UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

DaveC426913 said:
That moment may never come.
It may never be identified as an aircraft.
Thus it remains a UFO.
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That moment will never come because a ufo cannot be identified as a familiar object. A flying metallic disk or a 40 ft long tic tac are NOT identifiable as familiar objects. Hence it is a ufo.
 
Magical Realist said:
That moment will never come because a ufo cannot be identified as a familiar object.
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This is false.

True, it hasn't been, and we gave up trying. But that does not rule out the - quite possible - likelihood that it is, indeed, a familiar object seen in conditions not suitable to identifying it. See below.

Magical Realist said:
A flying metallic disk or a 40 ft long tic tac are NOT identifiable as familiar objects.
Hence it is a ufo.
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Yes.

The fact that they are not identifiable as familiar objects does not mean they are not familiar objects, we just can;t identify them as such.
Yet they are indeed still UFOs.

That's the nature of one-time, non-repeatable events. You can't go back and say "Huh. Turns out, when looked at from this other angle, it did have wings."

Again, no pilot or group of experts can truthfully say "It did not have wings", they can only say "I did not see any wings (from my vantage points, miles away, where we could only see one angle, and only for a short time, etc.)"
 
Again, no pilot or group of experts can truthfully say "It did not have wings", they can only say "I did not see any wings (from my vantage points, miles away, where we could only see one angle, and only for a short time, etc.)"
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Yes they can. It only takes a few moments of observation to know if a flying object has wings or not. We can, iow, ascertain factual states in the world thru sight.
 
The fact that they are not identifiable as familiar objects does not mean they are not familiar objects, we just can;t identify them as such.
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Yes it does. There's no such thing as a familiar object that cannot be identified as a familiar object. Therefore it is a ufo, or an unfamiliar object.
 
All this polemical effort to turn ufos into ifos seems rather desperate to me. It's like the entire body of evidence and reports of ufos being craft that are beyond our present technology doesn't even exist. 40 ft long tic tac and metallic disks and black triangles never really seen at all because someday they may be identifiable as familiar objects! :)
 
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"Overbye highlighted that some of these accounts are obtained from respected observers such as military pilots. However, he cautioned, "as modern psychology and neuroscience have established, the senses are an unreliable portal to reality, whatever that is."
I don't believe that's true at all. In fact it sounds rather stupid.

Of course the senses are reliable. We rely on them every day of our lives, we couldn't live our lives if we didn't.
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It's just another feeble attempt by skeptics to undermine the accounts of ufos given by eyewitnesses. It's often paired with that other skeptical objection that all these accounts are just "anecdotal", as if people describing what they saw is de facto questionable and unreliable. Ofcourse that throws into doubt just about everything people tell us they saw and experienced in the course of normal everyday conversation. Imagine someone at work describing what they did over the weekend and a skeptic there objecting to it all because "the senses are so unreliable" and "your account is merely anecdotal".
It's an example of how out of touch the skeptic view really is, always demanding evidence and scientific peer consensus even in the face of someone's own firsthand experience.
 
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Magical Realist said:
It's an example of how out of touch the skeptic view really is, always demanding evidence and scientific peer consensus even in the face of someone's own firsthand experience.
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Of course, that's because there are a lot of crazy people who say all kinds of crazy things they consider factual.
 
Magical Realist said:
Yes they can. It only takes a few moments of observation to know if a flying object has wings or not.
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Usually that's the case. It's not always the case.
UFO accounts are about the "not always the case".

Magical Realist said:
We can, iow, ascertain factual states in the world thru sight.
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We can't say 'there is no dog in that house' merely by looking at the house from the outside.
What we can say is 'we cannot detect if there is a dog in that house'.

Just like we can't say 'that thing has no wings' without being able to examine it in sufficient detail.

You know this perfectly well. You are simply being argumentative now.
 
Magical Realist said:
There's no such thing as a familiar object that cannot be identified as a familiar object.
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Really?

Here's an object.

Familiar? Unidentifiable?

How many wheels does it have?
Can you say that 'it has no wheels'?
Or can you say 'you can't see any wheels'?
Can you say for certain it is not a familiar object? Yet you can't identify it?
thingy.jpg
 
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Magical Realist said:
That object is identifiable to anyone physically present to it.
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1] How do you know that?

2] That same claim could be made about any items in the UFO category - if anyone was physically present enough in the right viewing conditions to get a sufficient look.
 
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1] How do you know that?
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The sheer ratio of the number of identifiable objects in the world compared to the number of unidentifiable objects in the world..

That same claim could be made about any items in the UFO category - if anyone was physically present enough in the right viewing conditions to get a sufficient look.
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Most ufo accounts are by physically present witnesses who actually saw the object. Hence their description as metallic discs and 40 ft long tic tacs and spinning tops and black triangles, etc. Iow, as ufos.
 
Magical Realist said:
The sheer ratio of the number of identifiable objects in the world compared to the number of unidentifiable objects in the world..
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In other words, going on your preconception of what the world seems to be like - as opposed to the evidence before you.

You don't need to examine evidence; you've already decided what they ought to be.

Got it.
 
Magical Realist said:
Most ufo accounts are by physically present witnesses who actually saw the object...
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For a few seconds, at an unknown range, in poor lighting conditions, from one angle, etc etc.

If there's any doubt about how incredibly poor the viewing conditions are of "most UFO accounts", just look at the thousands of pics, virtually all of which are brief, blurry shots, with virtually no range information, poorly lit, and from one angle.

You can't have it both ways.

You can't offer up terrible pics that offer only a few scraps of information about an incident and then turn around and say "Well, if people were there and saw it, they'd know for sure."
They took pics. The pics don't tell for sure what the things are. The viewers didn't get any better views.
 
The viewers didn't get any better views.
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That's nonsense. You're saying a live and moving 3D observation of a ufo by a present witness is no better than a 2D still picture of a ufo? ?You're saying those pilots' experience of the 40 ft long tic tac zipping around and evading pursuit is no better than a photo of the ufo?
 
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