possible explanations, without necessarily being able to determine that any one is the "most probable" from among competing possibilities. Lots of "hard" cases end up as "unsolved due to lack of sufficient evidence pointing towards one explanation". But that's just fine. It is only the True Believers who are constantly demanding (and claiming) absolute certainty. Because they already decided what the thing was (or, at the very least, what long list of things it
couldn't possibly be) upon first hearing the story; no investigation required!
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.
It turns out, though, that a very large number of cases are actually amenable to investigation, which can turn up persuasive new evidence. True Believers tend to want to avoid such investigations, because they are afraid that the conclusions they jumped to at the start might be "debunked".
I'm not prepared to completely endorse either side in this little war. But I most decidedly want to promote intelligent open-minded discussion.
Can you honestly say that you think MR's approach to UFOs - or any of the myriad other kinds of woo he believes in - is remotely open-minded or intelligent? He spends his life with his head stuck determinedly in the sand. As for Q-reeus, he goes into an incandescent rage when his beliefs are challenged, making nasty personal attacks on those whom he sees as threatening to prick his bubble.
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.
Some of the people you are talking about have been here
for years. They are well known. After so much time observing them, the only viable explanations for their behaviours are (a) they really are too stupid to be able to think critically about their beliefs, or (b) they are intellectually dishonest interlocutors, willing to tell lies and to troll to protect their fragile positions and egos.
Believe me, I sympathise with your view that it would be great if everybody would just play nice with one another and discuss things in an atmosphere of mutual respect yada yada yada. Those kinds of good intentions are embedded in our site posting guidelines. They are what we should always aim at. Unfortunately, though, there are plenty of people who don't want to play by those rules. After you spend a sufficiently long time interacting with somebody to learn that they are essentially a dishonest troll or an immature crybaby or similar, you are inevitably faced with a choice between several options, including: (1) just stop interacting with that person and let them go on their merry way looking for unwary new victims on which to ply their wares; (2) Take off the kid gloves and start trying to hold them responsible for their words and actions, like adults; (3) don't feed the trolls, but be sure to warn others who might be victimised by them or their propaganda; (4) exclude them from your community.
Being a dishonest troll
is a moral failing, and there's nothing wrong with morally condemning trolls in my book.
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.
The moral problem is not the woo itself, but with what people do with it. If the woo is just a private hobby - which it certainly can be for many people - then it only poses a threat to the believer in the false things. But when the woo is proselytised and (as it often is) monetised,
that can and does cause measurable harms to other people - potentially to very large groups of people. Right now in the United States you have large groups of people pushing false conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and the illegitimacy of the current administration; that is actually an underrated threat to your democracy. Similarly, over the past year, the promotion of anti-vaccine woo has led directly to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Don't kid yourself that this stuff is just harmless fun. Some of it
is a moral evil, and we should condemn it.
