http://www.ufoindia.org/news_ufosatellite.htm

Just want your opinions on this picture, as I do not know nearly as much about space photography as many people here do.

If I had a nickle for every dumb claim about SOHO images, I wouldn't need ads on this site.

Here's your best link for debunking this nonsense. You can read my page about it too.

This quote in particular: "I think its absolutely irrefutable that this couldn't be anything other than a machine." by Mike Murray of EUROSETI is a pip. He doesn't know what it is, so it must be a spacecraft? That is grossly illogical. It is almost certainly a cosmic ray, and has been distorted through JPG compression. Read my page above about it.

A lot of people seem to miss this point, that the logic of "A implies not B" is not reversable, i.e., "not A implies B." Just because you can't think of an explanation does not imply another one.

BA - your two links are going to the same page.

A long time ago, I did a bit of work with some colour-enhanced IRAS images. Boy, you could see some classic spacecraft in some of those images - enough to keep the UFO'ers going for years!

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EUROSETI, now INTERSETI, gives real SETI a bad rep. Too bad something couldn't be done about the name. Also it was interesting that the "ufo" photo chosen by ufoindia.org looks a lot like the dome of a temple. :wink:

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I fixed the link. Thanks!

Thats it!
They didn't take the picture of a UFO, its the temple of God, they found Heaven!

See, there's the round base layer, and smaller layers raising up for the better souls to reside in, and the pinnacle for God himself.

Yeah, thats it!

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Right, that invalid inference is the fallacy of confirming the consequent:

P --> Q
Q
ergo: P

Example:

If Jim wins the lottery, then he'll be happy.
Jim is happy.
Ergo: Jim won the lottery.

But that does not logically follow. Speaking to the asymmetry that you note, the fallacy of confirming the consequent is an invalid inversion of the valid inference of modus ponens:

P --> Q
P
ergo: Q

Example:

If Jim wins the lottery, then he'll be happy.
Jim won the lottery.
Ergo: he'll be happy.

Another valid rule of inference involving the if-then conditional is modus tollens:

P --> Q
~Q
ergo: ~P

Example:

If Jim wins the lottery, then he'll be happy.
Jim is not happy.
Ergo: Jim did not win the lottery.

I always think of the character Rimmer on Red Dwarf. He always jumped to the conclusion that anything strange was an alien. On one show, he captured an old garbage pod which he thought was an alien vessel, and the other crew members played along just for fun and let him spend a lot of time on it.

Probably the least convincing thing for me is that it looks exactly like a spaceship from any given sci-fi movie. I imagine that an actual alien spacecraft would look less like our expectations and, well, more alien.

I have found that things are quite easily faked. Personally, I beleive that there are no extra-terrestrials, and if there are, there are no intelligent life forms. Here is an example of a faked UFO pic. It took me about 3 minutes to make. So if it is possible to make something like that in 3 minutes with limited software, think about those hoaxists with lots of time on their hands and good sofware.

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Hey, you can't fool ME, man! Those are obviously REAL chem trails up there in the sky. BTW, did your little sister get loose with a marking pen and circle that thing? PULL! :wink:

Nice job, BTW.

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Thanks. I love editing photos, and I'd show some of them, but most of them I don't have full rights to.... Lol! I'll try to make a better one later, one that is actually rather convincing.

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Galileo felt wierd when he saw "ears" on saturn. No, really, I'm SIRIUS!

But that picture is sooo cheesy. Like a cartoon of a UFO. Are we quite sure it's not a joke?

I don't know if this is affirming the consequent. That follows the pattern:

A implies B
B is observed
Therefore A is asserted.

This is illogical because it has not been established that B implies A. There could be some C that implies B. Hence the illogic.

I think this fallacy comes more along the lines of Wishful Thinking. All he has is a blob, and he's interpretted it as what he wants.

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Those SOHO-photographed UFOs are always so kind to align their axis with the pixels of the detector... In SF movies, spacecraft always meet in a way that both use the same "up" direction. Compare with any number of real space rendezvous photos...

Harald

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