The (greviously misnamed) "skeptics" seem to specialize in deconstructing individual pieces of evidence.
What skeptics do is to take an overall, objective look at all the available evidence. That can certainly involving looking at certain pieces of evidence in an "in depth" way. For example, in regards to the Pentagon infrared videos taken from fighter jets, a number of skeptics have carefully analysed the footage and carried out various analyses to try to determine such basic facts as: how far away are the objects in the videos from the camera (or how far from the ground/water surface)? How fast are they moving? How do the effects of the motions of the aircraft and/or the camera itself impact on the apparent motion of the objects in the videos? How do characteristics of the camera affect the quality of its images and the features seen in them?
These are all sensible, basic questions that anybody with an honest interest in the truth of the matter should be investigating. The problem is that the UFO nutcase brigade almost never bother to do this kind of basic homework. They approach these things backwards. Their
first assumption is that the object is probably an alien spacecraft or some other exotic thing. Then they try to find evidence to support that assumption. The result is that they often "deduce" things like impossible-seeming accelerations or speeds and the like, when the raw data itself supports no such conclusion. They also, notoriously, don't stick to just the facts that are backed by evidence. Instead, we get, from the start, wild speculation piled upon wild speculation.
You seem to have some issue with skeptics, to the extent that you claim they are "greviously misnamed". Probably you should sort out what your complaint is about skeptics. I'd be happy to discuss it with you, because it seems to me that you may be operating under a set of misconceptions about what skepticism is and about what skeptics do.
They speculate about what might have caused a similar result to the one reported, without providing any conclusive evidence that their speculations are in fact the correct explanation.
Of course.
You're aware, of course, that the UFO brigade similarly never provide conclusive evidence that any of their speculations are correct. So both sides are on an even footing, right?
Wrong! The skeptics start by assuming that the most likely explanation for a UFO/UAP is
not going to be something extraordinary and heretofore unknown to science. That does not mean that they rule out such explanations
a priori. It means only that, as they say,
extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
The UFO crowd often posit a false dichotomy which says that if a sighting is unexplained then it must be extraordinary (aliens, supernatural, what have you). But that's crazy talk. We can only conclude that an object is extraordinary once it has been shown to be so, based on the weight of evidence. Nothing is extraordinary by default. The onus is on the "believers" to demonstrate the extraordinary, not on the skeptics to "debunk" the believers' faulty assumptions.
A rational person believes something is true when they have sufficient evidence to convince them it is true, not before. UFO nuts will insist that they are rational people, but their personal evidential bar is often set so ludicrously low that they will be willing to believe that just about
any fuzzy blob in a photograph or video is an alien spaceship, often without doing any real investigation at all. Merely seeing a blob clears their evidential bar for believing in the extraordinary and the implausible.
They seem to assume that military radars and sensors are hugely unreliable and that military aviators and sensor operators are fools.
No. They assume that military personnel are human beings who can make mistakes like the rest of us. They assume that radars and sensors are instruments that are not perfect and whose readings are subject to human interpretation.
Of course, on further investigation, it can sometimes turn out that radars and sensors
were faulty, and/or that certain operators
are fools (or liars or whatever).
They ignore entirely that in a majority of these cases, observations were obtained by multiple observers or through multiple modalities (radar, visual, infrared etc.) such that an elementary error of perspective or a spurious instrument reading become far less likely explanations for the entire sighting.
That is certainly not true for the majority of UFO/UAP sightings.
You need to realise, also, that most such sightings turn out to have either straightforward explanations (the person saw the planet Venus and thought it was a UFO) or there simply is insufficient reliable evidence to make any definitive determination about what was seen (or even if anything was really seen).
The difficult cases are usually things on the edge of detectability of the relevant instrumentation, or cases where sighting conditions were unusual in certain ways, or cases where witness collusion or fraud is possible but difficult to confirm.
The bottom line from the recent Pentagon report is that the US military hasn't got to the bottom of some of the sightings that have been reported. But it's a very long way from "we don't know what it was" to "it was an alien spacecraft/extradimensional visitor/advanced Russian aircraft of an unknown type" or whatever.
To conclude, for example, that some non-American nation is secretly in possession of amazingly advanced aircraft with inertial drives that can defy gravity and G forces, is to jump to a premature and unreliable conclusion, based on overall weak evidence. Also, just thinking about what
else is known about the technological capabilities of other countries, it is unlikely in the extreme that Russia, say, could have leapfrogged the US in aerial technology to the kind of extent being breathlessly suggested by some.
None of this is to say that it's
impossible, of course. Skeptics ask only for evidence sufficient to support the claims that are made. If you think that is asking too much, then you're just not a very good critical thinker, I'm afraid.
