I keep reading little mentions, here and there that entire lines of scientific inquiry were quashed over the last century.
As someone who is fascinated by the UFO witnesses coming forward, which I have posted about on this site to standard ridicule, I think theres something to it.
But as a former member of CFI, I am well aware of the number and levels of grifters in the world. So I look forward to that intersection, of impeccable reputation and genuine curiosity in a single person, who decides to ressurect these dead threads of research.
If the 1930s ESP experiments showed anomalies, lets reproduce them and learn something new. Same goes with Townsend Brown's high voltage gravity anomalies. I hope, but I expect to die disappointed.
> If the 1930s ESP experiments showed anomalies, lets reproduce them and learn something new.
There's not really anything to learn. There's no widespread evidence of ESP going on. The experiments back then were evidence enough that it doesn't exist. Yes, there were statistical anomalies, but perhaps you are misinterpreting the meaning of that phrase? If you roll a dice and get a 6 ten times in a row, and then you roll it more times and show a regression then you had an anomaly. If you continue rolling 6 then it's not an anomaly, it's evidence of something else. In those experiments they got anomalous sixes, but wanted to believe it was evidence so made up a story about ability fading or other explanations.
There are various things that people want to believe, and they'll keep coming up for as long as there are people. We each have so many thoughts and feelings and a long enough life that in our lifetimes there will be a few instances where a thought or feeling circumstantially matches reality in a way that makes us believe something more is going on. Most of the time its probably harmless and not worth getting worked up about. Sometimes it deserves investigation, and when disproof is not heeded, a bit of ridicule might prevent future scams.
> a bit of ridicule might prevent future scams.
I think this is only true if you think scammers are driven by a desire to avoid ridicule or if you think people that have been scammed are likely to respond positively to being ridiculed. As a parallel consideration, look at the current accepted wisdom for talking about online scams. As far as I know, the current consensus is not to ridicule people who have been ensnared by an online scam because it’s likely to get them to dig their heels in harder and more likely to cause them to not speak up if they think they’ve been scammed.
"a bit of ridicule might prevent future scams"
That is something I don't believe at all. Humans are emotional beings and some will react by defending whom them perceive as "the underdog speaking truth to power".
All the previous mocking didn't stop the growth of the anti-vaxx movement, for example, up to some serious levels (see also: the current US government). Even ye olde religion is still quite strong in many, regardless of the absurdity of some of its claims.
Looking at this thread, I get the impression that there are many high-IQ and low-EQ individuals who don't get the societal ramifications of being seen as an "establishment asshole sneering down on people".
I agree. Ridiculing Christians for worshipping a zombie, after all their god was a man who was killed then rose from the dead, isn't a productive approach. All that will really do is make Christians feel besieged which is a position they are very comfortable being in, feeling besieged by mean people actually just makes them feel vindicated.
A better approach is to maintain a respectful tone while not giving ground to them. Don't call Jesus a zombie, but do say that you don't think people can rise from the dead after three days. When they say that belief in a god is a necessary foundation for moral and ethical behavior, don't accuse them of only acting good because they're scared of punishment, but instead explain how secular bases for ethics and morality can work.
Skeptics should be able to explain their positions without throwing down with insults. Instead of trying to shame the other guys into silence, explain your own position respectfully. And when that doesn't immediately produce satisfying results, let it be. Some people will only come around after they've had a long time to think about it. Some people will go to the grave believing. That's fine. Becoming impatient and trying to force a satisfying conclusion to the confrontation might make you feel good but it isn't actually doing any net good in the long run.
I'm not high IQ low EQ. At least not high IQ. But I do think society is better when it has the capacity to laugh at it's own absurdities. Which also means mocking the establishment as well. In some ways I feel that what happened with the anti vaxx stuff was a serious lack of skepticism about the vaccines, and suppression of the more comical position: these have been rushed and might not be great but it's what we've got and it's probably better than getting COVID.
Mocking? The safety of vaccines has been continuously, rigorously studied by scientists the world over, and specifically unlikely vectors of danger have been studied and restudied because they became specific targets of the anti-vax movement as the source of danger. Ingredients which were proven to be non-dangerous were removed to try and keep vaccination rates up anyway.
The anti-vax movement is mocked because everything else was tried. And frankly you must be terminally online to think this is a problem, because the medical establishment bends over backwards to try and ensure kids are vaccinated. The anti-vaxxers get mocked in exactly one place: the internet, on Twitter, where they aggressively seek out and try to belittle others are spread misinformation. And then retreat into accusing people telling them off or correcting them that they're "causing them to reject science" as though they didn't start from the same position they already held.
It was actually annoyingly difficult when my son was born to stress to the hospital to give him all the routine vaccines as soon as possible, give him the Vitmin K etc. because the medical establishment doesn't know if a routine protective intervention, presented the wrong way, is going to lead to that child never receiving appropriate basic precautionary care.
>As someone who is fascinated by the UFO witnesses coming forward, which I have posted about on this site to standard ridicule, I think theres something to it.
I mean I wouldn't call it "standard" at this point. The last 3 years the UFO community has made lofty claims and received unprecedented government attention but nothing has come out of it.
Every. Single. Video or piece of evidence has been debunked in a very rigorous scientific sense. The rest have been proven to be literal videos of balloons.
In one hilarious incident for MONTHS the UFO community believed there was a real video of the Malaysian airlines flight being abducted via some type of teleportation technology.
Meanwhile the video had been on the internet for like 10 years and the actual animator had to come and say he had made it himself.
When you compare such grand, extraordinary claims with the outcomes there's no logical choice but to just call the people involved in those circles grifters or Russian assets.
There IS a reason why Newsmax is pushing the UFO stories. And it's not because they're valid.
Quite frankly if I were in poverty and watched how the government treated the lower classes, while it gives unwarranted respect to UFO conspiracy theorists at the highest levels of government it'd lead me to do very drastic things.
And I'm not afraid to say that publicly.
Absolutely! The entire UFO phenomenon is just edging its true believers, or like dubstep that takes infinitely long to get to the drop. Always there's something that's about to be revealed or blow the whole thing open, but then it's just more rumors and hearsay and blurry videos of not quite anything.
There are serious people studying UFOs. There are also a lot of people flying around a lot of weird drones. Reports of triangular objects going really fast may be one of these.[1] It's even possible to hover one of those, standing on its tail, with the proper control system.
There are some people pushing an open source UFO detection system, which is basically a dome surveillance camera pointed upward, connected to tracking software.[2] They have lots of videos. Airplanes, helicopters, hawks, even the International Space Station. 117 sites worldwide, supposedly. No major discoveries yet.
Not well coordinated, though. They need to get the same target from two or three viewpoints. That gets you range, and resolves most reflection-type illusions. So you need a few in each city-sized area. Data reduction should be coordinated with ADS-B data, to ident aircraft.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVNIWuLs_7E
[2] https://ufodap.com/
There are billions of HD video recording devices in the world today. If UFOs were actually real we would have have a lot of footage of them like we have for everything else that's actually real.
>If UFOs were actually real we would have have a lot of footage of them like we have for everything else that's actually real.
Who is the "we" with access to everyone's video recording footage? I don't have access to anyone's camera footage. If I ask a big organization with lots of cameras for unfettered access to their camera footage they will probably tell me to take a long walk off a short pier.
If a large military organization has suspicious footage of unidentified objects, they probably don't share it to every outsider who asks for it.
Now, some organizations claim to have UFO footage, but I have little reason to take their claims at face value. Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
> we would have have a lot of footage of them like we have for everything else that's actually real.
I don't have a lot of footage of narco-submarines or drug cartel headquarters. Does that mean they don't exist?
Does something stop being real when cameras stop being pointed at it?
People are extremely likely to upload footage they think is a real UFO. There isn't a shred of physical evidence for UFOS after so many decades.
>People are extremely likely to upload footage they think is a real UFO. There isn't a shred of physical evidence for UFOS
Is there some central repository of alleged UFO evidence that every single human with a camera is given access to as soon as they get the camera? No, I don't think that's what you meant.
There is a huge amount of human-generated information, and it is ambiguous and practically impossible to process as a whole. No one person can audit all of the videos uploaded to Youtube, rumble, odysee, etc. If we want to argue about what footage has been uploaded, we have to be able to specify what body of footage we are familiar with.
I don't know your background -- people in various walks of life have very different ways of talking about evidence. In my experience of non-paranormal claims, scholars cite scholarly sources, so when I see people saying, "There is no evidence" without immediately adding a bunch of book titles and journal articles, I suspect they are commenting outside their field of expertise.
Instead of just saying "there is no evidence," which is overly broad, you could argue, "I, <insert name here>, have confidence in experts X, Y, and Z, plus committees P, Q, and R <insert websites here> and all their reports on the evidence have been negative."
XKCD for that.[1]
[1] https://xkcd.com/1235/
That's actually really cool though, and is the sort of creativity that you'd like to see some out of these things more often because it has genuinely useful applications.
I'm mid forties and I've been hearing about UFOs for as long as I can remember and yet there is absolutely no hard evidence for their existence. Thus I conclude they probably don't exist.
Same logic applies to Bigfoot.
I appreciate you well defining the standard.