"In short, yes. In a country of hundreds of millions of people, finding thousands of people with any shared characteristic is not surprising."
Do we really have a parallel here? I'm sure you could find a rather large number of people with horrible eye-witness quality. But with UFO-sightings that's not what is happening. Those people who observe UFOs does so by chance, not because they have previously been selected for their fallibility. Indeed there are many pilots (both civil and military) among the witnesses.
The link you point to says this:
"Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing."
I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned. Even more selection arises in the courts decision to overturn or not. Thus, only looking at cases that actually got overturned will give us a highly distorted view. We need statistics on the eye witness quality of random persons.
"As faul_sname said, I would expect at least hundreds of thousands of people to be eyewitnesses to anything happening over a major city"
Countering secondary evidence with secondary evidence I could suggest:
I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned.
There's no particular reason to think this is true. Availability of DNA evidence or eyewitness evidence is relatively independent. Thus, it is reasonable to treat the DNA & eyewitness (DNA+e) cases as representative of all eyewitness cases.
In the DNA+e cases where DNA is inconsistent with guilt, either the DNA or the eyewitness must be wrong. And we have independent reasons to think DNA i...
Recently I've been struck with a belief in Aliens being present on this Earth. It happened after I watched this documenary (and subsequently several others). My feeling of belief is not particular interesting in itself - I could be lunatic or otherwise psychological dysfunctional. What I'm interested in knowing is to what extend other people, who consider themselves rationalists, feel belief in the existence of aliens on this earth, after watching this documentary. Is anyone willing to try and watch it and then report back?
Another question arising in this matter is how to treat evidence of extraordinary things. Should one require 'extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims'? I somehow feel that this notion is misguided - it discriminates evidence prior to observation. That is not the right time to start discriminating. At most we should ascribe a prior probability of zero and then do some Bayesian updating to get a posterior. Hmm, if no one has seen a black swan and some bayesian thinking person then sees a black swan a) in the distance or b) up front, what will his a posterior probability of the existence of black swans then be?