Prior to watching the video, I have a very low estimate of the probability of aliens on earth (intelligent aliens visiting within human history, p ≈ 0.0001, intelligent aliens sending probes of any kind to earth during human history, similar, anything of alien origin coming to Earth over it’s entire history: p ≈ 0.1, though I could easily be persuaded of a higher or lower estimate).
We’ll see what effect the video has on those estimates.
--After watching the first half hour, taking comments in a window to the side throughout--
“Halt and his team locate three indentations [dramatic pause] in the shape of a triangle” in a very authoritative voice.
“Over two days, 60 personnel reported that they had seen a UFO.”
How were they asked?
They really like triangles. “my wife and I saw three bright white lights [dramatic pause] in triangle formation”. Triangle formation, as oppposed to a line? Either way, it would have sounded significant and ominous.
The original investigation is missing any confirmatory evidence—but that also means it lacks any disconfirmatory evidence. This is exactly what you would expect to see in unexplained cases if there actually was nothing unexplainable going on.
I noted that in the beginning of the video, they mention that most sightings occurred over sparsely populated locations. If events were located in random geographic locations, you would expect low population-density areas to have a disproportionate number of sightings (the probability of a sighting would be a function of the probability of an event, which will be the same everywhere (meaning that it’s most likely over a low population density area, as most areas have low population density), and the probability that someone will see the event (which will go up with population density, but approach unity at a fairly low density). If UFOs were hallucinations, you would expect to see a fairly even distribution over population, meaning high population density areas would report considerably more sightings per square mile. In areas that are more dense, such as Europe or Japan, you would expect about the same number of sightings per square mile: likewise with fairly homogeneous somewhat low populations (farming regions) you would also expect approximately the same concentration of reports per square mile. That suggests a fairly informative test: do most reports come from cities, or rural areas. Since, in America, 20% of the population lives in rural areas and 60% live in cities (population ≥ 200,000), you would expect about one quarter of sightings to occur over cities. The effect of disconfirmation from other people in the city who don’t see anything would decrease the number of hallucinations reported, but not enough that you would expect rural areas to have a higher incidence of sightings overall.
One other possibility that occurs to me now is that it is possible that there may be a higher concentration of reports near military bases. This would suggest military activities, which are quite likely to A: be conducted near military bases, B: look strange, particularly things like planes flying in formation, and C: be classified.
Phoenix incident:
“In the weeks after the incident [emphasis mine], over 700 reports were called in...” In a city as large as Phoenix, you would expect far more than 700 people to see an object several miles across that remained in place for over an hour. The fact that this includes reports in the weeks after, when people would have asked themselves whether they had seen anything strange, implies that the actual number of witnesses is even smaller. In addition, an absence of better video than grainy shots with home cameras of distant lights is fairly strong evidence against this being a solid object, as per the reports, instead of a number of lights traveling in formation. This was 1997: cameras were fairly decent even then.
You would expect to see much stronger evidence if there was actually a several hundred meter object in the Phoenix shy. High-intensity flares, the official explanation, look like they fit the video equally well if not better, and fit the other observations (silent, in particular) much better.
Remember to compare the convincingness of the report in the video with the most convincing report you would expect to see of something that actually happened, not just an average report of something that really happened.
I don’t have time to finish the video, but if there’s any piece of information that is considerably more convincing later on (not just more of the same ambiguous information), you could summarize and point me to a 1-minute segment in which they give it.
In the meantime, you could look at the frequency of UFO reports per square mile around cities and rural areas (if the values of reports per square mile are within 1 order of magnitude of each other for low and high population density areas, that’s fairly strong evidence for something actually going on) and reports per person in cities and rural areas (if the reports are not within an order of magnitude or two of each other, that’s pretty good evidence that this is not caused by hallucinations or something similar). You could also look at incidence per person and per square mile near military bases: if there is a significantly higher incidence there, that implies military activity is the most likely cause.
I don’t have geographic data, but if you do and don’t know how to run the analysis, I can do that for you.
Result
The video didn’t manage to convince me, because I’m fairly sure I could create a video at least that convincing in the absence of any alien activity if I had their budget (and I expect them to be at least as good at making convincing videos as I am).
Amusing sidenote:
This does have a significant impact on my estimate of the budget of the History channel, and my estimate of my own ability to create convincing videos. If I think I can create a video as convincing as a group of experts on making convincing videos on the same budget, that probably means I’m either overestimating my own skill, their budget, or the effect of expertise on making convincing videos.
“The original investigation is missing any confirmatory evidence—but that also means it lacks any disconfirmatory evidence. This is exactly what you would expect to see in unexplained cases if there actually was nothing unexplainable going on.”
Apropos what one would expect to see, let me quote from Wikipedia on a US military study:
“35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases. This was the exact opposite of the result predicted by skeptics, who usually argued unknowns were poorer quality cases involving unreliable witnesses that could be solved if only better information were available.”
35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases
OK, this one’s tough to analyse—big interplay of factors here. Basic classification of events:
Hallucinations—only one observer. Likely to be classified as low quality/crackpot or low quality/unknown
Seeing the moon etc. and thinking it’s a spaceship—pretty much same as hallucination
Foreign military craft—Not clear whether these would be classified as “unknown” or “inconclusive”. Skew towards high quality as more likely to be flying around military bases & hence seen by military personnel (also more likely to be seen by radar)
Undiscovered weather phenomenon etc. - probably classified as “unknown”, no bias towards high or low quality reports
Alien spaceship—likely classified as “unknown”. Plausible bias towards high quality as again we might expect to find more of them around military bases.
Poor quality hoax—likely classified as poor quality and miscellaneous.
Elaborate hoax—plausibly classified as high quality (can get multiple witnesses) and unknown.
The following factors might further skew how many events get reported or how they are classified:
Military personnel more likely to report everything unexplained that they see, ordinary people more likely to only report really weird stuff. Bias towards low quality/unknown
Opposite effect may be in play—ordinary people get spooked by anything, military personnel more used to seeing odd stuff from time to time. Bias away from low quality/unknown
When UFO gets reported, a bunch of people phone in saying they’ve seen the same thing when really they haven’t. Increases apparent number of witnesses—so adds noise to high/low quality but doesn’t skew known/unknown classification
Self-disbelief: people won’t report very unusual sightings unless they are military or have other witnesses or have corroborating evidence. Bias towards high quality/unknown
Ridicule, refusing to accept reports etc. - same effect as self-disbelief
If motivated to do so, military personnel have greater ability to make up a convincing story about an unknown sighting than ordinary people. Bias towards high quality/unknown
So I don’t have time today to do a Bayesian calculation on this, but the line from Wikipedia seems to be evidence in favour of elaborate hoaxes, alien spacecraft with particular motivations, wacky unreliable reports getting filtered before they make it to the Blue Book, and possibly foreign military aircraft. Evidence is weaker if there was too much credence placed in military personnel.
Other things to bear in mind:
I don’t know about the methodology of the Blue Book project or Report 14. In particular I’m guessing they’re not Bayesians, and influential people may have particular prejudices (we don’t know which way those prejudices go, but that consideration certainly makes the results harder to analyse)
The Wikipedia article departs slightly from Wikipedia’s usual voice which may indicate it’s of lower quality and might be missing relevant information or presenting information incorrectly
•Alien spaceship—likely classified as “unknown”. Plausible bias towards high quality as again we might expect to find more of them around military bases.
I’m not sure why we would expect that. If I were constructing a model of what I would expect of alien visitations, I don’t think that would be part of it.
If I were constructing a model of what I would expect from alien visitations though, I doubt it would resemble any of the recorded observations at all; I suspect that they would be either completely open and unambiguous, or totally unnoticed (if a race with the technology for casual interstellar travel wanted to avoid attention, I expect that they could avoid it completely.)
What you just did is suggest a series of hypothesis as to what could explain the evidence. That is a part of the scientific method, but it is not all of the scientific method. The scientific method also includes testing the various hypothesis against the evidence, for each and every case. You forgot to do that.
You mean in the History channel documentary and other videos on Youtube, or something else? I don’t usually like consuming knowledge in documentary form because it’s 1. slower than reading and 2. much easier to make emotion-based/nonsensical arguments without your audience noticing. Perhaps you could provide us with a summary of what happened when people tested Giles’ explanations? If there’s good text-based discussion you can link to us then I’d also be interested in that.
“35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases. This was the exact opposite of the result predicted by skeptics, who usually argued unknowns were poorer quality cases involving unreliable witnesses that could be solved if only better information were available.”
This confuses me. I’ll have a look at the report. Do you know what proportion of the unknowns are poor cases as opposed to excellent cases (I would guess there are far more poor cases than excellent cases).
Good thoughts. Many of your points are not primary evidence though. Primary evidence would be eg. a flight track log for an airliner showing that the airliner passed by right where some people simultaneously were having a sighting of an unidentified flying object.
If you didn’t find the first half hour convincing you probably won’t find the rest convincing either. What fuels my current belief is the sheer mass of observations. There are many documentaries and they portray many cases:
Eyewitnesses can be error prone but can thousands of them be 100% erroneous? That’s not how we usually treat our sensory input. Normally we attribute at least some value to it (this reasoning isn’t primary evidence either).
In short, yes. In a country of hundreds of millions of people, finding thousands of people with any shared characteristic is not surprising. As faul_sname said, I would expect at least hundreds of thousands of people to be eyewitnesses to anything happening over a major city.
Independently, our current knowledge of physics strongly suggests that interstellar travelers arriving in this solar system would be visible (during deceleration) to any serious observation of the night sky, whether Mayan, Ptolemaic, Galilean, or modern. The absence of any record that suggests arrival is strong evidence against interstellar aliens.
Many of your points are not primary evidence though.
Primary evidence includes eyewitnesses. And even if it didn’t, the secondary evidence is so strong that total absence of relevant primary evidence is irrelevant.
You asked elsewhere why you are getting downvotes, and the brief answer is that you are dramatically over-weighing the strength of the relevant evidence.
“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.
Fine, with our current knowledge knowledge of physics the Alien trick would be almost impossible.
But shouldn’t we rather estimate the probability that future physicists would discover something radically new? And isn’t this proposition significantly harder to estimate? Making your secondary evidence less strong?
“You asked elsewhere why you are getting downvotes, and the brief answer is that you are dramatically over-weighing the strength of the relevant evidence.”
That’s why I said that my belief was not of much interest :)
The topic of this thread really shouldn’t be about my belief. It would be just as interesting as discussing the aesthetic merits of my left little toe.
“Independently, our current knowledge of physics strongly suggests that interstellar travelers arriving in this solar system would be visible (during deceleration) to any serious observation of the night sky, whether Mayan, Ptolemaic, Galilean, or modern. The absence of any record that suggests arrival is strong evidence against interstellar aliens.”
Just curious:
Does human kind has in place 24⁄7 surveillance of every part of the sky around the globe? Citation?
Close enough to see the kind of effect that would be present from decelerating from interstellar speeds, assuming that aliens noticed us sometime after we made electromagnetic fields that exceeded background noise in orbit.
Prior to watching the video, I have a very low estimate of the probability of aliens on earth (intelligent aliens visiting within human history, p ≈ 0.0001, intelligent aliens sending probes of any kind to earth during human history, similar, anything of alien origin coming to Earth over it’s entire history: p ≈ 0.1, though I could easily be persuaded of a higher or lower estimate).
We’ll see what effect the video has on those estimates.
--After watching the first half hour, taking comments in a window to the side throughout--
“Halt and his team locate three indentations [dramatic pause] in the shape of a triangle” in a very authoritative voice.
“Over two days, 60 personnel reported that they had seen a UFO.” How were they asked?
They really like triangles. “my wife and I saw three bright white lights [dramatic pause] in triangle formation”. Triangle formation, as oppposed to a line? Either way, it would have sounded significant and ominous.
The original investigation is missing any confirmatory evidence—but that also means it lacks any disconfirmatory evidence. This is exactly what you would expect to see in unexplained cases if there actually was nothing unexplainable going on.
I noted that in the beginning of the video, they mention that most sightings occurred over sparsely populated locations. If events were located in random geographic locations, you would expect low population-density areas to have a disproportionate number of sightings (the probability of a sighting would be a function of the probability of an event, which will be the same everywhere (meaning that it’s most likely over a low population density area, as most areas have low population density), and the probability that someone will see the event (which will go up with population density, but approach unity at a fairly low density). If UFOs were hallucinations, you would expect to see a fairly even distribution over population, meaning high population density areas would report considerably more sightings per square mile. In areas that are more dense, such as Europe or Japan, you would expect about the same number of sightings per square mile: likewise with fairly homogeneous somewhat low populations (farming regions) you would also expect approximately the same concentration of reports per square mile. That suggests a fairly informative test: do most reports come from cities, or rural areas. Since, in America, 20% of the population lives in rural areas and 60% live in cities (population ≥ 200,000), you would expect about one quarter of sightings to occur over cities. The effect of disconfirmation from other people in the city who don’t see anything would decrease the number of hallucinations reported, but not enough that you would expect rural areas to have a higher incidence of sightings overall.
One other possibility that occurs to me now is that it is possible that there may be a higher concentration of reports near military bases. This would suggest military activities, which are quite likely to A: be conducted near military bases, B: look strange, particularly things like planes flying in formation, and C: be classified.
Phoenix incident:
“In the weeks after the incident [emphasis mine], over 700 reports were called in...” In a city as large as Phoenix, you would expect far more than 700 people to see an object several miles across that remained in place for over an hour. The fact that this includes reports in the weeks after, when people would have asked themselves whether they had seen anything strange, implies that the actual number of witnesses is even smaller. In addition, an absence of better video than grainy shots with home cameras of distant lights is fairly strong evidence against this being a solid object, as per the reports, instead of a number of lights traveling in formation. This was 1997: cameras were fairly decent even then.
You would expect to see much stronger evidence if there was actually a several hundred meter object in the Phoenix shy. High-intensity flares, the official explanation, look like they fit the video equally well if not better, and fit the other observations (silent, in particular) much better.
Remember to compare the convincingness of the report in the video with the most convincing report you would expect to see of something that actually happened, not just an average report of something that really happened.
I don’t have time to finish the video, but if there’s any piece of information that is considerably more convincing later on (not just more of the same ambiguous information), you could summarize and point me to a 1-minute segment in which they give it.
In the meantime, you could look at the frequency of UFO reports per square mile around cities and rural areas (if the values of reports per square mile are within 1 order of magnitude of each other for low and high population density areas, that’s fairly strong evidence for something actually going on) and reports per person in cities and rural areas (if the reports are not within an order of magnitude or two of each other, that’s pretty good evidence that this is not caused by hallucinations or something similar). You could also look at incidence per person and per square mile near military bases: if there is a significantly higher incidence there, that implies military activity is the most likely cause.
I don’t have geographic data, but if you do and don’t know how to run the analysis, I can do that for you.
Result
The video didn’t manage to convince me, because I’m fairly sure I could create a video at least that convincing in the absence of any alien activity if I had their budget (and I expect them to be at least as good at making convincing videos as I am).
Amusing sidenote:
This does have a significant impact on my estimate of the budget of the History channel, and my estimate of my own ability to create convincing videos. If I think I can create a video as convincing as a group of experts on making convincing videos on the same budget, that probably means I’m either overestimating my own skill, their budget, or the effect of expertise on making convincing videos.
“The original investigation is missing any confirmatory evidence—but that also means it lacks any disconfirmatory evidence. This is exactly what you would expect to see in unexplained cases if there actually was nothing unexplainable going on.”
Apropos what one would expect to see, let me quote from Wikipedia on a US military study:
“35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases. This was the exact opposite of the result predicted by skeptics, who usually argued unknowns were poorer quality cases involving unreliable witnesses that could be solved if only better information were available.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14
OK, this one’s tough to analyse—big interplay of factors here. Basic classification of events:
Hallucinations—only one observer. Likely to be classified as low quality/crackpot or low quality/unknown
Seeing the moon etc. and thinking it’s a spaceship—pretty much same as hallucination
Foreign military craft—Not clear whether these would be classified as “unknown” or “inconclusive”. Skew towards high quality as more likely to be flying around military bases & hence seen by military personnel (also more likely to be seen by radar)
Undiscovered weather phenomenon etc. - probably classified as “unknown”, no bias towards high or low quality reports
Alien spaceship—likely classified as “unknown”. Plausible bias towards high quality as again we might expect to find more of them around military bases.
Poor quality hoax—likely classified as poor quality and miscellaneous.
Elaborate hoax—plausibly classified as high quality (can get multiple witnesses) and unknown.
The following factors might further skew how many events get reported or how they are classified:
Military personnel more likely to report everything unexplained that they see, ordinary people more likely to only report really weird stuff. Bias towards low quality/unknown
Opposite effect may be in play—ordinary people get spooked by anything, military personnel more used to seeing odd stuff from time to time. Bias away from low quality/unknown
When UFO gets reported, a bunch of people phone in saying they’ve seen the same thing when really they haven’t. Increases apparent number of witnesses—so adds noise to high/low quality but doesn’t skew known/unknown classification
Self-disbelief: people won’t report very unusual sightings unless they are military or have other witnesses or have corroborating evidence. Bias towards high quality/unknown
Ridicule, refusing to accept reports etc. - same effect as self-disbelief
If motivated to do so, military personnel have greater ability to make up a convincing story about an unknown sighting than ordinary people. Bias towards high quality/unknown
So I don’t have time today to do a Bayesian calculation on this, but the line from Wikipedia seems to be evidence in favour of elaborate hoaxes, alien spacecraft with particular motivations, wacky unreliable reports getting filtered before they make it to the Blue Book, and possibly foreign military aircraft. Evidence is weaker if there was too much credence placed in military personnel.
Other things to bear in mind:
I don’t know about the methodology of the Blue Book project or Report 14. In particular I’m guessing they’re not Bayesians, and influential people may have particular prejudices (we don’t know which way those prejudices go, but that consideration certainly makes the results harder to analyse)
The Wikipedia article departs slightly from Wikipedia’s usual voice which may indicate it’s of lower quality and might be missing relevant information or presenting information incorrectly
I’m not sure why we would expect that. If I were constructing a model of what I would expect of alien visitations, I don’t think that would be part of it.
If I were constructing a model of what I would expect from alien visitations though, I doubt it would resemble any of the recorded observations at all; I suspect that they would be either completely open and unambiguous, or totally unnoticed (if a race with the technology for casual interstellar travel wanted to avoid attention, I expect that they could avoid it completely.)
You forgot swamp gas.
What you just did is suggest a series of hypothesis as to what could explain the evidence. That is a part of the scientific method, but it is not all of the scientific method. The scientific method also includes testing the various hypothesis against the evidence, for each and every case. You forgot to do that.
If you want that to happen then you’re going to need to do it yourself. Nobody else here is interested enough in this subject.
They already did it! You just say “whatever” to their effort.
You mean in the History channel documentary and other videos on Youtube, or something else? I don’t usually like consuming knowledge in documentary form because it’s 1. slower than reading and 2. much easier to make emotion-based/nonsensical arguments without your audience noticing. Perhaps you could provide us with a summary of what happened when people tested Giles’ explanations? If there’s good text-based discussion you can link to us then I’d also be interested in that.
This confuses me. I’ll have a look at the report. Do you know what proportion of the unknowns are poor cases as opposed to excellent cases (I would guess there are far more poor cases than excellent cases).
I like your approach to this. (no joking)
--- update: ---
Good thoughts. Many of your points are not primary evidence though. Primary evidence would be eg. a flight track log for an airliner showing that the airliner passed by right where some people simultaneously were having a sighting of an unidentified flying object.
If you didn’t find the first half hour convincing you probably won’t find the rest convincing either. What fuels my current belief is the sheer mass of observations. There are many documentaries and they portray many cases:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEhkqEuqXzEDEWQ3aQhqT8ToAZJ1mLmU
Eyewitnesses can be error prone but can thousands of them be 100% erroneous? That’s not how we usually treat our sensory input. Normally we attribute at least some value to it (this reasoning isn’t primary evidence either).
I wish I had geographic data, but I don’t.
In short, yes. In a country of hundreds of millions of people, finding thousands of people with any shared characteristic is not surprising. As faul_sname said, I would expect at least hundreds of thousands of people to be eyewitnesses to anything happening over a major city.
Independently, our current knowledge of physics strongly suggests that interstellar travelers arriving in this solar system would be visible (during deceleration) to any serious observation of the night sky, whether Mayan, Ptolemaic, Galilean, or modern. The absence of any record that suggests arrival is strong evidence against interstellar aliens.
Primary evidence includes eyewitnesses. And even if it didn’t, the secondary evidence is so strong that total absence of relevant primary evidence is irrelevant.
You asked elsewhere why you are getting downvotes, and the brief answer is that you are dramatically over-weighing the strength of the relevant evidence.
I hoped the “yes” link was to http://xkcd.com/718/ …
“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.
Fine, with our current knowledge knowledge of physics the Alien trick would be almost impossible. But shouldn’t we rather estimate the probability that future physicists would discover something radically new? And isn’t this proposition significantly harder to estimate? Making your secondary evidence less strong?
“You asked elsewhere why you are getting downvotes, and the brief answer is that you are dramatically over-weighing the strength of the relevant evidence.”
That’s why I said that my belief was not of much interest :) The topic of this thread really shouldn’t be about my belief. It would be just as interesting as discussing the aesthetic merits of my left little toe.
Beliefs don’t exist outside of people (and other animals). If we want to talk about beliefs, we have to point inside at least one person’s head.
As I’m not sure whether you will be notified on new comments to the original post (including my new fancy comment to the original post) I give you the permalink to it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ffd/struck_with_a_belief_in_alien_presence/7t4i
“Independently, our current knowledge of physics strongly suggests that interstellar travelers arriving in this solar system would be visible (during deceleration) to any serious observation of the night sky, whether Mayan, Ptolemaic, Galilean, or modern. The absence of any record that suggests arrival is strong evidence against interstellar aliens.”
Just curious:
Does human kind has in place 24⁄7 surveillance of every part of the sky around the globe? Citation?
Close enough to see the kind of effect that would be present from decelerating from interstellar speeds, assuming that aliens noticed us sometime after we made electromagnetic fields that exceeded background noise in orbit.