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.

Meh. While I basically agree with your conclusion I think the reasoning is terrible. A veteran getting abused because of his part in the war is a priori many, many orders of magnitude more likely than aliens visiting America. I think a better comparison is something like the day care child sexual abuse panic of the 1980s. The lesson there is to be appropriately skeptical, especially of lurid and unsupported stories. The lesson is not that child sexual abuse in daycare centers literally never happened in America in the 1980s.

Happily, unlike aliens visiting Earth, it doesn't matter if the number of cases of veterans getting spat on or whatever was literally 0 or simply some small number. The point that the stories are vastly exaggerated is sufficient. I'm just pointing out that I think your reasoning sucks because I am weirdly compelled to do so despite there being no point to it.

The point is if you have a big sample of X and you investigate X and you get three categories of things:

- large % debunked
- small % unverified
- 0% confirmed

The reasonable conclusion is not let's wait and see and not form many opinions about this quite yet, we should have invested more resources into determining the veracity of the small percentage of unverified cases.

I sort of agree that whether it was a small percentage or none should make no difference. But that there are literally, precisely, zero confirmed cases, contemporaneously published accounts, police reports -- nothing that points to it ever happening. That really is worth pointing out because it shows the utter preposterousness of fixating on this.

You and others seem focused on this "the left MUST admit this COULD have happened once, you cannot DISPROVE IT, that is a fallacy!"

No ****, I agree, but it really is worth reiterating that when you give unscrupulous people an inch they take a mile. See this thread how easily the burden of proof shifts around. If there were even one single, verified incident, raradevils perhaps would have never leave his house for fear of street hippies bringing their disrespect to the boys in uniform, and he certainly would use that as absolute, conclusive proof that anti-war speech is highly dangerous and should be prohibited as soon as Trump can sign the Executive Order for it. I agree for all normal, reasonable people -- ~0 instead of literal 0 should suffice but we are not left dealing with reasonable people here.

We're forced to keep repeating things like "hey, here's how burden of proof works; without this, YOU should not be repeating your fairy tales" but instead, in the real world, we're constantly met with "well, you can't DISPROVE my in-all-liklihood-entirely-fictional account, so shutup and respect the lesson."

There you go putting words in my mouth. The only thing I stated is that while I was in uniform someone threw trash at me and a couple other sailors (from a moving car). There is no way it was an accident given they yelled at us when they thew it. I have no idea what their political persuasion was nor do I care. I and a couple others with me were accosted outside a local establishment spit on and provoked to try and start a fight. Again while in uniform (these were local "boys" with long hair). Why they targeted us I had no idea nor do I care. I only used what happened to me to say that if it happened to me that I tend to believe that it wasn't an isolated incident. The fact that you keep saying this type of action never happened is naive. Especially after Dom reported a case of vandalism to one of his neighbors. Was it as common as some reporting has stated, I don't know nor do I care.

There are kind of important details here, my dude.

There's a very strange idea in that post that while ~0 is a reasonable estimate for all normal reasonable, it has to be insisted that it's literally 0 because of reasons.

It's a bizarre idea both in principle and practice. Far better to stick to being reasonable and normal.

Why?

Also we've been talking about faulty memories but the false memories that commonly happen in various ways isn't the same sort of phenomena as people making up ludicrous explanations for real events such as eclipses, hurricanes, lights in the sky etc.

Your whole flipping point is that these guys were harassing you because you were in a Navy guy. Like, if some guy cuts you off in traffic that doesn't mean he's disrespecting the US Navy.

They were. There is still no way of know if they were liberal or conservative.

How did you know?

LOL yeah Dom and rara both appear to be strenuously arguing against what they perceive as the leftist argument: "nothing bad has ever happened to a veteran, ever".

I mean, come on boys, try to follow along?

And Dom, seriously, stop whining about mistreatment that didn't even happen to you. If when you sit down to defend yourself in this thread, ask yourself, "hey am I just gonna make stuff up to whine about?", if the answer is yes, just don't say anything.

Saying stuff is for people with points.

You just said you didn't know why you were targeted, now you say you were targeted because you were a Navy guy.

I'm just ****ing baffled that in a thread where Dom is rending his ****ing clothes over the outrage of having his credibility questioned he cannot help himself but lie about the events of THIS VERY THREAD to make it more dramatic and make himself a victim.




Dom's actual first post:
I literally couldn't ask for better confirmation of my initial skepticism.

Widespread abuse of soldiers being the underlying motivation behind littering near rara and petty vandalism have been proposed and then subsequently walked back. Decrying them as serious suggestions instead of preposterous scenarios is you trying to settle the argument. It's just another way of saying, well sure, the stories are fictitious but they're so realistic.

At least people who reported seeing lights in the sky at least probably saw something.

In high school in the eighties my shop teacher told me -- with pure rage and hate in his eyes -- that he missed the early seventies when he got to spend his weekends in the National Guard beating wise ass long haired punks like me.

But I'm sure if someone spit on a guy like that he would have meekly walked away.

thats why it was always pretty young females. they cant beat them up.

and it played into their victim complex since they were supposed to be swimming in pussy like the ww2 guys. many of these stories just reek of entitlement.

The stories also usually involved the spitting happening as they got off the plane or still at the airport, often to explain why these guys might plausibly still be in military fatigues or be identifiable. But wait, how did protestors get into the airport and knew soldiers were arriving back?

These stories were often way, way more preposterous and unbelievable than UFO sightings. Like I said, at least people reporting UFOs probably are confusing natural phenomenon for something extraordinary. NOT DOMINIC, NOT RARA, if only because it's tedious dealing with aggrieved people ITT, but *most* of these stories were surely complete fantasies.

Blood splatter and puke may have been confused with spit.

I'll put it another way to try to highlight the difference.

With rara and dom type stories, the chances of the conclusion being true/false are fairly closely related to whether the memories are broadly accurate/mistaken

With aliens visiting earth type stuff, the chance of the conclusion being true are effectively independent of the accuracy of the memories.

Anybody consider that the spitters may have actually been aliens? Would be an effective way to sow dissent and chaos in advance of an invasion imo.

Really, anyone could walk into an airport at anytime and walk up to any gate they wanted back then. This is not to argue that the protesters were there in the airport but there was nothing stopping them from entering.

Yep My dad used to fly in and out of Lockheed airport (now Bob Hope/Burbank) all the time - we used to be allowed to walk out on the tarmac and meet him when he walked down the stairs off the plane (they still use them, which is kind of fun) - I dimly remember a couple of times when a bunch of soldiers were getting off the plane, but I don't recall any drama.

Simpler times.

MM MD

One time dvault egged my house.