"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 the report didn't leave it to the eye witnesses to judge whether an observation was of ordinary stuff or not. They did their own analysis of of the observations and found 22% to be genuinely unknown, according to very strict criteria. So we know that objects fly around and that they do it in ways that man made things cannot do. That's a very interesting conclusion in itself - we don't have to say "it is aliens" to make it very interesting. This conclusion really should spark enormous scientific investigation.
"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.""
This sentence has several problems:
You didn't really comment on my proposition that ALL eye witnesses has to fumble.
The scenario you describe is very far from how the most serious cases have unfolded. Do your research.
I'm not interested in whether the observer says "it's a UFO". I am talking about post observation analysis of observations by experts. You knew that perfectly well as I had just linked to the Wikipedia article on the study. Please be serious.
It's pretty clear that most eyewitness accounts of observations with ordinary explanations is correct. What we are left with is a tiny minority of people who observed an ordinary event and concluded that it was an extraordinary event.
A tiny percentage of witnesses, multiplied by the large population and large number of ordinary events, yields a number roughly consistent with the numbers experienced.
Lights in a triangular formation is pretty typical for aircraft; each type has several different possible configurations of light, and almost all of them involv...
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?