UFO skeptics be damned?

Isaac Asimov:

“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?

No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.

One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"

Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”    

So, is there evidence for UFOs?

(Not ET-related UFOs, but just “Unidentified Flying Objects” or, better perhaps, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?)

My “friends” – CDA, Lance Moody, Zoam Chomsky, Gilles Fernandez, et al. – are avowed skeptics, they all (except for Christopher Allan aka CDA, who is skeptical about an ET connection to UFOs and the Roswell incident, in particular) are staunch “UFO atheists.”

And this despite the overwhelming “evidence” from reliable witnesses, who state they’ve seen odd things in the sky (and sometime on the ground).

Is it likely that all these witnesses were hallucinating or misperceiving mundane things?

If one adopts the idea, as my “friend” Brit David Clarke has in his latest book (noted here a few posts down in the blog), that UFOs are only a myth, what does that say about the skeptical mind?

Doesn’t the litany of UFO accounts, found in many sources – ancient records, the Blue Book files, news reports, et cetera – indicate evidence in the sense that Isaac Asimov suggests above?

Is there any other accumulation of human reportage that is eschewed so diligently, disavowed by persons with a skeptical bent?

No, I’m not talking about the existence of Jesus or his alleged resurrection. (There are not reliable records of either.)

UFOs have a panoply of human sensory interaction(s): sightings being the most plentiful.

All the persons seeing a strange “thing” flying overhead or nearby can’t be errant in their observations; the odds for that totality is statistically improbable, even impossible (if my training in psychometric methods has any standing in scientific measurement).

That the skeptical juggernaut is overly vibrant in the UFO field of interest goes to the heart of what may be wrong with the mental makeup of those who take such a livid stance against the many accounts from reasonable people, some professional in related fields: pilots, astronomers, aircraft designers, for example.

One can disavow the existence of God, because there are no witnesses to such a being extant,

But can one discount, reasonably (and intellectually) the many, many accounts of seemingly sane individuals, as have been gathered over the years, from ancient times to now?

No. If the skeptical view is anything, it’s determinate stubbornness to see what is obvious: something quirky has been spotted in the skies of Earth (and on the ground sometimes) for millennia, by persons who are not or were not psychologically or neurologically compromised.

RR