[LocalH]

While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.

[krapp]

One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.

I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.

Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.

[WalterBright]

When an engineer tells me he built a car that runs on water, he'd better bring some pretty amazing evidence. And no, I'm not going to waste time reading his paper looking for the inevitable flaw, either.

I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!

Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?