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Originally Posted by Oldschool61
I however give eye witness testimony from credible people more weight than you. Especially when there are multiple witnesses to same sighting.
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Okay, I'm taking a risk here but i'm going to bring up a religious event witnessed by thousands of people. Now, this has nothing to do with religion so don't go off on one. It concerns the nature and reliability of eye witness testimony.
The day the sun went mental*....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun
I will wager that you and I don't believe for a second that on the 13 October 1917 the sun actually....
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....appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky.
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And yet presumably there were quite a few people in that huge crowd who would easily qualify under your standard of '
credibility'. Still, you will be inclined, as would I, to explain the event in naturalistic terms. Perhaps as a mass delusion, an optical illusion or an instance of people seeing what they expected to see...etc. I very much doubt you will entertain the thought that perhaps God
really did make the sun dance for the faithful on that day.
However, when it comes to UFOs all this seemingly goes out of the window. Why is that? Why, in the case of religious visions (of which there are many) would you immediately look for a natural, down to earth explanation; but when it comes to testimony concerning un-identified flying objects you have your heart set, it appears, on advocating probably the most out-landish explanation imaginable!
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Not everyone is crazy or out to make a buck.
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True. But the fact is that UFOlogy is filled to the gills with crackpots and charlatans. For anyone who is truly trying to get a handle on the phenomena they have my respect and sympathies.
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And lots of theoretical physicists believe now that its likely possible to travel light years away by bending space and time...
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Don't confuse possibility with either probability or evidential support. The fact that wormholes may be theoretically possible in no way constitutes supporting evidence that aliens are using them to get here.
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....we are just to primitive to figure it out now.
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This notion of 'primitive' brings up a point I don't recall reading in this thread so far. Have you noticed how the alleged space-craft have evolved over the years? We've gone from the 1950's hub-cap style flying saucers to modern day stealthy '
black triangles'. When I was growing up in the 80's the common description for UFOs was as a '
cigar-shaped craft'. Similarly the descriptions of extra-terrestrials given by '
contactees' have undergone an obvious evolution.
How to explain this? One way to explain this is to take the testimony at face value and begin categorising all the various ETs and their ships into 'races' or 'species'. A somewhat more realistic approach is to explain this variety as the projections of culture upon a confusing and at times frightening phenomena.
*
El dia el Loco Sol (
or something like that...
)