“Anyhow, it’s really easy to just make shit up on television—by which I don’t (just) mean lying, making things up is just a natural consequence of rationality failure. The unreliability of eyewitness testimony and all that.”
The Wikipedia-article on reliability of eye witness testimony only mentions this statistics:
“The Innocence Project reports eyewitness misidentification occurs in approximately 75% of convictions that are overturned”
Unfortunately this statistics will be very hard to generalize, as argued by me in another comment: “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.”
Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ffd/struck_with_a_belief_in_alien_presence/7t4w
We need statistics that can explain why every single person among thousands of witnesses has consistently fumbled in their eye-sight roll. Also we need to forget the fact that this US military report on UFOs only attributes 1,5% of sightings as being caused by psychological factors:
“Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or “crackpot” cases”
Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you’re not being rational—if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say “it’s moving this way, it has all these lights all over it” (which is the sort of thing I mean by “making stuff up”), that would be “86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations.”
We need statistics that can explain why every single person among thousands of witnesses has consistently fumbled in their eye-sight roll.
By witnesses you mean, every person who later went on to claim that they saw a ufo, while the people who think they just saw the moon don’t get interviewed on the news? “Shocking expose, local woman sees moon.”
Unfortunately this statistics will be very hard to generalize
“Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you’re not being rational—if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say “it’s moving this way, it has all these lights all over it” (which is the sort of thing I mean by “making stuff up”), that would be “86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations.”″
Sure, most observations are just ordinary things. But the report didn’t leave it to the eye witnesses to judge whether an observation was of ordinary stuff or not. They did their own analysis of of the observations and found 22% to be genuinely unknown, according to very strict criteria. So we know that objects fly around and that they do it in ways that man made things cannot do. That’s a very interesting conclusion in itself—we don’t have to say “it is aliens” to make it very interesting. This conclusion really should spark enormous scientific investigation.
“By witnesses you mean, every person who later went on to claim that they saw a ufo, while the people who think they just saw the moon don’t get interviewed on the news? “Shocking expose, local woman sees moon.”″
This sentence has several problems:
You didn’t really comment on my proposition that ALL eye witnesses has to fumble.
The scenario you describe is very far from how the most serious cases have unfolded. Do your research.
I’m not interested in whether the observer says “it’s a UFO”. I am talking about post observation analysis of observations by experts. You knew that perfectly well as I had just linked to the Wikipedia article on the study. Please be serious.
1.You didn’t really comment on my proposition that ALL eye witnesses has to fumble.
He did. It’s not necessary for all eyewitnesses to be mistaken. If 600 people report something that sounds like possible extraterrestrial activity, but there were 60,000 people there to see it, only 1% have to “fumble their eyesight roll,” and if they’re given opportunity to converse with each other beforehand, a few people who think they saw something strange may be able to convince many other people to revise their memories so they also believe they saw something strange. This sort of thing happens all the time, and almost certainly accounts for a proportion of eyewitness accounts even if we assume that there really are genuine cases of people witnessing extraterrestrial activity.
It’s pretty clear that most eyewitness accounts of observations with ordinary explanations is correct. What we are left with is a tiny minority of people who observed an ordinary event and concluded that it was an extraordinary event.
A tiny percentage of witnesses, multiplied by the large population and large number of ordinary events, yields a number roughly consistent with the numbers experienced.
Lights in a triangular formation is pretty typical for aircraft; each type has several different possible configurations of light, and almost all of them involve three or more lights that aren’t in a line. Without anything to create perspective, it is basically impossible to tell the distance of an aircraft by eye even in the day (experienced people can identify the type, know the size, and do the trig to convert degrees of arc or elevation and altitude to distance, but those people typically recognize aircraft lights as aircraft lights).
Three lights in a triangular formation, perceived as distant and far apart and with no audible noise, is roughly what one would expect to experience if a Cessna Caravan was making a nonstandard approach to a nearby airport. If the airport lacks an operating control tower (like most municipal airports in the middle of the night), it is reasonable that air traffic never communicated with the aircraft. Further, it is perfectly legal for such an aircraft to fly without an installed transponder, meaning that the radar track (if observed) will show something there that cannot be proven to be an aircraft.
Think you don’t have a municipal airport near a given witness? The US has about 13179 public and private use airfields, roughly one for every 300 square miles.
“Anyhow, it’s really easy to just make shit up on television—by which I don’t (just) mean lying, making things up is just a natural consequence of rationality failure. The unreliability of eyewitness testimony and all that.”
The Wikipedia-article on reliability of eye witness testimony only mentions this statistics:
“The Innocence Project reports eyewitness misidentification occurs in approximately 75% of convictions that are overturned”
Unfortunately this statistics will be very hard to generalize, as argued by me in another comment: “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.” Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ffd/struck_with_a_belief_in_alien_presence/7t4w
We need statistics that can explain why every single person among thousands of witnesses has consistently fumbled in their eye-sight roll. Also we need to forget the fact that this US military report on UFOs only attributes 1,5% of sightings as being caused by psychological factors:
“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
Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you’re not being rational—if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say “it’s moving this way, it has all these lights all over it” (which is the sort of thing I mean by “making stuff up”), that would be “86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations.”
By witnesses you mean, every person who later went on to claim that they saw a ufo, while the people who think they just saw the moon don’t get interviewed on the news? “Shocking expose, local woman sees moon.”
The unreliability of eyewitness testimony was originally an experimental psychology effect. I shouldn’t have just linked to wikipedia without checking it more—here’s some experimental stuff.
“Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you’re not being rational—if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say “it’s moving this way, it has all these lights all over it” (which is the sort of thing I mean by “making stuff up”), that would be “86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations.”″
Sure, most observations are just ordinary things. But the report didn’t leave it to the eye witnesses to judge whether an observation was of ordinary stuff or not. They did their own analysis of of the observations and found 22% to be genuinely unknown, according to very strict criteria. So we know that objects fly around and that they do it in ways that man made things cannot do. That’s a very interesting conclusion in itself—we don’t have to say “it is aliens” to make it very interesting. This conclusion really should spark enormous scientific investigation.
“By witnesses you mean, every person who later went on to claim that they saw a ufo, while the people who think they just saw the moon don’t get interviewed on the news? “Shocking expose, local woman sees moon.”″
This sentence has several problems:
You didn’t really comment on my proposition that ALL eye witnesses has to fumble.
The scenario you describe is very far from how the most serious cases have unfolded. Do your research.
I’m not interested in whether the observer says “it’s a UFO”. I am talking about post observation analysis of observations by experts. You knew that perfectly well as I had just linked to the Wikipedia article on the study. Please be serious.
He did. It’s not necessary for all eyewitnesses to be mistaken. If 600 people report something that sounds like possible extraterrestrial activity, but there were 60,000 people there to see it, only 1% have to “fumble their eyesight roll,” and if they’re given opportunity to converse with each other beforehand, a few people who think they saw something strange may be able to convince many other people to revise their memories so they also believe they saw something strange. This sort of thing happens all the time, and almost certainly accounts for a proportion of eyewitness accounts even if we assume that there really are genuine cases of people witnessing extraterrestrial activity.
It’s pretty clear that most eyewitness accounts of observations with ordinary explanations is correct. What we are left with is a tiny minority of people who observed an ordinary event and concluded that it was an extraordinary event.
A tiny percentage of witnesses, multiplied by the large population and large number of ordinary events, yields a number roughly consistent with the numbers experienced.
Lights in a triangular formation is pretty typical for aircraft; each type has several different possible configurations of light, and almost all of them involve three or more lights that aren’t in a line. Without anything to create perspective, it is basically impossible to tell the distance of an aircraft by eye even in the day (experienced people can identify the type, know the size, and do the trig to convert degrees of arc or elevation and altitude to distance, but those people typically recognize aircraft lights as aircraft lights).
Three lights in a triangular formation, perceived as distant and far apart and with no audible noise, is roughly what one would expect to experience if a Cessna Caravan was making a nonstandard approach to a nearby airport. If the airport lacks an operating control tower (like most municipal airports in the middle of the night), it is reasonable that air traffic never communicated with the aircraft. Further, it is perfectly legal for such an aircraft to fly without an installed transponder, meaning that the radar track (if observed) will show something there that cannot be proven to be an aircraft.
Think you don’t have a municipal airport near a given witness? The US has about 13179 public and private use airfields, roughly one for every 300 square miles.