Opinion Piece in Today's San Diego Union Tribune Commemorating 20th Anniversary of Tic Tac

[Ann K]

It would fit in a thread debunking ancient aliens. Was the video this one?

No, it was a different one I saw with a bigger block rolling over the rounded shapes, but I have seen this one before. Thanks!

 

[FatPhil]

The jury analogy might be problematic; Fleischmann and Pons believed they had evidence for cold fusion; both were respectable scientists: Put in front of a hypothetical jury to testify as to the truth of their (mistaken) findings the day after their press conference of 23 March 1989, I'm pretty sure they would tell the truth -as they saw it- and the jurors would be convinced (see Wikipedia, Cold fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion).

What if they were asked "why have you held a press conference about the findings before the research has been peer-reviewed?"?
That was a big red flag at the time, as that's not how good scientists advance the field. (I have no objection to sharing preprints - that is a form of peer review - it's going straight to a press release that's the problem.)

 

[John J.]

What if they were asked "why have you held a press conference about the findings before the research has been peer-reviewed?"?

Oh, totally agree, that was an early red flag (as it was in the much more egregious case of fraudster and struck-off doctor Andrew Wakefield's press conference re. his made-up link between MMR vaccines and autism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield).

The point I was trying to make was that people with an extraordinary claim might convince others (like our notional jury) that their claim is true, or at least that their claim is an accurate account.
But objective facts about the physical world are not affected by the deliberations of "twelve good men* and true".

There's no obvious reason to doubt that the USN pilots Fravor and Dietrich reported what they thought they saw- a flying object shaped a bit like a Tic Tac with great acceleration. Though this is subjective, I believe that Lonnie Zamora related what he saw near Socorro in 1964 as accurately as he could (thread, "What happened in Socorro..." here).
In 1948 Captain Thomas Mantell risked and tragically lost his life pursuing a UFO, now accepted as being a Skyhook balloon (Wikipedia, Mantell UFO incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident).

Many reports of strange phenomena are made by honest, reliable people.
Despite the sincerity of their accounts, we should consider what we know about perceptual biases, lapses and limitations; countless known cases of misidentification / error by usually competent professionals as well as normal folk; and the fact that what might seem to be unlikely coincidences happen all the time; e.g. ground/ tree markings found near where a UFO was observed in woodland, later shown to be of mundane origin as at Rendlesham Forest in 1980 (thread here), or children at Ariel School having a classroom discussion about UFOs a day or two before a bright initially unexplained fireball in the evening sky became national news, two days after the fireball children at the school reported their own sighting (threads Ariel School UFO- glinting reflections... and The Ariel School, Zimbabwe, UFO sighting...). -I'm not confident that the child witnesses were sincere or accurate in the way we'd use those terms for adults, but the coincidence of their UFO discussion and the "actual" UFO(s) - a Zenit rocket stage- might have influenced them.

And of course, we do have hoaxes of strange phenomena, sometimes conducted by people we might not expect to be hoaxers, adding to the hoax's credibility, e.g. "the surgeon's photograph" (Wikipedia) of the Loch Ness monster in 1934.


*And / or women.

 

[Mike F]

I feel more that it's reaching the limits of what you can do with available data - which is almost entirely eye-witnesses.

Just one quick belated point on media interest in the topic of UFOs. I may have missed something, but it appears to me that neither NYT, WaPo nor CNN covered the UAP hearing this week. The NYT and WaPo also appear to have ignored the AARO report, although CNN did pick up that story. I feel as if top-tier establishment media, as I mentioned, feel burned by this topic and are retreating from it. The promise of marginally additional clicks does not outweigh the credibility issues,

Agreed. After the election, politics will go front and center. As for congress, I still think it's a few people and today's hearings didn't seem to advance much of anything. A few in UFOlogy will take Shellenberger's Immaculate Constipation Constellation documents as a major breakthrough, but after reading through it, I doubt it will stand up to scrutiny.



Or, more inclined to go with something that generates more clicks and views, unfortunately. I'd never heard of News Nation until they got into UFOs with Ross Coulthart, who I also had never heard of. Obviously, News Nation is far behind the other networks and going full UFO alienates some while capturing a small but dedicated viewership. A formula places like the Discovery networks has seized on the last 20 years. Granted, that's not a news organization, but the financial institution my wife worked at seemed instant on adopting practices from the tech world because they worked in the tech world.



New evidence, eh? Thanks, I'll check it out.

Just one quick belated point on media interest in the topic of UFOs. I may have missed something, but it appears to me that neither NYT, WaPo nor CNN covered the UAP hearing this week. The NYT and WaPo also appear to have ignored the AARO report, although CNN did pick up that story. I feel as if top-tier establishment media, as I mentioned, feel burned by this topic and are retreating from it. The promise of marginally additional clicks, I would imagine, does not appear to outweigh the perceived credibility issues.

 

[NorCal Dave]

Just one quick belated point on media interest in the topic of UFOs. I may have missed something, but it appears to me that neither NYT, WaPo nor CNN covered the UAP hearing this week. The NYT and WaPo also appear to have ignored the AARO report, although CNN did pick up that story. I feel as if top-tier establishment media, as I mentioned, feel burned by this topic and are retreating from it. The promise of marginally additional clicks, I would imagine, does not appear to outweigh the perceived credibility issues.

Agreed.

I did note a few stories here and there, with my wife reading an NPR story to me, asking if I had heard of the F22 being harassed by a bunch of orbs? Yes, I told her, that claim is in Corbel/Shellenberger's IMM CONN report and merely a 2nd-3rd hand recount of someone watching a video, did NPR take it seriously? She said, "not really".