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Merged Their Return

King of the Americas said:
How would a single scout from the tribe convince the others in the tribe, that there even was a L.W.B.??...
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For a start, the scout probably has built up a reputation for accurate observation and recall, so the rest of the tribe would have a logical reason for believing a sighting.

Whereas in this thread....
 
King of the Americas said:
:rolleyes: It was not "lights" alone that led me to believe in gods of the heavens... History itself led me to that belief, seeing "objects" perform inhuman flight patterns & meld together others confirmed that there is indeed something up there, better than us.
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You saw some lights you couldn't explain.

You know some history.

You put the two together in order to confirm a belief you already had.

You claim that you followed an unbreakable chain of logic from "lights" to "gods" when in fact you did not such thing.

It's really pretty simple.
 
King of the Americas said:
What I find exceedingly interesting AND SAD is the almost total lack of serious responses to ANY of my arguments.

Worse was the daily mis-statements or outright lies about my actual stance.

This exchange has been anything but an honest straight forward discussion put forward by my OP.

When ridicule and mockery take the place of critical thinking based skepticism, debate itself suffers.

When you ignore what your opponent actually says, and just make up your own strawman to attack, there can be no discussion at all...

<snip ‘them’ vs ‘alien’>

Masquerading blatant ignorance, ridicule, and mockery as skepticism hurts or otherwise hinders everyone's search for truth.

And I think THAT is really the point or goal of skeptics here, to derail any and all efforts to find out the truth behind U.F.O.'s and their connection between history's- "god(s) of the heavens".

This place, JREF, is NOT the bastion of intellectualism it once was...
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But But But… I played by the rules you set out and was ignored (ok it wasn’t every timely) but you dismissed it as a strictly humorous attempt. Sure I did inject some mildly humorous elements (at least to me) but it was to demonstrate a point.

Even IF we grant that the evidences that you have provided indicates that there is a non-human intelligence that exists somewhere just outside our grasp, where is the evidence that we know anything about any other property about them. We have conflicting stories about what they look like, and what they do when they abduct people, we know nothing about their physiology, we don’t know if they traders, raiders or farmers and how we fit within their galactic view. To attempt to figure out what will get them to do anything would be speculations built on speculations which we are founded on the granting of an argument with a conclusion that is not accepted by the members of this board.

For the sake of argument let’s assume that there is an undiscovered tribe of intelligent big feet living in the Pacific Northwest North America. Please tell me what we can do to get them to reveal themselves to the world.

Sounds silly doesn’t it. In order to understand a society you have to at least be able to observe it, study it and ultimately to communicate with it in order to understand what would drive it. For Human Societies we have at least SOME basis in our common mental and emotional elements for speculation to be partially grounded. If we move to non-human intelligences the basis for those speculations is significantly reduced and would perhaps be nil. Projecting a human model of thinking and motivations on to the classic SciFi ‘Hive Mind’ would not result in any sort of understanding.

I have put forth an honest straight forward discussion of your OP. It just did not fit in with the way that you wanted the discussion to go and was promptly dismissed.

It appears that the OP was not intended to generate the honest straight forward discussion but to generate support for an unfounded speculation regarding what would motivate a set of beings that have not been confirmed to exist to reveal themselves to us.

I find the goal here is to find the real truth not the wishful thinking that many put forward founded on a few facts wrapped up in correlations, anecdotes, speculations, assumptions and logical fallacies.
 
King of the Americas said:
I didn't see "lights". I saw "star-like objects"...

Stop mis-representing my statements.
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I don't get "drunk", I get "intoxicated".

I don't "beat my wife", I "pummel my female spouse".

I don't "cheat on my taxes", I "file fraudulent tax returns".

Stop mis-representing my statements.
 
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EHocking said:
For a start, the scout probably has built up a reputation for accurate observation and recall, so the rest of the tribe would have a logical reason for believing a sighting.

Whereas in this thread....
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You think this thread represents the whole of my ability to identify airborne craft...?

So, are you suggesting that you would accept a U.F.O. report if it were say from a veteran pilot or military official (Rramjet inserted example here)? I think you are lying again.

What if a GROUP of military folk made such a report? (Rramjet inserted example here)

So, could you make a list of 'trustees'...? Is there a kind or sort of person who's report you would accept?
 
carlitos said:
Why not look at the wikipedia entry for a start:



So, what's your hypothesis for your sighting? State a hypothesis, and members here can work on improving it, making it testable and falsifiable.
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CLEARLY, my 'hypothesis' is:

"That there are evidences of a technologically advanced 'something', that existed here in the past, but now exists as an E.T., responsible for some U.F.O. sightings."

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OK, King. Here's the big question:

What evidence would prove your hypothesis wrong? What specifically would it take to cause you to re-evaluate your belief about this?
 
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King of the Americas said:
Why is "E.T.'s" the least likely conclusion...?
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If you really have to ask that, you're incapable of rational run of the mill skepticism, even for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate. Just looking at the fallible nature of people and the possibility of human error, every single one of these sightings being a mistake is more likely than a life form traversing interstellar distances or warping space and time, barring everything we know about reality. If anything, one would be forced to conclude secret technology being used by our governments before positing sentient alien travelers I'd think.
How can you ask that and claim you don't believe in ETs? You've got to just be saying that to satisfy a bias you perceive in those you're challenging if you have to ask why that is so unlikely, c'mon.

carlitos said:
OK, King. Here's the big question:

What evidence would prove your hypothesis wrong? What specifically would it take to cause you to re-evaluate your belief about this?
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Indeed.
 
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carlitos said:
OK, King. Here's the big question:

What evidence would prove your hypothesis wrong? What specifically would it take to cause you to re-evaluate your belief about this?
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Thirty pieces of silver is the traditional place to begin such negotiations.
 
carlitos said:
OK, King. Here's the big question:

What evidence would prove your hypothesis wrong? What specifically would it take to cause you to re-evaluate your belief about this?
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I don't understand how to prove a negative.

It is not a belief. It is a finding, after a review of the facts.

I don't believe in gravity, I KNOW how it works and that its laws are absolute. Gravity, the principle won't cease to exist, just because I can't prove it, while in orbit.

*The guy in the diving bell, returns and puts forward the hypothesis that the lights he saw was bioluminescent fish. What evidence would prove him wrong?
 
King of the Americas said:
You think this thread represents the whole of my ability to identify airborne craft...?
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No, only the accuracy of your recollection ability.
So, could you make a list of 'trustees'...? Is there a kind or sort of person who's report you would accept?
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Physical evidence would do it for me.

Anecdotal sightings, while vaguely interesting, are not evidence for anything but people seeing things that they can't readily identify.
 
King of the Americas said:
*The guy in the diving bell, returns and puts forward the hypothesis that the lights he saw was bioluminescent fish. What evidence would prove him wrong?
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The hypothesis is:

"The lights I saw were bioluminescent fish."

The null hypothesis would be:

"The lights I saw were NOT bioluminescent fish."

How would you test the null hypothesis? You find out what the lights are. Then you ask yourself, "Are these bioluminescent fish?" If the answer is no, then the hypothesis is falsified.

If the lights are never seen again, then the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, and these bioluminescent fish are of no interest to science.
 
King, you still have not asnwered my basic question, based on your statements of how science is done and truth considered (your post #1447). I'll ask it again. Do you think that N-rays, phlogiston, and the canals of Mars were true between the time they were "discovered" and the time they were discredited?

When the first diver saw the first bioluminescent fish, it was a rumor or an anecdote. The anecdote may have been true, but the discovery was open to reasonable doubt until some way was found to test it. This might have been either finding the thing that glowed and discovering that it was not a fish, or finding a fish that glowed. In the case of something that actually exists, it is likely that eventually it will be confirmed or falsified, since one might imagine that the first person (or maybe the tenth, who knows?) to spot such a fish would make some other observations, such as its size, its depth, the area in which it was found, and thus be able to guide further exploration. If nobody can ever do this, then no one can ever truly know, any more than one can know if another person says God spoke to him. This is how science sorts out the difference between reality and faith,error and fraud. This does not seem to have been possible with UFO's. I wonder why not?

Of course, this thread will never settle down the way you like it, because the initial post and its initial premise do not actually express what you are looking for. It is, if not dishonest, inaccurate and fatally vague. What you really are looking for, and perhaps ought to start a new thread for if you have the will, is more like this:

let us assume for the moment that E.T. of a particular sort exist. The assumed E.T. are technologically advanced beings, once resident on earth, and correspond to the myths of ancient gods. It is stipulated for the purposes of this thread that their existence is supported by evidence, so the quality of that evidence is not a subject of discussion. If you wanted them to come back to earth, how would you go about this? Disallowed in this thread are questions about the veracity of the E.T. themselves, suggestions that the E.T. are something other than those specified, and discussions of whether we should wish them back at all.

This would correspond, more or less, to the post-hoc specifications you have inserted into this thread, and might allow you, in good faith, to discount or disparage the many serious and not so serious, but polite and to-the-point responses you've gotten here
 
bruto said:
King, you still have not asnwered my basic question, based on your statements of how science is done and truth considered (your post #1447). I'll ask it again. Do you think that N-rays, phlogiston, and the canals of Mars were true between the time they were "discovered" and the time they were discredited?

When the first diver saw the first bioluminescent fish, it was a rumor or an anecdote. The anecdote may have been true, but the discovery was open to reasonable doubt until some way was found to test it. This might have been either finding the thing that glowed and discovering that it was not a fish, or finding a fish that glowed. In the case of something that actually exists, it is likely that eventually it will be confirmed or falsified, since one might imagine that the first person (or maybe the tenth, who knows?) to spot such a fish would make some other observations, such as its size, its depth, the area in which it was found, and thus be able to guide further exploration. If nobody can ever do this, then no one can ever truly know, any more than one can know if another person says God spoke to him. This is how science sorts out the difference between reality and faith,error and fraud. This does not seem to have been possible with UFO's. I wonder why not?

Of course, this thread will never settle down the way you like it, because the initial post and its initial premise do not actually express what you are looking for. It is, if not dishonest, inaccurate and fatally vague. What you really are looking for, and perhaps ought to start a new thread for if you have the will, is more like this:

let us assume for the moment that E.T. of a particular sort exist. The assumed E.T. are technologically advanced beings, once resident on earth, and correspond to the myths of ancient gods. It is stipulated for the purposes of this thread that their existence is supported by evidence, so the quality of that evidence is not a subject of discussion. If you wanted them to come back to earth, how would you go about this? Disallowed in this thread are questions about the veracity of the E.T. themselves, suggestions that the E.T. are something other than those specified, and discussions of whether we should wish them back at all.

This would correspond, more or less, to the post-hoc specifications you have inserted into this thread, and might allow you, in good faith, to discount or disparage the many serious and not so serious, but polite and to-the-point responses you've gotten here
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I think you make your best point, in the "Canals of Mars", analogy. To which I can only retort, that there ARE areas on Mars that look to have supported water flow...that someone saw these as man made irrigation tools is moot. There ARE darken areas where water once flowed. If 'I' am mis-identifying a common natural occurrence as something created by an intelligence, then it is not 'common' to me or anyone else I've presented my findings to.

Things lay undiscovered, where we can't go with ease...until the heavens are our playground, we likely will not be able to fully investigate or test my hypothesis.

As for how I portrayed this post...I can't say that your wording would have been anymore successfully in garnering serious discussion. I could be wrong... but I saw no serious difference between what I've requested, and your suggested topic.

I must have missed the polite, serious, to the point part(s)...
 
King of the Americas said:
I think you make your best point, in the "Canals of Mars", analogy. To which I can only retort, that there ARE areas on Mars that look to have supported water flow...that someone saw these as man made irrigation tools is moot. There ARE darken areas where water once flowed. If 'I' am mis-identifying a common natural occurrence as something created by an intelligence, then it is not 'common' to me or anyone else I've presented my findings to.
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Weak.

What you're saying is, essentially: "What I saw may have been fireflies, but that doesn't mean heavenly agents aren't real."

Umm....yeah, I guess. But, even if it turns out they are real, you haven't supported your claims that they are.
 
King of the Americas said:
Things lay undiscovered, where we can't go with ease...until the heavens are our playground, we likely will not be able to fully investigate or test my hypothesis.
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I can't help thinking that, if these "gods" really want to remain hidden, they wouldn't conduct physically impossible maneuvers in public. How difficult would it be for them to just pretend to be ordinary airplanes?

If they don't really want to be hidden, then how come the only people who see them are those with questionable critical thinking skills?
 
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