Simply because I am certain about my own experience does not make me closed minded. It makes me sure.
You claim to be certain about something which there is no possible way anyone could be certain about, even somebody who witnessed exactly the same event that you claim to have witnessed. You've provided absolutely no evidence to prove your personal experience has anything whatsoever to do with alien spacecraft. All you've got is your own steadfast and uncompromising faith-based opinion.
Provide an explanation for what I saw that makes sense rather than ridiculing me, accusing me of fabrication or picking at irrelevant details.
I refuse to entertain your
argument from ignorance or participate in your little "think up some plausible explanations for me to systematically refute" game.
I did not make the claim of witnessing an alien spacecraft, so
I'm not the one with the burden of proof in this discussion. You seem to have considerable difficulty understanding that concept, but that's not my problem.
Besides all that, I do not believe your story for a second. I suspect it was completely fabricated. Or, even more likely, it was a simple misperception of a mundane object (maybe a reflection of a ceiling lamp in a plate glass window) that you saw as a stoned teenager half a lifetime ago, and you've been retelling the story ever since. I believe you have spent the last 35-odd years twisting, plying, and embellishing this yarn with every retelling. If we talk to you a couple years from now, you'll probably be insisting you cracked a few beers with little green men on your girlfriend's back porch.
So there it is. I don't have any proof that you
didn't see an extraterrestrial spacecraft in the mountains while listening to Led Zeppelin (or was it Black Oak Arkansas? I don't recall). But it's not my responsibility to disprove anything. The onus is on you to prove it and so far we haven't seen jack-squat.
J. Allen Hynek may have been a serious scientist when it came to his Astronomy work, but by the end of his career with the Air Force, he'd been pretty much converted into a pseudoscientist crank.
Jacques Vallée doubly so.
There. I said it.
The above statements are completely unfounded and disrespectful. Your constant name calling and character attacks on those who don't agree with your position contributes nothing to meaningful discussion.
He was a respected scientist who went on to get a cushy job pushing papers for the military, then made a public career out of promoting pseudoscience. The only reason you revere him so highly is because you happen to buy into his claims that UFOs are paranormal vehicles, on no better evidence than them being unexplained. That conclusion is a
converse error that no self-respecting scientist would hang his career on.
Notice that all of Hynek's scientific accomplishments occurred prior to him ever going to work for the USAF. His UFO work was the death of his scientific career. He never published again after taking that job (at least not in any respectable science journals). All those decades were wasted in fruitless frivolity, manipulating stats to show senior Air Force officers exactly the kinds of results they wanted to see.
Hynek's story is an undisputable example of a scientist with impeccable credentials and reputation, whose attitude towards UFOs was transformed by personal investigation from all out debunker to serious researcher. He's done more to seriously study the UFO phenomenon than you or anyone else here will probably ever do.
That last is sentence probably quite accurate, because in all his years of shilling for the Air Force, he made
zero progress towards falsifying the null hypothesis:
All UFOs are the result of mundane causes.
