Saul Luizaga <sau### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> Why you misinterpret what I say? I'm not saying you must accept what I'm 
> saying

  When you say "you're like the ignorant which hunters, only seeing what
you want to see, science and nothings else", it certainly sounds like you
adamantly want me to accept what you believe.

> I'm saying is logical to see that there are indications that 
> there are things that seem to go beyond our everyday world, that 
> probably will be explained in a future when we develop more technology.

  There certainly are things that go beyond our everyday world. However,
those are not the things you are talking about (in other words, you are
not talking about things like quantum mechanics, black holes, dark matter
and so on). What you are talking about is superstition and spurious
explanations of allegedly unexplained phenomena.

  The major problem with ufologists and new age hippies is that they *want*
to believe their superstitions and unjustified hypotheses even if that means
discarding completely plausible (and even fully demonstrable) natural earthly
explanations.

  The fact is that the vast majority of "sightings" can be easily explained
by uncommon (and sometimes even not that uncommon) weather phenomena,
misinterpretations of what is being seen, and other such psychological
things (this disregarding the cases of outright hoaxes and hallucinations).
Not only can they be explained, thay can actually be *demonstrated* in
practice (in other words, the exact same settings can be repeated under
controlled conditions). The psychology of the human mind with regard to
describing eyewitness accounts, and how much it can change over time and
from person to person, can also be (and has been repeatedly) demonstrated
in practice. Also all kinds of other affect behavioral factors (such as
confirmation bias, cherry-picking and so on) can be easily demonstrated.

  The problem with ufologists and new age hippies is that they outright
reject the naturalistic mundane explanations because they are not exciting.
It's much more exciting to think about UFOs, ghosts and whatnot.

  For example, if a NASA video taken in space shows small white moving
dots outside the shuttle's window, the ufologists will immediately claim
that they are UFOs. They will reject the explanation that they are actually
ice particles floating close to the shuttle (a phenomenon which is very
well understood) which may get expanded by bokeh effects (which is also
very well understood and easy to demonstrate, and it has been demonstrated
in practice). They will point out how some of the dots suddenly change
direction which, according to them, is impossible, and completely dismiss
the mundane explanation that the short bursts of the thrusters of the
shuttle cause them to change direction.

  Ice particles are boring, UFOs are exciting. That's why they want to
believe in the latter.

  Of course believing that the dots are UFOs is ridiculous. The astronauts
don't comment in any way about the swarm of UFOs all around them and NASA
doesn't seem to have any problem in publishing such videos. (Of course the
real explanation for both is that both the astronauts and the people at
NASA know that they are just ice particles and there's nothing odd about it.)

  Why believe in such nonsense? There are tons of really interesting and
exciting things in demonstrable science already. Why waste time in
superstition and old-wives tales? Personally I find astrophysics a much
more interesting topic than ufology.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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