Shadowbanned Response to The Great UFO Debate! Yes, Really.
Channel: Joseph Chisholm
Date: 2017-12-06

Stefan Molyneux has done a tremendous service for the cause of reason and evidence, but he doesn't always honestly meet his own standards.

The Great UFO Debate! Yes, Really: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Xj2YtQzqg

"Almost anyone with an informed opinion on the complexities of UFOs, 9/11, or other subjects never broached here outside flights of condescending rhetoric, know that they would be wasting their time calling in.  When Stef believes he has nothing more to learn about a subject, he jumps right into the logic.  But logic is only as good as the knowledge you plug into it.

Charles Fort's cataloguing of flying anomalies in the papers a hundred years ago?  Jacques Vallee's statistical analyses of many thousands of sightings?  Stanton Friedman giving the same lecture for forty years, because there have been no substantive arguments against it?

What about the photographs and radar returns?  Jets scrambled to shoot down objects that vanish or fly away impossibly fast?  Nuclear missiles shutting down as a UFO hovers over a base?  These things are documented.

The Honourable Paul Hellyer is a kook.  Dr. Edgar Mitchell was a bit of a kook too.  Maybe that just proves that this is a kooky subject, with a lot of kooky people around it.  You can try to psychologise a person's motivations for being interested, but it doesn't make the data go away.

"Maybe Bigfoot is blurry, and that's the problem.  It's not the photographer's fault.  And that's extra scary to me, 'cause there's a large out-of-focus monster, roaming the countryside.  Run!  He's fuzzy!  Get outta here!"

The rational has to make room for the irrational.  The little monkey brain has to accept that it can't encompass all creation within its paradigm.  How could it?

The funny thing is, if you were to catch up with the paranormal zeitgeist, and listen to Greg Bishop, Tim Binnall, Seriah Azkath, the guys at Mysterious Universe, if you were to read Gordon White, Jeff Kripal, Josh Cutchin, Mike Clelland et al., you would discover that they spend much of their time bemoaning how embarrassingly stupid and ridiculous UFO culture is.

To boil it down to their main point, "unidentified flying object" doesn't necessarily mean "space aliens."   If we're really playing the philosophy game, Stefan might have pointed this out.  Instead, the data was tossed out along with the interpretation.  There's a squirming baby in a pool of bathwater on the ground!

In fact, the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is spoken of very disparagingly in some circles.  It's considered outdated and inadequate. That moves the conversation about UFOs into phenomenology, psychology, shamanism, mythology, religion, metaphysics, and a myriad of other interesting topics, and away from ignorant, arrogant, scientistic pedantry or credulous faith."