French National Assembly to host UAP seminar with true believers

[Leekster]

I don't know what the career of that pilot was, but, for what I know, most civilian pilots are ex-military.

In the USA most commercial pilots are not ex-military. After Vietnam larger percentage commercial airline pilots in the US were former military. With the post cold war draw down and massive retirements the percentage of airline pilots that are former military has dropped significantly. I have read it's around 30% now. I would have to do some research to get exact numbers but it's definitely not a majority these days.

 

[Andreas]

Michael Shermer said in a recent video on UAPs that Kenneth Arnold saw geese.
It's possible, but how does he know? Was he there as well with Kenneth?
I don't see how any other stance other than "there is nothing to look at" is seen as "suspicious".
No alien spacecraft does not mean "everything pretty explained without any problem".

Obviously, it's impossible to tell exactly what Arnold saw. It could have been alien spacecraft, it could have been geese, or he could have made it all up. But what we do know is that there's no evidence of strange crescent-shaped craft flying past Mount Rainier that day. Explaining eyewitness accounts scientifically is impossible without supporting evidence because we don't know what we're supposed to explain, if anything. When it comes to UFO stories, the important thing, to me, is determining whether something constitutes evidence of anything extraordinary or not.

To me, there are two different types of UFOs: the LIZ UFO and the high-information UFO. A LIZ UFO is something that remains unidentified because of a lack of data, while a high-information UFO is something deemed anomalous despite the existence of scientifically testable evidence, for which no mundane explanation exists. The problem is that we have a lot of LIZ UFOs, but not a single high-information UFO. In light of this, the "there's nothing to look at" hypothesis seems like the obvious null hypothesis.

 

[Mauro]

I agree with this, I just don't see how this shows that every time a pilot describes something that seems to be weird (excluding liars), then I have to assume he surely misidentified whatever he was looking at.

Yet again, then I will stop.

I have a big bag with marbles. You pull one out and you see it's black. Then another one, and it's black. Then another, and another, and another... and they are all black. Which colour would you bet the next marble will be?


Or a similar one.

I have a big bag with say 10000 marbles. I propose you this game: you pay me 1$ to draw a marble, if it's black I keep the dollar, if it's red I pay you half a million dollars. Let's say you agree and start drawing marbles. How many dollars will you give me before it starts dawning in your mind that all the marbles in the bag are black?