I agree; especially when you combine a possibility like cognition-altering gas exposure (CO, etc), the brain can do some weird shit; connecting disparate strands of thought between movies you've seen, things you've heard, etc. When a fighter pilot says "both myself and my copilot saw it"... you're breathing the same air, right? Ate the same meal four hours ago? Touching the same control surfaces?
There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny.
I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel.
So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.
Go back in time a thousand years and tell people that one day man will fly faster than a bird and land on the moon.
FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light.
Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us.
Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?
There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny.
I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel.
So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.