There was a sighting yesterday, and there were 10 F-16s flying around. If it wasn't a UFO, what were the F-16s doing? Maneuvers?

Here's a link to an article from the NY Times - F-16s at Scene of U.F.O. Sighting in Texas. I can deny the claim of a lone experiencer, but I do not have an explanation for the F-16s.

Also, why do we rush to find explanations for these sorts of observations?

I'm not saying there was or wasn't a UFO, but why do you think F-16s in the area is an unexplainable occurrence? Common sense suggests to me that military aircraft in the area implies it is less likely to be a UFO and more likely to be somebody mistaking a military test or training event as a UFO.

As has happened before.

FWIW the sightings happend in early January (7th or 8th maybe?), not yesterday.

Honestly, I just cannot buy the whole UFO alien thing. It just doesn't make any sense. Life out in the universe somewhere, no basis or inclination to rule that out. But they certainly do not originate in this solar system, so they would have to have crossed interstellar distances to get here. Either they go ftl which has no glimmer of a theoretical basis to believe, or they have crawled across interstellar space at sublight speeds and are totally out of touch with their home base. Then they blunder around in our atmosphere getting chased by F-16's, doing what? They contact nobody except the occasional loner who is not even remotely credible and then crawl back home at sublight speeds again? For what? Any race that stupid couldn't build a buggy let alone an interstellar spaceship.

The whole government secret thing is even more unbelievable. I have never seen our government be able to keep a secret for any length of time. One like this, with real financial possibilities for the whistle blower and very little downside in terms of criminal liability would be out in a heartbeat.

Thanks, lol. I just saw it on Larry King, and decided to check it out. I clearly don't know a lot about this topic.

I don't believe in aliens... but I think that people who believe in aliens serve a purpose. We can say that people who believe in aliens and UFOs are clearly nut-jobs, which helps us build our social construction. Just as the people who believe in UFOs and aliens think we are being supressed by the government, they put us down to build their social construction. So, we basically have two camps, the believers and the non-believers... both with their own version.

Of course, this could be because the government and the media doesn't want me to know...

The American, myself included, sees the headline and says, "eeeeeh, I don't know... I'm going to go with my gut and say that the government is hiding something." The fact that the military base changed their story on whether planes were flying in the area clearly feeds that notion in a lot of minds. Why would they want to do that?

I don't think the government could keep this kind of gossip secret for very long either. It's so implausable for a group to keep a secret. Two people can keep a secret. Three is a stretch, and a whole group is highly implausible.

But, if I may continue to play multipul personality... I can say that, it's just further evidence on HOW DEEP the conspiracy really goes! The reason that there are no whistle blowers is because the government exicutes them ahead of time, predicting their every move. The ones that do wind up blowing the whistle are thoroughly discredited. The conspiracy started out small, but managed to get larger and larger through time... with people at the very top controlling the information.

Anything can be fed into a conspiracy theory in some form or another.

"UFOs? Nope. They were fighter jets, Air Force says"
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/23/air...ref=newssearch

Yes, naturally the government spins the truth by manipulating the news outlets. This article is evidence of that, and of the greater conspiracy. OMG, it's even larger than I thought!

Aliens? Don't believe in 'em.

Except for Michael Jordan. No human could possibly move through the air like that.

Yea, him and Tom Brady are either aliens or robots. Go Giants!

MJ is definately an alien, but Dennis Rodman obviously is not. The government just uses his strange appearance as a red herring, so they can continue on with their experiments.

Go Giants!

UFO stands for "unidentified flying object." Of course there are UFOs. I don't see why that's interesting.

In this case? It's possible there's a coverup. The military may have been running a test of some new type of aircraft. Then again, it may well have been one of the F-16s.

People are not able to reliably identify high-flying objects in the sky.

Yes, it's a UFO, because it's unidentified. What I'm saying is that we flat out say that people who believe in such non-sense are cooky. The reason we do this is because we need to have some cooky people in our society, so that we can promote our ideas as the sane and rational ones. They are the exceptionally stupid.

This is the falacy.

We don't really know if UFOs (from outer-space) exist or not. I frankly assume that they do not, and that anyone who believes in them is defective. It makes my life easier, and I don't have to think so much. UFOs aren't THAT important to me, so I'm inclined to be lazy. Is that ethical?

No. There are plenty of kooks in society, and they can be identified based on the reasoning they use to support the claims. Of course, shoddy reasoning is common, and most people only avoid being "kooks" because they follow authority blindly, rather than trying to apply their underdeveloped critical thinking skills.

It's a problem. I do think critical thinking is important. Though I'm not sure it's as easy to teach as some make it out to be.