It's amaziing to see how the skeptic's perception of human ability changes to suit their biases.
As GeeMack pointed out, this is a
strawman argument. Nobody here ever argued that human ability changes with regard to UFOs. Your argument is based on conflating
a single individual's perceptions with the
cooperative ingenuity and hard work of entire societies of individuals.
There's a
huge difference between the two, which also can serve to illustrate an important difference between real science and pseudoscience.
If it is about a UFO sighting, humans are frail fallible creatures with senses and brains so poor they can't count on them to recall anything accurately and are fooled easily into believing almost anything.
Human senses, cognition and especially memory are certainly fallible, especially where eyewitness accounts are concerned. Nowhere is this more evident than in the legal profession, which relies on eyewitness accounts by necessity on a daily basis.
This lecture given to a body of Stanford law students by a psychologist and a legal professor, is a very good treatment of the subject.
When it suits their bias the other way, for example when addressing supporters of ancient astronaut theories, suddenly even really primitive people are these brilliant smart creatures with incredible minds that can figure out almost anything and are constantly underestimated.
When you talk about "really primitive people," you're in fact talking about modern humans, a.k.a.
homo sapiens. Despite their lack of accumulated technology that we enjoy today, the ancients were regular people just like you and me. Their brains may have been somewhat differently developed as a result of living in very different types of environments, but we know by their writings and the artifacts they left behind that they possessed similar powers of abstract thinking, an equally strong curiosity about the Universe around them, and a desire for order and regularity in their lives, just as we do.
Though their reasoning skills lacked many of the scientific methods that we rely on today, the ancients were still pretty adept at figuring things out. They may not have possessed our modern building materials or the sophisticated math of today's structural engineers, but they had basic measurement skills, geometry, arithmetic. What they lacked in powered machinery, they made up for with human and animal muscle power augmented by basic tools like the inclined plane, the wheel, the lever, the screw, the pulley, etc. Considering the complexity of the things they built, that's enough information to adequately extrapolate how they might have done it without needing to assume the existence of supernatural or extraterrestrial involvement. In some cases, we even have historical accounts of the construction of early buildings, so we can extrapolate their methodology from that.
Now where all this ties into science, is that science is not an individual effort either. It's not just one dude (or a thousand dudes, for that matter) seeing something, taking notes on it and then declaring it to be the truth to anyone who'll listen.
Science is a concerted effort among a community of educated specialists across a wide range of fields who all have agreed to conduct their work according to a certain set of rules. These rules are universal to all sciences, and these rules define not only the collection, measurement, parsing, and organization of data, but also the forming of hypotheses, the design of experiments, the extrapolation of results, the publication of results, and the testing and verification of those results by independent researchers. Like the ancients who worked together in an organized fashion to achieve great goals, science benefits from concerted, organized cooperation.
But scientific cooperation is not self-reinforcing. It's very competitive, sometimes to the point of being adversarial. Scientists challenge one another constantly. Vigorous effort is applied to try and falsify claims, to expose faults and inconsistencies. That effort, a.k.a. "critical thinking," is applied at every step of the scientific method. Scientists question their own procedures and results just as critically as they question those of others. It's the same kind of thing we do here at the JREF; we constantly challenge one another to weed out faulty logic and unfounded assumptions. It's not easy, and sometimes people get butthurt about it, but the ability to withstand criticism, acknowledge one's own errors, and move forward are traits that earn respect from one's peers.
On the other hand pseudoscientists, like religious types, share a common belief in unproven ideas, and everything they do seeks to reinforce those ideas rather than challenge them. That's why they'll accept any anecdote at face value, no matter if there's zero objective evidence to support it, as long as it fits into their preconceived belief system. That's why pseudoscience, like religion, never makes any progress in its ability to make predictions about reality. It's based in
avoidance of reality.
