UFOs: The Research, the Evidence

[Sideroxylon]

It says "are you referring to a garden shed or an Alien Space Ship?"

That's it.

Not very good this redefinictionary, is it?

And have you noticed that often when you look something up it tells you that you in fact wanted a completely different but irrelevant word which it then proceeds to smugly define?

 

[Akhenaten]

It says "are you referring to a garden shed or an Alien Space Ship?"

That's it.

Not very good this redefinictionary, is it?

It's antipragmatically insufficient.

 

[23_Tauri]

Yeah, I just shook my head and let that bit of blather go through to the keeper.

I've tried to imagine a real world conversation where someone asks to see proof of any standard at all for garden shed ownership but my imagination isn't sufficient for the task.

The funny thing is, (and this is a true story) only yesterday I was advising a client who wanted to demolish some industrial buildings that were in very bad condition, but was concerned it might prejudice the forthcoming planning application for re-developing the site. I advised him that demolition would probably be ok, but that he must get a full structural survey carried out first, by a suitably-qualified surveyor, so that he had sufficient evidence of the state of the building pre-demolition.

Having read this thread today, all I can say is I hope to god the Members of the local district Planning Committee aren't ufologists in their spare time. Otherwise they'll never accept a surveyor's report as evidence that the building once existed, let alone the state it was in!

Maybe I been insufficiently antipragmatic in my advice to my client. What do you think?

 

[Akhenaten]

Nope. Sounds like good advice to me. Without the survey the buildings, once they were demolished, would have become unknown, which is to say, alien, and there'd be hell to pay when the People in Charge of That Sort of Thing found out that your clients had destroyed the last remnants of an alien civilisation.

 

[23_Tauri]

Nope. Sounds like good advice to me. Without the survey the buildings, once they were demolished, would have become unknown, which is to say, alien, and there'd be hell to pay when the People in Charge of That Sort of Thing found out that your clients had destroyed the last remnants of an alien civilisation.

Now you mention it, at the time of my site visit I did think that an oblate spheroid was a funny shape for an light industrial unit.

 

[abaddon]

Reports indicate that alien craft can vary in appearance in all aspects from the seemingly mundane to the highly unusual with the most common feature being a prevalence of some basic geometrical shape such as an oblate spheroid, sphere, cylinder, triangle, disk, other low aspect ratio shapes or a combination of such shapes. The one I saw was a glowing sphere.

"Reports indicate...."

Whose? How have they been verified?

So they can pretty much look any which way. How convenient for you.

That is a non-answer.

 

[GeeMack]

Not exactly. I tried to explain to the person who asked the original question that alien craft are identified more by their performance than their appearance. After all we can make objects that look alien enough no problem ( for example a flying saucer or glowing sphere ), therefore simply seeing something that looks alien isn't sufficient to conclude that it is something alien. What we can't do that I'm aware of is make our facsimilies duplicate the performance of alien craft. Instantaneous high speed accelleration, decelleration and changes in direction without any visible means of propulsion are not possible with any known manmade technology that I'm aware of. I so desperately want to hang on to my belief that aliens are real that I'll demand a transparent argument from ignorance is "sufficient evidence" for their existence.

See how easy it was to make that honest? Well an argument from ignorance may be sufficient to you, but you may have noticed that nobody else is fool enough to buy it. Seems as though you've failed again.

 

[GeeMack]

Not exactly. I believe alien craft have visited Earth because I've seen one. If I'd never seen one myself I'd only believe that given the various reports and studies that it's reasonable to think that the probability of alien visitation is high enough to be taken seriously. I saw something which I couldn't identify, and since nobody ever believed my talking rabbit story, I decided to try out the alien craft angle.

Your argument from ignorance fails again.

 

[RoboTimbo]

More misrepresentation above. I never made the claim that I have such evidence ( an alien craft ). However you are correct that an alien craft would be sufficient. In fact it would be more tha sufficient, it would also be definitive. However in the absence of definitve evidence, study can still take place, probabilities can be calculated and a reasonable assessment of whether or not the available evidence is sufficient to take a claim seriously can still be made. With respect to UFOs there is in my view enough evidence to validate the claim, but not enough ( as yet ) to definitively prove it.

We have such definitive evidence for UFOs ( witches ). UFOs ( witches ) have been proven in courts of law ( triers of fact ).

There must obviously be enough ( sufficient ) evidence to validate the claim that UFOs ( witches ) exist for you.

ulog, do you believe UFOs ( witches ) exist, YES or NO?

 

[RoboTimbo]

I'll go back to graden shed analogy for you. If someone claims they have a shed at the bottom of the garden, and the claim requires some sort of evidence, then such things as a reciept for purchase, a land titles plot showing the location on your property, and a report from a housing inspector rating the condition and value of the shed along with the other property would probably be considered sufficient to validate the claim. However it would still not definitively prove it was actually there.

You may want to take this argument to the "Claims that ECREE is nonsense are themselves nonsense" thread. We extraordinarily trashed all the arguments of that other failed ufologist sufficiently.

In the meantime, present your alien raygun, alien body or alien spaceship as sufficient ( extraordinary ) evidence for your claims.

 

[RoboTimbo]

You're making presumptions again. Sufficient evidence may seem extraordinary to one person, in which case it will be both be sufficient and extraordinary at the same time to that person. However the same evidence may not seem extraordinary to someone else. Either way the evidence is the same, which illustrates the nature of the bias in requiring "extraordinary" evidence. All that is really required is for it to be sufficient.

You didn't think that the two welded together Volkswagons that resembled a firefly was an extraordinary event? I thought before that you said your memory was enhanced when it encountered such extraordinary events. Since it wasn't an extraordinary event, are you saying that your memory is subject to all the fallibilites and you likely misremember or misperceived what you thought was an Alien Space Ship?

 

[RoboTimbo]

The problem is that what one person thinks is extraordinary may not be extraordinary to someone else, therefore introducing a requirement that sufficient evidence must also be seen as extraordinary is pushing a bias onto the issue. Certainly There is nothing wrong with you personally thinking that some sort of evidence is extraordinary, provided you recognize when the evidence before you is sufficient, regardless of how extraordinary you think it is or isn't.

Regardless of whether you think it is sufficient enough or not, it has to be extraordinary for us to give it credence. You must cater to the audience that you are trying to sway. What is sufficient for you to believe in Alien Space Ships wouldn't be enough to convince a child that Santa Claus exists because your standards are so low in the context of your personal religion.

Why don't you believe in UFOs ( witches ) when there is more than a sufficiency of evidence?

Are you saying that "sufficient" is subjective?

 

[RoboTimbo]

Not exactly. I believe alien craft have visited Earth because I've seen one. If I'd never seen one myself I'd only believe that given the various reports and studies that it's reasonable to think that the probability of alien visitation is high enough to be taken seriously.

No, we have sufficient evidence that your claim is nothing more than the J Randall Murphy VolksUFO ( firefly ) Hoax. There is sufficient evidence that all the other witnesses saw UFOs ( witches ). Are you saying that all those witnesses were hallucinating?

Hey, that "sufficient" thing comes in handy, doesn't it?

 

[Paul2]

Rather it simply demonstrates that some people deem some things to be extraordinary while other people don't. Either way all that is needed s sufficient evidence, not "extraordinary" evidence

You seem to think that because "extraordinariness" requires judgment that some sort of extreme relativism applies and that *no* judgment of extraordinariness on any objective terms is possible. That is wrong. While there may be borderline cases, there are also non-controversial cases, and it is in these non-controversial cases (concerning whether something is extraordinary) in which we can clearly see ECREE apply, even if, at the same time, extraordinary evidence is also sufficient.

 

[John Albert]

I believe alien craft have visited Earth because I've seen one. If I'd never seen one myself I'd only believe that given the various reports and studies that it's reasonable to think that the probability of alien visitation is high enough to be taken seriously.

The thing is, you don't know that you've seen an alien craft; you just believe you did. You saw what you saw—whatever it was—and assumed it was an alien spacecraft, when the simple fact is you have no possible way of knowing that whatever you saw was alien, or even a "craft" as such.

For all you know, it only appeared to be the size of two Volkswagens, and only appeared to perform the "extraordinary maneuvers" that you think you saw it perform, on the scale you believe it was. In reality, it might have actually been much smaller and closer than you think it was, and it might have even been a number of different objects that you unconsciously conflated into a single one. Your perception of the experience might have been erroneous, and of course your memory might also be completely distorted by countless re-tellings and mental revisions of the story over the past 40-some odd years.

Lots of posters in this thread are content to forward the (gently mocking) assumption that whatever you saw was a firefly, but I won't even go that far. While a firefly might certainly be a reasonable explanation under some circumstances, we have no way of knowing it was a firefly, any more than any other mundane phenomenon. There's simply not enough information to know for sure, and there certainly is no evidence to support the conclusion of anything extraordinary.

Even if indeed you saw exactly what you claim to have seen, then the best opinion you can offer about its identity with any degree of certainty is that it is unknown. And I don't mean "unknown" as in "something alien from another planet," nor "unknown" as in "something of non-human manufacture." I'm saying "unknown" in the classic English definition that you quite simply "don't know what the hell it was." You cannot make any such determination with any confidence because there's absolutely no evidence to support that determination. The total and complete lack of evidence that your "sighting" was an alien craft is roughly equivalent to the lack of evidence that it was a flying witch on a broomstick, a will 'o' the wisp, an angel, a portal to Hell, or anything else that has likewise never been shown to exist.

Of course, nothing's stopping you from making the assumption, or proverbial WAG ("wild-ass guess") that what you saw was an alien craft (or a witch, will 'o' the wisp, etc. for that matter), but you should at least have the forthrightness to admit that your conclusion is a "wild-ass guess" and not a certain fact. You should at the very least be able to acknowledge that neither you nor anyone else has any actual evidence on which to claim the existence of extraterrestrial life (let alone ET intelligence or technology). You should at least be honest enough to refrain from asserting this nonsense about "firsthand knowledge," and "scientific evidence" versus "anecdotal evidence." Evidence is evidence. Anecdotes do not constitute evidence. Anecdotes are claims, and claims do not represent evidence for themselves, no matter who's telling them. Evidence is the stuff that is required to validate claims.

The kind of analysis, logical weighing of evidence, and intellectual honesty that I just described is the fundamental procedure of critical thinking. It is the exact opposite of making determinations of unproven things without any evidence. It's also the basis of Dr. Sagan's ECREE quote, which is not, as you claim, a biased assumption, but the logical extent of critical analysis when applied to so-called "extraordinary" claims, ie. claims of the existence of things which have never been proven to exist.

 

[23_Tauri]

Hey, that "sufficient" thing comes in handy, doesn't it?

I guess it's sufficiently handy.....

 

[tsig]

More misrepresentation above. I never made the claim that I have such evidence ( an alien craft ). However you are correct that an alien craft would be sufficient. In fact it would be more tha sufficient, it would also be definitive. However in the absence of definitve evidence, study can still take place, probabilities can be calculated and a reasonable assessment of whether or not the available evidence is sufficient to take a claim seriously can still be made. With respect to UFOs there is in my view enough evidence to validate the claim, but not enough ( as yet ) to definitively prove it.

So if you add up enough doubtful claims you get certainty?

 

[tsig]

Yes, I am. At the moment I'm presuming that you feel a need to bog the discussion down with this ridiculous semantic nonsense in order to distract the viewers from noticing that you don't have any evidence of any kind to support your flying saucer ( Omgalien ) fantasy.





You have a full-blown case of adjectiphobia, just as Rramjet did.

You should probably get it looked at.

Adjectiphilia?

 

[tsig]

I dunno about you, but I have never in my life come across someone who wanted such a high standard of evidence to prove the existence of a garden shed. Surveyor's report and he's still not convinced!

And yet when it comes to an Alien Space Craft, any old **** will do.

Maybe we could lock him in the shed...for a week...

 

[Jocce]

all that is needed s sufficient evidence, not "extraordinary" evidence

Bullcrap. Stop arguing semantics. "Extraordinary evidence" is just shorthand for "extraordinary solid evidence".