Also by the way: how can you so easily dismiss thousands of eyewitness reports as evidence? The studies does not align with that conclusion:
The study itself dismissed thousands of eyewitness reports.
About 69% of the cases were judged known or identified (38% were considered conclusively identified while 31% were still "doubtfully" explained); about 9% fell into insufficient information. About 22% were deemed "unknown", down from the earlier 28% value of the Air Force studies.
In the known category, 86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations. Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases. A "miscellaneous" category comprised 8% of all cases and included possible hoaxes.
~2200 of the 3600 cases were outright solved. Dismissing eyewitness testimony wouldn't be so easy if eyewitness testimony weren't so comically unreliable. In the absence of physical evidence, it seems plainly silly to mutate "we couldn't trace this vague claim back to any FFA scheduled flight plans" into "high tech alien visitation."
Assuming these people actually saw something, how can we make the leap to aliens? The interpretive jump from [some kind of light] to Alien Space Ship seems no different to me than deciding that a toast burn/water stain/oddly shaped tree knot is an apparition of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior. Neither conclusion would be proposed in absence of a preconceived bias toward it. I don't know; therefor Aliens.
Seriously, is this the level of discussion: "the study discarded some eye witness reports, so I am fully justified in discarding the rest as well" ?
"Assuming these people actually saw something, how can we make the leap to aliens? "
As discussed elsewhere you are completely right. In the cases where we just see something on the sky that cannot be explained by anything we know, we cannot just jump to the aliens conclusion. But it leaves a massive phenomena to be explained, which should spark massive scientific investigation. Also this res...
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?