Anybody who is here to expand minds, promote alternative explanations to current DOGMA[...] is wasting there time utterly and completely.
The expansion of mind must accompany the expansion of understanding in order to be useful. Imagination alone doesn't get you there. To expand understanding is a brutal, unforgiving process that asks hard questions. It's the intellectual equivalent of yanking hard on the rope one is about to climb, before trusting one's weight to it. Pseudoscience wants to stop at imagination and forego the test. In this thread's context, UFO enthusiasts want you simply to revel in the "possibility" that there is extraterrestrial life, as an explanation for unexplained experiences. They don't seem to want anyone to yank on that rope to see if it's attached to anyhing factual.
Alternative explanations are fine, so long as they continue also to predict what has been predicted before by earlier theories. Too often alternative explanations are not expansive at all, but rather narrowly aimed at one particular desired outcome. Useful theories are those that predict from a wider set of initial conditions, not merely chart a one-time course to the desired conclusion in the interesting case.
And too often the sine qua non of the alternative theory is the alternativeness of it: it is set up specifically to oppose the mainstream by any means and according to any line of reasoning that presents itself. The seekers of the paranormal seem to have an irrational fear of their occurrences and observations ceasing to be "para" and becoming "normal." When undirected opposition to some nemesis idea is the order of the day, understanding will not be the result.
This is where human ingenuity, creativity and the TRUE scientific method all go to die and rot.
Then please describe "true" science to us in detail. Many well-reasoned and useful books have been written over the centuries about wherein mainstream science has been successfully and usefully performed. If you can supplant that with a better-reasoned and more correct method, please do so.
Delete and ban!
Sorry, you probably won't get the coveted "I was banned at Bad Astronomy" badge so easily.
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