Yazata:
The most interesting UFO cases are the one that don't have this kind of "obvious" explanation. (It's also worth noting that what is obvious to somebody familiar with astronomy is often not at all obvious to people who are not familiar with stargazing.)
UFO cases that are very resistant to explanation, despite there being apparently quite a lot of evidence, are, when you think about, more likely to require a complicated explanation than a simple one. We should not be surprised if a full explanation turns out to be multi-faceted in such cases.
To give you an analogous example, I sometimes watch the TV show Air Crash Investigations. That is partly because I like how it takes you through what is initially a mystery - a plane has crashed - and reveals the evidence and reasoning that leads investigators to an explanation of the disaster. In the case of airliner crashes, it is, of course, vitally important that the reasons for a crash are understood, because that knowledge can and does help prevent future crashes.
Modern air travel is very safe, in part because of the findings of investigations into crashes and the steps taken to prevent any reccurrence. But we still see crashes.
What I always find interesting is that, mostly, airliner crashes don't have a single cause. Usually, at the end of an investigation, it turns out that the crash resulted from a confluence of factors. The pilots were tired, and the plane had maintenance issues, and a vital circuit-breaker had been switched off, and the circuit that was switched off happened to also switch off another important warning system in the cockpit, and the plane was delayed and the pilots rushed through some procedures, and the procedures weren't written down clearly in the instruction manual anyway, and the airline company was losing money because of delays so the pilots were under pressure to stay on schedule, and so it goes on.
So, my question is: why should we expect a puzzling UFO incident to have a single, simple, explanation? If it had such an explanation, it wouldn't be puzzling in the first place.
As I pointed out previously, I think we need to be careful in assuming there is a single cause of the multiple observations by different witnesses in this particular case. That might seem like a reasonable assumption, and I think it's a reasonable starting assumption for an investigation. But if such an assumption does not lead to a positive identification, then we should be willing to look further afield.
It's like in the air crash situation. It looks like pilot error - that they flew the plane into the ground on takeoff. Buy why would they do that? What factors led to that outcome? We shouldn't stop at the point of blaming it on "pilot error", because something important might have led to the pilots making an excusable error in the first place, and other pilots could make the same error in future if we don't get to the bottom of it.
It also raises the question as to what is a simple explanation, anyway. Is it really a simple explanation to say the tic tac was an alien spaceship? That explanation comes with a whole lot of complicated baggage. Where did the aliens come from? What were they doing? Why were they doing it? How did they do it?
My main point here is that nobody here has presented any "compelling" evidence that this was aliens, or even any kind of "craft".
The vast majority of UFO sightings can be "solved" fairly quickly. Take sightings of the planet Venus, for example. Astronomers tend to get asked about that a lot. "I was looking up the other night and I saw this really bright blue light in the sky" blah blah blah "What could it have been?". A few questions about the precise location of light light in the sky, the the location of the observer, the direction the observer was looking, and the time of the observation, are often enough to provide a positive ID of the planet Venus with high certainty.
The most interesting UFO cases are the one that don't have this kind of "obvious" explanation. (It's also worth noting that what is obvious to somebody familiar with astronomy is often not at all obvious to people who are not familiar with stargazing.)
UFO cases that are very resistant to explanation, despite there being apparently quite a lot of evidence, are, when you think about, more likely to require a complicated explanation than a simple one. We should not be surprised if a full explanation turns out to be multi-faceted in such cases.
To give you an analogous example, I sometimes watch the TV show Air Crash Investigations. That is partly because I like how it takes you through what is initially a mystery - a plane has crashed - and reveals the evidence and reasoning that leads investigators to an explanation of the disaster. In the case of airliner crashes, it is, of course, vitally important that the reasons for a crash are understood, because that knowledge can and does help prevent future crashes.
Modern air travel is very safe, in part because of the findings of investigations into crashes and the steps taken to prevent any reccurrence. But we still see crashes.
What I always find interesting is that, mostly, airliner crashes don't have a single cause. Usually, at the end of an investigation, it turns out that the crash resulted from a confluence of factors. The pilots were tired, and the plane had maintenance issues, and a vital circuit-breaker had been switched off, and the circuit that was switched off happened to also switch off another important warning system in the cockpit, and the plane was delayed and the pilots rushed through some procedures, and the procedures weren't written down clearly in the instruction manual anyway, and the airline company was losing money because of delays so the pilots were under pressure to stay on schedule, and so it goes on.
So, my question is: why should we expect a puzzling UFO incident to have a single, simple, explanation? If it had such an explanation, it wouldn't be puzzling in the first place.
Think about that. Is this really "about as good ... as one could possibly hope to have"? Of course it isn't. We could have video footage of what the pilots saw over the ocean where the wave disturbance was, for example.
As I pointed out previously, I think we need to be careful in assuming there is a single cause of the multiple observations by different witnesses in this particular case. That might seem like a reasonable assumption, and I think it's a reasonable starting assumption for an investigation. But if such an assumption does not lead to a positive identification, then we should be willing to look further afield.
It's like in the air crash situation. It looks like pilot error - that they flew the plane into the ground on takeoff. Buy why would they do that? What factors led to that outcome? We shouldn't stop at the point of blaming it on "pilot error", because something important might have led to the pilots making an excusable error in the first place, and other pilots could make the same error in future if we don't get to the bottom of it.
Occam's razor, in the end, is just a rule of thumb. It doesn't say that the simplest explanation must be true. It only says that if two explanations have equal explanatory power, then we should prefer the simpler one.
It also raises the question as to what is a simple explanation, anyway. Is it really a simple explanation to say the tic tac was an alien spaceship? That explanation comes with a whole lot of complicated baggage. Where did the aliens come from? What were they doing? Why were they doing it? How did they do it?
I agree it is puzzling, and moderately interesting. (If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be commenting on it.) I similarly don't have an explanation at this time.
My main point here is that nobody here has presented any "compelling" evidence that this was aliens, or even any kind of "craft".
From my point of view, the problem here is not that people claim to have seen something unusual. The problem is that enthusiasts like Magical Realist take that and turn it into a full-blown alien encounter, based on nothing.
