panchezpablo,

First, a belated welcome to BAUT.

What speaks volumes of Mr. Hastings critical analysis of evidence, is the mention on his website of an 1950 FBI memorandum concerning a recovered crashed ufo in New Mexico.

source: http://www.ufohastings.com/LecturePage.html

This memorandum, which you can find under the FBI FOIA act website, is a known memo based on the Aztec ufo scam, and discarded even by most ufologists.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Scully

Ufologists speak of a coverup by the government. Do they really think that the government would release this memo if it were authentic?

Hastings accepts it without question since it fits into his lecture quite nicely.

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“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

i have been a witness in an armed robbery and a juror on a triall involving actual bodily harm - both of which relied entirely on eye-witness accounts.

the armed robber is now doing a 10 year stretch.

I meant whether you have ever prepared a case. Being a witness and listening to witnesses as a lay juror does not create expertise in handling expert testimony.

In contrast I have assisted several lawyers in preparing cases involving eyewitness testimony in forensic matters. As an occasional forensic engineering investigator I have taken and deposed dozens of eyewitness accounts of engineering and industrial failures, as well as having been trained by one of the foremost experts in the field, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus.

Robert Hastings can demonstrate or substantiate no actual expertise in the handling of eyewitness testimony. When asked what methods he used to control the veracity of that testimony, he described only a process he invented to correctly reproduce what the witness had said.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

No, they didn't. I assure you. For one thing, if the only evidence of the crime itself was eyewitness testimony, it wouldn't make it to court in the first place. There must have been at bare minimum forensic evidence that the crime took place. If there wasn't, I shudder for whatever jurisdiction you live in.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

if the witnesses had failed to turn up at court or refused to testify, then the guy would be walking free now. as it is, hes singing like a canary..... and the difference between the two scenarios..... eye witness testimony..... thats what convicted him!

I find this very difficult to believe. An armed robbery with NO other evidence?

No weapon? No recovered money/property? No other forensic evidence at all?

Sorry, but how did they even know there was a crime? According to this, I could go out and accuse my neighbor of stealing $100,000 from me, and he would be convicted just on my say-so. Sorry. Not buying it.

Did you read my link a few posts back?

And again, there's a difference between conviction in a court of law, and the truth.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

ok, here´s the deal.

the police had been tipped off that there was going to be a hit on a security van delivering money to a bank ATM.

immediately after said ´hit´ (which happened 10 feet from the car in which i was sitting) there were armed police all over the gaff.

2 were caught on the spot but one got away and was later arrested because of association.

OMG...that is so far from what you described that I, for one, have no idea what to say.

I don't think anything needs to be said. I think most of us have reached a new level of understanding.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Why would the police need eyewitness testimony when the armed robbers were caught "red-handed"?

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

thats exactly what i said when i had to take several days off work to attend court... especially when the police had the whole thing on camera.

but apparrently, the sun was at the exact angle to make all of the footage useless (or so they told us) ... but i agree with swift ... this whole semantics thing has took us off at a complete tangent.

and to fazor... sorry but i had to rush my earlier post and make it more concise than i would have liked to.

whilst reading through this thread the other day, i remember coming across a comment which refered to the ´culture´ of ufo reporting at malmstrom afb during the 1967 incidents, i was just curious if anybody out there with any ´hands on´experience was aware of the regularity at which minuteman missiles would go offline, and if indeed it was a rare occurance in itself (ie without the meddling paws or claws of the space aliens )

That comment - [a] 'culture' of ufo reporting - would lead me to ask how many times security reports were written about unusual occurrences where the missile squadrons didn't go off-line.

And that question would only be looong after if what the experts said to do to stop the problem from happening again didn’t stop the problem (the off-line event) from happening again.

What is much more readily believable: That we out-smarted the aliens or that we learned about designing reliability requirements into systems that we found were necessary from earlier system problems?

Aliens. Aliens are the answer to everything. Stoopid aliens.

i was just curious if anybody out there with any ´hands on´experience was aware of the regularity at which minuteman missiles would go offline...

One of my best friends is a major in the Air Force and supervises the maintenance and upgrade of Minuteman missiles. He's very busy. Minuteman missiles go offline all the time.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

thanks jay,

does this have anything to do with the age of the minuteman or has this been a problem since inception? (ie would this have been a regular occurance during the periods relevent to this thread)

There is no one particular cause or condition that leads to failures in the Minuteman system. In 2009 there are obviously age-related issues that weren't present in the 1960s. Conversely in the 1960s various elements of the system were primitive and have been since upgraded. You can't paint this with a broad brush. At least not if you expect an answer from an engineer.

The sudden and simultaneous unreadiness of an entire flight points to whatever has a commonality. Investigators discovered an obscure commonality in a secondary test system under certain conditions that resulted in systemic failure. In the 1960s understanding of systemic complexity was in its infancy. Because of considerable work on complex systems undertaken in the 1980s we now understand that unintended interactions arise in complex systems leading to systemic behavior that can't be easily predicted. Engineers in the 1960s naturally overestimated the reliability of such systems because they lacked a formal understanding of this behavior.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

HOLLY: Oh, I forgot, I haven't told you the news.
RIMMER: What news?
HOLLY: A signal. We're getting a signal. It's probably nothing but I just thought I'd mention it.
RIMMER: (Snaps his fingers) Aliens!
LISTER: Oh god, aliens? Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys -- it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall -- it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day -- you thought that was aliens as well.
RIMMER: Well we didn't use it all, Lister. Who did?
LISTER: Rimmer, aliens used our bog roll?
RIMMER: Just 'cause they're aliens doesn't mean to say the don't have to visit the little boys' room. Only they probably do something weird and alienesque like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
LISTER: Well I wouldn't like to be stuck behind one in a cinema.

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papageno


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"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)