this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
One of my seven grandpas said you should believe me because I'm a real swell dude
Ha! Three and a half parents! I knews aliens were real!
gay polycules were a thing in the 60s
Those stone soldiers should have made a world tour 25 years ago when they were declassified.
*stoned
It would have been classier to have turned them into terracotta.
But why?
Proving our place in the cosmos only required regular evidence. That was extraordinary. Why is this subject on a separate pedestal?
Do you think our astronomical theories were developed on word of mouth, rumor, and "trust me bro?"
Yeah that's not at all what I said.
And there is plenty of evidence/data that points to something out of the ordinary going on, plenty aside from word of mouth/rumor.
Show me he stoned soldiers.
Am I the only person left that can read? The question is, why is this line of thinking only applied to this subject?
Nope. Can't read. You caught me.
Everyone wants to jump in and talk about semantics and very specific claims, and no one has answered a very simple question on why they think about this the way they do.
Everything is "paranormal" until it's explained by science is what I'm trying to get at. Something is very clearly happening with this subject, and it has been systematically ridiculed or put in separate categories of thought and no one is stopping to ask why.
That's all I'm getting at.
I shouldn't have come at you like that, that was an asshole move. You're just the next person to shrug it off instead of actually talk about it, so I took it out on you. Sorry for that.
There isn't something "clearly" happening with the subject of UFOs and aliens. UFO reports are people seeing weird lights in the sky and not understanding parallax. Do some people report direct contact with alien beings? Sure. But some people also report contact with angels, demons, leprechauns, bigfoot, and any number of other otherworldly phenomena. It's really not that complicated. People hallucinate and dream things, often based on pre-existing cultural exposure. There's very few people on Earth at this point that haven't seen depictions of a big eyed grey alien. And since everyone has seen these depictions, when people end up in altered states of consciousness through mental issues or psychotropic substances, that image serves as feedstock for their visions.
Yes, claiming that otherworldly beings are visiting us and interacting with people IS an extraordinary claim. It's something that would redefine our entire worldview and our understanding of our place in the universe. And we don't accept those types of claims based on flimsy and unreliable eyewitness testimony.
The most damning piece of evidence against UFOs and alien encounters is that the quality of visual evidence for these phenomena hasn't increased at all over the last 30 years. Every UFO is still an out-of-focus blob, and that's because it's only out of focus objects that can be mistaken as alien spaceships instead of ordinary objects like planes and balloons. And despite everyone now having HD cameras in their pocket, no one has ever managed to get a clear video of one of these grey aliens that are supposedly constantly flying around and fucking with people.
The quality of evidence for alien visitors is, from a scientific perspective, absolute dogshit. It's not repeatable. It's not reliable. It's not in a form that can be interrogated and examined critically.
Do you know what it took to get people to accept the heliocentric model of the Solar System? The exact opposite of that. It took multiple independent lines of evidence that could be independently verified. Galileo didn't say, "I have observed that the Earth goes around the Sun, and you'll just have to trust me." He said, "here are my pieces of evidence A, B, C, D, and E, here is my method, and if you build a telescope like mine, you can repeat my experiment and confirm everything I've done myself." And even then it took centuries for the heliocentric model to be accepted completely!
I'm sorry, but fuzzy out of focus dots and unreliable eyewitness testimony (often produced under hypnosis) is just absolute shit-tier evidence. And no, the recently military videos aren't any proof either, as they're also out of focus crap and clear parallax errors.
I'm not going to touch the aliens part of that because that would require more data than exists publically, at least right now.
I will talk about UFOs/UAP though, because there are quite a bit of data points on that.
This is a historical record and culmination of what our different government agencies had to turn over by law:
https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps
Which was a product of
https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/senate-amendment/797/text
And that is only what the US has been able to bring forth so far legally against the will of the DoD.
France has a pretty public office/project as well.
https://thedebrief.org/the-new-director-of-geipan-frances-official-uap-investigative-office-discusses-science-and-the-study-of-aerial-mysteries/
So does Japan.
https://thedebrief.org/japan-launches-uap-investigation-following-u-s-report-identifying-region-as-hotspot-for-sightings/
There are serious people working on this, and it's not from word of mouth, dismissing it that way tells me you've refused to look at the data yourself.
This subject is an absolutely dumpster fire filled with misinfo and disinfo, but there is still solid data.
I have seen this stuff. You make the mistake of forgetting that governments are just made of people; they're not some vast all powerful entity with godlike powers. You've linked to a few vast databases of blurry dots and parallax errors.
Volume of noise does not evidence make. Bureaucraties keep records on everything. Every time a pilot sees some smudge in the sky they can't ID, they file a report. That's what these archives you've linked to are.
And really, what are you thinking? You can't seriously make case for something by telling your audience, "here, look at this website or thousands of low quality records." You just told me to go read a library of garbage. If there's anything real or convincing in there, try showing people that. Just because people see a bunch of stuff they can't ID in the sky does not mean there's something odd going on. It's the sky. It's hard to ID things at unknown distance against a featureless background.
All you have is a library of noise. That isn't evidence; it's spam.
Although I still feel like you're being overly dismissive, let's talk about this case in particular, it remains unexplained, and it does have an obvious anomaly in it.
https://youtu.be/tf1uLwUTDA0
Nothing we have or have publicly released info on matches the behavior of this object, that goes for any nation.
People have tried to explain it away with parallax and the IR sensor itself rotating, but those don't hold up to scrutiny.
It really doesn't matter how you look at this subject it's interesting no matter the explanation, it's got government transparency issues, possible/probable misspending issues, it's a psyop, we've dropped the ball on technology/we have the tech, people up to thousands at a time are having mass hallucinations. To shrug it off as a couple of mistakes being made or a couple of people being crazy is irresponsible imo.
You're too focused on the word "extraordinary" but all this adage is meant to convey is that claims require evidence. If you ignore the word "extraordinary" the point remains the same.
The phrase is popular among skeptics because we deal with a lot of paranormal claims. And paranormal claims are by definition, extraordinary.
That is my point entirely. It would just require evidence, just like anything else.
Yes, and I explained why the phrase is worded the way it is because you clearly didn't understand.
Proving our place in the cosmos already HAS extraordinary evidence. Our continued existence (and witness to that) IS the evidence. No one bar solipsists doubt that humans exist.
I meant the actual mapping of this planet in the universe as we know it as an example of something that changed how we view our place in the universe. It had regular evidence. We don't need evidence+ for anything including this topic.
Because generally, if you're making an extraordinary claim based on ordinary evidence, chances are the evidence actually points to something ordinary. You need extraordinary evidence that can't be explained by something ordinary.