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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. |