This is really key. Eyewitness accounts are reliably dismal in evidentiary value, even by people with relevant knowledge. Our brains lie to us all the time.

I remember a case long ago where a woman was cruelly raped. She was face-to-face with her attacker. She identified him in a lineup, he was convicted, and sent to prison.

He always insisted on his innocence, but people just laughed at him. She was face to face with him, and identified him. But decades later, as DNA testing became available, a testing was done and he was not a match! But a known sex offender was a match, and had died in prison some years earlier. They dug up a picture of him, and he looked just like the wrongfully accused man.

The woman apologized to him as best she could, but her mistake was an honest one, and the falsely convicted man did not blame her. The jury did the right thing based on the evidence. It was just a horrible coincidence.

Eyewitness testimony is the gold standard in court. But I'm skeptical of it. I'd like to see hard evidence if I was on a jury. Fortunately, hard evidence is a lot more easily obtained than it used to be.

There was a story about this on a podcast.

This is a case of a single witness during a single traumatizing event.

You're trying to compare this to a situation where we have thousands of witnesses across time across hundreds of events, with a few events having multiple witnesses.

Who are also under no emotional duress.

Sorry, but not remotely comparable.

I'm aware of this, but a sufficient amount of it, almost entirely in concordance, should override this noise.

This is one example using a minor observational discrepancy. Put it this way- All the observers agreed with the reality that the plane did hit the water.

You're basically using this 1 example to prove that 10, 100, 1000 people all saying that the plane hit the water (with or without wings) is not evidence of anything hitting the water (assuming no aircraft was found).

It wasn't minor, it was crucial to determine the cause of the accident. The wings being on or off was not just a "discrepancy".

It's an irrelevant example.

The question in THIS case is not whether "the wings fell off before or after hitting the water, if at all", but whether "there was a plane hitting the water at all" or "whether there even was a plane" (also a plane that was caught on multiple radars).

It's simply not a good comparison. The Navy pilots say they see bogies on radar (not just visually) every day. Watch the "60 Minutes" broadcast I linked elsewhere (which is only 13 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY). The USG has already admitted these things are real but have an unknown source. To continue to maintain extreme skepticism at this point is to bury one's head in the sand.

Q: What's the most likely explanation?

A: Problems/glitches/bugs with the extremely complex radar system.

Q: What's a likely explanation?

A: We don't really understand everything there is to know about radar.

Q: What's the least likely explanation?

A: Alien craft buzzing around that nobody has ever managed to get a clear picture of.

If the radar system exhibited other types of "steady anomalies identifying nonexistent objects in space" that didn't happen to fit the "UFO expectation", we would be hearing of those too, no? Have we? Since the whole point of a radar system is identifying friend, foe or possible collision courses, it would seem to be extremely important that this basic function of a radar be extremely reliable, no?

Also, what are the chances that both the radar AND the person's eyesight (which saw the object in the first place) are failing in the exact same way and with the exact same concordance? That has to be absolutely astronomical.

So, no. You didn't compute your probabilities correctly in this case. Try again.

It's like when people trivially dismiss eyewitness observers for "seeing things" every single time. I just Googled, and US citizens drive 3.2 trillion miles each year on US roads, which most of the time have two-way traffic with NO divider in between. If observers were as inaccurate as dismissals suggest, we should also be seeing FAR more accidents, head-on collisions etc. The error rate of the human visual system (if not the memory system which is admittedly often faultier) has to be extremely low to see the RELATIVELY low number of accidents we see. It's fundamental to survival for the human visual system to be as precise and accurate as possible.

I've been hearing my whole life about the "it can only be aliens" explanation. Many, many of these have been debunked, but it never dampens the enthusiasm "yeah, but this one must be aliens!"

Why has nobody ever taken a photo of these alleged aliens?

It's up to the proponents to provide convincing evidence. "But I saw it with my own eyes!" is completely unconvincing. Anyone who claims to have never misinterpreted anything they saw is just not credible. Optical illusions affect everyone.

Sane drivers know this and take it into account when driving, that's why it doesn't cause (many) accidents, and is so ordinary nobody bothers to report it.

The human visual system is full of compromises and kludges that just happen to work well enough. Did you know that your eyes have a blind spot that your brain fills in for you? By guessing? That magicians rely on all kinds of errors your brain makes in perception?

But no, it must be aliens!

I hear you on the "it must be aliens!" argument. Really, I do. And until at least the concept of the "Alcubierre drive" came out, one could simply claim "there's no possible way for any being to physically come here from any galactic-level distance because of the amount of time it would take at sub-light speeds" and that would be the end of the story. (Even then, my response was usually "no way that we can think of"...)

I am well aware of all of your other arguments, as I was a Psych major who specialized in perception.

I'm of the government's stance on this currently: I think it's a real phenomenon, I trust most qualified eyewitnesses especially if it is in concordance with radar data, and I refuse to concretely claim anything further. And it is a mystery.

But I AM free to speculate.

I could claim something like "assuming there IS some alien intelligence controlling these hyper-performing craft... if another intelligence was advanced enough to even make it here in the first place, ostensibly they also have fairly full control over all elements of the interactions with us, which includes not showing themselves outside their craft", but this is also the Conspiracy Fallacy. Two thoughts on that though: The Conspiracy Fallacy does not disprove conspiracies (which is why I am openly stating this is speculative). And secondly, this also means that (if this claim is at all true), they are likely voluntarily showing themselves at some "pace" as to not overly upset us. Why that? Well, perhaps you've heard of systematic desensitization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization) as a treatment for phobias? That might be going on here. And it's apparently working, since nothing crazy's happened since the USG openly admitted this is real. This is a far cry from the Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast days.

So, no. I can't say it's aliens, at least rationally. But I do speculate that. ;) And honestly, I think it's fun to think that not only might we be not alone (wouldn't that be amazing??) but that we're kind of in a galactic kindergarten. ;)

No. They are using this example to demonstrate that prior bias can influence eyewitness accounts.