From: Mark Cashman <mcashman@ix.netcom.com> Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 01:21:36 -0400 Fwd Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:39:51 -0400 Subject: Re: IFOs >Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 22:20:13 +0100 >To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net> >From: John Rimmer <jrimmer@magonia.demon.co.uk> >Subject: Re: IFOs >Unfortunately this introduces a very subjective element into the >gathering of statistical data. Any individual investigator's >view of "paydirt data" will vary. It is clear that many >researcher's view of paydirt is anything which will support the >idea that at least some UFO reports represent structured craft, >hence vague lights-in-the-sky type reports are of little >interest to them, and can be ignored when compiling statistics, >inflating the "unexplained" cases at the expense of the >"insufficient data" column. Hi, John! Actually, there can be little doubt as to what represents "paydirt" in any science. It is that observation which contains the greatest amount of information. In the UFO field, that means high angular size observations with the longest available durations (at least for those of us who accept the OEH (Objective Existence Hypothesis)). Yes, some good information can be extracted (with a healthy respect for the error bars) from relatively low content reports. But a simple comparison between a high quality close encounter and even a high quality quarter-degree NL shows the difference in available data (which, of course, relates to Hynek's "strangeness"). >But researchers with a different agenda, promoting the >earth-lights hypothesis for instance, will find the distant >star-like objects extremely interesting, and would want to >include them in any definition of a UFO worth studying. Inclusion of such reports would seriously degrade to S/N ratio in the data under study. If this is the sort of thing EL proponents consider acceptable data, no wonder their conclusions fail to be supportable. History tells us that such reports are more likely than high angular size reports to represent a "known". If they are instead accepted as unknowns, they corrupt all of the results to which they are applied. >Ultimately we have to accept that the figure on which we must >base our percentage of "unknowns" is the totality of events >which are reported by the percipients as UFO events, and not >just the ones we personally happen to find interesting. That's a position which would hardly be acceptable in any science. Can you imagine an ornithology which performed its study of birds by including observations of insects, on the rationale that specks too small to resolve could be birds? ------ Mark Cashman, creator of The Temporal Doorway at http://www.temporaldoorway.com - Original digital art, writing, music and UFO research - UFO cases, analysis, classification systems, and more... http://www.temporaldoorway.com/ufo/index.htm
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