Q. How do you figure "aliens" is a reasonable explanation at all.
A. It's plausible and considerable effort has been made to rule out all natural or manmade explanations including hoaxes, misidentifications, mental or physical illness, hallucinations etc.
It's not plausible, because there's no evidence aliens exist. Jumping to the conclusion that 1) aliens exist, and 2) these stories must be evidence of them is analogous to the kind of religious thinking that presumes the existence of God as a given, and then works backward to prove it.
As I said before, in the
total absence of material evidence, assuming the existence of ET carries exactly as much weight as the presumption of any other cause that lacks material evidence, like Jesus, the BVM, angels, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, vampires, etc., so none of those things can be ruled out either.
Effort may have been made by the researchers to "rule out all natural or manmade explanations including hoaxes, misidentifications, mental or physical illness, hallucinations etc.," but whether or not that effort has been adequate is anybody's guess. The fact that they're basing their studies primarily on anecdotes indicates they're not doing real science anyway, so I'm not assuming their other methods aren't equally faulty.
Psychological causes such as mental illness, hallucinations, confabulation or just plain old-fashioned lying can be just as unfalsifiable as aliens. Unlike aliens, those things have been
proven to occur. Not only that, but they're
extremely common.
Quote: "There's no material evidence whatsoever"
Answer: That is a conclusion that is not reasonable. First of all, evidence and proof are two different concepts ( Rramjet made this point as well ).
Well if you're going to start basing your arguments on Rramjet's logic, you've got more problems than I thought and we might as well just hang up this discussion right now.
Evidence can take the form of information, and there is plenty of information. The value of that information is what is at issue.
Exactly!
All evidence is not equal. The value of material evidence, and evidence gathered through controlled and repeatable experiments, far, far outweighs the evidence of stories. In fact, stories are so weak, that they can't be taken as anything more than a guideline pointing where to maybe start looking for some real material evidence.
You want to know how weak anecdotal evidence really is?
If you're going to accept stories as evidence of stuff that hasn't been proven to exist by any other means, then you might as well become a fundamentalist Christian and start believing everything written in the Bible, because that's all the Bible is: anecdotal evidence. But of course it's not so simple as that—there's also the Book of Mormon, the Q'ran, the Buddhist Sutras, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Bhavagad-Gita, The Principia Discordia, The Book of the SubGenius, etc.
Once you start down the path of accepting anecdotal evidence as fact, things get very confusing. You're liable to end up believing just about anything. That's why critical thinkers don't accept unsupported anecdotal evidence as proof. It's just too unreliable. To put it plainly, people talk too much **** to believe everything you hear.
This thread doesn't claim the information is "proof"...
This thread doesn't claim that;
you claim that. Let's clear this thing up right now.
You seem to like to declare your own personal views to be the general consensus of everybody within various arbitrary groups. You did it repeatedly in the "Is Ufology Pseudoscience?" thread when you made bold, unsupported declarations like, "Ufology says
x." Everybody in the field of study called ufology doesn't say that;
you say that, and you're falsely attributing it to all of them to add authority to your argument. It's an
argumentum ad populum or "appeal to popularity" and it's dishonest. Now I'm politely asking you to please refrain from making statements like that.
And again, I don't care about any USAF definitions. They make absolutely no difference to me whatsoever.
Q. Why is the "aliens" conclusion any more reasonable in your mind than Jesus, the BVM, angels, fairies, unicorns, vampires, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster himself?
A. The examples you use aren't what we're discussing, but for the sake of good faith in participation, given the assumed context of each of your examples, the ETH is plausible. Space flight is a proven fact and intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is an near statistical certainty.
Space flight is a proven fact, but ET isn't. It's just as unproven as all those other paranormal things. In fact, if you accept anecdotes as evidence, miracles and BVM sightings have a far more extensive history of evidence than ET, the Drake equation notwithstanding.
Quote: "you're confused about what Occam's Razor means."
Response: You presume incorrectly.
The way you used it in your last post to validate your belief in ET, I'd have to say your grasp on the concept is exceedingly weak:
...after a serious and significant effort has been performed to rule out every possible natural or manmade explanation ( and by the way this also includes misidentifications, hallucianations, hoaxes, and sightings with insufficient information ). At this point it is perfectly reasonable to propose that the phenomnon could represent an alien craft. We don't know that for certain ... but if as you suggest, we apply Occam's Razor as it was meant to be applied, since all other options have been ruled out by investigation, then the most logical and plausible explanation that remains at this point is the ETH.
That ain't Occam's Razor, and is sure as hell ain't critical thinking.
"Occam's Razor" means you cut out all explanations that would require further conclusive evidence that is not available. There is no conclusive evidence for the existence of ET, therefore Occam's Razor certainly cuts ET out of the hypothesis.
Your problem appears to lie somewhere in the vicinity of, "after a serious and significant effort has been performed to rule out every possible natural or manmade explanation," if that helps any. It seems like there are a hell of a lot of "manmade" explanations you're passing up in your mad dash to get to the ETH.
Quote: "They can neither prove or disprove that somebody became confused, hallucinated, or just made it up, and that is a far more likely scenario than ET, which is equally impossible to prove or disprove."
Response: This thread isn't about "proving" or "disproving". It's about considering the information and determining what is reasonable to believe.
Then the business you're involved in is called "pseudoscience," and your thinking is magical, not critical. The beliefs you consider "reasonable" are certainly not reasonable to most reasonable people.
Quote: "To me, it looks like all these kinds of tall tales—UFOs, religious sightings, ghost sightings, cryptid sightings, etc—all fit the PSH better than any of the specialized hypotheses forwarded by researchers in all those discrete fields."
Response: The comment "tall-tales", implies lies, fabrications and such. I'm not talking about those
Yes, in all likelihood you absolutely are. You just prefer not to acknowledge them as such.
so the PSH, whatever it is doesn't apply anyway. If you would like to discuss hoaxes, in one study spanning about 5 years and taking into account 1,593 of the best cases, 1.66% of the cases were found to be hoaxes. I suspect there are probably a lot more now due to the ease of faking video and putting it up on the Internet.
See, you and Rramjet, you guys like to throw out these statistics regarding hoaxes without providing any clarification whatsoever about how the researchers arrived at them. That doesn't prove anything. If those stats represent
confirmed hoaxes, then the actual number of hoaxes is almost certainly higher, and possibly
much higher, depending on how credulous and fallible the researchers themselves are at spotting hoaxes.
It all ties into the whole "accepting anecdotal evidence as facts" thing. Stories aren't proven facts. You've already admitted as much, but you can't seem to bring yourself to admit that the stuff you're studying is folklore and not reality.
Quote: Note there weren't any "flying saucer" reports prior to the late 1940s. If they're really extraterrestrial craft, then why had they gone undetected for so long, until the popular media began promoting the stories so heavily?
Response: There were a few reports of strange flying objects during World War Two, at the time called foo fighters which contrary to common reports, were not limited strictly to spheres. However before World War Two, it is true that reports are sparse and relegated to myth.
However that is no reason to suspect the phenomenon isn't real. It is entirely possible that they just weren't coming here that often ( or at all ) until the 1940s. Simply because we haven't travelled to another inhabited planet yet and shown them we exist doesn't mean that we don't exist until they say we do.
The point we get to another inhabited planet will always coincide with some cultural period and have an influence on it. It is well documented that the films and and media reports about flying saucers and space aliens were inspired by the sightings, not the other way around. All the way from the Kenneth Arnold sighting to Earth vs The Saucers to Close Encounters.
A far more plausible scenario is that the stories from WWII were brought back stateside during the late '40s, picked up by science fiction writers and became a cultural meme that caught on big, and some people mistakenly think it's real.
It happens. People watch woo-related TV shows and movies and come away with the false notion that the related subjects were real.
People do this all the time. It's an observable phenomenon well known to psychologists. People love fantasy and tend to prefer it to reality. When somebody with a lack of critical thinking skills sees a movie or TV "documentary" about UFOs, ghosts, psychic phenomena, or religion, they tend to be influenced by it, like a form of suggestion. These people are then more prone to imagine, hoax or otherwise confabulate a story of their own as an active confirmation of their belief. When such a credulous person talks with a UFO researcher, they likely see a kindred soul with whom they feel free to share their innermost ET fantasies. Then the ufologist takes that information back to "the base" and uses it in a pseudoscientific study to prove UFOs are ET. The more cultural impact these kinds of stories have, the more the entertainment industry will capitalize on it with more movies and TV shows. It's a self-perpetuating feedback loop of woo.
As I said before, the UFO sighting trends can be observed rising and falling according to flying saucer stories in the popular media. There's a proven correlation.
