If John didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him because he provides such a perfect foil. The sort of rigid, dogmatic thinking he exemplifies, here and in his responses to anyone who dares not to share his views about the JFKA, is encountered across the entire spectrum of what I lovingly call Weirdness, which includes the UFO phenomenon and even the JFKA. This "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up, I'm right and you're wrong" mindset is all too common.
Duncan may be regretting he ever started this thread, but I shall persist because this is way more interesting for me than whether Oswald was carrying curtain rods into the TSBD …
I don't know what you saw but ...
John doesn't know what I saw, but by God he knows what it wasn't!
it is completely illogical to assume because you can't explain what it was ...
Do my posts suggest I "assume" anything at all about my experience? Did I not make quite clear that I have no firm position as to what it was or wasn't? The nature of the experience leads me to a provisional belief that it was non-mundane, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief by compelling evidence to the contrary. My belief that it was non-mundane is bolstered by numerous anecdotal reports of similar experiences by other sane and credible persons. My provisional belief that it was not a nuts-and-bolts ET craft is based on 60+ years of study of the UFO phenomenon, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief as well by compelling evidence of ET craft.
that it must have been space aliens or some other supernatural phenomenon.
Does anything in my posts suggest I assume my experience involved "space aliens"? Quite the contrary. In my first post, I made clear that (1) I thought the UAP Disclosure movement was badly misguided for focusing on this angle, and (2) among experienced ufologists the ET hypothesis is regarded as among the most unlikely. I also made clear that I did not think my own experience involved an ET craft. (That being said, there are a vast number of UFO reports, including some of the best, for which an ET craft seems at first blush the most likely explanation; the problem is that there are just too many such cases unless Earth is the Disneyland of the universe and, moreover, there are aspects of the phenomenon that just don't mesh with the ET hypothesis.)
Does anything in my posts suggest I think my experience was a "supernatural" event or that the UFO phenomenon is a "supernatural" one? I used the term "non-mundane," meaning "not easily explainable in terms of our present understanding of reality." No, I don't think my experience involved angels or demons, which is about the only supernatural UFO hypothesis.
There is zero credible evidence that extraterrestrials have visited the third rock from the sun or of the existence of supernatural events.
John appears to know pretty close to nothing about the UFO phenomenon, but he somehow knows there is "zero credible evidence." Ditto for whatever he means by the supernatural - a term that I do not use unless talking about theology because "anomalous" and "non-mundane" are more precise. I have spent 60+ years deeply involved in these subjects, to some minor extent as an experiencer. Although I don't happen to buy into the ET hypothesis, I would strongly dispute the statement that there is zero credible evidence. There is a great deal of credible evidence for which ET visitation is at least a plausible hypothesis. For the supernatural - i.e., anomalous - I would say flatly that John doesn't know what he's talking about. There are mountains of evidence, including laboratory PSI studies, that cannot be explained by conventional science.
The problem with folks like John is that he thinks he gets to be the sole arbiter of what is credible. I wish it worked that way, too - but it doesn't. I get to be the arbiter of what I find credible and so do you, but that's as far as it goes. If 999 out of 1000 people disagree with me, then I probably do need to take a closer look and reconsider.
I have no problem with someone who has studied the UFO phenomenon or any area of the anomalous as diligently and for as long as I have and who reaches entirely different conclusions and convictions. I do have a problem with someone who seems to be speaking from a position of near-total ignorance telling me my own conclusions and convictions are "completely illogical" and supported by "zero credible evidence."
I am a believer in the adage that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I've seen lots of examples of the former and none of the latter. I'm not sure of the origin of that adage but the late Dr. Carl Sagan expressed it in both video and print.
One wonders if John knows that his hero Sagan wrote a scholarly article in 1963 in which he speculated that the earth had been visited by ETs numerous times in the past and possibly within the historical era: "Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight,"
Planetary and Space Science, Volume 11, Issue 5, May 1963, Pages 485-498. Using the Drake equation for the likelihood of ET life, he estimated the frequency of extraterrestrial visitation. Based on his estimates, he hypothesized that Earth had been visited many - perhaps hundreds - of times during geological time and possibly once during historical times. He went on to state, "It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions."
Once he became a highly paid spokesman for atheism and the materialistic paradigm, he did his best to suppress this paper and distance himself from it. The fact is, the tales of his intellectual dishonesty and manipulation are legendary. But I digress ...
No, the "extraordinary claims" shiboleth was popularized by Sagan but predates him by 300 years. It is akin to a logical fallacy. The obvious problems are: Who gets to decide when a claim is "extraordinary" and who gets to decide when the quantum of evidence is "extraordinary"? In reality, this is little more than a tool for intellectually dishonest skeptics and debunkers to keep saying, "Sorry, you're nowhere near the 'extraordinary' standard yet. In fact, your claim is so 'extraordinary' we don't see how you could ever get there." As Thomas Kuhn suggested in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it's also a tool to insulate a prevailing paradigm against challenge - anything that contravenes the prevailing paradigm is
ipso facto "extraordinary."
As Garry P. Nolan, an immunologist and the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, has stated: "Science doesn’t care whether the claim is extraordinary or not. It simply arbitrates if the evidence is sufficient. The extraordinary claims/evidence meme is pretentious nonsense."
Many UFO hypotheses and other claims regarding the anomalous are "extraordinary" only in the sense that they are inexplicable given the prevailing materialistic paradigm, which itself is fast crumbling. If reality happens to be fundamentally different from what we now understand it to be, these hypotheses and claims may not seem extraordinary at all. Indeed, perhaps the evidence for UFOs and anomalous phenomena is a very large clue that our present understanding of reality is incorrect.
