[Candor7]

I have been looking at the UFO phenomeon for decades. My father and our neighbor saw one. They rarely talked about it, they just shrugged it off, no big deal. A good friend of mine saw one fairly close, a couple of hundred yards from him, in the Gaspe Peninsula, as a field geologist.He only told a few friends about it, and rarely speaks about the sighting.He was alone at the time and took a picture of it at twilight, after he put a couple of miles distance between him and the object. It was glowing a deep scarlet color.

The real fact is that we have a consistent unexplained phenomenon, which is really tied up in a lot of emotional hoo haw, and denial. Perhaps you one day will get to see one yourself. The individuals I just spoke of were ordinary salt of the earth people, not blow hards, not people who " like to tell a story." If anything they are masters of understatement in my experience, knowing them as I do.

So the old, "you didn't see what you thought you saw" $hit really doesn't work anymore. It simply proves how invested such people are in their own world view. Alvin Toffler talks a lot about this phenomenon in his work about paradigm shift. And if you pretend they are not there hard enough, they will just go away.

Sorry, they have not gone away for centuries, and the history of UFO sightings is well documented for thousands of years, if you include the corpus of Indian works in Sanskrit.

So keep talkin your talk, while the rest of us try to figure out what these things are as phenomenon. But please, stop telling people that trained observers do not see what they thought they saw, especially if you yourself did not see it as an observer. Its just an insult to ordinary human intelligence.

[spinestein]

[I have been looking at the UFO phenomeon for decades.]

So have I.

[My father and our neighbor saw one.]

In the past twenty-five years I've seen three things in the sky that were 1)very unusual 2)impressive 3)beyond my ability to specifically explain 4)would each be something that if I wanted to make a good story out of I would embellish just a liiiiiittle bit and have others believing a "credible" witness who has thousands of hours experience looking at the sky and observing all types of weather phenomenon and aircraft activity that he saw an alien spacecraft. I've also seen dozens of things that were very unusual, impressive, and would make a great UFO story, except that I knew what they were because of my years of experience in watching the sky. For example, every few years or so, I witness a "fireball" meteor that is brighter than the full moon, travels across the sky very quickly, sometimes breaks into different pieces and lights up the sky all around for several seconds leaving a glowing trail behind it. It is hugely impressive, and to people who don't know what it is (it's a small chunk of rock falling to the earth from space) they WANT to believe it's aliens. There are people I know who swear that the bright meteor they witnessed with me, and others, was really an alien spacecraft, in spite of being told otherwise. Why? Because they'd rather believe that trained astronomers are wrong or mistaken, because that means they really did see aliens.

[The real fact is that we have a consistent unexplained phenomenon, which is really tied up in a lot of emotional hoo haw, and denial.]

The emotional part is right, but it is in the area of gullibility, not denial.

[So the old, "you didn't see what you thought you saw" $hit really doesn't work anymore. It simply proves how invested such people are in their own world view.]

Actually, the old "witness testimony is usually credible and accurate unless proven otherwise" doesn't work anymore. Witnesses to interesting or unusual events, sincere though they may be, have proven to be unreliable in recounting critical details of that event. Normal people (salt of the earth people, as you called them) DO make errors when recounting details of an event and they tend to make those errors on the side of MORE sensationalism. Example: I used to be an EMT, and at accident scenes I've been at, there is no shortage of witnesses who each tell different versions (many contradictory) of what happened. What do they have to gain? Seemingly nothing, but human psychology being what it is, witnesses seem to remember accidents having more vehicles involved and greater numbers of fatalities and more gruesome injuries, and it's common to talk to witnesses weeks or months after an accident, and what they remember is more like a sensational movie crash scene than what the more reliable public record shows happened on that day.

[Sorry, they have not gone away for centuries, and the history of UFO sightings is well documented for thousands of years]

Up until about 100 years ago, "alien sightings" were always described in terms of devils and angels, complete with horns and fire and brimstone, and wings and halos and messages from God. As soon as science fiction stories of aliens and their spacecraft became widely popular, those incidents went away to be immediately replaced by pale, noseless, almond shaped head aliens with huge eyes who ride around in flying saucers and who bring messages of warning from the great galactic civilization.

[So keep talkin your talk, while the rest of us try to figure out what these things are as phenomenon. But please, stop telling people that trained observers do not see what they thought they saw, especially if you yourself did not see it as an observer. Its just an insult to ordinary human intelligence.]

Please stop assuming that only the people who claim to have seen flying saucers are the only credible witnesses, and that other trained observers who have alternative explanations are not worthy of being listened to. That is a real insult to people's intelligence.