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 the number of eyes and instruments aimed upwards would be at an all-time high already. Satellites are recording images of our planet from every angle. What, exactly, should scientists be studying? What evidence is there to pour over? How can new evidence be gathered?
Also this resolution doesn't account for the cases where little grey men actually emerge from these objects.
Have little grey men actually emerged from objects? Or is that just what people have claimed? There is a significant difference between those two statements and your choice of phrasing indicates an unjustified bias.
A personal note: I suffer from chronic sleep paralysis and regularly have wild, terrifying hypnagogic hallucinations, many of which take on the form of the standard alien abduction scenario. An unintended consequence of my childhood obsession with The X-Files, no doubt. I have seen demons, elder gods, and greys with my own wide open eyes and I believe in none of them. When confronted with an unknown, it is possible for the mind to run amok with myth and fantasy. We're all susceptible to this and cannot be cautious enough about what we accept as truth.
"The trend is for these mysteries to have boring solutions. Eyewitness testimony is known to be unreliable."
As discussed elsewhere in this thread this is not the same as saying they all are 100% fallible. By far, as stated in the Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14.
"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;"
Where did you get these statements from? Thin air? Any references on it? You obviously hasn't looked into this.
"Have little ...
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?