The U.F.O. skeptics are in denial

originally posted by: neoholographic
That's just a straw man argument. You're debating against something that nobody said was the case.

The thread was (apparently) started on a straw man argument, as was pointed out earlier.

You excel in irony:

originally posted by: neoholographicIt's obvious why you don't want to answer the question.

Don't see your answer to my question.

Harte

originally posted by: neoholographic
I will as the question you have dodged 8 times now.

Which one of these statements accurately describes all observers or eyewitnesses?

A. The independent objective truth is that people are not very reliable observers, and no, not even pilots.

or

B. The objective truth is some people aren't reliable observers while some people are very reliable observers.

It's obvious why you don't want to answer the question.

If you read my earlier post (linked below), I already said KNOWN objects may be a different story. But if we are talking about UFOs, A is true. I don't know why I should have to repeat what I already said, but stop twisting my words and taking them out of context. Read the whole paragraph, not just the first sentence:

www.abovetopsecret.com...
"The independent objective truth is that people are not very reliable observers, and no, not even pilots. J Allen Hynek who studied UFOs and even came to believe some weren't from Earth, found pilots to have among the highest misperception rates of all the categories of observers, so it's really odd to hear people say they are the most reliable when the only evidence I've seen of reliability is from Hynek saying the opposite, and there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence that pilots don't have any special skills in identifying UFOs, though maybe they do in identifying other KNOWN aircraft."

So, do some pilots have some special skills in identifying other KNOWN aircraft? Yes they do. Does that apply to UFOs reported by pilots? No it doesn't, because if a pilot says it's unidentified, they are talking about something which all their training has not enabled them to identify. It's beyond all the training they received about known aircraft.

Below, you're twisting my words around, completely misrepresenting what I said.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

neoholographic
You have one pseudoskeptic calling all Pilots unreliable idiots

originally posted by: Phage
Which one?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: neoholographic
Arbitrageur

The independent objective truth is that people are not very reliable observers, and no, not even pilots.

First, that does not say "all Pilots unreliable idiots", which was your first effort to twist my words around, that's not what I said.
Second, that's the first sentence of an entire paragraph. Since it's in a UFO thread hopefully the context is obvious that it relates to UFOs. Instead of relying on the comment being in a UFO thread making it obvious it related to UFOs, I went on to explain specifically how that related to UFOS, but you never quote the rest of the paragraph, where I point out that maybe pilots have some special skills in identifying other KNOWN aircraft. So if you want to change the topic from the thread topic of UFOs, to an off-topic discussion of identifying known aircraft, I know some pilots have a lot of training in identifying known aircraft, whereas other pilots have little to no training in identifying known aircraft. So we can certainly make a case that some pilots are more reliable than others in identifying known aircraft.

You keep suggesting some pilots are "reliable". As I already said in the rest of my statement you keep citing out of context, I admitted some pilots may have special skills in identifying KNOWN aircraft. That would depend on their training. But I maintain that no pilot has training which makes them reliable observers of UFOs. If they don't know what they are looking at, then for one thing they can't make reliable estimates of the size, distance and speed of the UFO, as they might be able to do with known aircraft. It's just not possible for anybody to accurately estimate the size, distance and speed of an unknown flying object, unless as I said before there are special circumstances that give the observer a reference.

I also made the specific reference to UFOs clear in this post:

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: neoholographic
Who are you saying is immune from eyewitness misperception regarding UFOs?
The answer is nobody.

And then I gave you an example of a Lufthansa German Airlines captain who reported a UFO and said 'It had to be something from another planet -- because it was definitely not man-made!". Do you believe him? I believe he's got to have some good piloting skills, but they didn't help him identify the UFO, and he was jumping to conclusions, which is something you have a tendency to do yourself, neoholographic.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
web.archive.org...
"Other pilots, including a Lufthansa German Airlines captain, reported a UFO sighting around the same time. Capt D'Alton said. 'It had to be something from another planet -- because it was definitely not man-made!"

www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: neoholographic
Here's Hynek's classification system:

Hynek, who you keep mentioning, showed that Technical Persons were reliable U.F.O. eyewitnesses. This is obvious because the more technical training you have the better you are at identifying technology.

I read your post trying to re-classify modern pilots into a different category. I see this as kind of pointless because even if your argument was true, the absolute best class of observers still had a misperception rate of 50% and that's with multiple witnesses, so even that "most" reliable class I would say is not reliable if they are wrong at least half the time. So Hynek's data didn't show any occupations of observers that were immune from misperception.

The other thing which I believe you overlooked is the psychology of pilots flying a plane. Observers on the ground may not feel threatened by seeing something in the sky they can't identify, but a good pilot will necessarily want to assess any object they see for any possible threat it may pose to their aircraft, such as a possible mid-air collision. So I don't think you can just move pilots to a different technical category on the basis they have more technical training, because this completely ignores the aircraft safety and psychological aspects of pilots seeing UFOs that are not typically issues with ground observers of UFOs.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I would think it goes without saying constantly referring to Project Blue book for proof is a little sketch as the whole point of that project was to "disprove" UFO's and tell people there is nothing to it and they are all imagining things. So I'm a little dubious on their numbers. While I do agree that their are plenty of miss identifications across the board the report basically says all pilots are terrible observers and for me I wouldn't even want them in the air if those numbers are true.

There are only so many things flying in the sky. Birds, drones, other planes/helicopters and weather balloons plus the occasional Chinese lantern or lost BDay balloon but those are tiny compared to a plane. With enough pilot hours it would seem your going to have a pretty good idea what's up there with you. Not to mention the other plane staff and passengers who give the same descriptions.

Again, I agree there is a lot of miss identification but 88% of pilots don't know when they are seeing another plane, bird or balloon? That's scary AF if true.

originally posted by: FishBait
Again, I agree there is a lot of miss identification but 88% of pilots don't know when they are seeing another plane, bird or balloon? That's scary AF if true.

I think the best theory on the death of Captain Mantell in one of the most famous UFO cases is that what he was chasing was a skyhook balloon. It's never been proven 100%, but it's considered a plausible even if not proven explanation. At the time, the balloons were classified so the pilots wouldn't have known about them, and there would have been some embarrassment in that case involving a fatality in admitting the pilot died chasing a balloon.

This is from "AVIATION WEEK - Feb 19, 1951" and talks about the excessive secrecy about the skyhook balloon program, which may have contributed to Captain Mantell's death:

Readers of this magazine have often read the opinion here that secrecy is overdone in the national capital; we have seen no better example than this.

The hoax the ONR has perpetrated brought on something akin to public hysteria in some areas, cost the Air Force, National Guard and other public services needless wasted monies in investigations and flights and, most tragic of all, cost the life of an Air Force pilot, Capt. Thomas F. Mantell, whose plane crashed while he was pursuing a “saucer” in 1948. Apparently then, months after the ONR balloon ascensions began, neither ONR nor high Navy officials had tipped off the Air Force, else we can presume the USAF would not order or permit its pilots to try to chase already identified objects that were known to rise to 19-mile-altitudes.

ONR=Office of Naval Research, and as the US military tends to do, they like to keep things secret, so the pilots didn't know about these skyhook balloons at the time Mantell died possibly or apparently chasing one.

The UFO didn't actually kill him, he died apparently because he went to too high an altitude with not enough oxygen and probably lost consciousness, then crashed.

Hynek cites other objects that pilots were very poor at identifying, like astronomical objects. The article Jim Oberg wrote I linked above even talks about a pilot who saw a satellite re-entry, and then apparently concluded he knew what all entries of objects from orbit looked like. Then he saw the Gorizont/Proton rocket body entering the atmosphere, but he didn't know that's what it was, and he said he'd seen a satellite re-entry before but it didn't look like what he saw:

web.archive.org...

"Was it a satellite re-entry? The pilot stated: 'It certainly didn't look like that to me. I have seen a re-entry before and this was different.'

"But it was the BA captain's further comments that are causing amazement and intense interest. SIGAP has released the information to UFO researcher and writer Tim Good, and we hope to have more comprehensive details this year.

So he seems to be ruling out a re-entry when he shouldn't have, and there were some very interesting misperceptions of that re-entry by the pilots, noted in that article.

I would also suppose that just like the Skyhook balloon project was secret when Captain Mantell died, there are other projects of the military still secret today, that pilots don't know about. And just like Mantell perhaps not being able to identify an object that was known to others, but not to him, some of that could still be happening today. To what degree I don't know, but an example that comes to mind is Fravor's sitghting. At first I assumed he was telling the truth, but now I'm not so sure, but let's assume he's telling the truth. He presumes the military doesn't have anything that can do what he saw, but just like Captain Mantell didn't really know what the ONI had flying around, Fravor also doesn't know about secret projects where he has no need to know, so to him it's a UFO, even if someone else may know what he saw but can't say because it's a secret, like skyhook was.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Why explain something technologically when it is naturally occurring, if the ancients say these energies come from the earth why are we looking at the sky, whether it's djinn or elementals, nature spirits or archons.... To discount these is ridiculous in itself as these ideas have been around much longer than ETs and many of the greatest men in history have attested to the existence of supernatural phenomenon.

originally posted by: OutTheBox
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Why explain something technologically when it is naturally occurring, if the ancients say these energies come from the earth why are we looking at the sky, whether it's djinn or elementals, nature spirits or archons.... To discount these is ridiculous in itself as these ideas have been around much longer than ETs and many of the greatest men in history have attested to the existence of supernatural phenomenon.

We have a method for exploring the natural world called science.

One premise of science is that what happens, happens according to natural laws. If it appears to be supernatural, then one possibility is that it's happening according to natural laws we don't know about or our understanding of natural laws is incomplete.

However the evidence I've seen suggests a different hypothesis, that a large part of what we are dealing with in UFOlogy is the ability of people to take phenomena they don't understand and then assign supernatural characteristics to them, even if the objects don't actually exhibit supernatural phenomena. Here is a case example, where a pilot says he shot a video of a UFO that wasn't behaving by the normal laws of physics. In some sense that makes it a supernatural object. But we watch the video and see that the pilot just doesn't understand what the hell he's looking at in the video, it doesn't defy any laws of physics.

So here's a supernatural example, which is not supernatural. I suspect if we had good evidence of all the supernatural claims, we could use that evidence to determine that they are indeed following natural laws. Good evidence means NOT from an eyewitness, but from something like a video recording, as this pilot had:

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks: ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’

If it was obeying physics like a normal object that you would encounter in the sky — an aircraft, or a cruise missile, or some sort of special project that the government didn’t tell you about — that would have made more sense to me. The part that drew our attention was how it wasn’t behaving within the normal laws of physics. You’re up there flying, like, “Okay. It’s not behaving in a manner that’s predictable or is normal by how flying objects physically move.”

It behaved exactly according to the normal laws of physics, so for the pilot to say his video shows ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’ again reinforces that we need something other than what an eyewitness says, to get to the bottom of these apparent paranormal sightings.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Natural laws are at play in many psychological phenomenon that is unexplained at this point.

Things happen differently just by us viewing it.

Our scope of perception is minimal compared to all that is perceivable, and that is just the things we know about. When you bring in the aether, collected conscious thought, fear, emotions, all the things that can trigger a wider scope of perception then we can see the unseeable...
I'm not saying aliens don't exist but it makes no sense for them to be here, probing us or whatever.

It makes more sense that our science is not at the level to understand our place on this earth and what else is here, never mind the cosmos.

a reply to: OutTheBox
One thing I've seen researched is how people perceive time in various circumstances, including the distortions created by various states of emotion which can certainly happen during sightings of unknown flying objects:

Scientists Uncover How Emotions Alter Time Perception

In the midst of the neuroscientific focus on time perception, scientists continue to recognize the integral role that happiness, sadness, fear, and other emotions play in the way we feel the passing of seconds and minutes.

It's something that's still being researched but I suspect most of us know from personal experience that emotions do affect our perception of time. One of the experiments discussed in that article seems to be a scientific validation of the expression "time flies when you're having fun", not exactly perhaps, but something like that.

So when Lonnie Zamora stated how long it took the UFO he saw to fly away, given his emotional state during the event, I'd be very reluctant to consider his time estimates accurate, and to his credit he admitted he wasn't confident in the accuracy of his time estimates. That didn't stop some people from using those to calculate the speed of the UFO, which could have been way off, if his perceptions of time were way off.

But for say visual stimuli, we have some understanding of how the rods and cones in the human eye operate, and what frequencies can trigger them. Based on that knowledge, it seems unlikely that people will start seeing in ultraviolet or infrared when they get excited, the mechanics of how the rods and cones work wouldn't seem to support that. However I think there's ample evidence that the way the brain process the information it receives from the eyes can vary a lot. For example, someone seeing multiple lights in the sky might have a tendency to "connect the dots" int heir mind. We've seen examples of that, some I mentioned already in this thread, like the Yukon UFO case.

I'm not saying aliens don't exist but it makes no sense for them to be here, probing us or whatever.

I'm not sure why you say that, we'd like to go to other places in our solar system and "probe" whatever might be living there, like Mars, Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa as possibilities where we think there could be life. In those cases, WE would be the aliens, doing the probing.

It makes more sense that our science is not at the level to understand our place on this earth and what else is here

Science has limitations, no doubt. Regarding what makes sense, that may be a product of a person's spiritual beliefs, scientific training, or other factors, but I don't think any of that really gives us any insights into the possible psychology of alien intelligent life forms. They could be curious, as we are, in our desire to see what other kinds of life is out there. Or as some people suggest, they may see us like we see ants. We can't do anything but speculate and perhaps we all tend to have not necessarily justified anthropomorphic expectations of intelligent alien life forms.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for your response, very scientific and academically writen, but I'm talking more on like a hallucinary level, do the cones on the mad mens eyes see the pink elephant or is it happening in the mind?

a reply to: Jay-morris

I stated it all boils down to meaningless
information. Unless anyone anywhere can
prove unidentified flying objects have
helped anyone with anything it's
completely meaningless.

All the UFO evidence combined
is of no practical use.

I used the fruit fly reference
to make a point. The point being,
a fruit fly takes flight, just as some
of the UFO evidence suggest UFO's
take flight.

But a fruit fly will die in less than 40 days,
yet has more practical use and purpose
than all the UFO evidence combined.

If I continue on this subject comparing fruit flies
against UFO''s, it might cause some to be offended.
And that's not really my objective.

Here are some fascinating facts about the fruit fly.

www.mentalfloss.com...

originally posted by: OutTheBox
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for your response, very scientific and academically writen, but I'm talking more on like a hallucinary level, do the cones on the mad mens eyes see the pink elephant or is it happening in the mind?

This is something I'd really like to address, mad men. Sorry if I'm taking your post in a direction you didn't intend, that's my fault, not yours, but when I suggested all eyewitnesses are not reliable when it comes to UFOs, this was turned around by another member into a false dichotomy, that there were only two options, either:
1. People are perfect observers, or
2. They are idiots, crazy, insane, or whatever.

Instead of picking on the other member, I'm going to pick on the prominent UFO researcher Dr Hynek, in this excerpt from page 116 of his book "The UFO Experience", which your "mad men" comment reminded me of:

Hynek asks, "Do we have a phenomenon in which several people suffer temporary insanity at a given instant, but at no other time before or after?"

This to me is an example of asking the wrong question. Take the example of the Yukon UFO case which I linked earlier and again below; I don't think any of the 30+ eyewitnesses were mad or all simultaneously had "temporary insanity" which is the only other option Hynek considers for reports such as that where the "accepted logical limits of misperception are in these cases exceeded by so great a margin that one must assume that the observers either truly had the experience as reported, or were bereft of their reason and senses."

I commonly see people who think along these lines, presenting these two choices as if they are the only two options:
A. The witnesses really did see something completely paranormal or extraordinary, or,
B. They are crazy, nuts, idiots, or whatever.

Here we MUST EMPHASIZE the third option, and that is that the real problem here is what Hynek calls "accepted logical limits of misperception". So let me say that the Yukon case demonstrates a third option not offered in Hynek's false dichotomy:

C. The observers are normal, generally reliable people, faced with an unusual stimulus which they described in ways that many would say exceed "accepted logical limits of misperception".

For example:
"Top Ten" UFO Case - Yukon, Canada, 1996 - BUSTED!

Report: the UFO was hovering approximately 300 yards in front of the observer. "Hynek Classification: CE1" (Close Encounter of the First Kind).

Reality: the distance to the re-entering booster was approximately 233 km (145 miles), so this was not a "close encounter."

Who would argue that reporting an object as 300 yards in front of the observer is within the "accepted logical limits of misperception" when in reality it's 233 km away, or that they see a giant mothership when it's a fireball swarm and there is no giant mothership?

So what everyone needs to do I think is realize that the previous "accepted logical limits of misperception" need to be vastly expanded in the light of cases like that one. I really think relatively few people really get this other than folks like Jim Oberg, Robert Sheaffer and some others who have spent some time looking at these cases.

Now are there mad men out there seeing pink elephants? Maybe, but I don't see any reason to think that is a significant factor in the UFO phenomena that people observe. I think the predominant issue is that we have generally reliable people who are not crazy, idiots, or "mad men" seeing things that they don't understand, and their brains can take a confusing stimulus and "fill in the blanks" in ways that exceed what Hynek called "accepted logical limits of misperception". I really think that is a much more significant portion of the UFO phenomenon than crazy people or idiots, though I don't deny there may be a few of those,but Hynek seems to think he filtered most of those out in his evaluations if I read what he said correctly about the "filtered" cases he looked at.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

What the 'Yukon Case' and the dozens of other 'mother-ship' reports that coincided with documented satellite reentries should teach us all is that simply =IMAGINING= what 'common sense' tells us are the limits of 'conceivable' misinterpretations is unscientific. The suggestion certainly =DID= defy 'common sense', and could have continued to do so indefinitely but for the serendipitous 'control experiments' offered by the reentry fireball swarm phenomenon. That's the theme of my report here: www.jamesoberg.com...

The sad fact that apparently everybody in the world 'UFOlogy community" overlooked the lesson that has been again and again glaringly painted in the night skies of Earth by manmade fireball swarms since the dawn of the Space Age is dismaying to me.

originally posted by: JimOberg
a reply to: Arbitrageur

What the 'Yukon Case' and the dozens of other 'mother-ship' reports that coincided with documented satellite reentries should teach us all is that simply =IMAGINING= what 'common sense' tells us are the limits of 'conceivable' misinterpretations is unscientific. The suggestion certainly =DID= defy 'common sense', and could have continued to do so indefinitely but for the serendipitous 'control experiments' offered by the reentry fireball swarm phenomenon. That's the theme of my report here: www.jamesoberg.com...

The sad fact that apparently everybody in the world 'UFOlogy community" overlooked the lesson that has been again and again glaringly painted in the night skies of Earth by manmade fireball swarms since the dawn of the Space Age is dismaying to me.

One of a great many dismaying developments, no doubt, or if not then you lead a happy life.

Harte

originally posted by: FishBait
.....
There are only so many things flying in the sky. Birds, drones, other planes/helicopters and weather balloons plus the occasional Chinese lantern or lost BDay balloon but those are tiny compared to a plane. With enough pilot hours it would seem your going to have a pretty good idea what's up there with you.....

Your imagination has failed. You're in good company.

a reply to: neoholographic

Quite a few of the skeptics just don't have the mindset required to see this. When the Earth was discovered to be round to when we realized our planet orbited the sun vs. being the center of the universe, there have always been those simply not able to grasp the bigger picture.

They are too absorbed in their own subjective reality to imagine anything different, or even that they got it entirely wrong

a reply to: JBurns

When exactly was the Earth discovered to be round?

a reply to: Phage

I should say "not flat" or whatever near circular shape it's in

a reply to: JBurns

Ok.

When exactly was the Earth discovered to be "not flat?"

a reply to: Phage

Don't know. Whatever year morons in power stopped burning alive anyone who challenged their political/etc doctrines. Basically any belief that said human = small, insignificant in the grand scheme of things compared to human = center of all existance

Small fish in a big pond.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: JBurns

Ok.

When exactly was the Earth discovered to be "not flat?"

Since he won't, I will.
It was around 450 BC. Couple hundred years after that, around 300 BC, the heliocentric model was proposed.

The second one was lost during the "Dark Ages." The first one was not.

While morons were burning people for disagreeing with them, everyone - morons and flamers - already knew the Earth was round.

Harte