New Science of UAP Paper

[Tezcatlipoca]

We're all a bit off topic at this point, so what the hell?

That's an interesting point. I would argue, from the skeptical point of view, in the UFO world, much of the stigma is self generated. I'll use one example so I don't ramble too much.

Two of the bigger names in the UFO world are George Knapp and Jeremy Corbel. Corbel regularly releases supposed secret videos from the military, they appear at many UFO conferences and more recently Michael Brown, the leaker of the Immaculate Constellation program files, was on their podcast/ YouTube program. They present a lot of UFO evidence. Evidence we skeptics are supposed to take seriously.

Both of them also defend the incoherent and un-evidenced ramblings of Bod Lazar. Lazar's stories about him working on "sport model" flying saucers at Area 51, his multiple degrees from schools he never attended and claims of keeping the highly unstable element 115 in his kitchen are sketchy at best. When one delves into them, they are ludicrous. Yes, his first interviews in the late '80s made Knapp national news, but instead of moving on, 30 years later Corbel produced a whole documentary trying to keep Lazar and his stories going and defending all the BS Lazar trolled out over the years, because it was about UFOs.

For me, this creates a "stigma". When someone says "did you see the evidence Corbel posted today?", my first thought is, he thinks Bob Lazar has element 115 in his kitchen, why would I take anything he presents seriously?

This repeats in UFOlogy continuously. Every fuzzy light in the sky is an alien space ship. Even when things like the Chilean Air force UFO are identified as an airliner, many in the UFO world insist it isn't. A supposed crashed UFO under a mesa that no one has seen is reported to have superconducting ceramics on Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch. The Buga ball in Colombia. Batman balloons. Christmas shows reflecting off the clouds. It's this constant barrage of nonsense trolled out as "evidence" of UFOs and aliens that creates the stigma.

Also even just within the Brown reference. There's two parts to this, the "leak" and the document "leak" (and self-debunk).

The "leak" - They claimed "Immaculate Constellation" was an actual program, but the entire way they explained it was instead as a Control System for specific types of imagery. When we talk Special Compartmented Informtion/SCI, a "Control System" is when you see fancy terms like GAMMA, HCS, TALENT KEYHOLE, etc. These are not programs at all what so ever - but may be connected to one/a series of specific programs. The Control Systems are basically the widest categorization for SCI (with compartments and subcompartments being below that respectively). You can get read-in/granted access at this level but most folks would be dealing with the compartment/subcompartment level not the overall CS.

The document "leak" - As we find out, "Immaculate Constellation" was in fact not a program, nor a real thing even. It was referenced in a concept proposal for a single training exercise as a simulated control system not an actual one.

Edited with a slight note: On the leak, they also clearly had access to the accurate information here the entire time. I don't really see a feasible way that occurred unless Brown was lied too. Same hand though, he did give enough detail in the original "leak" (pre-docs) that would indicate he did have/read at least some of the relevant documents - the context of which was very clear and overtly written.

 

[Ann K]

The reality is - any exotic topic is going to act like flypaper for the fringe. That doesn't mean everyone's claims are crap by proxy... in fact, many people never come forward precisely because the stigma is amplified by those louder, less credible figures. And that, to me, is where stigma becomes its own kind of filter.

That stigma, I think, is more likely to cause sensible observers (as opposed to attention-seekers) to think twice about what they think they saw, rather than go off half-cocked and exclaim "the aliens are coming" every time they see a light in the sky. They do not want to report something that they can't defend with evidence, and perhaps that's exactly the kind of "filter" that we need.

Nevertheless, that's something that is personal to individuals, and thus something we have to take as it comes.

 

[orianda]

That stigma, I think, is more likely to cause sensible observers (as opposed to attention-seekers) to think twice about what they think they saw, rather than go off half-cocked and exclaim "the aliens are coming" every time they see a light in the sky. They do not want to report something that they can't defend with evidence, and perhaps that's exactly the kind of "filter" that we need.

Nevertheless, that's something that is personal to individuals, and thus something we have to take as it comes.

Here's a quick example from my own life: my previous boss, a lawyer in NJ, saw a huge, silent low-flying drone near his home during the flap last fall. He described it to me in detail the next day and even had a video. But he had no interest in attaching his name to the sighting, or sharing the video. The stigma was just too great - in his mind just not worth it.

And this is someone I worked with for years - extremely level-headed, not at all the type to fabricate a story just to tell me privately. It absolutely didn't fit his personality.

Which is a shame, because many of us would have loved to see the video.

 

[Gary C]

Here's a quick example from my own life: my previous boss, a lawyer in NJ, saw a huge, silent low-flying drone near his home during the flap last fall. He described it to me in detail the next day and even had a video. But he had no interest in attaching his name to the sighting, or sharing the video. The stigma was just too great - in his mind just not worth it.

And this is someone I worked with for years - extremely level-headed, not at all the type to fabricate a story just to tell me privately. It absolutely didn't fit his personality.

Which is a shame, because many of us would have loved to see the video.

Well stigma may be a partial explanation, serious people with real lives are often less inclined to post anything personal on social media. The ego stroke of lots of likes and shares just isn't that important if you are fulfilled in you daily life. And if he is the sort of serious person you describe, the "me too" act of joining an ongoing frenzy can be a turn-off in itself.

tl;dr Your interest in seeing it does not correlate with his interest in posting it.

edited for spelling

 

[Mendel]

Here's a quick example from my own life: my previous boss, a lawyer in NJ, saw a huge, silent low-flying drone near his home during the flap last fall. He described it to me in detail the next day and even had a video. But he had no interest in attaching his name to the sighting, or sharing the video. The stigma was just too great - in his mind just not worth it.

And this is someone I worked with for years - extremely level-headed, not at all the type to fabricate a story just to tell me privately. It absolutely didn't fit his personality.

Which is a shame, because many of us would have loved to see the video.

Yes.

The reason is not that someone might post it to Metabunk, and we identify what it is.

The reason is that some youtuber with reach might snatch up the video and push it as "new mysterious unexplained drone sighting, is it Chinese or aliens?" and could end up on the evening news that way, with the lawyer's name associated with that ridiculous claim and no effective means of redress.

This isn't the skeptics' fault.

 

[orianda]

This isn't the skeptics' fault.

I can't help noticing a bit of a stigma shuffle here: first it's 'stigma is useful,' then 'it's social media's fault,' now 'it's the UFO people.'

The reality is, stigma isn't a single-source phenomenon. It's fueled both by sensationalists hyping shaky evidence and by skeptics ridiculing it. Put those together, and a lot of level-headed people who might otherwise contribute responsibly just decide it's not worth the risk

 

[Gary C]

I can't help noticing a bit of a stigma shuffle here: first it's 'stigma is useful,' then 'it's social media's fault,' now 'it's the UFO people.'

The reality is, stigma isn't a single-source phenomenon. It's fueled both by sensationalists hyping shaky evidence and by skeptics ridiculing it. Put those together, and a lot of level-headed people who might otherwise contribute responsibly just decide it's not worth the risk

If you state the problem as one of risk/reward it explains itself. The reward is always negligible while risk is a function of the observers personal social situation.

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

I can't help noticing a bit of a stigma shuffle here: first it's 'stigma is useful,' then 'it's social media's fault,' now 'it's the UFO people.'

The reality is, stigma isn't a single-source phenomenon. It's fueled both by sensationalists hyping shaky evidence and by skeptics ridiculing it. Put those together, and a lot of level-headed people who might otherwise contribute responsibly just decide it's not worth the risk

Not entirely a shuffle, those all integrate together.
Eg stigma can be helpful for regulative purposes when it comes to balance in group dynamics. In this specific referential context, it is happening through the medium of social media - and the audience conducting the behavior that is creating the stigma is "UFO people". I don't agree with this 1-1 but does track conceptually, not really a shuffle in a negative sense.

You are correct on the second part and it's a tid bit that a lot of people don't get. It's gets brought up sometimes with the malign influence context in regard to the fact our reporting on it, in a lot of cases, debatably achieves far more affective benefit for them than the operations themselves. We see it now with politics too - not now in existence but rather discussion. Take the Sydney Sweeney ad for example, or the college campus tiktoks. The "left outrage" and all that, is in fact, non-existent and both sets of discussion are primarily driven by right wing talking heads, talking about "left outrage".
Rather than manufacturing it though, what happens here is both ingroups laser focus on specific influencers the other has and projects negatively exaggerated perceptions & metaperceptions. Rather than focusing on their own part in the dynamic, it is viewed through the lens of focusing on the other. So rather than "seeing" they are driving it or that the left influencers they're looking at aren't really impacting overall discussion, they end up with the exaggerated perceptions due too the narrow focus (and a few other factors). This happens plenty in reverse too, just offering that example since both discussions are widely relevant for at least us here in the US at the moment.

 

[Mendel]

I can't help noticing a bit of a stigma shuffle here: first it's 'stigma is useful,' then 'it's social media's fault,' now 'it's the UFO people.'

The reality is, stigma isn't a single-source phenomenon. It's fueled both by sensationalists hyping shaky evidence and by skeptics ridiculing it. Put those together, and a lot of level-headed people who might otherwise contribute responsibly just decide it's not worth the risk

The stigma attaches to how UFO sightings are framed. The jump "there's something I can't explain, therefore it's aliens" is not a reasonable thought, and no complaints from your end will make it so. (We do understand that reasonable people's minds will jump there in the excitement of the moment.)

The problem we have is that the term "UFO" today means "it's aliens". The term "UAP" was introduced that could've mitigated that, but the UFO believer scene embraced it, and they use it for "it's aliens, but they could also be in the water or in space" now. It's not the skeptics who did this!

And it's not the skeptics who will frame a neutral report as "it's aliens".

In fact, I challenge you to quote a reputable skeptic ridiculing a UFO report from someone who hasn't got a history of going for "it's aliens" where it's not warranted.

My go-to example is Ryan Graves framing neutral pilot reports of lights in the sky (reported to "Americans for Safe Aerospace") as UAP threats, even after similar sightings had repeatedly been identified as orbiting Starlink satellite flares. Pilots trusted them to be reasonable, and they weren't, because they're believers with an agenda (push for "disclosure").

So if someone is afraid that a neutral report they could make ("I have video of something in the sky, what exactly is it?", as posted to e.g. Metabunk's "Skydentify" subforum) gets framed as "it's aliens" (or, in case of your boss, "it's spy drones"), they're not afraid of us. We don't do that.

Feel free to show your former boss https://www.metabunk.org/forums/Skydentify/ , he might get some ideas about what he might have seen, or the confidence to post his video there for identification. He doesn't need to reveal himself, but an approximate location and view direction of the camera would be expected, as well as an accurate time and date of the recording.

 

[FatPhil]

Yes.

The reason is not that someone might post it to Metabunk, and we identify what it is.

The reason is that some youtuber with reach might snatch up the video and push it as "new mysterious unexplained drone sighting, is it Chinese or aliens?" and could end up on the evening news that way, with the lawyer's name associated with that ridiculous claim and no effective means of redress.

This isn't the skeptics' fault.

The solution to that problem is to be in control of the narrative surrounding the release. Show it with a description that you are happy with. If someone later touts it as something else, it's clear that any exotic bullshittery is entirely theirs, and there's no reason to feel any stigma because of that.

 

[Eburacum]

Here's a quick example from my own life: my previous boss, a lawyer in NJ, saw a huge, silent low-flying drone near his home during the flap last fall. He described it to me in detail the next day and even had a video

How would you feel if he posted the video here, and we positively identified it as a distant plane, as we did for almost every other video from that flap? (The few that we couldn't identify were probably small, nearby, hobbyist drones, not secret US or Chinese drones).

Would that be us 'ridiculing' the video, or simply explaining it using the tools we have available?

 

[flarkey]

How would you feel if he posted the video here, and we positively identified it as a distant plane, as we did for almost every other video from that flap? (The few that we couldn't identify were probably small, nearby, hobbyist drones, not secret US or Chinese drones).

Would that be us 'ridiculing' the video, or simply explaining it using the tools we have available?

According to UFO-fans it would be the typical debunking method of disregarding data (eye witness testimony) but selecting other data that fits our pre-conceived narrative that everything has a prosaic explanation. They seem to think that by testing the eye witness testimony we are saying they are either stupid, lying or delusional.

 

[Mendel]

According to UFO-fans it would be the typical debunking method of disregarding data (eye witness testimony) but selecting other data that fits our pre-conceived narrative that everything has a prosaic explanation. They seem to think that by testing the eye witness testimony we are saying they are either stupid, lying or delusional.

1) Observer: "I saw something weird."
2) UFO community: "You saw a UFO!"
3) Observer: "I saw a UFO."
4) Metabunk: "You saw a scheduled flight."
5a) Observer: "Gosh, now I feel ridiculous."

alternately, depending on far down the rabbit hole they got between step and step 3:
5b) Observer: "It was a UFO, and you're not going to convince me otherwise!"

At this point, 5a) is likely to trigger hostile responses from the parts of the UFO community that stigmatises debunking. There are several pages of Google results calling Mick West a shill. And even the most congenial people lament debunking destroying their sense of wonder.

We just don't complain about it, because the number of people who do it is small. But when you catch people framing the discourse as "they stigmatize us, don't listen to them", you're entering the trenches of a conspiracy theorist's fortifications.

 

[jarlrmai]

The other thing is UFO 'true believers' dominate the spaces where non believers who saw something end up in search of answers first.

Reddit UFOs will say your video is anything but a mundane object, they'll welcome you in to the club, say they saw the same thing 10 years ago. You won't find out what your thing was, it will just become part of the "Phenomenon."

There's a load of talking heads in the UFO space looking for content, especially these days. Some of them are making money from social media engagement and some are true believers (and both)

 

[NorCal Dave]

But skeptics also sometimes use that stigma as a broad brush as if all UAP questions can be dismissed just because the loudest voices are kooks.

I'll respectfully disagree a bit here. Yes, it's easy to invoke Lazar and then dismiss Corbel's latest cell phone recording of a computer screen with limited information as likely more hype. Although, you will find that most of his postings do end being analyzed here on Metabunk purely on the merits of the video. Lazar is "low hanging fruit" so to speak. However, when we deal more sober and serious UAP researchers, such as many of the authors of the paper this thread is about, a little digging shows they are engaging with similar rubbish.

The authors of this paper provide the Ubatuba incident as evidence of material possibly retrieved from a crashed UFO:

5.1.1. The Ubatuba Incident, 1957, Ubatuba Brazil The Ubatuba incident is one of the most fascinating events that involved the catastrophic explosion of a UFO resulting in debris that was collected [256, 257, 192, 258, 259]. However, the most difficult aspect of this case was the fact that the identities of the witnesses are unknown, which compromises the veracity of the account.

pg: 65

The debris in question are actually bits of magnesium. Convinced these pieces came from a crashed UFO, multiple groups have tested them for the last 70+ years, with UFO groups even convincing the Condon committee to do so:

The Ubatuba samples have been extensively studied by more than a dozen laboratories [257, 259]. The first studies, conducted by Dr. Olavo Fontes and performed at the National Department of Mineral Production in Brazil,determined that the samples were pure magnesium [260, 258].

Dr. Roy Craig, working with the Colorado Project, used the facilities of the Alcohol and Tobacco Division National Office Laboratory to perform neutron activation to measure the isotopic abundance of 26Mg. They found that the abundance of 26Mg was 14.3% ± 0.7%, which they claimed was in agreement with the terrestrial value, which is between 10.99% and 11.03% [261].

The paper by Powell et al. [259] summarizes chemical tests performed over several decades from the 1960s through the 1980s, as well as their work with two independent laboratories...The Cleveland lab showed that the magnesium isotope ratios were consistent with the terrestrial ratios. However,the Austin lab is believed to have been in error as the Mg ratios they obtained, with the same sample, differed from terrestrial values. The paper concludes with auseful discussion of the difficulty of obtaining and interpreting isotope ratios of these types of samples.

pg:66-67,

It's bits of magnesium. More importantly to the claim, is where did these bits of magnesium come from? They came with a letter addressed to Ibrahim Sued, a gossip columnist at a Rio newspaper, El Globo, where he ran a story on it in September 1957. Here is the only known origin story for these samples:

... I was fishing together with some friends, at a place close tot he town of Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, when I sighted a flying disc.It approached the beach at unbelievable speed and an accident, i.e. a crash into the sea seemed imminent. At the last moment,however, when it was almost striking the waters, it made a sharp turn upward and climbed rapidly on a fantastic impulse.

We followed the spectacle with our eyes, startled, when we saw the disc explode in flames. It disintegrated into thousands of fiery fragments, which fell sparkling with magnificent brightness. They looked like fireworks, despite the time of the accident, at noon,i.e. at midday. Most of these fragments, almost all, fell into the ea. But a number of small pieces fell close to the beach and we picked up a large amount of this material - which was as light as paper. I am enclosing a sample of it. I don't know anyone that could be trusted to whom I might send it for analysis.

pg:66

Note that in this version of the letter to Sued quoted in the New Science of UAP paper, they have left off the more sensationalized intro. From a paper by Peter Sturrock about Ubatuba, here is the way the letter opened (Sturrock's paper was not copiable, so screen shot had to be used):

From Sued, the samples made their way to elements of the Brazilian government who thought the magnesium "too pure" to be terrestrial, then they got shipped state side and sent to the Lorenzens who ran the amateur UFO group APRO. They kept them in boxes at home and repeatedly lent them out to various researchers, including the Condon committee, and yes at least one of those samples includes an MiB story. Eventually the samples, or what was left of them, made their way to the afore mentioned Professor Peter Sturrock of Stanford.

Sturrock, along with others, spent a lot of time and effort attempting to track down both the letter writer and the event described to no avail. There were researchers in 1957-1960 and again in the '80s, none of whom could track down any trace of a crashed UFO in the area. In addition, Sturrock notes:

The story doesn't make sense as told. And:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237309319_On_Events_Possibly_Related_to_the_''Brazil_Magnesium

Note the airplane crash in 1957 which is public record. It was a DC-3, an aircraft known to have had some magnesium in the landing gear, and sometimes in the superchargers depending on the motor variant. Even if the bits of magnesium that were passed around did manage to come from the Ubatuba area, there is a prosaic and mundane explanation for it. Something the UFO people ignore.

So, all of that was a long winded way of showing that a modern supposedly "scientific" paper on UAPs is peppered with "evidence" like the Ubatuba samples. Bits of terrestrial magnesium, possibly from a plane crash, passed around for decades, who's only connection to UFOs is an anonymous letter, from an anonymous author about an event no one has ever been able to corroborate. The samples are not evidence of anything other than magnesium. The Ubatube "event" is an un-evidenced farce. And yet here it is on page 65 of this new paper. That creates a stigma. If the authors are going to continue to cling to the belief that these bits of junk might be from a UFO given what we know of the story, why should I take them seriously?

In depth look at Ubatuba and other bits of so-called UFO "meta-material" discussed here:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/meta-materials-from-ufos.12995/

 

[yoshy]

To me, this shows a page that wants me to prove my credentials. I am among the credential-less unwashed, alas. Anybody know of a more accessible site for this?

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001

You'll find the PDF there. In general, you'll find most papers on sci-hub (the domain sometimes changes so I just Google "sci hub") by searching for the DOI or title.

 

[yoshy]

@orianda there's a politeness policy that is pretty rigidly enforced here (and that's a good thing), that doesn't allow making fun of or insulting people who claim to see UFOs or ghosts or whatever. I agree that a stigma against UFO witnesses can be a bit strong or insulting in discourse outside of this website. There's decreasing tolerance and charitability towards some of the biggest UFO personalities (e.g. Elizondo) because they're starting to come across as disingenuous or even grifters. But for someone like your former boss, for example, they would be treated respectfully if they came to share their story here.

 

[Mendel]

There's decreasing tolerance and charitability towards some of the biggest UFO personalities (e.g. Elizondo)

Elizondo is not a UFO witness (though he claims other paranormal experiences).
Coulthart and Corbell and Grusch and Graves have never seen a UFO.
We know Puthoff thought he saw people perform paranormal mental feats when they were doing magic tricks.

We should be very clear that these "UFO experts" have never seen a UFO. They might as well call themselves unicorn experts. They do not deserve to be mentioned when we're discussing witnesses.

[Graves saw some dots on a newly developed radar system that was being tested. He's a pilot, not a radar technician.]

The Tedesco brothers parked their "Nightcrawler" full of equipment on Long Island at night, and wrote a two scientifical papers about it. They represented a recording to be made towards the ocean when it was really made towards JFK. They pretended to scientific rigor, but their methods were lacking. We know they saw what they saw because they recorded it, but we also know it wasn't what they said it was.

 

[Carlo]

Not to quibble but Elizondo said he had orbs floating about his house for years so technically does that count as a UFO witness? Or did he claim it was spirits or something else? I read the book when it came out but haven't revisited it since.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Not to quibble but Elizondo said he had orbs floating about his house for years so technically does that count as a UFO witness? Or did he claim it was spirits or something else? I read the book when it came out but haven't revisited it since.

Hard to say. Elizondo and the rest of the Skinwalker Ranch crowd tend to lump UFOs, were-wolves, orbs, remote viewing, cattle mutilations and other high strangeness together as all part of the "phenomenon". It's all part of the same thing, whatever that is.

In terms of classic UFO/UAP, that is a supposedly physical craft of otherworldly origins, I don't remember Elizondo ever making a claim. All the UFO evidence he presents is from other sources.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Coulthart also saw some "orbs" that were probably satellite flares in Sedona, AZ with Melinda Leslie a couple months ago. He claimed they saw ones that changed speed and direction, but for some reason they only filmed ones that moved at a constant speed in straight lines.

 

[Mendel]

Not to quibble but Elizondo said he had orbs floating about his house for years so technically does that count as a UFO witness? Or did he claim it was spirits or something else? I read the book when it came out but haven't revisited it since.

That's what I referred to as "other paranormal experiences", including his alleged ESP performances.

 

[MapperGuy]

Not to quibble but Elizondo said he had orbs floating about his house for years so technically does that count as a UFO witness? Or did he claim it was spirits or something else? I read the book when it came out but haven't revisited it since.

Afraid I would not classify orbs in his house, or ghosts in his attic or other paranormal things happening at arms length as UFO's. UFO's as others have said are usually related to alien craft and related physical things.

 

[JMartJr]

UFO's as others have said are usually related to alien craft and related physical things.

In UFO circles, that may be an old fashioned concept for some folks. "Nuts And Bolts" space ship UFOs are still a meme, probably/possibly even still the dominant one. But alternate sci-fi memes are popular, such as flying atmosphere jellyfish or time travelers, and what you might call "New Age" UFOs have a following-- demons, spiritual entities, projections from Dimension X, and the like. Those would overlap more with orbs in the house, maybe!

And didn't he claim to have sometimes seen them outside, around the yard and the like? If a UFO comes inside to visit, is it not still a UFO? ^_^

 

[Mendel]

But alternate sci-fi memes are popular, such as flying atmosphere jellyfish or time travelers, and what you might call "New Age" UFOs have a following-- demons, spiritual entities, projections from Dimension X, and the like.

"Plasmoids" (aka white blobs on space mission footage).

 

[MapperGuy]

In UFO circles, that may be an old fashioned concept for some folks. "Nuts And Bolts" space ship UFOs are still a meme, probably/possibly even still the dominant one. But alternate sci-fi memes are popular, such as flying atmosphere jellyfish or time travelers, and what you might call "New Age" UFOs have a following-- demons, spiritual entities, projections from Dimension X, and the like. Those would overlap more with orbs in the house, maybe!

And didn't he claim to have sometimes seen them outside, around the yard and the like? If a UFO comes inside to visit, is it not still a UFO? ^_^

You are correct, there is a push these days for people with interest in various paranormal fields to try and broaden the term, to enhance the visibility (and profitability) of whatever they are "selling". The die-hard UFO fans are going to regret this more and more, as their core interest gets submerged with each addition of some field where claims are based on someones "channeling" this or that, where no physical evidence could exist, and you just have to "believe" what the psychic said.

 

[Gary C]

You are correct, there is a push these days for people with interest in various paranormal fields to try and broaden the term, to enhance the visibility (and profitability) of whatever they are "selling". The die-hard UFO fans are going to regret this more and more, as their core interest gets submerged with each addition of some field where claims are based on someones "channeling" this or that, where no physical evidence could exist, and you just have to "believe" what the psychic said.

All of their evidence will become equivalent to a collection of "Just So" stories.

In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative[1]​ nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore genres like mythology (where they are known as etiological myths – see etiology). A less pejorative term is a pourquoi story, which has been used to describe usually more mythological or otherwise traditional examples of this genre, aimed at children.

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

All of their evidence will become equivalent to a collection of "Just So" stories.

In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative[1]​ nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore genres like mythology (where they are known as etiological myths – see etiology). A less pejorative term is a pourquoi story, which has been used to describe usually more mythological or otherwise traditional examples of this genre, aimed at children.

Ah I love this reference, glad you made it. It's so funny when this gets brought up in relation to the (claimed lack of) potential to assess malign influence or deception around the subject (usually alongside heavily over-exaggerating government capabilities).
Coined famously in a nod to Rudyard Kipling, who was once not only a propagandist, but also participated in counterpropaganda efforts.

 

[yoshy]

Elizondo is not a UFO witness (though he claims other paranormal experiences).
Coulthart and Corbell and Grusch and Graves have never seen a UFO.
We know Puthoff thought he saw people perform paranormal mental feats when they were doing magic tricks.

We should be very clear that these "UFO experts" have never seen a UFO. They might as well call themselves unicorn experts. They do not deserve to be mentioned when we're discussing witnesses.

Agreed! And to be pedantic, I did call Elizondo a "UFO Personality" not a "Witness", technically hehe. (But with the way I wrote that paragraph, it definitely can be read as if I did call him a witness.) I just wanted to make it clear to @orianda that nobody here will make fun of her or her boss for claiming to witness a UFO. But ignoring my pedantry, I completely agree with you. Elizondo is still treated as an expert by those who aren't as deep into the lore as we are here, but his long history of misrepresentations, mistakes (like the lamp reflection UFO), and false predictions should have resulted in him being a pariah in the UFO community a long time ago.

 

[Mendel]

Agreed! And to be pedantic, I did call Elizondo a "UFO Personality" not a "Witness", technically hehe.

Yep, that's why I didn't claim you called him a witness.

(But with the way I wrote that paragraph, it definitely can be read as if I did call him a witness.) I just wanted to make it clear to @orianda that nobody here will make fun of her or her boss for claiming to witness a UFO.

Exactly. We make fun of Elizondo for other reasons (mostly because he really should know better by now).

We've had many cases where the "UFO personalities" will actually distort or cherry-pick witness statements to suit their agenda.
Metabunk, on the other hand, tends to be explicit when we disagree with a witness (the witness said X, we think it's Y because ...), and these are polite disagreements, because we all make mistakes.

 

[yoshy]

Yep, that's why I didn't claim you called him a witness.

Haha damn it, you've out-pedanticced me! You are correct!

 

[Ann K]

In fact, it hasn't really taken off as a specific term within the related fields, but "LIZ" even has a direct comparative in-reference. It's called a low-information environment (LIE, great pun contextually)

The term "LIZ" is perfectly comprehensible as an acronym, and if we here at Metabunk are the only ones using it, does that matter? Whereas the term "LIE" has the unfortunate connotation of being a pejorative, and to avoid causing needless offense, we would have to spell it out ...and that is the exact OPPOSITE of having a handy acronym. Mick tries to keep this site courteous; I'll stick with the term LIZ.

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

The term "LIZ" is perfectly comprehensible as an acronym, and if we here at Metabunk are the only ones using it, does that matter? Whereas the term "LIE" has the unfortunate connotation of being a pejorative, and to avoid causing needless offense, we would have to spell it out ...and that is the exact OPPOSITE of having a handy acronym. Mick tries to keep this site courteous; I'll stick with the term LIZ.

I didn't say it wasn't comprehensible. I brought it up in the context of the debate chain my original comment referenced, and how use of other standing concepts would help fill in some of the issues they were having during the debate whereas LIZ did not. Whether or not it matters isn't what I was getting at really, I was responding to a specific debate where what was being debated, using the LIZ references, was/is something already filled by the concept of a low information environment with far more understanding.

It's not actually acronym-ed as lie either, or well haven't seen it acronym-ed at least probably would end up as that. That was a joke.
As towards the "handy" part, I just offer there if we used the low-information environment concept accurately most of the debate that was in response too wouldn't have happened because both sides would've had a more robust and shared understanding of the gap areas they differed on. That would technically make it more handy contextually unless we base "handy" off something other than efficiency, effectiveness, or accuracy.