http://interstellarjourney.blip.tv/

Stephen Bassett, the organizer of the conference, is on the record saying that he does not care about the credibility of his “witnesses”. And he presents witnesses who are discredited, disheveled and disappointing. Some are known frauds.

Hilariously, at yesterday’s press conference, Bassett threatened the government with the release of embarrassing documents if they don’t precipitate the “disclosure event” by the end of May.

Somehow, I don’t think the government (or anyone) even noticed. And Bassett will go back to his borrowed couches and basement rooms until next year, when his credibility is sure to be somewhat less (and hey, it wasn’t very high anyway).

The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the proof has to be. It is really that simple. So far the proof isn’t even ordinary… it’s nonexistent!

Danny

And I would be HIGHLY SKEPTICAL of a copy of a copy of a copy of a story that is posted on a website like ufocasebook.com. That website is clearly willing to post photos that are clearly fake under the heading “Breaking UFO News Reports.”

@Greg,

And it is never just about UFOs. Not only are such sites terribly uncritical, but they almost always include links, books, or DVDs for all manner of pseudo-scientific beliefs – psychic abilities, the lost city of Atlantis, and so on. It gives them a very credulous tone, and greatly detracts from their believability regarding UFOs.

Clear skies, Alan

Here is one possible earthly explanation…
http://www.nmsr.org/socorro.htm

It was interesting to contrast Lonnie Zamora’s “Blue Book” report with descriptions elsewhere. He first said he “Saw two people in white coveralls very close to the object.” and later offered “These persons appeared normal in shape–but possibly they were small adults or large kids.” He also noted he saw them for perhaps two seconds. (Given the distance – 150 to 200 yards – and brief look, he could certainly have mistaken their size.)

Reports on “UFO sites” include “[Zamora] then noticed two beings that he thought at first to be children,” “[Zamora] reported seeing two, small aliens,” or said he saw “humanoid figures.”

There are also embellishments on his description of the two people, of the craft, and of his description of its flight.

I suggest reading Zamora’s report as written in Project Bluebook and then visiting some of the UFO sites and reading their versions. Nothing like changing the facts a little to support your view. And then they wonder why many people tend to be skeptical of such things.

Clear skies, Alan

“As I said, the reports are enough for me to WANT TO STUDY THE SITUATION FURTHER (caps intended) rather than to close my mind to the possibility because I just can’t conceive how it could possibly be true.”

Please, feel free to study these reports. Check the sources, and check the background of those who are claiming these reports are really aliens. Perform your scientific analysis of these stories, then come back here with your conclusions.

Why do you assume that scientists have not already debunked those stories? Don’t you think that the story of Kelly Johnson would have been researched in the past 55 years? Don’t you think that if this story had any real physical evidence to support the claims, that someone in the past 55 years, would have said something?

And I would be HIGHLY SKEPTICAL of a copy of a copy of a copy of a story that is posted on a website like ufocasebook.com. That website is clearly willing to post photos that are clearly fake under the heading “Breaking UFO News Reports.”

Keep an open mind, but close it a little when you feel your brains falling out.

If there is some real data hidden in the noise, the uncritical UFO proponents are not doing much to help ferret it out.

Clear skies, Alan

It’s that attitude that really makes me wonder who has the closed mind, the folks who scream that UFO’s are real, or those that scream there’s nothing to it.

As I said, the reports are enough for me to WANT TO STUDY THE SITUATION FURTHER (caps intended) rather than to close my mind to the possibility because I just can’t conceive how it could possibly be true.

My beef is that people close themselves to any evidence that doesn’t confirm their (smarmy) worldview.

Do you have any recent reports not linked to known UFO Crackpot… er I mean Casebook… websites?

Oh, I see, you already left. Nevermind.

Hey, I don’t believe in all the kooky things out there, but to dismiss all witness testimony out of hand is absurd.

Kelly Johnson. California coast. I’d say Mr. Johnson was certainly qualified to know what’s in the sky. What’s more, a flight if his engineers saw the same object, from a different position (they were in a plane unbeknownst to him).

This and the RB47 case (with multiple ground and air based radar returns, plus actual signals received from the craft tailing the plane) are enough for me to say “Hey, there’s something to this”

Consider me unsubscribed.

As I mentioned in my post, sudden, short chaotic moments. Not standing there watching an object for 15 minutes or more. In the case of the Vincennes, they were engaging an Iranian gunboat and the whole incident lasted 7 minutes and it was amid chaos. The cop shooting, again, short and chaotic.

As BlackCat already mentioned, first, where are you getting that most UFO sightings last 15 minutes or more? Second, in a lot of the accounts that I have read, the eyewitnesses tend to mention that they were frightened, excited or experiencing some other non-calm emotion. Hardly a non-”chaotic” event.

Most sightings aren’t short and quick with a “variety of visual and auditory stimuli.”

Again, where are you getting that most sightings aren’t “short and quick”? And exactly where is the threshold between “short and quick” and “long and slow”? 8 minutes? 10 minutes? 10 minutes, 27 seconds? And there is not a variety of visual and auditory stimuli? Really? Just a plain white or black background with no wind, no smells, no trees or background scenery, no cars/radios/other people, no talking? The sightings have only the UFO, the UFO’s noise and nothing else? Let’s see, that would make judging size, speed and direction pretty tough.

In the test I proposed, the observers would be in a pretty calm state (sitting, watching a video). The scene need not be chaotic or high emotion. My limitation on the length of the video is more for ease of administration and recall – shorter video means less to recall and less delay between seeing and recalling the first part of the video. Go ahead and make it 15 minutes. The results will probably be similar to a shorter example.

Sure, trained professionals make mistakes, but it is a rare occurrence. If it was a common thing, planes would be shooting each other out of the sky and crashing into each other and cops would be shooting civilians on a regular basis.

You’re making a false comparison, an “either it’s rare or it happens all the time” statement. There is a middle ground. It certainly does not need to be happening on a “regular basis”, whatever that means (daily? hourly?), to not be rare. Take near misses at airports. Those are pretty frequent. The USS Vicennes incident is of interest because, while the incident itself was a rare one, so, too, were the circumstances surrounding it (armed cruiser near an active passenger flight lane).

So, if you maintain a stance that average people are only so-so observers and that people such as pilots, military/police officers, etc., are, for the most part, phenomenal observers who only very rarely and only under extreme stress conditions make mistakes, set up a test like I described. See how they do. See how many different descriptions you get of the same video, how many details are right, wrong, or missed completely.

Of course, you could also do a literature search on psych studies that specifically look at how well people do at recalling events. There are a fair number out there.

“how exactly is 15 minutes a long time while 7 minutes is not?

This happens with people all the time even in the most ordinary situations. If you are looking in your fridge for the ketchup bottle, you go over and over and can’t find it. You look got 10, 20, 30 minutes. You just can’t find it. You ask someone else and they spot it immediately. That was because you expected it to be standing upright, while it was laying on its side. This is just an example, but this sort of thing is a common issue even with highly-trained people and under a wide variety of situations, their brain focuses on looking for certain patterns or looking at input in a certain way and they ignore all irrelevant information. It goes by various names, “attention blindness”, “inattention blindness”, “perceptual blindness”, or in the case of accidents “human error”, but it is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon. For instance in one study people were shown cards from a deck and told to say what the number on the card was. However, some of the decks had red spades, red clubs, black diamonds, and black hearts. Almost everyone missed them entirely, although a few sensed there was something weird about the mixed-up decks but couldn’t figure out what it was. These experiments were done under stress or anything at all unusual, they were just reading off numbers (I think, it may have been some other menial task). Yet they completely missed an important feature because it was not perceived as being relevant to what they were looking at. It is easy, you think you are looking at something so you miss any cues that might inform you that you are actually looking at something different. Magicians depend on this as a form of misdirection, they trick you into focusing on a certain aspect of what they are doing so you will not notice other things going on.

Next, how exactly is 7 minutes a long time while 15 minutes is not? And where did you get this 15 minutes number, or the idea that most UFO reports last a long time and are not stressful?

And skeptics are not “moving the goalposts”, we have been clear from the very beginning. Anecdotes are not evidence. End of story. Only physical evidence, or something predictable and reproducible, is acceptable. This is not just with UFOs, it is a basic rule for all science. Humans are horribly unreliable witnesses even over prolonged times and under ordinary conditions. Science can be seen largely as a way to counter the flaws present in humans as observers, as a way to limit the problems inherent in human perception.

“…police officer in California who killed a young man, mistaking him for one of four burglary suspects he was chasing.”

As I mentioned in my post, sudden, short chaotic moments. Not standing there watching an object for 15 minutes or more. In the case of the Vincennes, they were engaging an Iranian gunboat and the whole incident lasted 7 minutes and it was amid chaos. The cop shooting, again, short and chaotic.

This is exactly what I’m talking about.

And look at your test. It should last no more than “a few minutes.” You are making my point for me. Most sightings aren’t short and quick with a “variety of visual and auditory stimuli.”

Sure, trained professionals make mistakes, but it is a rare occurrence. If it was a common thing, planes would be shooting each other out of the sky and crashing into each other and cops would be shooting civilians on a regular basis. (although the last one is not so remote a chance) .

I just think this pseudo skeptic argument is a totally lame one, like most of their arguments. It sounds all sciency, but it’s nothing more than a last resort tactic .

As I mentioned earlier, while some professions may have more training on how to make certain observations, that training, itself, may lead to mistakes in observation. For example, in 1989, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus, mistaking it for a fighter. All 290 crew and passengers onboard were killed. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DB1F31F93AA15756C0A96F948260)

Also, despite any training in identifying things, mistakes still occur, as evidenced by the police officer in California who killed a young man, mistaking him for one of four burglary suspects he was chasing (http://www.fox11az.com/news/topstories/stories/california-20081029-newlywed-killed-mistaken-id.15f45381a.html)

Then there are all the cases of friendly fire in the military or occasionally in police actions.

This is not to say that every time someone says they saw something that they are mistaken. Rather, it is just to point out that when someone recounts an incident, it is quite possible for them to make mistakes, regardless of their training or background. Quite apart from any other circumstances (weather, lighting, how anxious/tired the person was, other visual or auditory input, etc.), humans can never capture every last detail of a complex visual stimulus. There’s just too much information coming in, that the eye and brain miss some things which are later filled in based on a best guess. These gaps can and do lead to misinterpretations now and then.

So, before you go off condemning skeptics for bringing up the possibility that pilots, police officers, ATCs, and so on could possibly be mistaken, consider that no matter how well trained someone is, there is always the very real (and likely) possibility that they will make some mistake in their observations. It might be small and insignificant, huge and grossly distorting, or anywhere in between.

If you still think that their powers of observation are siginifcantly better than the average person, why not conduct a little test? Gather together a collection of people, some “trained” observers and some average Joes, and have them watch a brief recorded scene with a variety of visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., outdoors, possibly trees around, wind, animals, cars, other people moving about/talking and so on). The scene should last no more than a few minutes. Then, ask them to write down, in as much detail as possible, what all happened. Compare their written accounts to the actual scene. How many details did they get right? How many details did they miss? How many details did they get wrong?

My guess will be that everyone will get approximately the same number of hits, misses and omissions. The difference will be in what particular details they pay attention to, based on their past training and preconceptions.

Second, to say that aviation professionals are no more reliable than the average Joe is laughable. They are taught to be able to differentiate between objects in order to do their jobs and they all have years of experience. If you really don’t think air traffic controllers and pilots can’t discern the difference, then you must be very afraid to fly.

As to the human fallibility aspect, that’s a very convenient excuse. While it is true that people make mistakes, it seems to be the fallback position if all else fails. You guys will grasp at any explanation that will maintain your non-belief.

The pseudo skeptic, or more accurately, the debunker, continually moves the goal posts. If explanation “A” doesn’t work, you work your way down the line until you get to the human fallibility option.

One poster here claimed that there hasn’t been one case that hasn’t been able to be explained by natural phenomenon etc. That is blatantly false. Even the USAF’s Project Blue Book stated that 6% of sightings were classified as “unidentified.”

Now, none of this is proof that what people are seeing the the skies are alien crafts, they could very well could be secret military aircraft, but it should show that there are weird things going on up there. To simply dismiss sightings, especially since tens of thousands of people all over the world witness these things, is less than “scientific.” But the life of the pseudo skeptic is the mirror image of the true believer. No amount of evidence will convince either.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that pseudo skeptics quite often talk through their a**es. In too many instances, they haven’t seen any of the “evidence” yet they feel free to make a pronouncement on the validity of the event.

Finally, maybe UFOs etc can’t be explained or investigated by “science as we know it.” Maybe we don’t yet have the tools to be able to figure it out. We don’t know everything about how our universe works. Science hasn’t explained everything. and most likely never will.

Nice story. It could have been aliens… Except for the fact that there’s no physical evidence it was aliens.

You have 1 eyewitness who claimed at the time to see something nobody else did, and then others who came forward a few days later to say, “Oh yea, we saw it too!” All of New Mexico to choose from, where there are thousands of square miles of uninhabited desert, and they land 200 yards from a highway?

Burnt plants? Not proof of aliens. Melted sand? Terrestrial rocket engines would melt sand. Speed of the craft? Ahh, here we go. This is one possible point that makes the story seem incredible, but it can’t be confirmed. A man, who was in a state of panic, who loses his glasses, who is trying to drive a car on a dirt road while watching something he just hid from, thinks the thing flew 6 miles in 20 seconds? There’s no way he could be mistaken of the time or the distance? And there’s no reports of anyone driving 6 miles away to see if the thing landed again?

Please give us more of your “many cases” so we can pick at them. This is fun!

Skeptics ask, perfectly reasonably, why they should be forced to take seriously a matter in which there is “nothing to investigate.” The age-old (and somewhat tired, by now) image of “a UFO landing on the White House lawn” is frequently invoked by skeptics who stand most strongly by the lack of physical evidence available for investigation to support the claim that UFOs are not worth our time, or that there is nothing (interesting) to them. This also offers the extremely effective (ultimately, because of the rhetorical work it does) characterization of the skeptic as remaining eternally open to the consideration of evidence, should such evidence ever appear.

At this point, it is crucial that skeptics recognize the validity of the proponent’s counter-argument: you are asking us to do something which we are already telling you is impossible. In other words, the UFO proponent’s argument includes an account of why no physical evidence is available to the scientific community–at least “hard” evidence, as it is characterized by skeptics, who discount the physicality of imagery and radar data and ask for the object itself to be presented for analysis. Proponents need to emphasize the documentation of Air Force programs designed to recover downed craft and other objects of possible extraterrestrial origin, as well as the documentation of efforts by the Air Force to deny that such programs ever existed, even while being presented with evidence that directly contradicts such assertions. (http://www.nicap.org/moondust.htm, for one example)

If this information was repeatedly insisted upon by proponents, skeptics might finally be forced to deal with its consequences. Scientists, in particular, may also be inclined to begin to wonder why there are government/military programs in existence whose focus is to restrict the potential scope of “public” science by removing certain forms of physical evidence or data from the sphere of non-restricted space, thus rendering certain phenomena unavailable for scientific study (save for study in a context of classification, the results of which would also be classified).

Proponents, if they are to have any hope of adding to their ranks or effectively combating debunkers (who are NOT skeptics), need to focus more on elucidating the mechanisms of secrecy surrounding the very real, well-documented study of UFOs that HAS occurred, and less on presenting the evidence which seems (to them) so obviously to already establish the reality of ETI/visitation.

Phil Plait, I am not saying that you need to go out and look for hard evidence of UFOs so that you may study them; I am saying that you won’t find such evidence because it’s someone else’s job to get to it before you do. In light of that, you look like a bit of a fool asking why nobody has yet been able to place a UFO into your oh-so-scientific, authoritative hands.

Proponents are asking that we be able to see what our government has collected over the years and know about the results of its study. We would love it if more of you respectable scientist-types would join us.

After doing a little poking around on google, I came across some sites that suggest an earthly explanation for what Zamora saw: a test run of the lunar landing module. I still need to look around a bit more to see if that fits the descriptions of Zamora’s encounter, but it seems like a more likely explanation than aliens.

“Name them.

If indeed they landed and walked around, there would be evidence. Footprints, DNA, bodily fluids, space candy-bar wrappers and empty space-coke cans. I mean, why else would aliens land in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night except to take a leak and ask the nearest owl for directions to Venus?”

I don’t know why, i am not a wizard.

You asked me for cases. There was a good one in 1964, it was in Socorro, USA. The officer Lonnie Zamora saw a white oval shaped craft landing in middle of dunes, he went with his car, got out of his car, and sighted two small people, not kids, outside the oval craft. When the small guys saw him, they quickly got into de craft and the craft departed making strong noise and emitting strange fire at the bottom. There were indeed footprints, and according to Zamora, the craft had metalic legs, wich also made prints on the soil, and some vegetation resulted burned. After investigation, the USAF officer Major Quintanilla reached the conclussion that Zamora was not a hoaxer and that the case was enigmatic (note that Quintanilla was a true skeptic who considered almost every UFO case to be mundane or hoax).

Here is the kick, there were eleven other witnesses, some of them independent of Zamora. One saw the oval shaped craft form far away, some listened the strong noise, and one of them almost lost the roof of his car when the oval craft passed over his car!!!!

Natural phenomena? OK, good.

I once say a guy in a silvery suit walk out of a spaceship, and there was this big robot he called Gort. It’s all on film, too!