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This gets me back to my comment: the UFO subject can be fascinating because even the skeptics often have to suggest that unprecedented effects are at work even if those effects are purely natural in origin.

I believe I made exactly that point in post #11. The possibility that UFOs are clues to poorly understood natural processes is more intruiging to me than that they are extraterrestrial spaceships.

But I don't get this example as an answer to my question to you of a case where "fringe science" is cited by a skeptic to explain away a UFO report. What's the connection?

I misunderstood your question. For instance, many of the alien abduction debunkings smack of fringe science and offer improbable explanations.

Fantasy prone personality, fantasies induced by leading questions during hypnosis, and fantasies during hypnogogic and hypnopopmic sleep are often cited as explaining alien abduction beliefs; but such explanations cannot account for many cases in which claimed abductees are not fantasy prone, transcripts and recordings show a complete absence of leading questions during hypnosis, and alien abduction experiences are recalled while fully awake.

The most compelling abduction cases, such as that of Travis Walton, are usually ignored by debunkers or rejected based on categorical claims that even multiple witnesses are liars and deluded, even if they are of good reputation and standing. The Walton abduction: began in the view of terrified witnesses; law enforcement immediately investigated but could not shake their accounts; and the traumatized abductee reappeared after a few days and described what happened without benefit of hypnosis.

Debunkers tend to fall back on lines of attack that amount to not much more than accusing Walton and his crew of brush clearers as being young, poorly educated blue collar roughnecks. Yet, whatever science driven skeptics may think of such types, they tend not to withstand close questioning by cops; and is it not hard to deride nerdy skeptics as working out residual teenage jealousies about dumb jocks being popular and getting the girls in high school.

Trace abduction evidence, like implants with exceptional properties, are usually also ignored or categorically described by debunkers as ordinary in nature -- despite some implants having extreme magnetism and isotope profiles consistent with metallic meteorites instead of terrestial origins.

And just how is it that abduction accounts from the 1960s and early 70s seem to describe laproscopic procedures unknown to the medicine of the era? Can it be said that fantasies generated by unschooled human minds anticipate medical advances on the cusp of development? If so, that would be remarkable in ways that UFO debunkers seem unwilling to contemplate.

Yet, in the end, alien abduction cases are mostly stories that can neither be disproved by skeptics nor confirmed by physical evidence or the sheer number of such stories. To me, the case for alien abductions is open and eludes resolution, being neither proved nor disproved.

A full-scale, bona-fide debunking would seem to require some new element, such as latent psychosis due to the lasting effects of marijuana -- and including damage to the children of users. Yet such a proposition would seem likely to be scarcely less disputed than alien adbuction claims -- and unlikely to explain the Travis Walton case and the handful of other cases of equivalent weight.