Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> Now, the "witnesses" in UFO cases are rarely clinical, they add details, 
> as they go, they tend to talk about what they felt, rather than only 
> what they saw, i.e., even from the standpoint of talking to them, 
> "within minutes" of the event, their testimony would be thrown out as 
> unlikely to be reliable, without additional information, right from the 
> start. Yet, we are supposed to presume that, having had years to 
> rethink, reexamine, talk to other people, listen to, or read, other 
> stories like their own, etc., there testimony of what happened got "more 
> reliable" with time?

  Another less known fact (which I already mentioned in my earlier post)
is that it's surprisingly common for people to have witnessed something
personally when in fact they didn't, and instead they were just told about
it.

  One reason for this happening is that people misremember things. When a
person is told a story, he forms a mental image of that story in his head.
In other words, he uses his imagination to envision what is being told.
Much later this person may well misremember this event and mistakenly think
that he himself witnessed those events he only imagined back then. In other
words, he forgets that it was his own imagination of the story he was being
told, not an actual direct witnessing.

  It has happened many times that when these "first-hand" eyewitnesses are
scrutinized in more detail, it turns out that they didn't actually witness
the event themselves. For example the Roswell UFO event was rife with this
type of eyewitnesses.

  Another problem is that, as I said, people do not repeat the words they
hear. They repeat the mental image they got from those words. Naturally
it's impossible for the mental image to be the same as the real event.
People "fill in the blanks", form concrete mental images from vague
descriptions, and so on. When they later describe these mental images they
got, they may be wildly different from the original events. (And when this
retelling is further retold by others, it changes even more, and so on.)

  Eyewitness testimony is just worthless. Ufologists and ufo believers
should stop putting so much weight on them.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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