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Old 27-February-2008, 06:35 PM
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JayUtah JayUtah is online now
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The fact that people see something in the sky, and cannot immediately identify it means nothing more than...well, that they saw something in the sky that they couldn't identify.

This affects how we interpret the consistency of testimony. Consistency is significant only if it involves a sufficient number of details.

If I'm interviewing witnesses while attempting to determine the cause of an industrial incident, I'll usually hear something like, "I heard a loud noise on the factory floor." But honestly 90% of all such incidents start as a "loud noise on the factory floor," whether they're safety violations, job actions, or equipment failures. Ten people telling me they heard a "loud noise" isn't meaningful consistency. There's a particular kind of loud noise when a steel structural member snaps. That's a completely different loud noise than when a crane hoist brake fails and drops a load on a concrete floor. And there's another completely different kind of loid noise from when a pocket of trapped hydrogen ignites.

One simply can't say that UFO sightings are "highly consistent" when significant detail is lacking. "I saw a bright object moving in the night sky" is not necessarily consistent with "I saw a bright object moving in the night sky."
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