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> Someone in this thread might scoff at testimony describing unmistakably unidentifiable phenomena that lacks compelling video evidence, while simultaneously reposting "I believe victims" on Twitter. Pick one. Do you think credible witness testimony is admissible, or do you not? Millenia of justice systems are built on this concept.

In a justice system, testimony is trusted to the extent that we believe those people saw what they did. Their opinions on what it might mean is completely inadmissible even for mundane phenomena. Even then, we test these accounts by asking probing questions, we don't just accept them at face value.

Let's take this example:

> I personally have sane family members, who, in a group, circa 1970, had a close encounter in broad daylight so unmistakable there is no way it could have been anything but an intelligently controlled flying object with incomprehensible capabilities.

In a court of law, their testimony that some light/object visible to humans displayed some behavior they describe could be accepted. Of course, the opposition lawyer would be free to ask probing questions about their mental and physical state at the time, their history of similar claims, their pre-existing beliefs about such phenomena, the extent to which they each personally observed these things versus being influenced by the others etc.

Let's assume that the lawyer didn't successfully cast any doubt in their minds. The next step would be to bring in expert witnesses describing known phenomena that could match the observations that were described, at least to a great extent - flares, parallax, even exotic phenomena like ball lightning or St Elmo's fire could be described, and evidence could be brought that people observing these understood phenomena had previously described them in terms similar to the witness testimony we heard earlier.

In the end, the jury would conclude something based on the preponderence of the evidence or on the beyond reasonable doubt standards - in the latter case, concluding aliens beyond reasonable doubt is impossible, and I believe it would still be extremely unlikely even for the preponderence of the evidence.

>> Do you think credible witness testimony is admissible, or do you not? Millenia of justice systems are built on this concept. Even "hard evidence" all comes down to trusting the people in the chain of custody, since things can be doctored so easily nowadays.

Except that eyewitness testimony is never uncritically accepted in any justice system. Ask a group of people who observed an event and invariably there will be a substantial portion who remembered basic facts about the event wrong. This phenomenon is well understood. Furthermore, there is a difference in asking about the phenomena a person observed and a causal event a person was a part of. An eyewitness can be confused about any number of specific details but it is much harder to be confused about an event that had a direct impact on them. In the latter case, we are not blindly trusting their recollection but rejecting alternative explanations as lacking causal power.

Accepting hard evidence doesn't involve trust at all. You don't trust a medical lab not to fabricate evidence; you rationally judge the probability that they went to the effort for no gain whatsoever and risked their reputation and career on something that would be subjected to intense scrutiny in a courtroom on the hope no one would notice something was amiss. Of course, the defense has rights to directly question and propose an alternative explanation. A court doesn't accept evidence blindly.

>> Want to claim crazy or spontaneous mass hallucination? Prove it. Show the mechanism in the brain. Reproduce in a lab. Put a name to the disease. The burden of proof is on you to describe why our justice systems are built on a complete farce.

Nonsense. It is up to the person claiming a radically new phenomena to show evidence and proactively demonstrate that there is no possible alternative explanation. This isn't unfair, if you can't examine the explanatory power of other theories your own theory should probably not be accepted. Do you declare at the end of a magic show that you have just witnessed a supernatural event unless a person can explain to your satisfaction exactly how the tricks were done? Furthermore, you are going further and asking for counter evidence that does not rationally match the standard of evidence you have actually presented. As I just pointed out above, the justice system does not uncritically accept eyewitness testimony.

> Ask a group of people who observed an event and invariably there will be a substantial portion who remembered basic facts about the event wrong. This phenomenon is well understood.

This phenomenon is not well understood at all, only observed. But if not one, but a half dozen unrelated people with no conflicts of interest testify that they saw a specific person shoot another person, despite slightly different details from each perspective and individual perception of time, that is as good as fact in a court of law (what type of criminal charge the shooting constituted becomes the rest of the case) [0]. It often takes only one if the person is "credible" (e.g. a police officer).

So why is it that a half dozen highly trained (much more so than a police officer) and credible people aboard the USS Nimitz or Princeton do not get the same treatment? Even the official press release going laterally and vertically through the chain of command corroborates key aspects of these incidents.

> Accepting hard evidence doesn't involve trust at all. You don't trust a medical lab not to fabricate evidence

You really walked into this one. Read this example completely contradicting your claim [1]. The world is built on trust amigo.

> Nonsense. It is up to the person claiming a radically new phenomena to show evidence and proactively demonstrate that there is no possible alternative explanation.

I'm not going to reiterate my whole comment above, but no. Determining the existence of some intelligence greater than our own that is keeping a low profile is less of a scientific method endeavor than an intelligence gathering one. Intelligence is gathered, and then it's up to people to evaluate. It is ridiculous to expect people to prove the infinite set of everything that it is not. People invested in not changing their worldview (of whom there are many) will attempt to assign explanations, and that enters the pool of material to consider. Not that anything changes if everybody all of a sudden agrees on the general nature of the phenomenon, if the phenomenon isn't trying to make contact. Maybe more interest in research into spacecraft that don't spew gas out the back, or more people majoring in physics to try to improve our current primitive models.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/127/508/1193/4555414 [1] https://reason.com/2019/02/09/the-chemists-and-the-cover-up/

Thank you - You said in a much more eloquent way than I did in this thread

This line hit home for me

> Lots of psychological barriers are preventing people from examining this topic with an open mind (on both sides of the debate, mind you