French National Assembly to host UAP seminar with true believers

[Eburacum]

That's how active radar works

By cherrypicking? I doubt that very much.

 

[Baptiste Fr]

Good point, we can't know about photos/ videos of UFOs that aren't made public. Perhaps many exist.
But photos/ videos we don't know about aren't evidence (although they may become evidence if revealed later).


The Gendarmerie? (Many English-speakers are familiar with the term, but some incorrectly use it as a word for French police generally).

Oh, but they are, in a trial, the public doesn't see most of the evidence collected, but it exists. You even have presumption of evidence, forbidding you to destroy any data that can be relevant, without even knowing if it exists, just on the potentialité of its existence

You could argue in favor of anything using those arguments, even things that are mutually exclusive.

That's why they are in a paragraph explaining them

 

[Baptiste Fr]

By cherrypicking? I doubt that very much.

If you want to accuse them of cherry picking, please address your critics to a report and send them to the SCU, I'd be really interested to read their response

 

[Nourali]

I see many opinions and few facts, critics can be directly forwarded to the SCU, they are very open to dialogue. I would advise to assemble the remarks in a report first, for ease of communication, I'm not sure forum posts or webpages are the most efficient way of communicating.

Edit: regarding your "remark", please try to take a picture of a bird mid flight next time you see one, but take a 15 seconds delay to simulate the shock of witnesses trying to understand what they see, and a 5 seconds delay to simulate the actual time of finding your phone while in a state of panic, and remember, it was 2008 phones. Then factor in peer pressure, do you really want to be exposed as someone who has the picture of a UFO, considering that whatever the quality of the picture you took some will always call you a hoaxer, and your job will surely be affected as you'll become "the guy that photographed a UFO". The best pictures of UFOs I've authentified and seen were sent by private citizens whom I verified the identity and they didn't want their pictures to go public, because many people are very agressive regarding that subject, an agressiveness and an irony, it seems to me, that shows through your message.

I would also add that, in most explained GEIPAN cases (meaning cases where we know there was a something and not a hoax or a hallucination) there is no video at all. And when there is one, the quality is often poor.

Videos also come with their own problems: they need reliable authentication, sufficient quality, and enough contextual information to determine whether the object is genuinely anomalous. Good recording devices are more common today, but they are still not always available at the right moment. For example, I have a good phone with a 30x zoom and decent video quality, but if I saw a UFO this week, I probably couldn't film it properly because my phone needs repair. At best, I might get a x3 portrait-mode photo. Good luck proving from that alone that it was not just a balloon or a weird drone.

There are indeed many practical reasons why getting an authenticated video good enough to prove that an object is truly anomalous is much harder than people assume.

 

[Nourali]

Yes; they both cherrypick from 2.5 million data points to find 187 'significant' returns, even though those returns are described as weak. We need better evidence than that.

That's how active radar works

Our thread on Stephenville is here
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/stephenville-texas-ufo-2008.13446/page-2#post-371988
There were several F16 planes flying around on that night; one likely explanation is that the witnesses saw some, or several of these planes at various times and moving in various directions.

Even if one wants to dispute the radar tracks selected by the MUFON/SCU study as evidence for a truly anomalous object, the study still matters for another reason. It provides a detailed comparison between the witness reports, the timing, the directions of observation, and the known military and civilian aircraft in the area. On that basis, several key sightings do not fit with F-16s, flares, commercial aircraft, or other conventional explanations.

 

[Nourali]

If I saw a strange light in the sky that I could not identify, I would surely bring my phone up and film it right away, I'd post it here or anywhere and have it full analyzed.
Problem is, nothing I ever saw was weird enough.
If I were to see something VERY weird, would I do the same thing? I don't know, if I'm in shock and awe, maybe there are chances I would't think about it?
This doesn't disprove the fact that it's "very convenient" that the best UFO cases have almost always little to no photo evidence substantiating the weirdest claims.
But I think it's something to be considered.

Yep, same thing for me. When I see something in the sky, my first assumption is that it's prosaic, even if I still watch it for a bit to understand what I'm actually seeing. So if it suddenly started doing something very weird, there's a good chance I wouldn't be ready to record it in time.

 

[Mauro]

That's how active radar works

No, that's how noise works. Radar pareidolia.

 

[Mauro]

No photos of video that we know of, you can't deduce a truth from a lack of information.

But this can be said of anything. For example, no photos or videos of fairies that we know of, what can you deduce from that? Is this fact evidence for or against the existence of fairies?

 

[Mauro]

There are indeed many practical reasons why getting an authenticated video good enough to prove that an object is truly anomalous is much harder than people assume.

In your opinion, does this fully explain why we don't have authentic good videos of truly anomalous objects?

 

[Todd Feinman]

Yep, same thing for me. When I see something in the sky, my first assumption is that it's prosaic, even if I still watch it for a bit to understand what I'm actually seeing. So if it suddenly started doing something very weird, there's a good chance I wouldn't be ready to record it in time.

You also don't want to turn away from it lest you miss something. A form of fascination.
Many sightings can happen quickly; long enough to get a good look in some cases, but also not long enough to deal with a camera in some cases.

 

[Nourali]

In your opinion, does this fully explain why we don't have authentic good videos of truly anomalous objects?

In my opinion, yes. But that is only my opinion, and I can't know for sure.

There may already be good UFO videos online, but the web is full of garbage, hoaxes, misidentifications, and videos with no context. Some potentially interesting cases may simply be unnoticed or poorly documented.

For example, I made a thread about an alleged flying saucer video from Moldova. We don't have enough information to conclude anything, but it shows that interesting videos may exist without being widely known.

However, if nothing stronger appears in the coming decades, it will become much harder to argue that we were just unlucky. At that point, the lack of solid evidence would become a stronger argument against the reality of UFOs.

For now, I still think that argument is weak.

 

[Baptiste Fr]

But this can be said of anything. For example, no photos or videos of fairies that we know of, what can you deduce from that? Is this fact evidence for or against the existence of fairies?

Are you trying rhetorics on me? I said the lack of evidence isn't the proof of absence, not that it was a proof of existence

 

[Baptiste Fr]

In my opinion, yes. But that is only my opinion, and I can't know for sure.

There may already be good UFO videos online, but the web is full of garbage, hoaxes, misidentifications, and videos with no context. Some potentially interesting cases may simply be unnoticed or poorly documented.

For example, I made a thread about an alleged flying saucer video from Moldova. We don't have enough information to conclude anything, but it shows that interesting videos may exist without being widely known.

However, if nothing stronger appears in the coming decades, it will become much harder to argue that we were just unlucky. At that point, the lack of solid evidence would become a stronger argument against the reality of UFOs.

For now, I still think that argument is weak.

I would add that this isn't a time definite problem. Even if the probability is low tomorrow, contact may happen in the future, the further the more likely. So examining possible contacts day by day is still a necessity, as it's what future is made of. And if it becomes proven that contact happened, then it doesn't cancel the fact that other future different contacts are likely.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Even if one wants to dispute the radar tracks selected by the MUFON/SCU study as evidence for a truly anomalous object, the study still matters for another reason.

No. This is the standard UFO response when a flaw is pointed out.

And I'm not discussing the Stephnville case particularly, just using it as the example. The investigators claimed that 2 likely unrelated radar returns that normally would have been dismissed, where evidence of an accelerating UFO. This identification was based on 4 witnesses, all 30+ miles away, seeing differently described lights in the sky at a particular time in a particular direction. 2 of the witnesses were actively driving at dusk/night, so their sightings are glimpses while driving along. At least 1 witness gave 3 different times for his sighting, thus the investigators chose the claimed time that accorded with radar tracks they were trying to connect. Again, circular reasoning.

When this is pointed out, it is hand waved away and replaced with another claim:

It provides a detailed comparison between the witness reports, the timing, the directions of observation, and the known military and civilian aircraft in the area. On that basis, several key sightings do not fit with F-16s, flares, commercial aircraft, or other conventional explanations.

Whether "several key sightings do not fit" with various prosaic explanations does not make the pieced together radar track evidence. Without the supposed radar evidence, that case is fairly straight forward. There were several sorties of F16 going to and from the nearby MOD, where some dropped very bright flares. The report only contains 8 witness accounts, so I'm not sure which ones are considered "key". All but Steve Allen's just describe lights in the sky, with some even commenting that they looked like flares. Others are from 30+ miles away and looking in a completely different direction.

It's a constant moving of the goal post. UFO investigators offer "proof" of a UFO being tracked by radar. When flaws in that proof are pointed out, it's onto a new claim. As for some of the "key sightings" not having conventional explanations, maybe it's because the sightings are flawed. As Mr. Babtiste pointed out above:

Facts are facts, furthermore when you have corroborative statements. We had a perfect example in Italy, a rocket made a catastrophic reentry. Some saw a meteor, some saw a cigar shaped UFO, some saw a rocket reentry. But they all saw something similar, and the event was real. It's just normal for the human mind to interpret data, and it has been extensively studied in psychology,

This is why witness testimony, particularly about vague things like lights in the sky, is often unreliable. People see things and interpret them in their own way. What a witness says they saw, and more importantly what they say they remembered seeing, which may very different from the actual event, can be a starting point for an investigation, but offers little in the way of evidence for aliens or their aliens spacecraft buzzing around.