No, you keep bringing up patterns. I am pointing out the patterns.
You say there is some thing happening that is repeatably witnessed, both through eye-witnesses and multiple camera devices. Yet you haven’t presented a case of this, let alone several.
The case you specified as an example had infrared imagery only. It did not have radar concurrence nor eye-witness outside the infrared scope. That’s not multiple sensors.
You say there is a pattern of weird visual things across time and cultures. But you have yet to show there is anything actually consistent beyond human psychology.
Take an example: there are stories of night visitations across cultures and times. They are interpreted differently based upon the ideas of the extant culture. They are ghosts, they are demons, they are incubi and succubi, they are aliens, they are home invaders.
While appearances differ, some consistent points remain. The victim is lying in bed at night when awakened to find themself unable to move. Some eerie creature/being/person is present and begins to do strange things to them. Then the victim suddenly awakens and they are safe in their own bed. But it feels real!
Now Sir Occam would suggest that there is some occurrence that is happening. But what stands out even more is that there is no independent corroboration, no third party witness to the event, and no physical evidence left behind.
Scientists have studied it. It isn’t actually a visitation by any kind of being. There is a dream state that occurs during transition falling asleep or waking up. The victim is in a partial sleep state, so they begin to gather sensory data. But sleep paralysis is in place. That creates the very real feeling of being awake and of being unable to move/pinned/tied down. It’s terrifying, and the rest of the experience is drawn from cultural expectation.
It’s a real phenomenon, but it’s not a real visitation. It’s a psychological experience. And I have experienced it on multiple occasions, I can testify it feels real and it is terrifying. But now that I recognize what it is, the clues to the dream nature are more observable.
Some of the strangest things are the psychological things that occur.
You say you want to “explain the core, recurring features not every outlier, but the patterns across credible cases:”.
But for there to be core features across credible cases, there first have to be multiple credible cases.
Yet you give is one, it gets explained, but somehow something you won’t state what is not yet explained in that case.
There are other cases you allude to, but they aren’t presented in front of us to look at the actual data to see if it fits your description. I’m not saying you’re lying, I’m saying that you have a mistaken impression of the incidents because they have been presented to you in an incomplete or conflated or credulist’s view.
You are the one who describe the situation as if it is a coherent intention that wants us to see it, but just barely. That it messes with our perception intentionally.
When I point out that if it messes with our perception we will never be able to study it. You say I’m dismissing it out of hand. No, I’m stating a fact. If it can distort out perception, distort our memory, distort reality, then we’ve already lost. Any attempt to understand is undercut by the thing’s desire to prevent us from understanding.
And just like the religious mantra, God The Phenomenon works in mysterious ways. If that sounds like ridicule, I can only say that your argument is exactly the same.
Similarly, it is pointed out that all of these cases occur at the limit of observation. Blurry photos from across the room when cameras take time to expose film. Glowing dots on CCDs from kilometers away when telecopes and video capture are available.
This is characteristic of an observation that is not a real interpretation. It is the “thing that happens only when we can’t tell what’s happening”. Yet you then decide this means that whatever is behind these occurrences is detecting our limits and then intentionally staying there, instead of that whenever our detection improves, the previous things that would have been mystical now are not, because we now can see them clearly.
It’s a standard feature of CT that anything that could disprove the CT is then claimed as a lie that is part of the CT. They can never be disproved because the conspiracists are somehow always able to fake the next level.
Here is the same pattern. Evidence that the phenomenon is a misinterpretation of fuzzy data at the extremes of detection becomes evidence that the Phenomenon wants to stay at the extremes, not that what would have been fuzzy before is now easily seen and explained.
You keep repeating descriptions of features of supposed patterns of behavior, but have yet to demonstrate that those descriptions match the actual events. The patterns of behavior, as far as have been shown, are that data is misrepresented by one person or groups, passed along as if it is correct, then held up as an incontrovertible pattern of weirdness because several distorted events seem to have similar traits.
You know what else has similar traits? Fiction.
It’s not as if these incidents are wholly independent. I mean, whatever happened may be a separate occurrence, but the information that a pattern exists comes from a concerted, coherent group trying to interpret the events similarly. They pass the events around within the group and look for the same patterns and propose the same explanations - aliens. It’s then the skeptic’s burden to show that the pattern wasn’t even inherently there in the first place, but projected onto the incidents.
