"Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases"
Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you're not being rational - if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say "it's moving this way, it has all these lights all over it" (which is the sort of thing I mean by "making stuff up"), that would be "86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations."
We need statistics that can explain why every single person among thousands of witnesses has consistently fumbled in their eye-sight roll.
By witnesses you mean, every person who later went on to claim that they saw a ufo, while the people who think they just saw the moon don't get interviewed on the news? "Shocking expose, local woman sees moon."
Unfortunately this statistics will be very hard to generalize
The unreliability of eyewitness testimony was originally an experimental psychology effect. I shouldn't have just linked to wikipedia without checking it more - here's some experimental stuff.
"Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you're not being rational - if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say "it's moving this way, it has all these lights all over it" (which is the sort of thing I mean by "making stuff up"), that would be "86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations.""
Sure, most observations are just ordinary things. But t...
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?