Struck with a belief in Alien presence

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?

35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases

OK, this one's tough to analyse - big interplay of factors here. Basic classification of events:

Hallucinations - only one observer. Likely to be classified as low quality/crackpot or low quality/unknown
Seeing the moon etc. and thinking it's a spaceship - pretty much same as hallucination
Foreign military craft - Not clear whether these would be classified as "unknown" or "inconclusive". Skew towards high quality as more likely to be flying around military bases & hence seen by military personnel (also more likely to be seen by radar)
Undiscovered weather phenomenon etc. - probably classified as "unknown", no bias towards high or low quality reports
Alien spaceship - likely classified as "unknown". Plausible bias towards high quality as again we might expect to find more of them around military bases.
Poor quality hoax - likely classified as poor quality and miscellaneous.
Elaborate hoax - plausibly classified as high quality (can get multiple witnesses) and unknown.

The following factors might further skew how many events get reported or how they are classified:

Military personnel more likely to report everything unexplained that they see, ordinary people more likely to only report really weird stuff. Bias towards low quality/unknown
Opposite effect may be in play - ordinary people get spooked by anything, military personnel more used to seeing odd stuff from time to time. Bias away from low quality/unknown
When UFO gets reported, a bunch of people phone in saying they've seen the same thing when really they haven't. Increases apparent number of witnesses - so adds noise to high/low quality but doesn't skew known/unknown classification
Self-disbelief: people won't report very unusual sightings unless they are military or have other witnesses or have corroborating evidence. Bias towards high quality/unknown
Ridicule, refusing to accept reports etc. - same effect as self-disbelief
If motivated to do so, military personnel have greater ability to make up a convincing story about an unknown sighting than ordinary people. Bias towards high quality/unknown

So I don't have time today to do a Bayesian calculation on this, but the line from Wikipedia seems to be evidence in favour of elaborate hoaxes, alien spacecraft with particular motivations, wacky unreliable reports getting filtered before they make it to the Blue Book, and possibly foreign military aircraft. Evidence is weaker if there was too much credence placed in military personnel.

Other things to bear in mind:

I don't know about the methodology of the Blue Book project or Report 14. In particular I'm guessing they're not Bayesians, and influential people may have particular prejudices (we don't know which way those prejudices go, but that consideration certainly makes the results harder to analyse)
The Wikipedia article departs slightly from Wikipedia's usual voice which may indicate it's of lower quality and might be missing relevant information or presenting information incorrectly

•Alien spaceship - likely classified as "unknown". Plausible bias towards high quality as again we might expect to find more of them around military bases.

I'm not sure why we would expect that. If I were constructing a model of what I would expect of alien visitations, I don't think that would be part of it.

If I were constructing a model of what I would expect from alien visitations though, I doubt it would resemble any of the recorded observations at all; I suspect that they would be either completely open and unambiguous, or totally unnoticed (if a race with the technology for casual interstellar travel wanted to avoid attention, I expect that they could avoid it completely.)

0[anonymous]14y

You forgot swamp gas. What you just did is suggest a series of hypothesis as to what could explain the evidence. That is a part of the scientific method, but it is not all of the scientific method. The scientific method also includes testing the various hypothesis against the evidence, for each and every case. You forgot to do that.

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Struck with a belief in Alien presence

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