No, pld, at most that’s intellectually careless, or sloppy. But it’s easy to see how desperate you’re getting for insults to sling . . .
Actually, it’s not even careless or sloppy, since it has been made clear that the context in which the terms are used is restricted to those cases where, all other rational, conventional explanations having been eliminated, it is simply the next most rational conjecture to make.
So DIF, what is your take on the events of July 1952? I’m assuming that its original and not the “trite poppycock” that others are regurgitating.
My ‘take’, Mojo, is that – whatever the objects were that were sighted during this period, and eliminating from consideration those sightings which, in retrospect, could be clearly or reasonably ascribed to misidentification of conventional objects or visual effects (which still left a considerable number) – they were not from any country on this planet.
Nope, sorry, DIF, but you’re wrong again; C3 regularly uses the words completely interchangeably. Anytime he says “UFO,” he means “alien spaceship.”
As to the other point, I hardly think you have dispensed with all other possible rational explanations. In fact, you haven’t dispensed with any at all; you’ve merely chided Tom for pointing out to you that this type of cyclical “sighting” phenomenon happens all the time, and not just with things in the sky. That does not eliminate the possibility that one sighting was genuine, but it does call attention to how a single report can color observations which occur after that report, a point you have conveniently dismissed all along. Simply asserting that all other explanations are precluded doesn’t make it so.
Oh, and I was obviously correct that you had made up your mind that they were ET’s, although you attempted to worm your way out from under it. Wouldn’t expect anything less from you.
It’s certainly fun to think about all the amazing technology other beings might
have. Hell, they might have technology that enables them to completely imitate human beings down to the point that a DNA test would not reveal anything unusual. We can speculate endlessly on imaginary technology and make it do whatever we want. But until you produce a genuine artifact of undoubtedly extraterrestrial origin, speculation is all it is.
You want to back that C#3 assertion up with some proof? You know how to use cut and paste don’t you Phil? When I talk about UFOs, I’m assuming the ones that aren’t stars, hoaxes, airplanes, etc… In other words, the ones that are truly unidentified. Do I think that some truly unidentified flying objects are alien craft? Absolutely.
My post nailed you and others for the lazy skeptics that you are.
Contestant #3
[[I read the link about the ‘Mattoon Gasser’. ]] DIF
C3’s from Illinois? "I heard he’s on the loooooose … "
Pickman’s Model said:
No, save the world first, then we deal with the galaxy. You have to keep a sense of proportion about these things! 
Why couldn’t they be naturally occuring phenomena that have not been documented yet? Or (IMO more likely) military craft that have not been divulged to the general public or most personnel at the military bases near which they were sighted?
I’m not saying that they could not be alien craft- I just haven’t seen any proof that makes that more likely than the scenarios above.
Contestant #3 said,
What post?
Which skeptics?
Men will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe absurdities.
-Voltaire
I amend my previous comment to read, “C3 frequently uses the words ‘UFO’ and ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft’ interchangeably, even in cases where it has not been established to anybody’s satisfaction that the objects in question are not mundane aircraft or natural phenomena.” You can’t object to that, because it’s true.
Of course I can and I will. The qualifier “to anybody’s satisfaction” is what kills your assertion Phil. Think about it.
Contestant #3
C#3 is right, pldennison.
You should revise it so that it reads “to any reasonable person’s satisfaction.”
Mojo:
[quote]
Why couldn’t they be naturally occuring phenomena that have not been documented yet? Or (IMO more likely) military craft that have not been divulged to the general public or most personnel at the military bases near which they were sighted?*
Some of them might very well be; you might say that, after “1a)alien craft”, those are 1c) and 1b) on my list of possibles. I tend to consider them less likely than even ‘alien visitors’ for a number of reasons.
One – we (to use the collective, social ‘we’, not the ‘royal’) have been studying weather phenomena for thousands of years. (Admittedly, some people would argue that UFOs have been spotted for just as long, but it’s a pointless pursuit, IMO, to worry about things that happened in the distant past, like worrying about the precise spot Columbus came ashore at, or whether what Ezekiel saw was a spaceship.) I believe that if most UFOs were simply weather phenomena, that fact would have become very apparent to science by now. In fact, if they were weather phenomena, it seems to me that they would be far more common than they are.
Earlier in this thread, I used an analogy to clouds to argue against the common demurral that most sighting ‘flaps’ are just ‘mass delusion/hysteria’. I was afraid when I used the analogy that someone would immediately overdraw it, and they did, but what the hell. However, the point made in rebuttal was that clouds are spotted every day of week by just about everyone, everywhere. So, if UFOs are (eliminating misidentifications of other sorts) only weather phenomena, I think it reasonable to expect them to exhibit (along with whatever other weird behavior they may have) at least the same recurrence/periodicity of other phenomena, like hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, hail, snow, etc. But UFOs appear in a vast variety of places and times under the most disparate of conditions, weatherwise.
Also, I’ve never heard of a weather phenomenon that exhibits apparently willful control, pacing along with airliners, playing chicken with them, etc.
Now, certainly, if someone describes a UFO as ‘a glowing ball of light, two feet across, that snapped, and crackled, and popped’, and there’s been a thunderstorm recently, I’d be the first (well, maybe after Phil) to agree it was probably ball lightning, a fairly well-documented phenomena (or else one hell of a mutant Rice Krispie!). But that’s not what I’m talking about.
As for being experimental/secret military craft – I got no problem with that, as long as we keep in mind that you’re speaking of sightings near military airfields that are under top secret restrictions, like the infamous Area 51. Otherwise, you’d have to account reasonably for the fact that people see them in the sky, yet no one reports seeing them take off or land in related incidents. Easy to do if you can rope off the entire surrounding valley and all the nearest mountaintops; not so easy if it’s just outside of Baltimore. In fact, I have no problem with attributing many of the sightings over Belgium a while back to the much-rumored ‘Aurora’ plane that the DOD or whoever is supposedly developing/testing.
But, don’t you think if they really wanted to keep such things secret, they’d test them over the South Pacific or somewhere where people are a lot less likely to see them? In any event, until and unless the government reveals such a craft, with at least some of the performance attributes of UFOs, I don’t think it necessarily any more reasonable to write them all off as government experiments than it is to suspect they’re extraterrestrial in origin.
Here’s a link to the MUFON website.
[http://www.mufon.com/](http://www.mufon.com/)
Bear in mind, if you go there and ‘go inside’, that many of the reports you’ll read have not been investigated as yet by MUFON. However, I think you may be surprised just by the number and variety of reports.
I hope you’ll also note from ‘Weirdness on the Web’ that MUFON hasn’t much use for the sort of credulous viewpoints that pld would probably attribute to everyone who thinks UFOs are a valid area of study and concern.
Tracer said
C’mon, do you really want to exclude half of us who post here? 
Actually, I was thinking about something similar to St. Elmo’s Fire (which isn’t all that common- I’ve never seen it) and NOT the cloud analogy you proposed earlier. Why couldn’t it be a terrestrial phenomena that we know little/nothing about rather than extraterrestrial?
C#3, you can THINK that anything “unidentified” flying through the air or space is an alien spacecraft. That’s your prerogative. However, for the purpose of a scientific debate on the issue you need to be able to prove it. It’s up to the person(s) making the outstanding claim to have outstanding evidence, not vice versa. Don’t you know that eyewitness accounts of ANYTHING are notoriously unreliable? I would be extremely suspect if a group of people previously unacquainted with each other reported exactly the same events. Seems more likely that they read it somewhere and wanted to get in on the notoriety. That’s all the proof a debunker is really required to provide, it’s up to you to prove these objects are alien craft, more proof than by merely saying they did things no craft was capable of doing at the time. Again, if you’re relying on eyewitness testimony, you’ll go wrong every time.
Jeff Alberts
First of all, to clarify things, from now on on this thread, I will refer to the specific class of UFOs which are unexplainable by any
apparent conventional means as NFOs, for Nonidentifiable Flying Objects. All NFOs are UFOs; not all UFOs are NFOs.
Mojo: St. Elmo’s Fire may not be that common, but it’s no mystery. (I personally haven’t ever seen ball lightning, but I’m willing to believe it exists, from films/video, etc.) Given a good laboratory, you can create St. Elmo’s Fire and there’s a well-understood sequence of chemical and electrical ‘events’ down to the quantum level that explains what it is and how it behaves.
Some NFOs may indeed turn out to be previously unknown/unrecognized meteorological phenomena. This might explain some NFOs that are described simply as balls of light that appear without warning in a calm sky, hang around for a while, then literally vanish before the eyes of witnesses. But if you’re going to propose that, you should have at least some theory of meteorology (even if most professional meteorologists think its totally off-the-wall) to explain why, in most instances, the NFOs manifest as objects which appear to be machined, polished metal and behave in non-random ways suggestive of intelligent control.
Jeff: I will respond to your post tomorrow, unless C#3 does so first.
I wasn’t very clear- I was not implying that St. Elmo’s Fire was a mystery, just that its a infrequent natural occurence. If you weren’t familiar with it and came across an instance of it, you might attribute it to extraterrestrials.
I thought St. Elmo’s Fire was caused by giggling green elflike creatures, thought by some to be extraterrestrial in origin.