The reason why the subject of UFO's is not taken seriously outside of fringe groups.

I agree that people should think more critically about the UFO phenomena instead of wanting so badly to believe they make themselves look rather idiotic.

However, the majority of Skeptics/Debunkers on this site get rather mean and high and mighty when someone comes on here to share a story or experience.

Even faced with solid eyewitness evidence and corroboration from multiple witnesses these serial debunkers ignore it, or completely disregard it. Even though eyewitness testimony is acceptable in a court of law.

Truthfully it wouldn't matter what evidence they are given. Some refuse to believe and will talk down to those who do.

While more critical thinking is need on the UFO subject, the chronic debunkers should also learn some civility.

Originally posted by Diablos

Originally posted by trystsOne of the main "investigators" of Project Blue Book, Hynek was his name I believe, said that the military wanted him to debunk UFOs. So, whenever he had an unexplainable case, Hynek would just rationalize with things like "swamp gas".

U.S government and military aside, what about investigators from other countries that have no bias when investigating these phenomenon? Such as the COMETA group, for example? They looked into cases that spanned over 70 years, and explained away 95% of the cases that had sufficient information, while dismissing the rest either on insufficient data, hearsay, hoaxes, or hallucinations. Of course, the group did not investigate all reported UFO cases, but they investigate some of the most significant. The British government as well has investigated all of the reports and also posted similar statistics of 95% of the cases with sufficient information being explained away by known phenomenon, while the remaining 5% could not be explained. So, if both COMETA and the British government are posting similar numbers to the U.S military in terms of unknowns, then I am inclined to think the U.S military is doing something correct and your accusations are off-base.

Insufficient data can probably be applied to 90% of UFO reports. There is reason for me to believe that people are actually seeing what they're reporting, but because radar data, or physical impressions are not necessarily a part of the visual experience of the witness, then it goes under the heading of whatever rationalization one wishes to project when insufficient data is really the case. Also, you pointing out the 95/5% is the same as the British government, and the COMETA report, makes it appear to be an often repeated statistic worthy of suspicion.

Originally posted by trystsInsufficient data can probably be applied to 90% of UFO reports. There is reason for me to believe that people are actually seeing what they're reporting, but because radar data, or physical impressions are not necessarily a part of the visual experience of the witness, then it goes under the heading of whatever rationalization one wishes to project when insufficient data is really the case. Also, you pointing out the 95/5% is the same as the British government, and the COMETA report, makes it appear to be an often repeated statistic worthy of suspicion.

So, you have a problem with investigators who require a little more evidence than eye witness testimony from people whose credibility cannot be determined? If there is no evidence other than eye-witness testimony, then how can you fault an investigator for trying to rationalize it by some sort of known phenomenon?

But, eye-witness testimony alone is "reason enough" for you to believe whatever they are saying, even if it turned out to be known phenomenon? See, that is exactly what is wrong with the UFO community and why the subject will never be taken seriously. If some Average Joe sees lights in the sky, it must be an actual UFO and there is a massive government investigators try to rationalize it because of a massive cover-up. Because every person is a trained observer of the night sky. Give me a break.

A lot of people dont discuss it out of fear of being ridiculed or fired from their job.

Originally posted by Diablos

Originally posted by trystsInsufficient data can probably be applied to 90% of UFO reports. There is reason for me to believe that people are actually seeing what they're reporting, but because radar data, or physical impressions are not necessarily a part of the visual experience of the witness, then it goes under the heading of whatever rationalization one wishes to project when insufficient data is really the case. Also, you pointing out the 95/5% is the same as the British government, and the COMETA report, makes it appear to be an often repeated statistic worthy of suspicion.

So, you have a problem with investigators who require a little more evidence than eye witness testimony from people whose credibility cannot be determined? If there is no evidence other than eye-witness testimony, then how can you fault an investigator for trying to rationalize it by some sort of known phenomenon?

But, eye-witness testimony alone is "reason enough" for you to believe whatever they are saying, even if it turned out to be known phenomenon? See, that is exactly what is wrong with the UFO community and why the subject will never be taken seriously. If some Average Joe sees lights in the sky, it must be an actual UFO and there is a massive government investigators try to rationalize it because of a massive cover-up. Because every person is a trained observer of the night sky. Give me a break.

edit on 6-7-2012 by Diablos because: (no reason given)

You brought up another, often-repeated claim from many documentaries and interviews: the theory of the "trained observer". I would really like to know what training program people can belong to, to witness unidentified flying objects? If you start reading the reports of the witnesses, you'll find that most reports are just too strange to be mistaken for idiotic rationalizations like meteors, swamp gas, or planets.
I have reason to believe the deluge of empirical testimony from eye-witnesses from the past 70 or 80 years, is not just reading stories from crazy people with an agenda. I think it best to avoid that prejudice. The many reports I have read are mostly from people just telling what they saw in a non-spiritual/metaphysical interpretation of the event, as if one would describe seeing an empirical object, like a bridge or a building.

Originally posted by trystsYou brought up another, often-repeated claim from many documentaries and interviews: the theory of the "trained observer". I would really like to know what training program people can belong to, to witness unidentified flying objects? If you start reading the reports of the witnesses, you'll find that most reports are just too strange to be mistaken for idiotic rationalizations like meteors, swamp gas, or planets.
I have reason to believe the deluge of empirical testimony from eye-witnesses from the past 70 or 80 years, is not just reading stories from crazy people with an agenda. I think it best to avoid that prejudice. The many reports I have read are mostly from people just telling what they saw in a non-spiritual/metaphysical interpretation of the event, as if one would describe seeing an empirical object, like a bridge or a building.

I'm done arguing with you, as this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'll just echo what I said in my previous post: You're a prime example of why the subject is ridiculed and not taken seriously at all. No rational person in their right mind would fault an investigator for employing the scientific method rather than taking everything at face-value and making an educated conclusion on the word of a few witnesses alone. Seems to me you don't seem to want a rigorous treatment of the subject but prefer the crackpots I mentioned in my OP who push everything as fact (alien abductions, probing, Zeta Reticuli, element 115, reverse engineering UFO's, recovering alien bodies from a crash, etc)? Let's not forget that all of this is based on the eye-witness testimony of average people. You believe them too, don't you?

Originally posted by Diablos

Originally posted by trystsYou brought up another, often-repeated claim from many documentaries and interviews: the theory of the "trained observer". I would really like to know what training program people can belong to, to witness unidentified flying objects? If you start reading the reports of the witnesses, you'll find that most reports are just too strange to be mistaken for idiotic rationalizations like meteors, swamp gas, or planets.
I have reason to believe the deluge of empirical testimony from eye-witnesses from the past 70 or 80 years, is not just reading stories from crazy people with an agenda. I think it best to avoid that prejudice. The many reports I have read are mostly from people just telling what they saw in a non-spiritual/metaphysical interpretation of the event, as if one would describe seeing an empirical object, like a bridge or a building.

I'm done arguing with you, as this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'll just echo what I said in my previous post: You're a prime example of why the subject is ridiculed and not taken seriously at all. No rational person in their right mind would fault an investigator for employing the scientific method rather than taking everything at face-value and making an educated conclusion on the word of a few witnesses alone. Seems to me you don't seem to want a rigorous treatment of the subject but prefer the crackpots I mentioned in my OP who push everything as fact (alien abductions, probing, Zeta Reticuli, etc)? Let's not forget that all of this is based on the eye-witness testimony of average people. You believe them too, don't you?

If there is something wrong with the "UFO community", it would no doubt be silly assumptions. I never said anything like what you're saying I believing in. I said that the 95/5% of explainable and unexplainable phenomenon is doubtful, at best. Also, that I think "insufficient data" is a better explanation than a hoax, mental illness, etc.

Originally posted by Blue Shift
The UFO field is not taken seriously because although there is a lot of evidence, nobody can figure out what it's evidence of. Aliens? Hardly. Ghosts and demons? Whatever those are supposed to be. Secret government projects? They ain't saying. Time travelers? Impossible.

Study UFOs and it ultimately gets you exactly nowhere.

Doesn't mean we should just ignore them while they freely penetrate our air space unopposed. This is now a question of national security, which merits some type of investigation to at least have some idea of what is behind this phenomenon.

COMETA was set up after around 500'000 people reported seeing a burning cross/arch on the french/belgian border, look it up online, nada, now thats a coverup.
nick pope, he makes out the mod might know something, or might not.
rendelsham something happened but its near a us air force base so might be nothing.
the interesting ones are the ones they dont let you know about

Originally posted by stinkelbaum
COMETA was set up after around 500'000 people reported seeing a burning cross/arch on the french/belgian border, look it up online, nada, now thats a coverup.
nick pope, he makes out the mod might know something, or might not.
rendelsham something happened but its near a us air force base so might be nothing.
the interesting ones are the ones they dont let you know about

Government cover-up has got to be one of the most ridiculous conspiracies out there. You seriously think that the government that is so incompetent and inefficient that they can't even run the mail properly at times, can keep hidden the biggest story in human history for more than half a century now?

The truth of the matter is that most governments don't know much more about these things than their citizens. They may at times keep certain stories classified due to a possible breech in defense capability or lack thereof, but they have nothing to hide at the end of the day.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Could they be Aliens, time travelers, military craft, natural phenomena etc etc etc?

Well I won't say its Aliens but...



... it just might be

The reason it is not taken seriously is because tptb don't want it taken seriously. They've made sure scientists get laughed at by their peers and have funding cut.
In plain sight they put aliens in movies so people think it's just silly fantasy.
The government says they are not a threat so they don't investigate them anymore yeah ok
Pilots are afraid to report them because they usually get fired if they do.

People believe what the media tells them and our media is completely controlled and can't even mention a ufo without a little green men reference.

Possible visitation by those higher up on the food chain should be the number one (and probably is) priority of our civilization. For good or bad it should be taken seriously.

So you really think that the US government and others, of course have been asleep at the wheel and simply allowed crackpots like myself to talk about our UFO stories and they have never, never had reasonto believe that there was something to the whole affair?

I guess you do not know UFO history in any depth of the topic. for one, there several damning statements and memos from US generals that called attention to the phenomena and in the process gave some fairly lucid data about the characteristics of those craft. Then in the US Project Sign, the forerunner of Project Grudge which was exactly as its name implies, the army having, of course, turned the topic over to their intelligence people, came up with a report for the generals that was disturbing. The report, entitled The Estimate of the Situation was an official army intelligence report was was done, for example, if the army suspected that the Soviets were test fling a highly secret new jet aircraft. The conclusion of the report was that the craft were ETs and not from earth.

General DeMay ordered the report destroyed, burned. His public argument was that since the investigators had no conclusive proof of the craft being alien, he could not accept the report and develop a strategy to counter it. That was when Project Blue Book came into existence.

There is one classic UFO book that you should read if you read nothing else from the early days. That book is The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt the first head of Blue Book. He pretty well spins the UFO story favorably to the governement's point of view, but he gives us some great details of the early details in the chasing down of the UFO enigma.

I get really tired of you self-styled "researchers" coming up with these poor examples of UFO "history." There is, in my opinion, a direct attempt by some "researchers" to revise the early history of the UFOs in order to not show details of the early coverup. the reasons for that are obvious. Also, I'm beginning to suspect with this, another piss-poor account of early UFO history, that such threads arre not without intent but are merely another tactic to rewrite UFO history for the gullible.

reply to post by Unity_99


I'm with you on that the phenomena is real, that there are UFOs is undeniable and self evident. That some UFOs are not even explainable by our current knowledge is also fairly accepted...

Now, the silence and even active deniability of the phenomena can only seen as correlated, that is they have a working understanding of what it is and are keeping it from the rest of the population or they have been infiltrated by the "power" behind the phenomena in a way that prevents them to act.

Them in this case is any authoritative institution that has been given by society the power and responsibility to not only investigate the subject but to make sure society is not at risk from it. The lack of action a criminal dereliction of duty by some.

We have UFOs nearly colliding with aircrafts and being a general nuisance, invading airspaces (that the military has the obligation to control and assert sovereignty over) and seemingly interacting with nuclear armament or at least attracted by it (just that makes it a national security issue).

Then we have civilians and even military and police officers that have been physically negatively affected by such objects. Even tales of people claiming to have been kidnapped. It boggles the mind why nothing is done...

Not to mention that in some cases people are extremely affected mentally, even to the point of committing suicide by the simple fact of how the subject is handled by those in authority.

People have ended committing suicide because no one believed them, more people suffer ins silence because of fear of being see as ridiculous, there is indeed many silent suffering occurring because of the status quo to a point that expecting benevolence by those involved in the phenomena or in the know to me are committing a crime against humanity.

I am in total agreement. Great post!

I am being genuinely honest and I am intrigued to know what skeptics say about the disclosure project.

video.google.com...

I was never really ABSOLUTELY convinced of the existence of UFOs and the UFO phenomena until I watched this video.

When people say "they need credible witnesses" after watching the (what I would consider) credible witnesses here, what type of witnesses are they looking for? NASA members, Airforce, Secret Service, etc.. all accounted for..Who exactly needs to be the person/people to count as "credible witnesses" needed to change a rational skeptic's mind?

When government admits/releases information regarding it? UK and other countries have released their UFO files with many unexplained/inconclusive results. Some are startling.

Again, these are GENUINE questions I would love an answer to from an actual skeptic. You can ridicule me all you want. Flame me, etc.. but can you ridicule the actual experts who put their careers on the line?

If even 90% of these people are complete wackjobs and only want fame, what about the 10% that aren't?

Edit:

Regarding Project Blue Book. The main scientific consultant was Dr J. Allen Hynek. He went along with the scientific explanations he was paid to give. Don't believe me? Great! I wouldn't expect you to.

en.wikipedia.org...

This is the same Dr, that years later, started up CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies). He did a complete turn-around when Project Blue Book was dissolved.

reply to post by Diablos


Well-summed-up. You hit a lot of the essential points, but I think the subject is taken seriously outside of fringe groups. There are many intelligent, accomplished people who have taken the time to look into it and have realized that it's not nonsense. The general population certainly does lump a lot of junk information under the heading of UFOs, but the legitimate phenomenon as elucidated by serious, competent investigation of UFO reports is a separate issue. It's not really difficult to separate the relatively good information from the less-good information if you just take to time to look into it.

UFOs have been taken seriously outside of fringe groups in the past as the opening post clearly shows. Official studies as mentioned, like Bluebook and many more went on before that. Across the Atlantic here in the UK we had our own UFO desk with the specific task of finding the "defence significance" of such sightings.

But the fact is that we are now over a decade into the 21st century and 65 years after the Roswell event and are still no nearer a solution. We can prove that UFOs exist as they remain unidentified until someone actually identifies them. But there is nothing in the public domain that provides conclusive proof of an extra-terrestrial interference on our planet. Even that meteorite from Mars in the 1990s.

If anything our modern technology appears to have made things worse. Fakes of UFOs can be easily made with cheap software. Mobile cameras and phones are not showing us anything more than lights in the sky these days and "fake" can always be screamed at anything that looks too good to be true. Taking a sceptical view then maybe the whole UFO phenomenon is nothing more than mistaken sightings of weird but natural events and man made technology?

Gone are the contactee stories of the 50s and early 60s when the space brothers would give tours of the solar system and warn of impending doom to the lucky few. Even the type of stories like the Betty and Barney Hill story and Travis Walton tales have disappeared. Why? Well maybe because had they happened in the current century someone would have caught a really good photo on their I-phone of the craft or even an alien being at close quarters in both of those type of scenarios. Even the Gray alien abductions stories of the 80s and 90s , where they come through the walls into the victims bedroom , have subsided because it would be quite easy to set up a webcam on yourself through the night if you really believe this was happening. What we do get are almost always deemed as fakes.

Although there have been a few more recent major UFO tales like the Phoenix lights, Stephenville, O'Hare and even Cardiff, all these were of strange lights/craft. Aliens don't appear to be contacting humanity as much as they once did. That's if the extra-terrestrial hypothesis has any grain of truth to it. Perhaps the truth was never out there?

Or, if you take a more conspiratorial point of view, maybe their mission has been accomplished and/or the ET cover up is so much greater today?

As for the crazy people, the crackpots. They were always around. Some of them even founded religions. Nowadays we'd demand a photo or a video of them seeing god and dismiss it as a fake!

The reason why the subject of UFO's is not taken seriously outside of fringe groups.

Because the CIA psyops plan created Aliens UFOs to keep the fringe groups occupied

and that keeps debunkers chasing their tails

All in all a successful operation all these years

ufopartisan.blogspot.com...
Here you have a man that understood every aspect of modern aircraft. You couldn't ask for a more credible witness. What was the Governments explanation for his sighting? They say a cloud. Guess they think that he was smart enough to build the fastest aircraft to date, but not smart enough to tell the difference between a craft and a cloud.
This is where my belief, in Aliens, or extra dimensional travelers, and government cover ups, stems from. They ask "wheres the evidence", yet when solid evidence is handed to them from credible witnesses they sweep it under the rug.
Why investigate something you already know the answer to. They know the truth but think that we cannot handle knowing what they do. Or they are covering up something that they did wrong, maybe provoking the wrong beings and are afraid to admit their mistake.