Expert (Official) UFO Witness v UFO Witness?

There is a premise of a so called expert witness (UFO)

On ITV This Morning (a shallow entertainment programme)

UFO researcher Gary Heseltine and sceptic Dr Chris French
argue over the credibility of a so called UFO expert witness.

7 Min 38 seconds for the subject matter on expert witnesses

www.youtube.com...

There seems to be a bias of state v people with this expert
witness scenario. Pilots as UFO witnesses? They have access
to the skies, which the skywatcher does not, yet we only cite
their bravery for coming forward with a UFO related event.

Somebody in some uniform has more clout than a non uniform
UFO witness appears to be outlandish in logic and thinking.

Dr Chris French tells you this 'expert witness' logic is pure folly.

The Cash-Lundrum UFO 1980 Texas UFO incident deserves
extensive important focus than most UFO cases, but they were
not in uniform and the monopoly of military UFOs continue.

I hope you can see the M.O and stranglehold of UFO research.

Human Beings, in and of and by themselves make for total crap recording devices.

Eye-witness testimony of any sort from anyone should be mostly inadmissible except as color, contrast, and comparison to more reliable and accurate data collected from sources such as cameras, and other instrumentation.

Additionally, one of the problems with UFOlogy today, are the UFOlogists (not all), who often lay claim as "expert".

We'll never learn much of anything from lights in the sky.

The real meat is the radar returns and crashed disks which we're not allowed to see and aren't supposed to know about.

What's funny is when the serial professional debunkers claim to know what's what, without ever having done any research at all. If you're in need of laughs, go to the James Randi Foundation website and read all the non-informational posts debunking everything they can think of. It's an education in how not to do research, and general snarkiness.

I personally like to give all witnesses the benefit of the doubt. Pilots generally have better vision, and might have more experience with seeing odd things in the sky that later turn out to be mundane, but that doesn't make them any more accurate in their descriptions if they're presented with something unusual. Doesn't matter if you're a soccer mom coming back from the grocery store or a pilot coming in for a landing, if they see something unique and odd, they're going to go through the same thought patterns to try and figure out what it is. So is one description by default going to be "better" than another. Not really.

Actually, one kind of person who might be a slightly better witness than average is an artist. Somebody who can look at something and grasp the shape of it, to the point where they could draw it accurately.

That being said, witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence you can have, and unless there's something solid to back it up, it's all just stories. No more information can be gained. It can be entertaining, but in the end, all it rates is a shrug.

Yep! Its funny how witnesses are just shrugged of as unreliable, doesn't matter who you are, what your qualifications, if you saw a ufo then your automatically unreliable.

People do make mistakes when they report events. Ask a man who watched a car accident what color the cars were and its very likely he'll get it wrong, it doesnt mean he didn't see and accident though.

When it comes to ufo's people simply refuse to believe, they dont care how much evidence there is, they simply will not allow it into their tiny little mind.

Check out the link in my siggy for some great examples of tiny minds.

reply to post by deprogrammer


How many UFOs does a person have to see in order to be termed an "expert witness".
How does anyone establish themselves, or deny someone else, as really credible?
Would a sighting by two witnesses be more credible than one by a single person?
What if one saw the same UFO on several occasions?
What if one witnessed different UFOs on different occasions?

reply to post by Blue Shift


James Fox 'Chasing UFO`s' as a sell out ufolgcical batman.

Ufology in documentaries is totally banal and has a clique.

The Media peddle the most cretin based UFO articles in farce.

UFO Salesmen .. media parasites spouting UFOlogical untruths.

10 years time. No 'non uniform dolt' will ever get their evidence
into the mainstream racket UFO media unless they are deemed as as a lunatic or fantasist. The media scum even control your
UFO experiences and you will accept the banal control grid.

UFO`s? TV- Military Events Only. The rest of you are Nutters.

reply to post by AliceBleachWhite


There can be no "expert UFO witness" and any claims to that end are baseless. A pilot will be about the best estimator of what appears to be a UFO (of some sort) and give general descriptions of shape, speed, distance, etc. but no one else, an astronomer, for god's sake, or armed chair anything even a top UFO writer is capable of being an expert on that topic.

However, some people seem to think first that UFOs don't exist as ET craft, and then they feel free to blast any observations out of the air, and to keep my metaphor going, to shred any pictorial presentation of a UFO whether a photograph, detailed drawing or a video. Nothing stands in their destructive pathway. You would think that once in awhile the harsh critic would stop and say about a detailed report, "Humm. That just may be an alien craft after all of the time." But they don't, they slink away without a word and go on with "Only us humans here" attitude.

Back in 1948, without the physical proof of a UFO but with the aid of a large bunch of sighting information, gun camera pictures and mostly pilot reports, the Air Force's ATIC produced The Estimate of the Situation that proclaimed that the saucers were alien craft. That Gen. Curtis Lemay chose to destroy the report indicates nothing but the cover up that began over a year before when the Roswell crash was discovered. There will always be a place for skeptics. It helps keep ufology honest to some extent.

VoidHawk
Yep! Its funny how witnesses are just shrugged of as unreliable, doesn't matter who you are, what your qualifications, if you saw a ufo then your automatically unreliable.

That's not what I said. I essentially said that I don't care who you are, your ability to accurately describe what you saw (or think you saw) is going to be the same. And it might be absolutely 100 percent accurate right down to the the writing on the control panel of the flying saucer and what the alien was wearing on his feet. Way to go. Good eyes.

But without anything to back it up, even if it was 100 percent accurate (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) it is still ultimately not worth anything except possibly mild amusement.

You tell me. What can be done with it? What can we learn from it? How does it answer any questions or solve any problems?

deprogrammer
10 years time. No 'non uniform dolt' will ever get their evidence into the mainstream racket UFO media unless they are deemed as as a lunatic or fantasist.

I disagree. I think there are plenty of people getting their evidence into mainstream media these days. The basic problem is that all the evidence is crap. All those bad camera phone images of "blurds" come from somewhere.

Obviously, if a UFO the size of a mountain hovers over New York City for 10 days, that would be hard to ignore or debunk. But that hasn't happened (yet).

reply to post by deprogrammer


Multiple eye-witness sightings and multiple abduction cases are in my opinion the strongest evidence of possible visitation. Although I don't call myself an expert, I've been researching UFO case studies for over 30 years. There are way too many sighting similarities and physical experiences abductees and eye=witnesses have described to group them all into misinterpretations, mass hysteria, dreams, psychosis and hoaxes. There have been many credible eyewitnesses and abductees who have crossed a broad spectrum of various professions including the military. What do they have to gain by talking about their experiences other than humiliation and the possibly of losing their standing in the community in which they live. Not to mention losing their job and military personnel subjecting themselves to interrogations.

We've all had unexplained experiences whether it's been related to this phenomenon or another no matter how small. For skeptics to think they have all the answers to experiences that they themselves have never encountered, is really trying to persuade someone who had the experience to accept their rationale for the sighting. When you have witnesses who continue to vehemently deny any rational explanation to their experience, you have to believe what they've seen or experienced had shaken them to their core.

While your post did influence what I wrote, my response was not aimed at you personally.
However you said..

Blue Shift
That being said, witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence you can have, and unless there's something solid to back it up, it's all just stories. No more information can be gained. It can be entertaining, but in the end, all it rates is a shrug

I'll post here what another member (Brighter) posted in the thread linked to in my siggy.

If this 1966 case doesn't convince you, and you still demand "proof," then I would be very skeptical as to such a person's ability to reason clearly. In particular,

1) I would be skeptical as to their understanding of anecdotal evidence, or

2) I would suspect some deep-seated psychological / emotional / cultural prejudices that bar them from assessing a novel phenomenon from a rational, unbiased viewpoint, or

3) a combination of 1) and 2)

Let me try to explain what I mean by 1). The school students', administrators' and teachers' accounts are all considered anecdotal evidence, yet anecdotal evidence is not weak by any means, especially when taken in large numbers. In fact, a large portion of our realities are deeply rooted in anecdotal evidence. For instance, have you ever seen an great white shark in person and actually experienced it first hand? I'm guessing you haven't. Yet you still, based on purely anecdotal evidence, believe in great white sharks.

In other words: Even if you have absolutely no direct perceptual evidence of something, your anecdotal evidence can still strongly justify a belief.

The strength of anecdotal evidence depends on quantity and quality. To illustrate this, take this simple example. You are situated outside of a barn in the country, and it is your job to take peoples' tickets to walk into the barn and see some exotic car. You've never been inside the barn, and you've never seen the car. After taking peoples' tickets and watching them walk in and back out of the barn, they all tell you of how strange the car looks, that they've never seen anything like it, its details and its color. Now after this happens, say, 100 times, you'd say that you have strong reason to believe that an exotic car actually is in the barn, wouldn't you? Even though you have absolutely no direct perceptual evidence of it, you are still justified in your belief based on the quantity and quality of the reports. Now obviously, if they were all intoxicated, or blind, or only 2 people went in, then your anecdotal evidence would certainly not justify your belief. But what if they were all sober, came from all walks of life and all cultures, included pilots, scientists, professors, government officials, doctors, police officers and high-ranking military officers, would you say that your anecdotal evidence was strong enough to justify your belief that an exotic car really is in the barn?

This all has to do with 1) one's understanding of anecdotal evidence. The other primary reason why it seems as though some people have so much difficulty thinking clearly about the UFO phenomenon is 2) that there is some sort of underlying psychological / emotional state that creates an immediate prejudice against their existence. It is of course natural to want to deny the existence of something that makes one feel uncomfortable, but just because something makes you feel uncomfortable, that doesn't mean that its denial is intellectually justified. In other words, how you feel about something cannot count as proof for something, no matter how deep seated such a feeling is.

In conclusion, if this 1966 case doesn't convince you that UFOs are real, then I would suggest that you stop and reflect very carefully on a) your understanding of anecdotal evidence, and b) whether or not psychological or cultural biases are muddying your ability to think clearly about this phenomenon.

WeRpeons
When you have witnesses who continue to vehemently deny any rational explanation to their experience, you have to believe what they've seen or experienced had shaken them to their core.

When somebody wakes up from a nightmare yelling, I have to assume that they experienced something in their dreams that disturbed them. I believe them! However, their reality is not necessarily my reality. I didn't experience it. Dreams are nothing but anecdotes, just like sightings with no hard evidence to back them up. I can believe they experienced something traumatic from their perspective. And maybe they even described it with complete accuracy. I can't prove otherwise.

But that's as far as it goes. Without something more, I can't incorporate it into my reality. And we all know what other people's dreams are worth to us personally. Not much.

Im nobody.............but I saw an undeniable UFO............(it came from outside of the atmosphere)
there ARE,real expert witnesses who gave excellent testimony, in the early years....
I wonder how their careers progressed afterwards though...............