“In short, yes. In a country of hundreds of millions of people, finding thousands of people with any shared characteristic is not surprising.”
Do we really have a parallel here? I’m sure you could find a rather large number of people with horrible eye-witness quality. But with UFO-sightings that’s not what is happening. Those people who observe UFOs does so by chance, not because they have previously been selected for their fallibility. Indeed there are many pilots (both civil and military) among the witnesses.
The link you point to says this:
“Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.”
I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned. Even more selection arises in the courts decision to overturn or not. Thus, only looking at cases that actually got overturned will give us a highly distorted view.
We need statistics on the eye witness quality of random persons.
“As faul_sname said, I would expect at least hundreds of thousands of people to be eyewitnesses to anything happening over a major city”
Countering secondary evidence with secondary evidence I could suggest:
It was at evening time and dark outside. Most people would be inside at that time and from inside it can be hard to see whats outside when it is dark outside and there are many other point-lights out there. There was no sound associated with the incident.
According to Wikipedia (article named ‘Phoenix Lights’) “thousands of people” saw the object/lights. Probably not all of them reported the incident to the authorities.
Some people probably wanted to avoid ridicule and thus didn’t talk about what they saw.
I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned.
There’s no particular reason to think this is true. Availability of DNA evidence or eyewitness evidence is relatively independent. Thus, it is reasonable to treat the DNA & eyewitness (DNA+e) cases as representative of all eyewitness cases.
In the DNA+e cases where DNA is inconsistent with guilt, either the DNA or the eyewitness must be wrong. And we have independent reasons to think DNA is more reliable than eyewitnesses. If DNA really is a representative sample of cases, and DNA+e is a representative sample of DNA cases, the wikipedia statistic you cited suggests that 75% of eyewitness testimony is wrong.
As an aside, the research is pretty clear that there is a substantial difference in eyewitness accuracy based on whether or not the witness knew the perpetrator.
Now, there are reasons to believe the DNA cases are not a random sample of crime, particularly because certain kinds of crimes are more likely to leave analyzable DNA (eg. rape vs. bank robbery). But that doesn’t suggest that they aren’t representative of eyewitness cases.
98.5% “non crackpot” cases is very different from 98.5% non-false positive.
I’m using a hotel lobby computer right now, and can’t rewatch the video for confirmation, but I believe that this video contains a highly relevant anecdote (as well as being generally relevant.) The author of the video was witness to a phenomenon which his host believed could only be accounted for by ghost activity. The author of the video realized that the phenomenon was, in fact, caused by a fan being on which his host didn’t notice. But if he hadn’t been there, his host could have conveyed the story as a phenomenon that could only be explained by ghost activity, and the relevant detail, the fan, that was the real explanation of the phenomenon, would have been omitted from the account. Nobody hearing the secondhand account could have known the real explanation, only lumped it in with the expanse of possible answer space. And a normal, non-crazy person who believes they witnessed ghost activity, would most likely deny that there had been a fan on that they had failed to notice, and indeed take offense at the very suggestion, because they would interpret it as an attack on their credibility.
If a phenomenon has a real incidence rate of zero, but any false positive rate at all, then all accounts will be false positives. Suppose that the real incidence of alien visitations of earth is zero, but 0.1% of the population has experiences they interpret as signs of alien visitation, for which they cannot come up with alternative explanations. That would account for hundreds of thousands of reports of alien visitation in America, all of which would be false positives.
“98.5% “non crackpot” cases is very different from 98.5% non-false positive.”
I fully agree, and indeed most observations turns out to be easily explainable. The interesting question is not “can eye witness reports be fallible?” Of course they can. The interesting question is “is every single ufo observation completely unreliable?” The science says that 22% of thousands of observations of ufos are truly explainable by any phenomenom we now. Thus the answer to the latter question is an unevoquivally “NO”.
“If a phenomenon has a real incidence rate of zero, but any false positive rate at all, then all accounts will be false positives. Suppose that the real incidence of alien visitations of earth is zero, but 0.1% of the population has experiences they interpret as signs of alien visitation, for which they cannot come up with alternative explanations. That would account for hundreds of thousands of reports of alien visitation in America, all of which would be false positives.”
There’s a trick here. Were not interested in eyewitnesses own ideas about whether they saw an alien spaceship or not. Were interested in the subsequent analysis performed by expert scientists and the like. All we want from the eyewitnesses are their accounts of size, shape, flight path, lights etc. Then we corroborate this with radar data and see if we can find a plausible earthly explanation.
Also your scenario simply does not explain all the cases that involve radar trackings, videos and photos. The latter can be faked but it is rare that we hear about military personnel faking radar data before handing it over to their superiors, just for fun.
All we want from the eyewitnesses are their accounts of size, shape, flight path, lights etc. Then we corroborate this with radar data and see if we can find a plausible earthly explanation. Also your scenario simply does not explain all the cases that involve radar trackings, videos and photos. The latter can be faked but it is rare that we hear about military personnel faking radar data before handing it over to their superiors, just for fun.
There’s a huge difference between “we can’t think of a plausible earthly explanation” and “alien visitation is more likely than an explanation we haven’t thought of yet.”
In the case of the “ghost” experience, if we were hearing a secondhand account from the original witness, we would have “no earthly explanation,” because they wouldn’t convey the information that would actually make it explainable.
Sometimes reports might be due to things that are kept secret for good reason, like the test flights of the B-2 “Spirit” bomber, which looks for all the world like a flying saucer, and was classified by the military. Others might be due to physical phenomena that are not yet understood, and some may be due to priming and erroneous pattern recognition causing people to exaggerate observations that are not particularly out of the ordinary. These are all events that we should expect to happen in the absence of any sort of extraterrestrial activity. But attributing the sorts of events described in these reports to intelligent life forms from different star systems travelling all the way to the vicinity of Earth and making such vague and dubious appearances is a profound case of privileging the hypothesis.
“In short, yes. In a country of hundreds of millions of people, finding thousands of people with any shared characteristic is not surprising.”
Do we really have a parallel here? I’m sure you could find a rather large number of people with horrible eye-witness quality. But with UFO-sightings that’s not what is happening. Those people who observe UFOs does so by chance, not because they have previously been selected for their fallibility. Indeed there are many pilots (both civil and military) among the witnesses.
The link you point to says this:
“Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.”
I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned. Even more selection arises in the courts decision to overturn or not. Thus, only looking at cases that actually got overturned will give us a highly distorted view. We need statistics on the eye witness quality of random persons.
“As faul_sname said, I would expect at least hundreds of thousands of people to be eyewitnesses to anything happening over a major city”
Countering secondary evidence with secondary evidence I could suggest:
It was at evening time and dark outside. Most people would be inside at that time and from inside it can be hard to see whats outside when it is dark outside and there are many other point-lights out there. There was no sound associated with the incident.
According to Wikipedia (article named ‘Phoenix Lights’) “thousands of people” saw the object/lights. Probably not all of them reported the incident to the authorities.
Some people probably wanted to avoid ridicule and thus didn’t talk about what they saw.
There’s no particular reason to think this is true. Availability of DNA evidence or eyewitness evidence is relatively independent. Thus, it is reasonable to treat the DNA & eyewitness (DNA+e) cases as representative of all eyewitness cases.
In the DNA+e cases where DNA is inconsistent with guilt, either the DNA or the eyewitness must be wrong. And we have independent reasons to think DNA is more reliable than eyewitnesses. If DNA really is a representative sample of cases, and DNA+e is a representative sample of DNA cases, the wikipedia statistic you cited suggests that 75% of eyewitness testimony is wrong.
As an aside, the research is pretty clear that there is a substantial difference in eyewitness accuracy based on whether or not the witness knew the perpetrator.
Now, there are reasons to believe the DNA cases are not a random sample of crime, particularly because certain kinds of crimes are more likely to leave analyzable DNA (eg. rape vs. bank robbery). But that doesn’t suggest that they aren’t representative of eyewitness cases.
But at least the court outcome will skew the selection.
Also we have plenty good statistics for eye witness reliability when it comes to UFO sightings and these statistics give a very different conclusion:
“Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or “crackpot” cases” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14
Shouldn’t we use the most relevant statistics?
98.5% “non crackpot” cases is very different from 98.5% non-false positive.
I’m using a hotel lobby computer right now, and can’t rewatch the video for confirmation, but I believe that this video contains a highly relevant anecdote (as well as being generally relevant.) The author of the video was witness to a phenomenon which his host believed could only be accounted for by ghost activity. The author of the video realized that the phenomenon was, in fact, caused by a fan being on which his host didn’t notice. But if he hadn’t been there, his host could have conveyed the story as a phenomenon that could only be explained by ghost activity, and the relevant detail, the fan, that was the real explanation of the phenomenon, would have been omitted from the account. Nobody hearing the secondhand account could have known the real explanation, only lumped it in with the expanse of possible answer space. And a normal, non-crazy person who believes they witnessed ghost activity, would most likely deny that there had been a fan on that they had failed to notice, and indeed take offense at the very suggestion, because they would interpret it as an attack on their credibility.
If a phenomenon has a real incidence rate of zero, but any false positive rate at all, then all accounts will be false positives. Suppose that the real incidence of alien visitations of earth is zero, but 0.1% of the population has experiences they interpret as signs of alien visitation, for which they cannot come up with alternative explanations. That would account for hundreds of thousands of reports of alien visitation in America, all of which would be false positives.
“98.5% “non crackpot” cases is very different from 98.5% non-false positive.”
I fully agree, and indeed most observations turns out to be easily explainable. The interesting question is not “can eye witness reports be fallible?” Of course they can. The interesting question is “is every single ufo observation completely unreliable?” The science says that 22% of thousands of observations of ufos are truly explainable by any phenomenom we now. Thus the answer to the latter question is an unevoquivally “NO”.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14
“If a phenomenon has a real incidence rate of zero, but any false positive rate at all, then all accounts will be false positives. Suppose that the real incidence of alien visitations of earth is zero, but 0.1% of the population has experiences they interpret as signs of alien visitation, for which they cannot come up with alternative explanations. That would account for hundreds of thousands of reports of alien visitation in America, all of which would be false positives.”
There’s a trick here. Were not interested in eyewitnesses own ideas about whether they saw an alien spaceship or not. Were interested in the subsequent analysis performed by expert scientists and the like. All we want from the eyewitnesses are their accounts of size, shape, flight path, lights etc. Then we corroborate this with radar data and see if we can find a plausible earthly explanation. Also your scenario simply does not explain all the cases that involve radar trackings, videos and photos. The latter can be faked but it is rare that we hear about military personnel faking radar data before handing it over to their superiors, just for fun.
There’s a huge difference between “we can’t think of a plausible earthly explanation” and “alien visitation is more likely than an explanation we haven’t thought of yet.”
In the case of the “ghost” experience, if we were hearing a secondhand account from the original witness, we would have “no earthly explanation,” because they wouldn’t convey the information that would actually make it explainable.
Sometimes reports might be due to things that are kept secret for good reason, like the test flights of the B-2 “Spirit” bomber, which looks for all the world like a flying saucer, and was classified by the military. Others might be due to physical phenomena that are not yet understood, and some may be due to priming and erroneous pattern recognition causing people to exaggerate observations that are not particularly out of the ordinary. These are all events that we should expect to happen in the absence of any sort of extraterrestrial activity. But attributing the sorts of events described in these reports to intelligent life forms from different star systems travelling all the way to the vicinity of Earth and making such vague and dubious appearances is a profound case of privileging the hypothesis.