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Originally Posted by Matata

That wasn't always the case, some people independently told their stories and they were corroborated after. A lot of them kept their stories to themselves for a long time either because they were ordered to, or it was out of fear of being ostracized as a loonie.

I didn't mean that they worked together on their stories, I mean their framework for explaining things is based on what they know, from society, from their existing beliefs, etc. In a different time or a different society in different circumstances they'd choose ghosts or angels or some other explanation for the phenomenon.

Originally Posted by Matata

These are people that are trusted with flying machines worth hundred of millions of dollars. I would think their skill set for identifying objects and marking distance and speed would be rigorously trained and largely free of bias.

Doesn't matter, they're still human and still vulnerable to all the fallacies and inadequacies of the human senses and brain.

Originally Posted by Matata

If you don't want to make unwarranted assumptions about UFOs, then you can't really say anything about them. The most basic explanation is this is secret technology from Lockheed (or similar group), but even that becomes a pretty zany story when you try and wrap your head around how they acquired this technology and why are they revealing it this way.

But you're still making an assumption that they're a technology at all, they could be an optical phenomenon or a system artifact or any other number of things.. things that seem really unlikely and beyond consideration until someone demonstrates its strange but still mundane explanation.

Magic works because humans are really bad at coming up with alternative explanations for what they experience.. even highly trained magicians can be fooled by something they've not experienced before.

But what you say is true... "If you don't want to make unwarranted assumptions about UFOs, then you can't really say anything about them."

"I don't know" is a better explanation than "I don't know therefore aliens."

If I find a hoof print in the dirt, it could be a horse, a zebra escaped from the zoo, or a unicorn. I can't eliminate the possibility that it's a unicorn entirely, but I'm not going to put a lot of effort into that line of thought without extraordinary levels of evidence to support the extraordinary claim.