Yazata:
I have to say that I'm more inclined to think that ufos are folkloric, which I'd guess is JamesR's view too, even if he's nastier about expressing it. But neither of us knows what ufos are for a fact, it's more of an assumption.
A UFO is an
unidentified flying object - something's in the sky and we don't know what it is. Presented with a UFO "sighting", I make no
a priori assumptions about what it is. It remains unidentified until and unless somebody identifies it.
It is faulty reasoning to assume that if we have an unexplained UFO, then it must be an alien spaceship. One problem with pseudoscientists is that they constantly pretend to have knowledge they don't have. They don't appreciate that it is ok to say "I don't know (yet)." Some mysteries take time to solve. Some remain unsolved. That's ok. Sometimes we can't find enough information to solve a mystery. Sometimes there just isn't enough information available to find. But if we don't know something, that doesn't mean it's acceptable to jump to outlandish conclusions that "the paranormal" is somehow involved. We'd need actual evidence to suggest any such conclusion.
As I tried to point out to MR earlier, for many unsolved mysteries we only have a list of possible explanations, not certain ones. So, for a UFO sighting, alien spaceships is one possible explanation. But there are usually many other possible explanations (it was the planet Venus, it was reflected light from a terrestrial source, etc.) If we haven't ruled out the possibilities with confounding evidence, they remain possibilities.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. To settle on the conclusion that a particular UFO is an alien spaceship we need very good evidence. Lacking that, it is far more likely, based on prior experience of such things, that the UFO has a mundane explanation (even if we don't know for sure what it is).
I think that there's a huge difference between
1. Government investigators are unable to explain away all ufo reports.
or even
1a. The government doesn't want to admit that they can't explain them all, since they know how the media would run with that.
and...
2. The government knows that ufos are extraterrestrial spacecraft.
or even
2a. The government knows that ufos are extraterrestrial spacecraft and is engaged in a huge conspiratorial coverup to keep information about the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth from the public.
As for me, I have no problem believing 1., that the government can't explain them all. It's basically what I would expect.
I can even believe 1a, that the government doesn't want to publicly admit that they can't explain them all.
But I see absolutely no evidence that 2. or 2a. are true.
What kind of evidence would we expect to see if they knew that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth?
I would expect to see far more interest in ufo sightings than we actually see. I'd expect to see government investigators descending on anyone who makes a ufo report. They would want to extract all the information that they could about what kind of extraterrestrials were involved and about what capabilities they displayed and what they were up to.
I would expect far more government interest in manned spaceflight and in space defenses.
And I would expect tremendous funding and effort flowing into SETI. I'd expect worldwide networks of electronic listening posts and huge watch-the-skies efforts.
I completely agree with all this.
UFO enthusiasts jump very quickly from "Somebody saw an unexplained light in the sky" to "It's aliens from the planet Zog come to experiment on human beings, and the government knows it and there's a grand conspiracy to keep the knowledge from the general public. And the motivations of the Zoggians are X, Y and Z, and the nature of the Zoggians is A, B and C, and we can fit all other historical mysteries into this Zoggian framework we've just fantasised" etc. etc.
Magical Realist:
And maybe snarky juvenile wisecracks by people who haven't even studied it is what keeps this phenomenon from ever being taking seriously in the first place. The fallacy of incredulity applies again: "Hey! I don't know what it could be! Therefore it isn't real."
You seem determined to keep missing the point, no matter how many times I carefully explain it to you and repeat myself.
Let me say it again:
I don't know that your favorite UFO sighting is not an alien spaceship.
I don't know that your favorite ghost sighting is not a real ghost.
I have not claimed that the light in the sky, or the fuzzy blur in the photo is not a real thing. I do not deny the "evidence".
I question your interpretation of the evidence (which, I add, is of typically poor quality, often of dubious provenance, and open to multiple interpretations).
Moreover, you don't know what these things are any more than I do. If you had any better evidence than you typically provide, you would have no trouble supporting your conclusions. But whenever I examine any of your claims in depth, they turn out to be flimsy and full of wishful thinking.
In essence they are not told by so called experts that it must be this or that: They are mostly informed that it could have been this or that, and that until irrefutable evidence is available, it is simply a UFO.
