[chez17]

The fact that there are literally millions, if not billions, of people walking, driving, riding in trains, and flying every single day with quality cameras on them and not a single one of them has captured a single shred of credible evidence. To quote Tim Minchin, every extraordinary claim that has ever been presented by humans has turned out to be "not magic".

[seren]

I think a good reference point is the Chelyabinsk meteor[0]. Just afterwards, we had plenty of high resolution videos from dash cam, smartphones, etc, with different angle, time and location.

I would expect about the same in quantity and quality for a major UFO sighting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

[senjutsuka]

You are comparing natural phenomenon with life forms. A better comparison would be silver back gorillas which up until the 70s were considered a myth. Or giant squid which are still somewhat unsubstantiated even today because they actively avoid us.

[huxley]

Silverbacks are male Mountain Gorillas, Diane Fosey studied them for 18 years starting in 1967 and George Schaller studied them back in 1959 and he wrote 2 books about them.

The giant squid is rare but not unsubstantiated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBRZuafewzI

[vitd]

Giant squid are in no way "unsubstantiated." Dead ones have been washing up on shores around the globe for centuries. Live ones were elusive until recently, but we now have a lot of footage of those, as well, thanks to things like deep sea oil exploration and various ocean science missions.

If there are aliens, even if they can easily elude us, it seems likely that there would still be traces of them had they visited. Some sort of technological foot prints, whether they be emissions from ships or communications, or actual pieces of technology that have been left behind or broken off. Something, somewhere, you'd think.

[senjutsuka]

You mean evidence like the 100s of hours of unexplainable phenomenon recorded each year (see google search of ufo video 2014). Including that which was release from classified status by an arm of our armed forces which chose to not only investigate, but to classify the investigation.

And for the record, we have more video and imagery of these unexplained phenomenon then we do of the giant squid. They, for whatever reason, just dont leave bodies floating up on the beaches.

[seren]

I am not sure your comparison is apt. Strange things in the sky tend to be viewed by much more people than animals that are actively hiding in unexplored/hard to reach areas. I am totally ready to believe there are plenty of things we don't know about the deep sea for example.

[senjutsuka]

Um, but if this phenomenon is a creature why wouldnt it try to stay out of sight? Further if 'things in the sky' are easier to find why were the bird of paradise only recently discovered and recorded? Answer: because their rare and prefer locations that arent very occupied by humans.

Hell we have whole tribes we've only just discovered. If something doesnt want to be found, its not impossible for it to stay hidden.

[nitrogen]

These sound a lot like arguments from ignorance. "We don't know for sure, therefore it must be true!" The dash cam videos are an excellent counterargument. If someone is lucky enough to film an alien on grainy blurry film, why is nobody lucky enough to get one on an HD dashcam?

[wavefunction]

I don't think you can claim that giant squid are avoiding humans: rather our respective habitats simply don't overlap enough to have noticed them until we could build vehicles capable of exploring where they are found.

A sentient species capable of interstellar travel would almost certainly be able to avoid detection by humanity if they wanted to, I will agree.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't think you can claim that giant squid are avoiding humans: rather our respective habitats simply don't overlap enough to have noticed them until we could build vehicles capable of exploring where they are found.

Well, we've got documented reports going back continuously to the ancient Greeks of giant squid, and photographic evidence going back almost as far as common photography. So, its not so more that we needed "vehicles capable of exploring where they are found" to substantiate them as we needed photography, etc., for people other than those who directly encountered them to be able to clearly distinguish the real reports of giant squid from all the rumors of fantastic beasts that lack such evidence.

[Crito]

The "giant squid was considered a myth" thing is much like the "the earth was considered flat" thing; both are largely myths themselves. Nobody who has put any research or thought into the matter has doubted the existence of giant squids for a very long time. They have been scientifically studied for centuries, about as long as we've been scientifically studying anything. Before then, fishermen were finding specimens all the time.

The only thing that is actually doubted is nonsense like the existence of squid the size of ships, big enough to take on Naval vessels. Much like the round nature of the Earth was never in question, just the idea that it was small enough to make sailing right around it a sensible thing to do.

[senjutsuka]

Could you describe what constitutes credible evidence? Eye witness testimony is often consider credible evidence of crimes with life/death sentences.

From a scientific standpoint Im not sure what you'd need for something like this. After all up until recently the long standing testimony by pilots about sprites, elfs, ball lightning (atmospheric electrical phenomenon) and the like had no credible evidence except eye witness.

Further there is a ton, literally 1000s of hours of video and 1000s of images. Most are fake but many (including in the op report) remain unexplained. Its exceedingly unscientific in the face of unexplained evidence to simply say - 'nah nothing is happening there, lets just ignore it and the corroborating evidence and not investigate any further'.

Im not saying I know the answer, Im saying ignoring all the exceedingly large masses of information is ignorant. Exceedingly so when we literally have the evidence you're claiming doesn't exist (video and pictures gallore).

[teamhappy]

I'm really no expert, but I think you'd need more than one eye witness to begin with. Then there is the obvious difference between your two examples: There aren't a lot of explanations for somebody seeing a person stabbing another person, then again there are a lot of explanations for somebody seeing light that moves in strange ways. The same is true for video footage and photographs. Hardware fails all the time and a lot of these technologies have quirks. Remember the old photographs with creepy looking kids in the background and that kind of thing? There are very good and easy to understand explanations for these events (images burning in, similar to plasma screens). Remember what the word "UFO" means to begin with. I'd need at least some evidence that proves the thing is actually an aircraft, let alone an extraterrestrial one.

By the way. Pilots were crazy high back in the day, weren't they? Amphetamines and that kind of thing? Just saying.

Also, you complain about people not investigating these events. That's obviously not true. It's just that (so it seems, anyway) if nothing ever comes out of it, people stop investigating.

[scott_s]

Which calls into question convictions based on eye witness testimony. There is a large body of research on how fallible, impressionable, and fungible human memory is. It's not reliable.

[anigbrowl]

Further there is a ton, literally 1000s of hours of video and 1000s of images. Most are fake but many (including in the op report) remain unexplained.

The best thing UFO advocates could do would be to pre-emptively debunk stuff, classify and label the fake stuff as fake or explainable by simpler causes, abandons old inconclusory evidence, and promote the small proportion of genuinely inexplicable phenomena that remain. I used to be very interested in UFO stuff but have completely given up looking at websites and so on because ther is too much shit to wade through. Lowish evidentiary standards were somewhat tolerable when the resources required to organize and study it were so much greater - there was a limit to what any one author could do. But with the internet, forums, worldwide mapping software, open-source image-processing tools and what-all else, UFO classification should be many many times better than it is, just as most scientific endeavors have benefited from digital technology. Instad there are forums like Godlikeproductions and prisonplanet that are mostly populated by gullible and/or mentally ill people.

If you want this issue taken seriously, then treat it seriously - use standards of evidence, consider things in their social context (eg many UFO reports were classified because of cold war paranoia and the desire to maintain a strategic military advantage), winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and invite people to falsify rather than endorse difficult cases. As you pointed out elsewhere, many people have trouble processing complex scientific information like climate change and so are reflexively skeptical about it. Well, that's the environment you're stuck with too, and UFO research has a long way to go before it can even start to be taken seriously as a topic of scientific inquiry by the general public.

Even looking at relatively well-curated sites like http://www.ufoevidence.org/ the front page still has 'Featured!' cases from 1959, 1974 that are nothing but reports of a single eyewitness. Mysterious? Sure, but of zero evidentiary value a half-century later, and therefore a waste of time. UFO advocates' collective inability to let go of such nostalgia cases tells us more about their psychology than about any physical phenomenon.

[darkarmani]

> Eye witness testimony is often consider credible evidence of crimes with life/death sentences.

You mean eye witness testimony backed up with actual forensic evidence like a dead body or a missing person, right? It's not eye witness testimony disconnected from physical reality, because there are tons of crank pots that wouldn't stand up under cross-examination.

[TeMPOraL]

Or, as XKCD puts it, http://xkcd.com/1235/.

[senjutsuka]

You know if you dig past a comic you may find that there are literally 100s of hours of video uploaded every year about this. Just type UFO video 2014. Its not like this ever stopped, people just stopped reporting about it significantly.