[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.