Originally posted by JimOberg
Lots of people thought that UFO reports could best be explained by alien spaceship visits -- it made sense based on our own primitive space efforts. But we know a lot more about how honest UFO misperceptions are generated, retold, and embellished now then we did in the early years. Throwing around important people's names is an interesting exercise in cataloguing, but hardly evidence.

Now, note that when a specific quotation is raised as to being bogus, responses are usually not constructive. Often there's the stubborn dig-heels-in response, 'Sez YOU!'. Or the response, OK, you found the bad one, that shows all the others are good. But when an ostensibly pre-verified, heavily vetted list is presented as evidence, there shouldn't BE any 'bad ones', after all these years.

The bigger question this raises is, is there any way that tighter quality control standards can be applied to what passes for 'UFO evidence' such as these quotations? Surely the Internet was supposed to make all points of view accessible, rather than facilitate mindless repetitions of the same points of view.

I raise the Harry Truman quotation as an example. There has been some original research calling that entire comment into question. How can that research be located via search engines, so its argumentation and evidence can be considered? I'm not arguing for that conclusion -- I'm advocating developing ways to make such anti-conclusions available for weighing against other claims.