For more than 60 years the primary approach by the media and scientific communities to the subject of UFOs and Flying Saucers has been based on pseudo-science. Proclamations and attacks, often given the appearance of being scientific, have been launched at every aspect of the phenomena. Despite an enormous array of real evidence and data, we have been treated to false claims, false reasoning, bias and ignorance.

Originally posted by 1SawSomeThings
At a certain point, the skeptics "grabbing at straws" becomes so predictable. It is not unreasonable to ask that they use logic and explanations that indicate:

1) actually carefully reading the report and looking at the evidence.
2) acknowledging the number, credentials and credibility of the witnesses, and lack of prior or subsequent mental illness.
3) basing explanations on something that is known to physically exist and well understood, not ball lightning etc.
4) reasoning that is not more far-fetched than the concept that some civilization somewhere in this vast universe may be more advanced than we are in the understanding of quantum physics and space-time relativity.

"Obsessed with the notion of his own omniscience, it enrages him to be confronted by phenomena that do not agree with this conviction. Finding in his limited armoury no explanation that satisfies him, he chooses to doubt rather than himself, and rejects the most obvious facts in order to avoid putting his faith to the test. The mistaken pride and anthropocentrism that supposedly went out with Copernicus and Galileo make him a peril to science, as history abundantly proves. … That strange things have been seen is now beyond question, and the “psychological” explanations seem to have misfired. The number of thoughtful, intelligent, educated people in full possession of their faculties who have “seen something” and described it grows every day. Doubting Thomases among astronomers, engineers and officials who used to laugh at “saucers” have seen and repented. To reject out of hand testimony such as theirs becomes more and more presumptuous".
General Lionel Max Chassin (1902-1970) Commanding General of the French Air Forces.



"UFO debunkers do not understand Occam's Razor, and they abuse it regularly. They think they understand it, but they don't.
What it means is that when several hypotheses of varying complexity can explain a set of observations with equal ability, the first one to be tested should be the one that invokes the fewest number of uncorroborated assumptions. If this simplest hypothesis is proven incorrect, the next simplest is chosen, and so forth.
But the skeptics forget two parts: the part regarding the test of the simpler hypotheses, and the part regarding explaining all of the observations.
What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses, which is the inverse
of the proper approach".
Brian Zeiler



"I propose that true skepticism is called for today: neither the gullible acceptance of true belief nor the closed-minded rejection of the scoffer masquerading as the skeptic.
One should be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers. The negative claims of pseudo-skeptics who offer facile explanations must themselves be subject to criticism. If a competent witness reports having seen something tens of degrees of arc in size (as happens) and the scoffer -- who of course was not there -- offers Venus or a high altitude weather balloon as an explanation, the requirement of extraordinary proof for an extraordinary claim falls on the proffered negative claim as well. That kind of approach is also pseudo-science. Moreover just being a scientist confers neither necessary expertise nor sufficient knowledge.
Any scientist who has not read a few serious books and articles presenting actual UFO evidence should out of intellectual honesty refrain from making scientific pronouncements. To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another. That is not science."
Bernard Haisch, Astrophysicist



"I believe that the attitude of spirit that one must adopt with respect to these phenomena is a completely open attitude of spirit, i.e. who does not consist in denying a priori as besides our ancestors of the previous centuries had to deny things which appear perfectly elementary to us today"
Mr. Robert Galley, Minister for the French Army.



"One refuses to study the facts because they are not included/understood, but to include/understand them, they would have initially to be studied"
A. Meessen,Physicist.



"The best means of not finding an evidence, it is not to seek some".
Pierre Guerin,Astrophysicist



"Skeptics, who flatly deny the existence of any unexplained phenomenon in the name of 'rationalism,' are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public. People are not stupid and they know very well when they have seen something out of the ordinary. When a so-called expert tells them the object must have been the moon or a mirage, he is really teaching the public that science is impotent or unwilling to pursue the study of the unknown."
Dr. Jacques Vallee,Astrophysicist



"Most scientists have never had the occasion to confront evidence concerning the UFO phenomenon. To a scientist, the main source of hard information (other than his own experiments' observations) is provided by the scientific journals. With rare exceptions, scientific journals do not publish reports of UFO observations. The decision not to publish is made by the editor acting on the advice of reviewers. This process is self-reinforcing: the apparent lack of data confirms the view that there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon, and this view (prejudice) works against the presentation of relevant data."
Peter A. Sturrock, "An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project," Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol.1, No.1, 1987



"Before I began my association with the US Air Force, I had
joined my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw
at the "psychological postwar craze" for flying saucers
that seemed to be sweeping the country and at the naivete
and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being
taken in by such obvious "nonsense." It was almost in a
sense of sport that I accepted the invitation to have a
look at the flying saucer reports....."
"I had started out as an outright 'debunker,' taking
great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling
cases. I was the arch enemy of those 'flying saucer
groups and enthusiasts' who very dearly wanted UFOs to be
interplanetary. My own knowledge of those groups came
almost entirely from what I heard from Blue Book
personnel; they were all "crackpots and visionaries.'"

"Now, however, documentation which puts the UFO-
U.S. government controversy in quite a new light has
become available. The authors have made revealing use of
documents released through the mechanism of the Freedom
of Information Act and other data which have been made
available to them, often through private sources, which
show that the CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and
lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of
prevarication."
"The reader must judge for himself or herself just
how far these implications extend, but certainly no one
can deny any longer that various intelligence agencies of
our government were long cognizant of UFOs and the global
extent of this phenomenon. Official dispatches from our
embassies and air bases in other countries to these
agencies, to the State Department, and even, on occasion,
to the White House, bear incontrovertible witness to
this."
"For the government to continue to maintain that
UFOs are nonexistent in the face of the documents already
released and of other cogent evidence presented in this
book is puerile and in a sense an insult to the American
people."
Dr Allen J Hyneck,astronomer, professor and scientific adviser to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force.



"I concentrate on the science. I'm interested in the UFOs seen by the police and military witnesses. I'm interested in the near misses that pilots report, where their aircraft nearly collide with these things. I'm interested in the visual sightings backed up by radar. I'm interested in the military bases that are overflown by these things. I'm interested in the cases where you have radiation readings on the ground.
These are no lights in the sky. These are not misidentifications of fantasy prone individuals. This is a cutting-edge technology being reported by reliable, trained observers, and it is something that goes beyond what we can do.
That to me suggests that if it is not ours, it belongs to someone else. If that technology is better than ours, then the extraterrestrial hypothesis seems to me the best explanation."
Nick Pope,Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994.

"Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is. The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility. Is there ... any residue that is worthy of scientific attention? Or, if there isn't, does not an obligation exist to say so to the public - not in words of open ridicule but seriously, to keep faith with the trust the public places in science and scientists?"

In a 1985 interview, when asked what caused his change of opinion, Hynek responded, "Two things, really. One was the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn't give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the street in broad daylight. Everything had to have an explanation. I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought they weren't going about it in the right way. You can't assume that everything is black no matter what. Secondly, the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there was something to all this."

In late March 1966, in Michigan, two days of mass UFO sightings were reported, and received significant publicity. After studying the reports, Hynek offered a provisional hypothesis for some of the sightings: a few of about 100 witnesses had mistaken swamp gas for something more spectacular. At the press conference where he made his announcement, Hynek repeatedly and strenuously made the qualification that swamp gas was a plausible explanation for only a portion of the Michigan UFO reports, and certainly not for UFO reports in general. But much to his chagrin, Hynek's qualifications were largely overlooked, and the words "swamp gas" were repeated ad infinitum in relation to UFO reports. The explanation was subject to national derision.

"As a scientist I must be mindful of the past; all too often it has happened that matters of great value to science were overlooked because the new phenomenon did not fit the accepted scientific outlook of the time."

Originally posted by 1SawSomeThings
reply to post by DoomsdayRex

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On "What science is and what it is not":
One of the definitions of science, according to Merriam-Webster, "1: the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding". In all fairness that applies to Ufologists and Anti-ufologists equally.

3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science

Originally posted by 1SawSomeThings
In speaking of the LHC project, I attempted to show the colossal imbalance in funding and "mainstream" interest between something that has not been observed before...

Originally posted by 1SawSomeThings
Regarding debating the evidence devolving into "attacking the witness", I cannot offer any better analyses than those of the late J. Allen Hynek...

Originally posted by 1SawSomeThings
He was warning against using swamp gas, ball lightning, Venus, Sirius, clouds, hysteria ad nauseum when very qualified witnesses came forth.

I am afraid you spent a lot of time and effort not crafting a response that misses my points. However, by way of missing my point you make my point.

I am afraid you are taking me out of context, and not on accident I am also afraid, committing distortion-by-omission. While you are correct in defining science as a word, we are talking about science as a discipline. From your source, a definition you had to ignore to make your point:

3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science

The fact you cannot understand the difference, is not only a comment on the general state of public understanding of science, but a microcosm of UFO research as a whole. A failure to understand what science is, the difference between what science is and the current state of UFO research, stunts UFO research, prevents it from moving forward, and prevents its acceptance by mainstream science.

By dismissing such explanations out-of-hand, you ignore the fact they can be, and sometimes are, the explanation in some cases. As much as we want to find evidence of aliens, we have to acknowledge there are prosaic explanations.