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"I heard", "I spoke to a guy", "I met someone who said", "single image of a sphere hovering above the water, and four diamond shaped lights from craft on a training mission", "the sensor array was switched off by the aliens" etc etc etc etc etc... Mountains upon mountains of bullshit.
I would have liked just one person to stand up before congress and describe alien physiology, say they met an alien, describe in detail and captured spaceship. Anything. Yes, that could (and almost certainly would) still be either schizo fantasy or outright fabrication, but at least it would be a concrete, real claim. Little green men, ET, flying saucers, weird sci fi computers.
Instead, the stories are always the same. Something heard, something rumored, bright lights, weird shapes spotted by fighter pilots in the distance, sensor arrays messing up. Always vague. Show me the aliens and I'll believe.
Yep.
We're literally half a step beyond bigfoot sightings here.
Oh you found footprints, or clumps of fur, or droppings or heard an unidentifiable animal call, or saw some vague shape staring at you from the woods under the moonlight at 2 a.m.?
Great. Call up NatGeo and see if they'll fund another expedition.
Kinda like you say, that one Bigfoot film is 'obviously' fake upon analysis, but at least they give you a complete view of the alleged creature that isn't solely secondhand evidence.
"Unexplained" phenomena is usually just the result of misinterpreting a rare but otherwise natural event, or possibly being fooled by intentional deceit. Give me something that isn't just explained by a failure of the human senses to accurately perceive something.
Note, I'm willing to save some (extremely low) probability for the existence of aliens on earth, but moving my priors on it would require appropriately spectacular evidence.
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I had made a comment to a similar effect but it evidently didn't post. Basically, as soon as I saw that it was an image taken by a flight crew I lost interest. Another low res photo or video of a moving object taken from another moving object that's miles away. That's obviously also subject to various kinds of distortion and is being taken with equipment designed for another purpose. I wouldn't even go as far as "show me the aliens"; if someone can produce a photograph that's more than just some vague shape or form or light and actually has some detail I'd take interest. Show me a door, or a propulsion system, or some piece of mechanical equipment and I'll pay attention.
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