Sure, the smarter "skeptics" probably do believe in the reality of "unidentified aerial phenomena" in the raw sense of aerial phenomena that are currently unidentified. It's hard to deny that unidentified cases exist.
For example, all of the skeptics who have participated in this thread "believe in the reality of unidentified aerial phenomena".
The more fundamental disagreement seems to me to revolve around the preexisting assumptions that people bring to the discussion regarding what kind of accounts, descriptions and explanations of the most puzzling of these unidentified aerial phenomena that they are willing to accept.
Accounts that actually evidence something extraordinary would be nice, for starters, if you want to assert the extraordinary.
Note: by "extraordinary", here, I don't just mean the fact that rare circumstances exist in which people see things in the sky that are difficult to readily identify after the fact; I mean "extraordinary" as in little green men flying spaceships, or interdimensional time travellers from Zarquon IV, or the ghost of Great Aunt Agatha flying a glowing sphere of light. Because, let's face it, these are the kinds of claims that UFO believers typically offer up as if they were explanations for which at least some positive evidence could be found.
Earlier in this thread, even my own rather innocuous "something seems to have been physically present and I have no idea what it was" came under concerted attack over and over.
Probably, you were unable to establish - with reference to appropriate evidence - that there was something physically present, in the relevant case. Therefore, any conclusion that something was physically present would be premature, and criticisms of exaggerated claims of that nature would be quite justified.
I don't think anybody in this thread has disputed that people reported seeing things in the sky they couldn't identify. Establishing that those things were "physically present" requires the gathering - and presentation - of appropriate evidence in support of the claim.
In regards to the Fravor incident, I suggested that birds might have been physically present, and/or unidentified jet aircraft. You didn't seem to think much of those ideas, for some reason. Perhaps you had something else in mind?
Presumably I was supposed to lose my interest in the case in question, in happy confidence that it was probably just birds or whales or radar defects, all come together in some "comedy of errors".
No. You were supposed to try to find some convincing evidence that the things you allege were "physically present" were something out of the ordinary. If that's your assertion.
If, as you now claim, you are only saying that you have no idea what the UFOs were, then the story stops right there. You have no idea? Fine. Pardon the rest of us if we want to try to examine the evidence to see whether a more definitive conclusion can be reached about the identities of the reported phenomena.
Presumably I was supposed to be willing to ridicule anyone that thought there might be something more happening. So...
If
you think "something more" might be happening, you ought to specify (a) what you think the "something more" might be, and (b) what facts support your conjectures about the identity of the "something more".
In other words, you are obliged to present evidence in support of
your claims - whatever they may be.
Before you start up again ... yes, if I claim the UFO was actually a bird, then I need to support that claim using actual evidence, just like you would need to support any claim you made about the UFO being an alien spacecraft.
But I haven't claimed that the UFO was a bird. I
have said that some of the evidence seems to be consistent with a sighting of a bird; nobody has refuted that. That doesn't mean the UFO has been identified as a bird; it just means that the bird hypothesis hasn't been ruled out yet.
Similarly, you might argue that the evidence is consistent with an alien spacecraft. Nobody has ruled that out, but the alien spacecraft hypothesis hasn't been confirmed either.
There is a quite important difference between the bird hypothesis and the alien spaceship hypothesis, which you seem eager to overlook. We
know that birds actually exist. We have many confirmed prior sightings of birds flying above water, in which birds were positively IDed. Alien spaceships? Not so much. We have yet to find a
single confirmed instance of an alien spaceship,
anywhere.
This means that the claim that this particular UFO sighting was of a bird is a plausible claim, on its face, even before we dig into the evidence, while the claim that this particular UFO sighting was of an alien spaceship is a quite extraordinary claim.
You know what they say about extraordinary claims? They demand extraordinary evidence.
The major problem for the UFO believers in the Fravor case is that nothing they are presenting amounts to moderate evidence for alien spaceships, let alone the sort of extraordinary evidence any reasonable person should demand for this sort of thing.
If I tell you there's a hammer in my garage, you'll probably take my word for it. If I tell you there's a dragon in my garage, you'll probably be skeptical, and rightly so. Think about why this is.
Must all 'UAP' cases reduce without remainder to what Sciforums calls "mundane" explanations? To explanations in terms of concepts and beliefs that are everyday, familiar, already-accepted and uninteresting?
"Must" implies teleology, which is a mistake.
I, for one, will be most excited and intrigued if good evidence is ever presented that any UAP is an alien spaceship. All I ask for is sufficient evidence to convince me.
Has Magical Realist convinced you that the Fravor UFO was an alien craft piloted by Lizard Men from the bottom of the Atlantic? If so, I'd say you've set your evidential bar way too low, for such an extraordinary claim. I'd have to wonder how many other claims you would accept as true, based on the same kind of flimsy evidence.
Or should investigators leave open the possibility that something extraordinary (in the extra-ordinary sense) might be happening in some of these cases? And not constantly try tooth-and-nail to dismiss the very possibility, often by ridiculing it in the most insulting terms?
The Yazata Big Lie again.
Nobody has dismissed the very possibility blah blah blah. You know this. Why tell that lie?
While you might feel insulted, I would venture that it's because you've been caught out in a repeated lie and you're maybe feeling a bit shamefaced about that. That's on you, not on us skeptics. The solution is simple: stop telling the lie. And stop trying to shoot the messenger who exposed the lie for what it is. Take some responsibility, man.
If we dismiss what our opponents say as "woo", assigning it a-priori close to zero possibility of being true, then any speculation that we produce might seem to us to have a higher likelihood of being correct. Without any evidence that the speculation is correct even being necessary. Horses vs unicorns.
Without evidence,
everything is speculation and guesswork and hypothesis. Talk about
a priori assumptions all you want; you'll never pin anything down unless you gather some actual evidence. All you can hope for is to lock yourself in an endless Bayesian loop.
