No ridicule taken, analogy noted. But here’s the thing: I’m not afraid of mundane explanations. I welcome them. That’s the point. But some of the explanations being offered aren’t as airtight as you’re making them out to be, they just shift the mystery sideways, or rely heavily on assumptions. If a case is solidly debunked, I drop it. But what I don’t do is pretend that because some are explained, all must be.
I’m not here to prove aliens, I’m here because a persistent cluster of credible reports keeps nudging at the edges of what we understand. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s a mirror. But I’m not going to stop looking just because some folks are more comfortable with certainty.
But I didn’t disregard it, I acknowledged the explanation and moved on. That’s what you do when a case is no longer compelling.
One explained case doesn’t erase the broader signal. If you think one debunked example disproves an entire field of inquiry, that’s not skepticism, that’s intellectual triage.
But I’m not saying every blurry light is a ‘unicorn’ I’m saying the fact that we keep thinking we see one might be worth exploring. Maybe it’s all horses, sure. But the persistence of the impulse to ask, to wonder, to investigate, that’s what I’m defending. Not any specific claim, but the right to be curious even when the answer isn’t clear-cut. Its not gullibility, its intellectual honesty. Dismissing all of it as nonsense shuts down the exact kind of thinking that leads to real discovery.
Ok, but I think you’re framing curiosity like it has to pass a cost-benefit analysis before it’s allowed. I’m not trying to assign odds, I’m saying the sheer recurrence of high-strangeness in credible contexts suggests there’s something here we don’t fully understand yet. Not proof. Not certainty. Just a good reason to stay curious, even if the odds are cosmic dust.
Forgive me. I am currently on my phone and copying and pasting is exceedingly difficult with my poor dexterity.
What do you mean “challenged “? If the explanations given are wrong or insufficient what, specifically and exactly, is wrong or insufficient about them?
You say that other events prove the pattern. Then provide them. We will examine them and see if they can be explained.
You say “. . . These patterns persist. . .” Again how are the explanations of every example you have given wrong or insufficient? If they are correct and sufficient, why do you keep claiming a pattern exists?
For the third time, how is it not resolved? How are the explanations of every example you have given wrong or insufficient?
I am not threatened by unresolved ambiguity. Kindly quote where i said that I was, or any post of mine that could be reasonably read to mean that. If you cannot find such a post, you should respond to what I have actually written.
But we have - this has been explored in great detail and there are very detailed studies of how human perception and need to find familiar patterns create reports of ghosts, UFOs, etc. You seem to be unwilling to accept that this framework of incidents you insist upon is fully explained by human nature and the limits of our senses. That’s something that can be tested and verified (and has been) rather than an unverifiable hypothesis with multiple unnecessary assumptions.
You’re conflating curiosity with credulity. I’m not defending every case as airtight, I’m pointing to the statistical weight of recurrence across credible platforms, not just late night Reddit threads. You say it’s all psychological. Fine. Then let’s apply that rigorously and investigate the psychology of denial too especially when people twist themselves into knots to dismiss anything anomalous outright.
No one’s claiming a unicorn here. But when the herd keeps getting spotted, the least we can do is stop pretending that the branch on the horse’s head always explains it away.
the belief in UFOs “suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged.
And yes, one notices how Joseph Campbell deals with what it is more likely: Our human physique following myths literally instead of metaphorically. That is more likely than interdimentional beings or aliens.
The possibility that a few unexplained encounters are more likely to be related to the militaries of the world is the real dangerous thing, pushing for a phenomenon explanation is really, really, the lazy and (popular) safe option.
Or more importantly, what sort of investigations? Because our scientific progress is, as you are saying you want to do, a history of investigating things that we wonder about.
Science is exactly about what you’re describing. The scientific process involves wondering about something (“What could be going on with this thing I don’t understand?”), coming up with some kind of explanation (“It could be this particular thing.”), and then running experiments to get a better understanding of whether or not that possible explanation is correct or incorrect (“If it is that particular thing I think it might be, that means we should see x when we do y”). Instead it seem like your proposing a way of looking at things where we say “I wonder what that could be, maybe it’s such and such, but because such and such are too far advanced from what we currently or could possible understand, let’s just stick to wondering, because investigating is useless.” If that isn’t what you propose, than what is it that you do propose?
As I am sure you know, you have described the Scientific Method. Observe. Formulate a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Discard or modify the hypothesis based on results of repeated tests.
As you also said- the OP seems to have done the opposite. He has come to a conclusion and then discarded any data that contradicts that conclusion. It appears that the OP has also not fully researched the examples given.
OTTOMH this reminds me of creationism. Start with the conclusion that G-d created everything and that “macro evolution “ doesn’t happen. Ignore any evidence that contradicts creationism. Don’t bother to research examples that seem at first to prove creationism.
I think that’s fair, up to a point; but after the 1,000th unicorn turns out to just be a horse juxtaposed with some coincidental pointy background/foreground object, would you agree that it’s reasonable to scale down the search a bit, and maybe accept the default assumption that there probably aren’t unicorns and that the phenomenon causing us to see them is that our perception is not perfect?
‘Investigate’ was what everyone here seemed to want to do; the problem was getting you to pony (pun intended) up the evidence on which to perform the investigation.
Nobody did that, at least not before looking at the evidence and seeing that it was in fact nonsense. If you don’t want people to dismiss actual nonsense, as nonsense, you’re going to be out of luck.