UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Moderator note: Magical Realist has been warned for trolling.

 

wegs:

What? Where did I lump you in with UFO believers?

Did you read anything I wrote? It looks like you skipped over most of it.

What's confusing about it?

You're critical of Mick West. I invited you to choose one of Mick West's "debunking" videos and point out the flaws that you see in his analysis. If you're just going to make generalised complaints about him being a debunker, that's not very helpful, for reasons I pointed out at some length.

Okay. So what?

He's trying to work out what the reported UFOs are. That's more than what any of the UFO believer crowd is doing.

If a UFO turns out to be mundane, then any claim that the UFO is the woo is debunked, obviously. If, on the other hand, the UFO cannot be positively IDed as something mundane, then it remains an open possibility that it's the woo. Finally, if there was ever actual evidence for the woo, then we could shut the case on the UFO by proclaiming the world's first confirmed discovery of alien craft, or whatever. That hasn't happened yet, as you know.

If you're worried about debunkers trying to debunk, maybe you should encourage the Believers to get off their lazy arses and gather some evidence to prove that their UFOs are the woo. Why should the skeptics do all the work? What's wrong with believers?

Did he give reasons for making that statement? Were his reasons correct or incorrect? Can you point to any errors in his analysis?

We don't know what "the Pentagon" thinks. Besides, the Pentagon is a whole bunch of different people. Who are you talking about, exactly?

We know that a couple of pilots thought that what they were seeing was out of the ordinary. Unlike West and yourself, however, they were making judgments in the heat of the moment, while concentrating on flying an aeroplane etc. You and I and Mick West have had lots of time to review the evidence, including things that the pilots did not know at the time.

Now, you might complain that one or two pilots still think what they saw was the woo, years after the events, having had an opportunity to review similar material that we have been reviewing here. That's fine; they are welcome to their opinions and beliefs, of course.

What I'm wondering is: why do you put so much stock in the pilots' opinions on what they saw? Do you think the pilots are infallible?

You're wondering who to trust, again. Stop doing that. It's not about deciding who to trust.

Did you listen to the reasons he gives? What do you think about the reasons? What is wrong with his analysis? Not the vibe - the actual details of what he did.

What if your motive is to try to work out what the UFO was?

You seem to be suggesting that Mick West is a dishonest fellow who would be willing to conceal or ignore relevant information so that he could falsely claim to have "debunked" a UFO sighting.

If you have identified something that West has ignored or told lies about, please let us know. We can work out whether Mick West really is as biased and terrible as the picture you paint of him.

Why have you made no attempt to actually detail your objections to his analyses, so far? Why can't you point to a single technical flaw in any of his analyses? And, if you can't point out any actual flaws, why do you persist in criticising him on the vague grounds of what you presume his motivations are?

Am I wrong, then?

Does that even matter? My previous post didn't talk about your belief or lack of belief in aliens. Did you read any of it?

What did I say about trust in my previous post? Did you read any of it?

Why not forget all the personality-based crap and just concentrate on looking at where the evidence leads for the UFO cases? Stop deciding who to trust or whose story makes you feel good, or whatever. Stop second-guessing people's motivations. Stop making unfounded personal accusations.

Of course there's room for that. In fact, West has posted a number of analyses of reported UFO in which he confirms, beyond reasonable doubt, that the reported UFO were advanced human-made technology (e.g. commercial jet airliners).

About what?

Don't forget that, probably, 90%+ of reported UFOs are easily identifiable as ordinary, "mundane" objects. For the other 10% (say) of UFOs that have not yet been identified, a lot of the time the problem is that the available evidence is just too poor to make it possible to make a positive ID with high confidence. There might be 1% of UFO cases that are interesting enough (in terms of the amount of data potentially, if not actually, available) to make them the subject of ongoing debate.

There's lots of things no one knows for sure. Nobody except me knows for sure what I ate for breakfast this morning. But if you had to guess, I think that ghost wheeties or UFO flakes will probably be pretty low on your list of likely possibilities.

The really funny thing is that even though there's a significant community of people who believe wholeheartedly that the aliens are here on Earth, not a single one of them is motivated enough to try to did up sufficient evidence to put their claim beyond reasonable doubt. Why is that, do you think?

Did you read anything in my previous post? You speak as if skeptics just knee-jerk say "It must be a weather balloon" when confronted with any UFO sighting. That's not what happens. Skeptics say UFOs are likely to be weather balloons when there is sufficient evidence to make the weather-balloon explanation a viable and plausible explanation. That is, they make a best-guess judgment after examining the available data, not before. You might like to compare and contrast this with modus operandi of a True Believer like Magical Realist, whose first statement in every case tends to be along the lines of stating that the UFO "cannot possibly be" a mundane object. He does that before he looks at the data, every time. In fact, he rarely looks at the data at all. He isn't interested in trying to work out what the UFO actually was, because he has decided well in advanced what it was (or, at least, what it wasn't).

Skeptics have been taking this stuff seriously for decades. I don't know why you think NASA is special, or likely to do a better job.

 

Magical Realist:

1. I have not accused wegs of believing in space aliens. There is nothing in my post to her about any such thing. You ought not tell lies.
2. I have told you before that I am not going to humour you by detailing your particular set of beliefs every time I mention that you believe in some kind of woo. I have told you that when I write "space aliens" in referring to your beliefs about UFOs, you can read that as code for whatever the woo is that you actually believe. That will include such things as super-advanced aquatic species from the bottom of the Atlantic, ghosts of Christmas past flying around in invisible jets, interdimensional beings from Colour Space, time travellers from a post-apocalyptic Earth, enchanted merry-go-rounds from the Telly Tubby dimension, or whatever. I am certainly not going to go through the list every time I mention that you believe in the woo.
3. If Yazata (or anybody else) believes in space aliens, that is really not problem in the context of any discussion about UFOs seen here on Earth, unless they start making claims that the UFOs seen here are the space aliens.
4. Stop telling lies and stop trolling.

Don't kid yourself that your silly woo beliefs are nuanced.

 

Regarding the 2014 Omaha sightings, important information has been ignored by Magical Realist, as usual.

The ship was operating right near an island where the US military had recently built an airstrip for the express purpose of testing new unmanned drones. The purpose of those drones: to pose as a "phantom fleet" of ships, with the aim of confusing an enemy as to numbers and locations of actual ships.

It is not unlikely that the Omaha and its radar system (essentially identical to commercially-available systems at the time) were used to test how well the new drones worked. Such a test would work better if the crew of the Omaha wasn't told in advance to expect to see a bunch of decoy drones on their radar and/or FLIRs.

That this is what occurred has not been publically confirmed by the US military. I'm sure you can think of a few reasons the military would not confirm this explanation.

 

Yes. It's discussed in the discussion thread on this case on Metabunk, which Magical Realist linked to above, of course without reading it first.