Using these broad but important guidelines while viewing some of the best “UFO” footage ( I would recommend “A history of UFO sightings”) You will see alot of footage in which, yes very reasonable explanations can be used to dismiss many sightings but you will get a “golden” few caught on film that really fits the desciption for an intelligently controlled Alien areial craft. Further, besides the cases in which film or photos were involved, there are hundreds of cases in which these objects are viewed both visually and by radar near military installments. There are also quite a few uncontested military personell who have had top secret clearance in the military and claim to have been involved in projects that had relations to crashed “UFOs”. ( see “The Disclosure Project”)
The grand question still remains: Are “UFOs” ALiens? I can confidently say that most of the cases of reported “UFOs” are indeed balloons or unidentified Human aircraft or other unknown natural occurance. Though should be considered that it only takes ONE case that fits the description of intelligently controlled craft to be Alien because the description LEAVES NO OTHER EXPLAINATION.
So,I feel the true social problem is actually not the “crazies” seeing spacecrafts but why people reject the idea of “UFOs” being Aliens so much and ridicule (*ahem* Jason) those who take the subject not only seriously but also see it as the most important question of our time. It may be possible that ALL 100% of “UFO” cases are misunderstandings or hoaxes but I personally think that the topic is definetely worth the study as contact could take us further technologically than we ever imagined and perhaps assist us to develop our consciousness and understanding of the universe.

http://www.disclosureproject.com (Stream the whole “Smoking Gun” news conference)

http://www.freedomofinfo.org

Solid testimony from over 500 corporate and military witnesses has been accumulated by two disclosure initiatives. These disclosure witnesses have openly stated they are willing to testify, under oath and before Congress about their direct encounters with UFO crash site investigations, secret UFO documents, UFO photographic evidence, UFO radar reports and recovered crashed ET vehicles.

As an Attorney, I can attest that the jurisprudential evidence of this quality does not get any better, especially when witnesses possess the ranks of Brigadier Generals, Commander of ICBM Launch facilities, Senior FAA Crash Site Investigators, astronauts, pilots and officers with above top secret clearance.

Men have been executed in the U.S. with far less evidence. The evidence is really remarkable and the two sites I have listed are only the tip of the iceberg. I am not asking people to believe just examine the information before making a judgement.

That social science can assign a probability to aliens’ existing is one thing; but can we determine how likely it is that that estimate is correct? It seems to me that using the alien-prediction scenario to gauge the reliability of social science’s predictions about the human future rests on the second condition’s being met, not the first.

Just because I am looking in my closet every 30 minutes to test my “hypothesis” that a hobbit has materialized there, that does not make it science. If I devise new experiments such as looking into the closet with sunglasses on (I hypothesize hobbits are scared of eye contact), that still does not make it science. If I quantify things such as how many dogs are sleeping in the neighborhood at any given time (I hypothesize hobbits are afraid of dogs), that still does not make it science.

In short, paradigms matter. The ufo cryptozoology paradigm is not science, and I discussed reasons why yesterday. No current methodology meets any reasonable criteria of demonstrating alien visitation. These varied witness methodologies trying to demonstrate such are pseudoscience.

There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers gauging witness reliability and the like, that are perfectly normal science. Examining the sociology and psychological of UFO belief/sighting/abduction is science as well.

Interesting. And when we talk to witnesses and people who know them to ascertain their credibility, this is not science? And when we plot the reliability of witnesses vs. the inexplicability of their reports, this is not science? And when we hypothesize that perhaps a sighting is due to sleep paralysis and disprove our hypothesis by finding 12 other people who saw the same thing at the same time, that’s not science either?

I know I’m not explaining this very well, but to do science, you have to look at the EVIDENCE, then come to a conclusion BASED on that evidence. Despite what you may have learned from Condon, smugly putting your hands over your ears and going LALALA is not part of the scientific method.

There was a New York Times article just several weeks ago that accepted alien visitors as true. Apparently, Al Qaeda and the Martian men are in cahoots to spy on American military bases. A new Axis of Evil, if you will, that we should obviously all Take Very Seriously.

This article reveals the same high standards the New York Times requires in all its op-eds, and that they boasted about days earlier when refusing to publish an op-ed by presidential candidate John McCain.

I believe I said, 1 in 100,000, even though I feel like that is reasonable, I don’t think it is a betable ratio at any amount. I don’t know if this means my p does not reflect my true belief, or if this just reflects that I am not purely an expected wealth maximizer. Getting true betting market odds on something like this might require robust bet insurance markets. Otherwise people could never make a bet that it would be worthwhile to win.

To choose odds for a bet on whether this is true and will become clear within say twenty years, I need to estimate the chance it would become clear (e.g., declared as such by three New York Times articles) in that period, given it was true. Unfortunately, I can’t see how I could assign a chance over 1% to this, as the most likely scenario given the assumption is that they are trying to hide, with rare failures. So this makes me willing to bet up to $1000 at 100,000 to one odds that 3 NYT articles will accept UFOs as aliens by 2029 (with someone who can show an ability to pay if I won).