[Moderated] So What Would You Think If This Were True?

It's been a while since I checked the thread.

Any evidence yet? Any theory derived from the evidence?
 
from another thread

boloboffin said:
[long-rambling-excursion]

When I was a child, I was a member of the Churches of Christ. We had all the marks of fundamentalism except for the end-time beliefs - we were more of the "Jesus shows up, that's the end" type. There won't be many members of the CoC buying copies of "Left Behind," shall we say.

We had some other peculiar beliefs for Christians - we were what's called water regenerationalists. That means we believed the Bible taught that you had to be baptized (fully submerged under water) for the express purpose of God forgiving your sins at that moment, in order for God to actually remove your sins. Also, no instruments of music in worship except for voices, and communion every Sunday. Christmas and Easter were secular holidays only - we put the Santa into Christmas, but I only knew it was Easter because the preacher's sermon that day was invariably "Why We Don't Celebrate Easter." (it was the communion every Sunday thing, plus Jesus didn't tell us to, or Paul, same thing).

Yes, we thought we were the only ones going to heaven. That wasn't our fault - we were doing what the Bible said! People standing on the beach are not standing in the ocean. You know, typical Christian stuff.

We were also big on the door knocking thing. The best method I'd ever seen our community produce for getting people to understand our peculiar beliefs was a series of brightly colored four page pamphets. Each pamphlet had a series of questions connected to a passage of Scripture. We would turn to the passage in the willing person's own Bible and they would read the passage. Then we would ask the question. They were simple questions - where does Paul say to make melody? (in your heart).

It was a progressive thing. If a person had a problem with a question, you stopped and you talked out that question. You didn't let them bring up lots of other things, you dealt only with the question at hand. And at the end, the person could see completely that we were the only ones going to heaven!

"What does the Bible say, Eric? In your heart. Let me hear you say it."

I never could make it work well. I wasn't enough of a salesman. I expected the product to sell itself. And the reactions of people bothered me. Once they realized the nature of the study guide, they'd look at it like a knife. It was fundamentally unfair. Of course, we didn't look at it that way. We thought it was a clear way of showing people the Light, the Truth. How that little tract judged us without our knowing it. If somebody couldn't see the Truth after this clear exhibition of it, then where are their hearts?

It was more for our benefits than our converts-to-be. It gave us comfort in our exclusion of the world. Sure, people would bite - people who bite are always among us, and each conversion was celebrated like slot machine mavens crowing over three cherries. I realize that now. Perhaps I doubted even then that we had it oh, so right, and everyone else had it oh, so wrong. But no. I believed.

True believers don't just need an echo chamber to reinforce their own beliefs. They need to get out in the fray. The belief system that survives skeptical inquiry becomes the stronger for it. And belief systems have more weapons in their arsenal than the facts properly interpreted and emphasized.

Especially if the battle is more for the fighter's benefit than the victory's.

[/long-rambling-excursion]
Click to expand...
 
I feel that I must congratulate Skeptic4Sure and Lyte Trip. They have done the impossible. They have managed to have their "bullet-proof" evidence debunked before they even released it. They don't seem to realize this achievement, hence this congratulatory note.

They have stated that their conlusion that the flight path was to the North of the Citgo station is based 100% on eyewitness testimony. They have been informed repeatedly about the fallability of eyewitness memory. They have also been informed repeatedly that physical evidence trumps eyewitness testimony. Let me restate that for comprehension:
When physical evidence and eyewitness testimony conflict, the physical evidence wins.
The only possible exception to this is if the eyewitness witnessed the physical evidence being planted, and even that is not an automatic win for the witness. There would be a re-evaluation of the evidence, looking for proof of it being faked, as well as an investigation into the credibility of the witness making the claim. This is beside the point as it has been made clear by these two that they have no witness to this effect.

Their claim is troubled even more by the many eyewitnesses that contradict their conclusion. Sure, eyewitnesses are fallible, but when the eyewitnesses are supported by physical evidence, their account becomes stronger. Now I can already hear LT or S4S clicking away at the keyboard that there are no eyewitnesses that saw AA77 flying on the South side. This may be true, as most were not aware of the plane until it passed over them on the highway. However, what they did see of the flight path, would only be possible if it flew South of the Citgo station.

It has also been claimed by LT and S4S that no one could have had a better vantage point than their witnesses. Better than the guy on the Pentagon lawn who saw it flying almost directly at him and dove to the ground out of fear of being hit?

In conclusion, unless either Lyte Trip or Skeptic4Sure have:
1. Physical evidence that AA77 flew to the North of the Citgo station
or
2. Physical evidence that the physical evidence at the Pentagon was faked (and not just the light poles, but the debris and DNA evidence)
then we must conclude that their eyewitnesses are in error. Since they have admitted to having no physical evidence to support their hypothesis, their explosive, bullet-proof evidence is debunked.

Any corrections or comments are welcome.

Previously, I asked:
ihaunter said:
Let's just switch this around for a second.

Skeptic4Sure, if it could be proven that your alleged witness(es) is/are in error, whether in regards to which side of the Citgo station the plane flew or even which plane they saw (see above), then will you accept that AA77 hit the Pentagon as described?
Click to expand...
I didn't really expect a direct answer, as the question was more to point out the flawed reasoning of the OP question and I wanted him to acknowledge that. Imagine my surprise when Lyte Trip responded:
Lyte Trip said:
Sure.

Because they are not in error.

Nobody had a better vantage point.

There is nothing remotely ambiguous about their claim.
Click to expand...

Well, Lyte Trip, will you keep your word?

P.S. One more time, in case there are any slow learners out there: When physical evidence and eyewitness testimony conflict, the physical evidence wins.
 
So ihaunter...


Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy?

Which is it?
 
How can they be mistaken about something that happened half a decade ago and which only now, through the valiant and brave intervention of the elite pentagon scribes, they are able to present to the world at large?
pah!
 
Skeptic4Sure said:
So ihaunter...


Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy?

Which is it?
Click to expand...

Wow, usually you only give the options that they are either correct or liars.
Did you even read my post? The part where I said "then we must conclude that their eyewitnesses are in error." must have been too dificult to decipher.

For clarity: your witnesses are mistaken

It has happened before and will happen again. That is why we rely on physical evidence.
 
Skeptic4Sure said:
So ihaunter...


Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy?

Which is it?
Click to expand...


when eye witnesses conflict each others testimony, they are mistakened. Not lying. They may not even know that what they claim is goign to match any other investigation or EVIDENCE, just what they thought they saw.

please, take a criminal justice class at your local community college.
 
Skeptic4Sure said:
So ihaunter...


Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy?

Which is it?
Click to expand...

Another thing about this favorite little question of yours. Have you ever applied it back to yourself? Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy? We already know the answer is yes, but which specifically?
 
Skeptic4Sure said:
So ihaunter...


Are you then going to be prepared to call multiple witnesses, liars, mistaken, or crazy?

Which is it?
Click to expand...

Mistaken, just like these witnesses to the JFK assassination.

Jean Hill. "The President and his wife were looking at a little dog on the seat between them as I looked down on them"

J.C. Price. "There was a volley of shots, I think five and then much later, maybe as much as five minutes later another one. I saw one man run towards the passenger cars on the railroad siding after the volley of shots. This man had a white dress shirt, no tie and kahki colored trousers. His hair appeared to be long and dark and his agility running could be about 25 years of age. He had something in his hand. I couldn't be sure, but it may have been a head piece."

Sam Holland. "After the first shot the President slumped over and Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and tried to get over in the back seat to him and then the second shot rang out. After the first shot the secret service man raised up in the seat with a machine guy then dropped back down in the seat. And they immediately sped off. Everything is spinning in my head and if I remember anything else later I will come back and tell Bill."

Bill Newman. "We were standing at the edge of the curb looking at the car as it was coming toward us and all of a sudden there was a noise, apparently gunshot. The President jumped up in his seat, and it looked like what I thought was a firecracker had went off and I thought he had realized it. It was just like an explosion and he was standing up. By this time he was directly in front of us and I was looking directly at him when he was hit in the side of the head. Then he fell back Governor Connally was holding his middle section."

Austin Miller when asked if recognized the first shot. "I didn't know it. I thought at first the motorcyle backfired or somebody had thrown some firecrackers out."

Jack Franzen. "He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President's car an noticed small fragments flying inside the care and immediately assumed someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile. He noticed the men, who were presumed to be secret service agents, riding in the car directly behind the President's car, unloading from the car, some with firearms in their hands.."

Marvin Chism. "The President's wife immediately stood over him, and she pulled him up, and lay him down in the seat, and she stood up over him in the car. The President was standing and waving and smiling at the people when the shot happened. . . . The two men in the front of the car stood up, and then when the second shot was fired, they all fell down and the car took off just like that."

A.J. Millican. "Just after the President's car passed, I heard three shots come from up toward Houston and Elm right by the Book Depository Building, and then immediately I heard two more shots come from the Arcade between the Book Store and the Underpass, and then three more shots came from the same direction only sounded further back."

"A man standing on the South side of Elm Street, was either hit in the foot, or the ankle and fell down."

James Simmons. "A motorcycle cop drove up the grassy slope toward the Texas School Book Depository Building, jumped off his motorcycle and then ran up the hill toward the Memorial Arches."

Nolan Potter. Nolan says that he noticed a policeman drive his motorcycle up the slope towards the Texas School Book Depository Building

Sam Holland. Sam also said a motorcycle cop "tried to ride up the embankment on his motorcycle and it tuned over about halfway up the embankment.

Lee Bowers. "A cop rode a motorcycle up the incline coming up from the lower portion of Elm Street, and he rode perhaps two-thirds of the way up or more before he deserted his motorcycle."

The cop in question, Clay Haygood speaks.

Mr. HAYGOOD. When I first got to the location there, I was still on Houston Street, and in the process of making a left turn onto Elm Street I could see all these people laying on the ground there on Elm. Some of them were pointing back up to the railroad yard, and a couple of people were headed back up that way, and I immediately tried to jump the north curb there in the 400 block, which was too high for me to get over.
Mr. BELIN. You mean with your motorcycle?
Mr. HAYGOOD. Yes.
Mr. BELIN. All right.
Mr. HAYGOOD. And I left my motorcycle on the street and ran to the railroad yard.
 
Arus808 said:
when eye witnesses conflict each others testimony, they are mistakened. Not lying. They may not even know that what they claim is goign to match any other investigation or EVIDENCE, just what they thought they saw.

please, take a criminal justice class at your local community college.
Click to expand...

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/6846

Lawyers are often suspicious of so-called "eye-witness accounts" and rightly so. Hundreds of scientific studies in the past few decades have shown that the memories of people who observe complex events are notoriously susceptible to alteration if they receive misleading information about the event after it has taken place. In this month's issue of the journal Learning & Memory, scientists from Johns Hopkins University report new insights into how such "false memories" are formed. This is the first study to use neuroimaging to investigate how the brain encodes misinformation during the creation of a false memory.

Using advanced, non-invasive imaging techniques, Yoko Akado and Craig Stark compared the areas of the brain that were active when a subject was encoding a complex event and afterwards, during exposure to misleading information. For example, subjects were asked to watch a vignette comprised of 50 photographic slides showing a man stealing a woman's wallet, then hiding behind a door. A little later, the subjects were shown what they thought was the same sequence of slides but unbeknownst to them the second set of slides contained a misleading item and differed in small ways from the original--the man hid behind a tree, for example, not a door.

Two days later, the subjects took a memory test, which asked them to recall details such as where the man hid, and which presentation--the first, second, or both--contained that information. Memory for a misinformation item was scored as a false memory only if the subject attributed the item to either the original presentation or to both the original and second slide presentations.

Stark and Akado found clear evidence that the subjects' brain activity predicted if their memories of the theft would be accurate or false. Consistent with findings from numerous previous studies that have reported that areas such as the hippocampus are highly active during memory formation, Okado and Stark found activity in the left hippocampus tail as well as perirhinal cortex was correlated with successful encoding of an item in memory, even when the memory that was formed was for a false item. But in subjects who had formed false memories, it was noticeable that activity in other brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex was weak during exposure to the second sequence of slides compared to during the original viewing.

Okada and Stark suggest that activity in the prefrontal cortex is correlated to encoding the source, or context, of the memory. Thus, weak prefrontal cortex activity during the misinformation phase indicaates that the details of the second experience were poorly placed in a learning context, and as a result more easily embedded in the context of the first event, creating false memories.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/4372

Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed

False memories are the controversial subject of hotly contested arguments about the validity of repressed memories that can surface years after a traumatic event and about the credibility of eyewitness accounts in criminal trials.

Because memories are imperfect under ordinary circumstances -- forming, storing and retrieving them, with great variations in factors influencing those processes -- it is unlikely that a one-answer-fits-all will settle those controversies soon.

But a group of researchers from various disciplines at Northwestern University literally have peered into the brain to offer new evidence on the existence of false memories and how they are formed.

Published in the journal Psychological Science, the new study used MRI technology to pinpoint how people form a memory for something that didn't actually happen.

''Our challenge was to bring people into the laboratory and set up a circumstance in which they would remember something that did not happen,'' said Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology and co-investigator of the study. (Brian Gonsalves, who was a doctoral student of Paller's and who now is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, is the first author of the paper.)

''We measured brain activity in people who looked at pictures of objects or imagined other objects that we asked them to visualize. Later we asked them to discriminate what they actually saw from what they imagined,'' Paller said.

Extending upon considerable Northwestern research on what happens in the brain when people remember versus forget, the researchers were interested in what happens differently in the brain when false memories are produced.

''We learned that the particular parts of the brain critical for generating visual images are highly activated when people imagine images such as those we presented to our study participants,'' said Paller.

Many of the visual images that the subjects were asked to imagine were later misremembered as actually having been seen.

''We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,'' said Paller. ''Thus, a vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that's very similar to that of an experienced event. When memories are stored for perceived or imagined objects, some of the same brain areas are involved.''

Take a real life example in which a police interrogator asks if you saw a particular person at a crime scene. That induces putting that person in your imagination and possibly corrupts later questioning.

''Just the fact of looking back into your memory and thinking about whether an event happened is tantamount to imagining that event happening,'' Paller said. ''If I ask you if something happened, you imagine it happening. Later on -- a day or a year later -- if I ask about that event, you have the tough judgment of deciding what happened and what was imagined.''

It is important to know that memory is fallible, Paller said. ''We know that we forget quite a bit, but we're not always in touch with the idea that our memories can sometimes can be misleading.''

For this procedure of measuring brain activity, people lay down in an MRI machine as they looked at a screen with a series of words, all concrete nouns, and pictures, and they wore head phones to hear what was being said. They were instructed to generate a visual image corresponding to each object that was named. For half the words, a photographic image of the object was presented. The subjects were told to make no response to photos, but only to look at each one while waiting for the next word.

They were told to make a size judgment about the objects they were to imagine. For example, if the word was cat, they were told to imagine the cat and decide if a cat is generally bigger or smaller than a video monitor.

The memory test was administered outside the scanner and began approximately 20 minutes after the scanning. Subjects heard a randomly ordered sequence of spoken words. One-third corresponded to photos they had seen, one-third to objects they had only imagined and one-third they had neither seen nor imagined. For each word, subjects decided whether or not they had viewed a photo of the named object during the study phase.

Three brain areas (precuneus, right inferior parietal cortex and anterior cingulate) showed greater responses in the study phase to words that would later be falsely remembered as having been presented with photos, compared to words that were not later misremembered as having been presented with photos. The words leading to false memories also tended to be slightly more concrete, on average, than those that did not. Presumably, people could generate a visual image more easily for the more concrete words.

''At any rate, the remarkable finding is that brain activity during the study phase could predict which objects would subsequently be falsely remembered as having been seen as a photograph,'' Paller said.

The flip side is that memory for viewed photographs was often correct. People gave many correct responses for objects they indeed viewed. Brain activity produced in response to viewed pictures and measured with functional MRI also predicted which pictures would be subsequently remembered. Two brain regions in particular -- the left hippocampus and the left prefrontal cortex -- were activated more strongly for pictures that were later remembered than for pictures that were forgotten. These two brain areas have previously been understood to play a central role in memory.

The new findings directly showed that different brain areas are critical for accurate memories for visual objects than for false remembering -- for forming a memory for an imagined object that is later remembered as a perceived object. The neuroanatomical evidence furthermore sheds light on the mental mechanisms responsible for forming accurate memories versus false memories.

''In the case of the false remembering emphasized here, the false memories were created when vivid visual imagery was engaged and a mental image was produced,'' Paller said. ''These mental images left a trace in the brain that was later mistaken for the trace that would have been produced had that object actually been seen.''

Listed as on the study, the co-investigators are Brian Gonsalves, post-doctoral fellow, Stanford University, and Northwestern researchers Paul J. Reber, associate professor of psychology, Darren R. Gitelman, associate professor of neurology, Todd B. Parrish, associate professor or radiology, M. Marsel Mesulam, Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Professor, and Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology. The Northwestern researchers are affiliated with the department of psychology, the Institute for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, the department of neurology, the department of radiology and the Feinberg School of Medicine.
 
ihaunter said:
Wow, usually you only give the options that they are either correct or liars.
Did you even read my post? The part where I said "then we must conclude that their eyewitnesses are in error." must have been too dificult to decipher.

For clarity: your witnesses are mistaken

It has happened before and will happen again. That is why we rely on physical evidence.
Click to expand...

Well then you have solved the case and there is no other need to hear from you.

Apparently, now all police detectives have to do is collect physical evidence and ignore witness accounts to make a case and conviction.

Hooray!
 
All I know Crungy, is you guys are going to be in for a big shock.

I hope you people are prepared to sign your names to these accusations of being "mistaken", so these witnesses can face their accusers.
 
Skeptic4Sure said:
All I know Crungy, is you guys are going to be in for a big shock.

I hope you people are prepared to sign your names to these accusations of being "mistaken", so these witnesses can face their accusers.
Click to expand...


Depends. Is God one of your witnesses? will he smite me?

-Gumboot
 
No they're still working on some pretty graphics to represent what the witness saw, even though the witness doesn't know that is what they saw.

It's all in the presentation, man.
 
I'd be willing to bet that what we're really waiting on here is the "appropriate" musical accompaniment.

Just save the trouble and use the X-Files theme. :)
 
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