Quote:
Originally Posted by junglist
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...multiple witnesses, a few of whom were proven to be competent in their respective professions, saw something very real.
Competence in one's profession does not equate to being excused from the natural limitations of human perception. Nor can someone be trained to accurately range objects with which he is no familiar, especially at night minus so many otherwise expected cues.
...when these unidentified objects display characterisitics and qualities that have not been displayed in currently available technology...
This leaps to two conclusions: first that the interpretation of the observation in terms of speed, size, and distance are to be taken literally as given by the witness, and second that some sort of technology is responsible for it.
Maybe they have been investigated and found to be ET in origin and the findings are secret, or they are prototype military vehicles that quite rightly, governments want to keep secret.
An extremely far-fetched set of hypotheses. Why not stick with ones that require shorter leaps of unfounded imagination?
UFO proponents always make the bifold proposal that people in the know are already sure these are extraterrestrial spacecraft, and are covering up that information for some nefarious purpose, or because the public are presumed to be panicky sheep. It's entirely circular reasoning.
...in fact the nations of this worlds national security laws are themselves, the very definition of a conspiracy theory.
Not a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy in fact, which is an entirely different thing. We know nations keep secrets and we know why. In fact, it is human nature to keep secrets from each other out of fear. But there is always evidence that the secret exists even if we don't know what it is. When the company board meets, you see them go into a room; there is evidence of their absence from other tasks; they emerge later. You may never know what they discussed, but you know something
was discussed.
That differs markedly from conspiracy
theories in which there is proposed some farfetched claim to explain what is entirely bereft of information.
my guess is, if they tried to fire on it, then they must have had it on radar.
Not necessarily. Engaging a target does not require it to have been seen on any radar.
Again, the argument settles on reliability of both human observation and the equipment on board the fighter jet, and I see this reliability argument time and time again on threads throughout this forum.
You see it because it is almost always the case in the real world. Things break down. People make mistakes. These sorts of occurrences account for the vast majority of anomalous events on Earth. To suddenly suppose that there must be a far-fetched explanation that has no
a priori plausibility, simply because an event cannot be conclusively attributed to a prosaic cause, is quite irrational.
We focus on reliability factors in human perception because that's what real investigators do. In real investigations where people are liable for the strength of the results, witness reliability is
always taken into account; whereas UFO investigations are almost entirely ignorant of this well-studied field. Go look at, for example, NTSB investigative methods and you'll find that worksheets and guides are provided to interviewers to help discern how reliable the witnesses' estimates are of things such as speed and distance.
"Reliability" in eyewitness testimony is not merely the witness's likely propensity to tell the truth, but more often his
ability to
discern the truth. Eyewitness observation (especially at night from a moving platform) is highly fraught with sources of natural, inescapable error. Real investigators take this into account and assess the witness statements on that basis. UFO "researchers" simply take every word that comes out of an eyewitness's mouth as gospel truth. And sadly, they think they're doing the right thing by that.