All I’m saying is that our eyes and our brains play tricks on us.
That's very true. Deeply ingrained expectations also make us vulnerable to illusion and deception.
I've never seen anything I thought (for long, anyway!) was a UFO machine of other-planetary origin, and hope I live to ripe old age that way.
People are smart enough, as you were, to understand and figure out when there is a logical explanation for what they saw. You're not the only one.
There are times when people see things that flatly, plainly, fall outside the purview of optical or psychological tricks. They know it, they experienced it, and they know others are secretly thinking, "Well, that's just because he/she isn't smart enough, like I have been, to figure out what it really was. Depend upon it, it was very much like my experience."
In many ways, it is insulting and arrogant. But not quite so bad as the condescending, "Well, I believe that the person really believes that's what she saw," which is just passive-aggressive for, "I think the person is too nutty to comprehend what he/she actually saw because there's no such thing as a flying saucer."
It isn't really about whether one "believes" in flying saucers and UFOs and extra-terrestrials.
It's about what one believes about his fellow humans. It's deductive reasoning that some very material manifestation of "flying saucers" exists if only because so many through the ages have described it.
Now you can choose to believe that your fellow humans are much beneath you in that they either lie, or are too simple to perceive that the sophisticated looking, nimble craft they saw, was really just a trick of the mind.
Or you can choose to believe the more frightening alternative.
Which one is more reasonable?
I choose to believe that y fellow human beings are, in general, honest.
I understand that our eyes and brains can be fooled and that, when someone recounts an experience, that’s truly what they saw - although that may not be reality.
I love magic tricks. I adore them and I refuse to watch anything that shows me how it’s done. I know that I’m being tricked and I love that the illusion has left me with a sense of wonder. I don’t want to know how they did it.
Do I believe in aliens?
Yes. I do. I cannot believe that, in the vastness of the cosmos we’re the only intelligent life to have formed. Do I believe that they’ve visited? I believe that it’s possible.
Have people seen them? It’s possible.
But I understand that the vast majority of sightings are not sightings. They come from that same sense of wonder at a magician’s illusions. That idea that anything is possible.
