Is there ANY evidence out there which isnt just witness testimony?

originally posted by: The GUT

Stubbs stuff is some of the more intriguing evidentiary items when all is said and done.

My guess: They're alive.

Yup, real head-scratchers.

I'm reminded of the curious camouflage-like phenomenon of "Fake Stars" that permeates ufology from time to time. Actually quite a creepy concept, isn't it?

a reply to: butcherguy

... and the pancakes had no salt in them.

Cheers

I really appreciate your replies guys.
I suppose, and this has been said 1000 times before, but if you look at the vastness of space, and look at in our galaxy alone billions of stars, all with their own planets and moons, even if 1 per cent of them had life, that would still be millions of planets with life - many probably identical to earth - why on earth would this planet be unique or even remotely interesting to advanced alien life.

So of course i believe out there is alien life, but the idea of them coming for thousands of light years just to crash their spaceship or abduct a swiss farmer (sorry billy) just sounds ridiculous

a reply to: PandaPrincess

Either we live in a desert among the stars or advanced civilizations only last so long before they become undetectable, stop using radio wave creating technology's and go silent or else are picked off by predator civilizations or just go extinct through disease, climate change they can not adapt to or other natural factor's.

But because I can't resist this is one of the best science fiction intro's of all time.

And to think Starbuck sell's coffee these day's hmmmm alien coffee.

originally posted by: PandaPrincess
Hello people.
Like all of you ive read the fascinating Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Betty Hill and all the other cases.
Ive also read reports from verified trustworthy pilots with no reason to lie, whove said they saw things not of this world.

It is very compelling. HOWEVER.....................
this is all just testimony, a lot of it second hand testimony.

Why in 2019 is there stil no actual evidence? its all just a load of fancy stories (albeit many compelling and very trustworthy).

All we have out there are blurry light videos over lake eerie, or horrible dark videos with points of light and absolutly no point of reference.
2019 everyone has camera phones and theres still nothing - i know that cliche is repeated over and over again, but its true.

So once again, is there any evidence whatsoever besides for these witness testimonys?

Please leave out ancient alien stuff, as i love all that, but im refering to from nowadays, last century or so - tangible stuff tangible evidence from recent times

Thanks, as i really want to be proved wrong.

Witness Testimony is considered the Platinum Standard in any legal dynamic....what the hades are you trying to push as a Status Quo?.....you make the most acceptable Evidence seem worthless...why are you so unwilling to accept the acknowledged Optimal Evidence Possible in place of something material that can be contrived contaminated or changed?

a reply to: PandaPrincess

I think in a round about way, you are asking for best cases. If you site search this forum for those terms, you should get some pretty good threads. From google, site:abovetopsecret.com best ufo cases

Video evidence is helpful, but is it really necessary when you have a mass sighting like Hudson Valley or multiple witnesses describing the same object at different locations like Levelland?

In the case of mass sighting cases where we are fairly certain of some event, the fact that we dont get pictures/video leads me to believe we shouldnt really expect it.

Cases recommended by various writers/investigators, compiled by Isaakoi

Some I prefer
Levelland 57 - Several motorist encounter a glowing sphere that stops their motor, police try to locate the object and also see it.
Westall 66 - Daylight sighting of a drone like craft, levitates up on a school campus.
Ravenna 66 - Several police chase ufo through 2 states
Minot AFB B-52 incident 68 - radar confirmation case
Colares 1977 - UFOs burning residents
Portugal 1982 - Pilot has extend UFO encounter, confirmed by 2nd airplane.
Belgium 89,90 - Wave of UFO sightings

a reply to: PandaPrincess
I'm guessing you are new to the topic? I say this because all 3 of the cases you mentioned in the OP actually had physical evidence. Unfortunately with this topic you can't trust Wikipedia or most news outlets.

For example, a case mentioned earlier was the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins. Many skeptics say the witnesses were merely drunk. However, police chief Greenwell who investigated the incident the night it happened specifically noted there was no evidence of alcohol consumption. You will find if you dig a little deeper that alcohol is something news outlets invented. Many modern bloggers, Wikipedia editors, etc don't bother to spend the time to dig this stuff up. So they regurgitate fake information from old news reports. As an aside, I would sincerely like to know which brand of beer causes UFO sightings, because I have read this explanation so many times that it must be true. But no matter how many I toss back I never see any aliens.

Skeptical explanations are often even more ridiculous than the et hypothesis: the Kelly case for example has been explained away by prominent skeptics as horned owls, monkeys dressed in silver suits wielding bioluminescent fungus, etc. None of these explanations are possible: monkeys, owls, piles of metal, etc all have very specific outcomes when shot multiple times at point blank range with guns. Its laughable. For the record I don't think this case was aliens, but that's more plausible to me than owls! Also this case had various types of physical evidence, good police reports, witness statements, etc. It's a really good one to investigate.

Another example of skeptical silliness in a case you mentioned, the Hill abduction, asserts that the stress of being an interracial couple in a racist nation... aliens? It's just as absurd as monkeys. Why not just say "these guys seem like they are making it up" and leave it at that? Why the absurd explanations?

Anyway, there are a great number of excellent cases with strong evidence. But you have to look at multiple sources because most of the the time whatever your source, be it blogs, forums, yt, etc, you are not seeing a complete picture of the sighting. I suggest getting a hold of original witness statements and documents and interpreting them yourself rather than letting someone else do it for you. There are of course good websites and excellent researchers to be found, but no matter how good they are, they could still miss some minor detail that ends up being important. And it goes without saying that everyone carries their own personal bias.

Now, as far as photographic evidence goes: please go and film some aircraft, stars, etc with your phone and see how they turn out. I have filmed some known flying objects as an experiment and found that the resulting footage is useless most of the time. Try it for yourself and see if you get better results. Personally this was a very useful experiment, and seeing the way things look from first hand pictures and film gives me a better idea of what things look like when I watch other people's videos.

There are a few types of evidence that are better than others. My favorite type is multiple independent witnesses. The more witnesses who report the same thing, and have never met each other before, the more likely it becomes that they aren't all in on some kind of grand hoax (which itself would be an interesting event). Some people like "high quality" witnesses like cops and pilots. But you don't have to be part of a specific club to see something weird and I think that anyone can be a good witness.

There are other types of good evidence such as radar, physical, even photographic and video. But sadly you can get free software nowadays that can create any sort of image or video, so I feel that by their nature photos aren't the best types of evidence.

There is also the evidence of omission. For example the USA government claimed that they stopped investigating UFOs in 1969 when they shut down project Bluebook. However we have things like the Bolender memo (and a great many other pieces of evidence) that prove beyond any doubt that they never stopped collecting UFO reports. Why would they lie about this? We can only speculate. But sometimes the lack of something is evidence too.

Take the Michigan "swamp gas" sightings for example. If you read the actual report written by Dr. Hynek, he spends most of the report attacking the witnesses, rather than investigating anything. But in the last part of the report he says that he has problems with the swamp gas explanation, and basically contradicts the report he just wrote. It's really weird, why would he do this? It sort of seems like the report was written by two different people. We don't have the answer but we do have some missing pieces that suggest quite a lot.

Anyway sorry for the wall of text, I hope it was helpful. If you want a few good cases to dig in to, that have what I consider strong evidence, check out Bentwaters 1956, Michigan 1966, and Illinois 2000 for starters. There are many others.

a reply to: one4all

Witness Testimony is considered the Platinum Standard in any legal dynamic....

I would say a considerable bit less "platinum" than physical evidence .
And so far , nothing of "substance"

originally posted by: Gothmog
a reply to: one4all

Witness Testimony is considered the Platinum Standard in any legal dynamic....

I would say a considerable bit less "platinum" than physical evidence .
And so far , nothing of "substance"

even the so called holy grail cases are nothing more than witness statements
very believable and the witnesses have no reason to lie
but thats it... nothing more to it

originally posted by: Jefferton
Not a bit. But, there is currently no hard evidence for the existence of God, but I doubt they will be shutting down the churches any time soon.

Personally I don't believe in extraterrestrial visitors, but a lack of evidence won't shake anyone's beliefs.

Just ask Bigfoot and Nessie.

Evidence that aliens are visiting earth? No. Wvidence that some ufos defy explanation? Underwhelming!

We have cases involving many witnesess, while also being tracked on radar. Militery cases alone is overwhelming that sometbing is going on here.

originally posted by: PandaPrincess
even the so called holy grail cases are nothing more than witness statements
very believable and the witnesses have no reason to lie
but thats it... nothing more to it

Witness testimony can be useful in certain circumstances (and with major caveats), but it is also capable of misleading. It's worth looking at Reification and false memories.

Scott Fraser: The problem with eyewitness testimony


The mind is a complex thing, and there are many aspects that are taken for granted, yet have implications for the study of UFOs. The same is true for how human vision works - basically in such a way that leaves us all wide open to what can only be termed "mis-seeing things".

IMHO you stand no chance of understand the UFO phenomenon without first understanding how humans perceive the world around them, since the majority of UFO cases involve people seeing objects. It's a fact that there are flaws in the way humans see, so this should be a "red flag", since if we can not trust what we are seeing, then how can we trust witness testimony?

As an example, I study meteors and in particular the brighter meteors known as "fireballs". In some cases a bright fireball may be witnessed by 100's or 1000's of people, and many report what they saw to various databases on the internet. The reports make interesting reading, but especially because for many it is the first time they have ever seen anything like that before, and in many cases they are unsure of what they were observing. So there are parallels between fireballs and UFOs, and looking at how people perceive fireballs can give us clues about what may be going on with UFOs.

Many people. after seeing a fireball will remark, along the lines of "I thought I was seeing a UFO", or similar. A fireball is after all just an unusually bright moving light in the sky.. which for many, who are unfamiliar with the wonders that can be observed in the sky, is a UFO.

This is a complex subject, and there is no way I can explain everything in one post, but to cut to the chase, when you look at the reports, it becomes obvious that something strange is going on, because many people report "how close it was to them" ("it came down just over the hill" or similar is common), but some of the reports are from people 100's of miles away from others who said it was "close".

I've looked at an actual example of distance misjudgement with fireballs if you are interested.

What it shows is that people can not trust their eyes when it comes to judging the distance of (unknown) lights in the sky, and if you can't even judge distance, then you can't judge the size or the speed of the object. Brightness is the key here - with no other visual cues to help judge, if you see a bright light, then the implication is that the object is close (lights that are distant, tend to be dim), so when your brain is taken by surprise with a bright meteor, your perception is that it's close, even though in reality it's not.

There are many implications for UFOs here, eg:

If a light in the sky moving perpendicular to an observer (ie. not traveling significantly towards or away from an observer), gradually starts to dim, it would seem to the observer that the light was moving steadily away from him/her, even if it was not!

If in the same situation as above, instead of the gradual dimming, the light quickly dimmed, going from "bright" to "nothing" in a second or two, it might even appear to "shoot off into the distance" to the observer, when there has been almost no motion whatsoever!

So we have some big clues to what is going wrong here. People don't generally know much about the sky, combine this with seeing a light in the sky (could be almost anything - plane, satellite, meteor, sky lantern, etc), with no way to properly judge distance (in many cases), all other estimates (size, speed, etc) are off, and you have a recipe for "I just saw something unbelievable!".

Naturally, these people swear blind that they saw something unusual, as you would, because most people do not realize how easily our eyes are fooled, or want to admit it for that matter, despite the evidence for that being the case being overwhelming. Please do ask, and I will post links.

So you can see why some on here invest so much in promoting the idea that "they are here", if they have seen something "unbelievable" with their own eyes, and why witness testimony is so important to them.

The plain truth is that if there was any "real evidence" (supporting the ETH), we would all be aware of it. On the other hand, I think the evidence that "they are not here" is building up. Cameras have gotten better/more widespread, yet all we get is more ambiguous lights/objects that could be anything and are likely terrestrial/natural in origin. We've got fireball camera networks scanning the skies all night/every night (plus a small army of astronomers, and satellites, etc), yet nothing unusual..

If anything, the absence of evidence (after so much time) speaks volumes, IMHO.

a reply to: Gothmog

The governments of the world spend huge amounts of money to get rid of physical effort, with the average person, what do you expect? a ufo strapped to the back of a car trailer?

a reply to: PandaPrincess

Look on the Brightside: by the time our light reaches their planets, tens of thousands or even million of light years from here, they will definitely have evidence that there was once a star where others sought the sky.

In other words, all the real estate is a terrific argument for more and more intelligent life over time. Right now, as far as we can tell, we are it*.

*Prizes and participation may vary. Not sold in stores. Order yours today!

a reply to: PandaPrincess

The series of videos below are the most compelling I've seen period. The original raw video file was released to the public by the people who shot this video so the question of CGI was immediately debunked as the raw video file had not been edited. Then it went to the question of speed and then size. The first video is the original video. The subsequent videos are excellent at determining it was not a bug, drone, or bird.

originally posted by: myss427
a reply to: Gothmog

The governments of the world spend huge amounts of money to get rid of physical effort, with the average person, what do you expect? a ufo strapped to the back of a car trailer?

Ok , do the due diligence .
Where is the proof governments of the world spend huge amounts of money covering up aliens ?
You can't , can you ?

no ufo in the sky

so why are you still talking about this ?

I think that skeptics are just afraid to know the reality

ufologists are more open minded and prepared than skeptics that's all

of course lots of money, condon report had a cost , a big one a that time, atip cost , aatip cost too

many gov agencies are involved in collecting data, it had also a cost

I have no details of course and I don't want them, for me the important thing is collaboration between official and private sector in the ufo field because we share same objectives to understand

that's all

and witnesses ? ufology is far more complex than just testimonies, there are audio, video, pictures, biological effects, sound effects, traces in some cases, and even artefacts

a reply to: anakinnEo

I think that skeptics are just afraid to know the reality

Who's a skeptic ?
I look at things logically and with reason .

So , you have no proof .
Why did you reply ?
BTW - it helps to leave in the post who you are replying to

a reply to: Gothmog

so you are not a skeptic

great

btw I look at things logically and with reason too and if I leave or edit some that's just because of a misunderstanding I suppose, it seems to me that my arguments don't interest people so much

so my conclusion is that my modest contribution on ufology on ats is a loss of time

not a problem

originally posted by: olaru12
a reply to: PandaPrincess

By Zondos beard....

the TTSA claims to have some solid evidence. But the TTSA claims to have a lot of things. Seems very spooky to me...

Please excuse my ignorance as I gave up following the TTSA saga, but have the latest huge thread saved to traul through, but have any of the items they are handling in this video clip ever been shown to the public? They are making a big song and dance in the clip that they have these items, but don't show one! As I say, I don't follow it so was wondering if they were ever shown in the public domain.