Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

 

Well, we know that 95% plus of "anomalous experiences" have mundane explanations and only a few percent are truly mysterious, so thousands dont mean much.

As for similarities, is that called copying? Or mistaking the same natural phenomenon for something fantastical? 

 

Ok, let's be more precise. 

There are hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have had anomalous experiences (conservatively). If we narrow it down to the small percentage lacking a prosaic explanation, that's still leaves thousands. We're looking at the small percentage of those who fall into the category of being an "authoritative" source. Trained observers, military, intel etc.

The point was, the idea of a credible witness is a counterpoint to the long-established stigma that people who claim to have experiences / encounters are crazy....as opposed to sober, right-minded, highly trained individuals (currently or formerly) occupying a position of trust.

By similarities I mean multiple people reporting very similar experiences, but who do not know each other, are disconnected geographically and otherwise have no reasonable means of comparing notes - like having corroborating eye-witness reports from multiple people who've never met.

1 hour ago, qqwertz said:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Let's break this one down.

If something exists, it's not really extraordinary. It's just part of this world, or universe. The term extraordinary is (highly) subjective.

Evidence is evidence, and should be evaluated on its own merits - albeit thoroughly if it appears to violate well-proven scientific principles. 

This is a term being thrown around to defend a dogmatic position - specifically the "non-existence" of something on the basis that the wider scientific community doesn't believe it yet....that's it, nothing more. 

The cognitive dissonance embedded in that statement (or at least how it's typically used) is almost overwhelming. At best it's intellectual laziness, and being used to avoid genuinely engaging with a subject. Even if Carl Sagan himself said it......this is about as un-scientific as it gets.

Evidence is evidence. Extraordinary is a test of beliefs and world-view, not facts.

DB

5 hours ago, martin-w said:

 

And so it should be. Convincing evidence is required. When that's provided the rest of the scientific community jump onboard. Using Galileo and Copernicus as an example isn't a good one, they were up against the religious community of the time, not the embryonic scientific community. 

My point was that things haven't changed much in the last few hundred years.

While a scientist today might not be put under house arrest (and/or have their work burned) for promoting an un-popular theory, quite a few have had their careers destroyed for daring to propose theories and evidence that violated the established narrative.

They lose funding and tenure, their works are not published, they face public ridicule and are excommunicated from their peer groups. If you're an academic with no funding, no peer support, and can't publish you work.......is that really much different to what happened to Galileo? Except in this case, it's not the church doing it, but their own peers or "the scientific community". 

Specifically in the case of the dinosaurs, their claims happened to also spark a large amount of curiosity and debate - which lead to more science being done and eventually, the discovery of the crater in Mexico, now believed to be the impact site.  << That's how it's supposed to work.

With Clovis, that's not what happened. Scientists' lives and reputations were destroyed after stumbling upon evidence that disrupted the established narrative.

 

In one case, science lead to more science, which lead to a game-changing discovery. In the other case, science lead to a dogmatic backlash which delayed progress and understanding of our own history by decades.

Guess which one had more evidence to start with...

DB

On 8/2/2025 at 12:09 PM, charliearon said:

Had me going there, Martin!  I thought a Marine was ambushed at a Crafts Fair or similar??  More ☕ needed!

Maybe the Raffia was behind it.

14 minutes ago, Holdit said:

Maybe the Raffia was behind it.

?? 

7 minutes ago, charliearon said:

?? 

An organised crime group operating in the craft fair circuit.

11 hours ago, DaviiB said:

.... and if you think that (or its equivalent) doesn't happen in modern times..... ask the guys who first proposed the theory that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs, 

It was terrible. One had an exo-planet named after him and the other an asteroid.  They were also given tenure at distinguished universities....jeeez🤷‍♂️

 

2 hours ago, DaviiB said:

that's still leaves thousands.

 

8.2 billion live on this planet, so that's a miniscule percentage. That's something like 0.00002439% that report what could be anomalous phenomena.

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly a mysterious phenomenon at play, more like multiple phenomena at play. But we need more than "stuff people say" to get to the bottom of it.

 

2 hours ago, DaviiB said:

quite a few have had their careers destroyed for daring to propose theories and evidence that violated the established narrative.

 

Has happened, but not that many, and it's usually studies that aren't well conducted, or when the proper scientific process isn't followed.  Like cold fusion for example where, if I recall correctly, instead of waiting for peer review they just went straight on TV. And then nobody could replicate it. Turns out, decades later, there may well be something going on and it's once again being studied.

 

2 hours ago, DaviiB said:

They lose funding and tenure, their works are not published, they face public ridicule and are excommunicated from their peer groups.

 

Has happened but you are vastly overstating your case and it doesn't really apply to the UFO phenomenon because nobody is conducting research, not proper research that is, we just have stories people tell, ATFLIR videos that don't show anything physics defying, claims of stuff on radar that we haven't seen, etc.

I find pilot reports very interesting, but again, its proper empirical evidence that's required. What's muddying the water is the number of individuals jumping on the UFO bandwagon to make some dosh. You can't tell, these days, which ones are genuine and which aren't.

 

 

Edited August 4, 2025Aug 4 by martin-w

3 hours ago, DaviiB said:

[Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence]

....

Evidence is evidence. Extraordinary is a test of beliefs and world-view, not facts.

I love that quote of Sagan, it really summarizes nicely how things work in science. It is not as black and white as you may think. Scientists are humans and thus share the same character flaws as other people. They can be selfish, self-important, careless, or simply scared about their career. I have seen quite often that people get away with blunder in scientific journals, as long as their claims are not that interesting. An "ordinary" claim (say, an improved spectral measurement of a chemical molecule) is only of interest to a small group of people. It may not have big consequences, so nobody bothers to look into the details. Some (not many) scientists do that routinely to save time and increase their number of publications. Looks good on their CV.

Then there are extraordinary claims, something that has (or would have) far-reaching consequences. If you do such a claim, you will be under the microscope. It may happen inadvertently (e.g., faster-than-light neutrinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly ) or the result of a scam (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal ). But if you claim you observed superconductivity in buckyballs, which were all the rage 25 years ago, you have to expect that people will try to reproduce that. The evidence that Schoen presented was simply not extraordinary - in fact, it was falsified. 

There is no absolute certainty in science, not even in mathematics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems ). Most of the time, scientists make a statistical analysis and present their data with some "confidence level", measured in standard deviations "sigma". 1 sigma means your claim is only correct with a 65% probability, but 5 sigma means 95%. That's pretty much the gold standard in physical sciences.

Coming back to "extraordinary evidence": I cannot give you a quantitative definition of that notion by itself. However, if you factor in the amount of reactions that the initial claim received, then you could give a kind of social science definition of what would be required.

3 hours ago, DaviiB said:

quite a few have had their careers destroyed for daring to propose theories and evidence that violated the established narrative.

Yep, that almost happened to me, but I survived. We dared to put into question the conditions for an established mathematical approximation that was in heavy use at the time. We took a lot of fire (extraordinary evidence was required), but our results passed the test. It is now one of my most cited publications 🙂. 

 

3 hours ago, Holdit said:

Maybe the Raffia was behind it.

Sounds like a crime syndicate embedded in a U.K. armed service

On 8/4/2025 at 10:01 AM, DD_Arthur said:

It was terrible. One had an exo-planet named after him and the other an asteroid.  They were also given tenure at distinguished universities....jeeez🤷‍♂️

 

So they weren't heavily ridiculed?......and it didn't take 30 years for them to fully be recognized? 

On 8/4/2025 at 10:22 AM, martin-w said:

Has happened but you are vastly overstating your case and it doesn't really apply to the UFO phenomenon because nobody is conducting research, not proper research that is, we just have stories people tell, ATFLIR videos that don't show anything physics defying, claims of stuff on radar that we haven't seen, etc.

Please define proper research. Don't paint over this with a broad brush.

Here is one of the latest (preprint): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_multiple-transient_events_in_the_First_Palomar_Sky_Survey

This is "proper" research, being conducted and put through traditional channels. It is also only one of many angles into the phenomenon being looked at by real academics.

If you don't look, you won't know about it.

On 8/4/2025 at 11:52 AM, qqwertz said:

I love that quote of Sagan, it really summarizes nicely how things work in science. It is not as black and white as you may think. Scientists are humans and thus share the same character flaws as other people. They can be selfish, self-important, careless, or simply scared about their career. I have seen quite often that people get away with blunder in scientific journals, as long as their claims are not that interesting. An "ordinary" claim (say, an improved spectral measurement of a chemical molecule) is only of interest to a small group of people. It may not have big consequences, so nobody bothers to look into the details. Some (not many) scientists do that routinely to save time and increase their number of publications. Looks good on their CV.

Then there are extraordinary claims, something that has (or would have) far-reaching consequences. If you do such a claim, you will be under the microscope. It may happen inadvertently (e.g., faster-than-light neutrinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly ) or the result of a scam (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal ). But if you claim you observed superconductivity in buckyballs, which were all the rage 25 years ago, you have to expect that people will try to reproduce that. The evidence that Schoen presented was simply not extraordinary - in fact, it was falsified. 

There is no absolute certainty in science, not even in mathematics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems ). Most of the time, scientists make a statistical analysis and present their data with some "confidence level", measured in standard deviations "sigma". 1 sigma means your claim is only correct with a 65% probability, but 5 sigma means 95%. That's pretty much the gold standard in physical sciences.

Coming back to "extraordinary evidence": I cannot give you a quantitative definition of that notion by itself. However, if you factor in the amount of reactions that the initial claim received, then you could give a kind of social science definition of what would be required.

Yep, that almost happened to me, but I survived. We dared to put into question the conditions for an established mathematical approximation that was in heavy use at the time. We took a lot of fire (extraordinary evidence was required), but our results passed the test. It is now one of my most cited publications 🙂. 

 

I agree with everything you're saying. Ordinary evidence, when scrutinized, should produce repeatable results. 

If you want to disrupt an established norm, you just need lots of ordinary evidence....If you want to call that extraordinary, then sure.

My point was, the term "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" should never be used as a throwaway line to justify a refusal to even "look through the telescope". Dismissing something offhand, without actually looking into it is quite unscientific no?

Carl Sagan was one of the greats. I think his words should be used to justify doing more science - i.e. more exploration, more debate, and a broader search for more/extraordinary evidence - than the opposite.

To be fair, this topic is becoming more mainstream, the stigma is just starting to recede, and more science is beginning to be done....so there's that.

 

DB

40 minutes ago, DaviiB said:

So they weren't heavily ridiculed?......and it didn't take 30 years for them to fully be recognized? 

No they weren't.  Luiz Alvarez - since he was one the main creators of the Bomb - wasn't really someone who would be subject to 'ridicule'.

The Alvarez's led a distinguished team and actually published just after the other discoverer; Jan Smit.

You might recall the impact crater that fully confirmed their work was recognised in 1991. This doesn't seem to fit with any 'ridicule' or 'thirty years to be recognised'.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make.  You're trying to equate scientific discovery with the transparent nonsense people like Ross Coulthard are trying to pedal for a very lucrative personal gain?

So tell me, last time it was mentioned, you stated the bodies of the miniature Peruvian aliens were still undergoing 'analysis'.

Remember them? That's hard, irrefutable evidence. Any news about this earth shattering event of late?