What is obvious to me is that there are patterns of illogic at work here. You contend, oh poor dear, he is so immersed in his “alien” beliefs that he cannot see his position is not rational.
You can't blame us, can you ?
It's the kind of behaviour we see in a lot of believers, religious or otherwise. They make a claim, unsupported, and when mundane explanations are given or contradictions in their arguments pointed out, they resort to strawmen and other fallacies to wiggle out of the argument and then act as though their opponents had never made the explanations or pointed out the contradictions.
But there isn't any more physical evidence for alien visitors as there are for ghosts or homeopathy. Every single time the claims have been investigated, mundane explanations have been proposed that fit the facts, or the claim was shown to be flat-out wrong. And in each case the believer STILL clings to his/her beliefs, for instance claiming that the studies didn't test the REAL homeopaths. Somehow we always get the BAD ones.
So it's no surprise that skeptics here recognise that behaviour in you. You make a claim, are presented with a possible mundane explanation that fits the observations (a blimp, in this instance), and then you start resorting to fallacies (shifting the burden of proof, in this instance) to avoid admitting that it's a simpler explanation than aliens. You are emotionally commited to your hypothesis, and that can't help you see straight.
Let me create a fictional example. Let's say that I claim to have awoken one night and saw a man-shaped shadow in my room. Moments later, I turn on the lights. Nothing's there. I come to the JREF claiming I saw a man in my room. Somebody says that my half-asleep state, combined with shadows, created this illusion. I point out that millions of people have had similar experiences. Someone else says that it doesn't prove that a cabal of evil men is entering people's home just to stare at them as they sleep. Then I ask them to prove conclusively that it was a shadow in order to disprove the evil man hypothesis...
It simply doesn't work that way. We know people see shadows and interpret them wrong, sometimes, especially when they are half-asleep. We know this to be true, while we DON'T know of a cabal of evil men entering people's homes just to stare at them as they sleep. The most likely explanation is NOT the evil man hypothesis.
Same here. The most likely explanation is NOT aliens. Not because lots of people see them, and not because they claim to have seen aliens. It's not the most likely explanation because we have other explanations that describe things we KNOW exist. Blimps, clouds, hallucinations, etc. We have no physical evidence of alien visitations, whatsoever. Like ghosts, the alien craft and their inhabitants evaporate under investigation. The only remaining explanation is mundane.
A rational person must accept this. If you can't, then something is preventing you from thinking rationally about this issue. In this case, belief.
