It's not whether he has some magical "scientist" card, it's whether he ran an experiment.

Imagine Carl ran an experiment where he put a sign in front of various groups of turnips asking for things like aliens, Bigfoot, or faeries to take the turnips.

After running this experiment, only the turnips with signs associated to aliens were taken.

In this scenario, Carl would have some scientific evidence suggesting aliens took his turnips. It'd be weak evidence that likely wouldn't be replicated, but still evidence.

This seems deeply flawed. How did the hypothesis forming the basis of the experiment get formed in the first place if there was "no evidence"?

An analysis of compounds in DNA finds that there are, within a small margin of error, identical quantities of adenine and thymine, and identical quantities of guanine and cytosine. You have not yet been able to experimentally verify your hypothesis of a base pair rule. It is nevertheless not true to say there is "no evidence" of a base pair rule.

Sufficient evidence to form a reasonable hypothesis, but insufficient evidence to elevate your hypothesis to a theory, is still some evidence, and it is a lie to say otherwise.

Is this in response to the alien comment. "This seems deeply flawed."

Really? The scientific method is flawed.

The OP had a funny alien example, so someone stretched and came up with a silly 'test' for a hypothesis of the alien ate the turnip.

That doesn't mean 'testing' is flawed way of determining 'evidence'.

I never said the scientific method is flawed. Your understanding of it, however, seems to be profoundly deficient, if you think the scientific method says "the only thing that constitutes evidence of any sort is something that has been specifically verified by experiment."

Testing and experimentation would be the high bar of evidence.

Then of course there are gradations below that. Observational studies, are just observations after all.

But because I can say "there is 'no evidence' that there are no aliens" is then the lowest bar, it doesn't mean there 'are' aliens.

But the point here is that 'no evidence' is being used as a rhetorical technique to promote actually false findings.

Kind of along the lines of simply injecting doubt into a debate in order to detract from real evidence. Like what has been done for cigarettes, sugar, etc...

No, scientific publications don’t change it unless those publications are about the claim.

A publications doesn’t give you a free pass from scrutiny.

Publishing a claim doesn't make it the scientific truth. Case in point, the many thousands of published studies about ESP.

What do you mean here by "scientific truth"?

Sorry to seem pedantic, but I think it matters here since we're talking about specific meanings of terms.

That is my point, yes. I am pointing out that there is no objective bar for a claim to be "scientific".