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Notes -
If I had found you were right (at least, to casually dismiss UFO reports on the basis that they weren't being photographed by cell phones), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I can believe that you examined in person the specific belief set you were exposed to a child! But your firsthand testimony may not by itself suffice to persuade third parties. And from a purely rational standpoint this is the correct perspective to take; simply because I have never seen a solar eclipse does not mean that they do not exist.
(Fortunately, I actually have seen an eclipse; it's an example.)
I have not read it, but I'm sure Sagan, in The Demon Haunted World, discussed how humans are hardly impartial observers, particularly when they have some sort of vested interest in a thing - and Sagan, it seems to me, definitely was not in a position to be an impartial observer on the UFO question.
Now, to give Sagan (who told Congress "I think a moderate support of investigations of UFO’s might very well have some scientific paydirt") credit, I suspect he probably had a much more nuanced view of UFOs than many skeptics, and it's quite possible that his views weren't influenced by his personal stakes in the matter.
Perhaps non-Catholics are not the most disinterested parties either, although (as a non-Catholic) when I've looked into some of their miracles rather casually I've found some of them to be rather difficult to dismiss.
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