We have seen the skeptics insist that in accepting Rramjets assertion, only the most narrowly defined form of 'evidence' is acceptable, using the Sagan quote as a shield. What I believe Rramjet is doing, and what I agree with, is his attempt to show that the repeatable body of evidence is showing exactly what he claims.
I believe I asked you before about the alleged pattern in UFO sightings.
As I recall you didn't respond.
Skeptics have ignored or dismissed literally hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, videos, photographs, physical traces, electromagnetic effects, radar echoes and physical damage to objects in their slavish devotion to the Sagan mantra.
No, "evidence" is "dismissed" when it fails to show anything other than the sort of thing you might expect from user error, misperception of common objects and observer error or bias.
What is it about hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence that is notextraordinary? Even if we discard 90% of those as errors or hoaxes, that still leaves 10,000 or so cases. Ten thousand cases (or more) of observations of alien technology is quite extraordinary! Some estimates put the number of sightings in the millions, as most go unreported.
I don't suppose you have a link to somewhere that supports with numbers with anything more than just stating the numbers do you?
For you to accuse Rramjet of hand waving dismissal damages your argument substantially.
And yet he does dismiss important facts and cases out of hand. Campeche for instance.
I think the accumulated body of evidence regarding UFO's can be classified as scientific. With hundreds of thousands of sightings on record, some of the data can be analyzed as to shape, size etc. How is that not scientific?
The steps of the scientific method are to:
Ask a Question
Do Background Research
Construct a Hypothesis
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
Communicate Your Results
Okay, let's look at the UFOlogist approach to science from the perspective of the scientific method, as Rramjet applies it.
Ask a question - what are those lights in the sky?
Do background research - read lots of websites about UFOs.
Construct a hypothesis - The lights are alien craft.
Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment - ummm, ah, no.
Analyze your data and draw a conclusion - the lights did things that are physically impossible so they must be alien!
Communicate your results - go on an internet forum and berate anyone who refuses to agree with your conclusion.
As a professional scientist I have to tell you, that isn't very scientific.
What is disconcerting about the skeptic attitude seems to be this intractable position that all observers or recorders of UFO/Alien incidents are wrong or mistaken. They have psych problems. They have a standing belief in UFO's...blah blah blah...it goes on and on. Any convenient flaw in personality or character and poof!- claim dismissed! It reminds me of those insurance companies who routinely deny medical benefits for legitimate claims.
Perhaps you need to read what people are writing more carefully. I can't think of a single person in this thread who has maintained that observers are always wrong or mistaken, and certainly nobody has argued that a single flaw in the observer's statement allows all of their information to be dismissed. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Let's take the White Sands case as an example. Rramjet would have everyone believe that the army personnel who took the triangulation measurement are infallible, stating that "they are experts" and "to suggest that they could be mistaken stretches credibility". In fact what we have in that case is one successful measurement out of several attempts on more than on occasion. That's hardly the accuracy one would expect from "experts" who couldn't possibly get it wrong. And furthermore the one measurement we have lacks an error value, which means that we have no idea how accurate it is. This isn't to say that their measurement is wrong, but it does mean that we can't take it as definitive.
The case isn't dismissed out of hand, but it is questioned. And that's the point of skepticism, to analyse the data as objectively as possible, and simply to ask, "Just how reliable is this?" The answer to that question, in the White Sands case is, not very. That doesn't mean that the object that were observed weren't at 150,000 feet, or that they weren't alien spaceships, as Rramjet argues they were, but that the evidence is inconclusive.
In the case of the Rogue River sighting Rramjet tried to argue that a blimp couldn't possibly explain what the observers saw, because there were no blimps in operation on the US West coast at that time. That argument was shown to be indisputably wrong, by simple virtue of the fact that there was at least one blimp in operation within flying distance of the sighting location at the time it occurred.
Again, that isn't to say that it was definitely a blimp, but it is a possibility.
All of the cases that Rramjet has presented have major flaws, which is all we have been pointing out. Not one person has said that there are definitely no alien spacecraft, or even that any one of the cases presented is definitely not caused by alien spacecraft. That isn't the point of our arguments at all. The point is that not one of these cases can be said to be good evidence, let alone proof.
An echo for the skeptics is 'arguments from incredulity and ignorance', usually coupled with the Sagan mantra. Perhaps in the 1950's most people were incredulous, and ignorant of the UFO phenomena, but the results of a 2002 poll say otherwise;
"A new national poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe the government is not telling the public everything it knows about UFO activity, and 68 percent think the government knows more about extraterrestrial life than it is letting on, the SCI FI Channel reported. The poll—sponsored by SCI FI as part of its promotion for Steven Spielberg's 20-hour SF miniseries Taken—also revealed that men more than women think such information should be shared with the public. RoperASW conducted the poll of 1,021 adults aged 18 and over from Aug. 23-25. The margin of error is 3 percent.
Among the poll's other findings:
•The younger you are, the stronger your belief that the government is withholding information about UFOs and extraterrestrial life: 80 percent of respondents 18-24 years old said so, compared with 75 percent of those 25-34 years old and 73 percent of those 35-49 years old.
•Just over half (53 percent) of respondents said that their level of trust in the government has remained stable over the past five years, while nearly a third (29 percent) said that they trust the government less than they did five years ago.
•Most respondents said that the government does not share enough information with the public in general (55 percent) and that the U.S. government should not withhold information about UFO sightings (60 percent) and potential encounters with extraterrestrial life (58 percent) when national security is not an issue."
Here is a link to yet another poll, this one stating that "Only a third of adults, however, believe it's either very likely or somewhat likely that intelligent aliens from space have visited our planet."
http://scrippsnews.com/node/34758
None of which is relevant to the argument from ignorance, or the argument from incredulity.
Argument from incredulity is simply when someone bases their argument on the fact that they can't believe something isn't true, and usually takes the form of, "I don't believe it could be anything other than X, therefore it must be X." usually in the face of evidence that it doesn't have to be X, and could in fact be something else entirely.
The argument from ignorance is similar, but based on the tenet, "
I don't know what else it could be." Again, this argument is often made in the face of evidence of other things that it could be.
Those skeptics who have dismissively stated that thousands of cases prove nothing seem to be bathing in their own sense of superiority, and the bathtub is leaking- badly.
The point isn't the number of cases - that's a red herring. If no individual case can stand on its own merits then it doesn't matter how many cases there are. There's another little mantra that you might want to learn, largely because it's very true - the plural of anecdote is not data. Lumping large numbers of unreliable data points together doesn't somehow make them reliable. The data as a whole is just as unreliable as the individual points.
To summarize- skeptics can (and will) chant the Sagan mantra ad infinitum, and pick holes in some of the cases, but if they truly believe that millions of people are delusional, a severe rethinking of their position is warranted.
That's all well and good, but it entirely misses the point. Firstly, anything which lies outside the normal everyday experience naturally requires good evidence. If I told you that I went to the supermarket this morning and saw 5 people out walking dogs you wouldn't question it, but if instead I said that I saw 5 people walking dragons you'd think I'd lost my mind. Okay, maybe that's too far fetched, let's say I said that I saw someone walking a Komodo dragon. We both know that Komodo dragons exist, but how many people do you know that keep them as pets? You'd still think I was lying, or at least mistaken, and I would rightfully be expected to provide some evidence, such as a cell phone photo, before you believed me.
And that's the point of the Sagan quote. Someone walking a Komodo dragon is an extraordinary claim, and must be backed up by evidence before anyone would believe me. Perhaps the use of the phrase "extraordinary evidence" is misleading. it should probably just be "good evidence".
Secondly, nobody is saying that millions of people are delusional (although it's certainly a possibility), but that millions of people could be mistaken, or just plain wrong. After all, thousands of people believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, thousands more believe that the moon landings were a hoax, huge numbers believe that the holocaust never happened. To suggest that millions of people can't all be wrong is to commit the fallacy of appeal to numbers.
Everyone is wrong about something (usually lots of things) and on a planet with 6.5 billion people it's just a matter of statistics that we will share our wrongness with a lot of other people.
