3 Things Needed to Debunk a U.F.O. Video or Picture

I'm tired of the Pseudoskeptic giving a bad name to skepticism. Skepticism should lead you to the truth but most people who claim to be skeptics just use skepticism as a crutch to back up their pre-existing belief system.

As soon as a pic or video of a U.F.O. comes out the words fake, balloon, flare or something else is soon to follow.

This shows that ufology truly is a threat to some people's pre-existing belief system because they fear any real investigation, they just want the case closed as soon as possible to satisfy their belief.

In order to say case closed 3 things need to be satisfied.

1. Their needs to be a step by step explanation on how it was done.

2. The effect would need to be reproduced.

3. A professional would need to look at the video or pic and list all the characteristic consistent with a flare or ballon and list all the characteristics inconsistent with a flare or a balloon.

You can't just solve it on a message board filled with Pseudoskeptics who are not seeking the truth but seeking to prop up a pre-existing belief system in the mind of the pseudoskeptic.

It's the skeptic that has to show that a video, pic or eyewitness account is fake or something else and you can't do that in most cases without a thorough investigation. I don't think the Pseudoskeptics want this.

You only need one thing to debunk a UFO photo or video:

1) No identification of the source.

No matter how good the video or photo might be, because of the technological sophistication of image manipulation available to any Joe Blow out there, if you can't determine exactly where it came from, then it's junk. There's no need to continue with any further analysis, because even if we were never able to figure out how it might be faked, that still doesn't mean it wasn't faked. It just means we don't know how it might have been faked.

Once we get past identification of who made the image, then we move on to other things, such as whether or not there are multiple photos by other identifiable witnesses, clearly associated physical evidence, independent expert analysis of the hard material, and so on.

But well over 99 percent of UFO images fail to make the first hurdle.

[edit on 24-4-2008 by Nohup]

agreed.

OP: i think you should start a thread called "3 things needed before claiming validity of a ufo video or picture". the burden of evidence is on the claimant. you have it backwards.

Nope the burden of evidence is on the skeptic. They are making the claim that it's not a U.F.O. The person making the claim is verifying what they saw. It's the skeptic that's saying that it's not what they saw.

A pilot can say they saw a U.F.O. and it's up to the skeptic to show that he didn't see it if they don't believe him.

I say 99 percent of U.F.O. videos and pics are still unidentified.

The way you debunk a video or picture now is to say this has "consistent characteristics" with a flare or something else and that's as far as most investigations go.

With enough time you can say anything has consistent characteristics with something else. I can say a fork has consistent characteristics with a spoon but that doesn't make it a spoon.

We need to know what characteristics are consistent and which ones are inconsistent before we can determine what it is.

If you have a video of a U.F.O. that has 3 or 4 characteristics consistent with a flare but 4 or 5 characteristics inconsistent with a flare then questions remain.

The skeptic will only point out the consistent characteristics and then scream case closed. Sorry, this is an affront to logic but many pseudoskeptics will buy any explanation.

Originally posted by polomontana
Nope the burden of evidence is on the skeptic. They are making the claim that it's not a U.F.O. The person making the claim is verifying what they saw. It's the skeptic that's saying that it's not what they saw.

There are some skeptics who don't understand that it's impossible to prove a negative, such as that such and such an image is "not" of a UFO. After all, even if the photo clearly shows a craft that might look like an F-16, that doesn't mean it couldn't be an alien (or whatever) craft that just happens to look a lot like an F-16. Why couldn't it?

I'm not a big fan of recreations. Just because a photo can be produced that kind of looks like the UFO photo, that doesn't mean the UFO photo was done that way.

However, if a skeptic posts a side-by-side comparison of an F-16 (or a gliding seagull) and the putative UFO, and they look very similar, then it presents a more likely possibility. Then the original claimant has to pony up with some better positive proof to provide an even more likely possibility. Nothing is proven, however. They're just possibilities and probabilities.

In any event, even if a photo is determined to be real or authentic, that in no way identifies or proves what the subject of the photo is. Could be editing, could be a kite or balloon. Could be something else. Don't know. Positive proof is necessary to get by that sticky "don't know."

That's why photos in general cannot by themselves be used as proof of anything, and why we have to move away from the photos and get more hard evidence that can be tested and verified.