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Originally Posted by pokerodox
Hmmm. So I read the Wikipedia article on Lembcke's book. Willing to admit he may be right. I wish someone would have followed up on Greene's letters. Like, you can't prove it's false, but someone should have at least cross examined as many of them as they could contact.
At some point it becomes like the Air Force and Project Blue Book. Take the project on its face: after receiving tens of thousands of reports of unidentified flying craft, the Air Force believes there is a credible threat, and investigates for 10+ years.
They investigate tens of thousands of cases, explained 95%+ of unidentified craft sightings as naturally occurring phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.), conventional aircraft, or problems with the eye witness account. But then they couldn't explain a few dozen cases and simply called them “unexplained.”
You don't look at the totality of the project and wistfully conclude "well, we didn’t spend even more resources or investigate in quite the right way or perform enough follow up to explain literally 100% of all the cases.” Unreasonable people have run with the unexplained cases for decades, assuming a cover up. Reasonable people conclude the chances of America being visited by aliens or under constant threat from mystery Soviet machines is lower than when you started the project, even if you can’t explain every unidentified aircraft and eye witness account, the probability that you would investigate most and discover pedestrian explanations is suggestive that all have a non-threatening explanation. That is, if you have a sample and conclude most are false positives, none are conclusively true, and some are unverified, you can safely assume all are false positives – good enough for our purposes here anyway. And you chalk up the explanation for the big spike in unidentified craft sightings as due to Cold War / nuclear war paranoias gripping the population.