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 resolution doesn't account for the cases where little grey men actually emerge from these objects. They may not be from another planet, but alternative hypothesis's aren't really a dime a dozen here.
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" ?
The trend is for these mysteries to have boring solutions. Eyewitness testimony is known to be unreliable. There is no physical evidence. All that is left is a very small amount of people who claim to have seen something that they don't understand; color me unimpressed.
But it leaves a massive phenomena to be explained, which should spark massive scientific investigation.
I would imagine that th...
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?