11 Comments

I just wanted to say agree with you generally, and it's sad to see you're getting hate for stating what should be obvious points of valid skepticism.

Kaku has never shown himself to be a serious thinker and has always shown himself to be an opportunist looking to promote himself with whatever sensationalist crap he can get away with on cable news. So nothing new there.

I saw a clip of De Grasse Tyson talking about the UFOs. I haven't watched the entire interview but what I saw I thought was fine.

The main prior we should have for some of these craft that Navy pilots have seen is that they are Russian or Chinese drones, and the fact the Navy/ DoD apparently doesn't have a handle on that potentiality is a bit disturbing. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but there is a really well researched piece of journalism on this point. I haven't had time to read the entire thing but it's definitely worth a gander:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos

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I love this. How does any true truth remain? ...And, what is Wikipedia's secret? Are they not sort of a facts blockchain?

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Bravo. My feelings exactly.

What I always tell people who ask me is that every major atmospheric event (e.g., a meteorite) over an inhabited area generates (now-a-days) a plethora of data, images and video and even sound from cell phones and surveillance cameras and dash cams, etc., of whatever it is in the sky. Those data can then be analyzed by anyone to figure out the actual location and altitude and velocity and course changes of the object. No one has to depend on any given individual to this, and any faked data will be rapidly thrown out. Until that can be done that for UFO events, they have nothing.

As an example, the Chelyabinsk meteor came down over Russia, deep in Siberia in a formerly closed area (the Russian Los Alamos), but there was enough data that no one anywhere on the globe had any serious doubts what had happened, how it moved, what caused the damage, etc. Have all that for a UFO, and we can talk.

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When someone begins his research with the circular-logic axiom "it can't be aliens because nothing is ever aliens" (or the opposite axiom) it is not really interesting to learn what follows, because the reader knows that the researcher is not treating his subject intellectually. Okay, a "professional skeptic" has debunked something…the least surprising thing I can think of at the moment.

Professional skeptics and professional believers alike are playing a different game than truth-seeking. Instead they are each hunkered down in their respective foxholes, lobbing these predictable circular arguments at each other, starting out at the desired conclusion and working backwards.

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A second note: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a bad policy. Extraordinary evidence rarely presents itself effortlessly. Rather, one starts out with an extraordinary claim and minimal evidence. At this point "scientific skepticism" tosses the claim into the garbage. Instead, the correct approach is to consider the extraordinary claim may just actually have some merit—some explanatory power—and to thus collect and analyze evidence _objectively_.

In contrast, when we restrict ourselves to hypotheses where irrefutable evidence simply falls into our lap, waiting around and hoping to get lucky is the only path to making nature give up her secrets.

—James Cropcho

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