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Those UFOs over Kyiv (Mick West)

#1
C C Offline
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/12/ufos-over-kyiv/

EXCERPTS: . . . These are extraordinary claims—astonishing if true—and my immediate thought was that the paper[PDF] was a hoax, possibly a student prank. Surely real scientists would not be claiming to have detected fleets of UFOs over the skies of Ukraine. There was, as yet, no media attention, but people in the UFO community were starting to get excited. Was this the scientific proof of UFOs that they had long waited for?

I read the paper. It was surprisingly light on detail [...] The authors described ... a “special observation technique,” the first of many red flags. Far from being “special,” those numbers are basically the default settings for tens of millions of cameras in daylight. Any time an iPhone shoots a video in sunlight, it’s going to be using an exposure time of between 1/500th and 1/4000th of a second and a frame rate of 30–60 Hz (25–50 in some regions).

[...] So it brings up the obvious question: If the Ukrainians were doing nothing special, then why didn’t everyone see these UFOs? The answer, I quickly deduced, was that perhaps they did.

One of the images in the paper looked familiar. It was a composite image of three frames showing three dark shapes traversing what looked like a cropped portion of the image. The shapes were mostly black or dark grey with a few lighter pixels on the sides. The lighting and shape varied from one to the next, and they were unevenly spaced.

In my experience, a good percentage of the skill used in successful UFO investigations is simple recognition. Here I recognized them as something I’d seen many times myself: flies.

[...] While I’d been looking into this, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine had not been inactive. Concerned about the international attention the paper had been getting, they organized a presentation by the main author, Boris Zhilyaev, to give him a chance to explain himself. He failed to do this, giving what amounted to a rambling version of the paper with no additional information.

With no good answers, NAS of Ukraine had two of their top scientists review the paper. The academy eventually concluded:

The article is pseudo-scientific in form and content, the methods are simply full of inaccuracies, simplifications, fabrications and outright manipulations. The conclusions are mostly absurd, far-fetched and have nothing to do with simple natural explanations of observed phenomena. Considering that the authors quite knowingly passed off this work as an already printed article in a professional peer-reviewed journal, I consider it a deception and falsification that casts the shadow of pseudoscience on the entire GAO. (Veles 2022)


[...] along I come, an uncredentialed skeptic. I correctly point out flaws in the study, but because I lack a PhD, it’s very easy to choose to ignore me. Even when PhDs and the voice of an entire academy refute the paper, there’s still now an unfortunate perception that pro-UFO PhDs are equally likely to be correct. This is the problem of “false balance.” (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Kornee Offline
From the last section at: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/12/ufos-over-kyiv/

"Uncertain Demarcation

UFO research sometimes hovers near the borders of pseudoscience and sometimes is deep within that territory. This raises issues of scientific demarcation. How do we know if research is rigorously grounded in scientific principles or is more like hopeful pseudoscience?

Normally, if you were presented with an online article that stated the authors had observed “squadrons of ships” flying at impossible speeds in the air, then you’d assume it was pseudoscience. But then you see the paper was written by who seem to be three respected scientists from a legitimate institution. The content is the same, but people give it far more credence.

Then along I come, an uncredentialed skeptic. I correctly point out flaws in the study, but because I lack a PhD, it’s very easy to choose to ignore me.

Even when PhDs and the voice of an entire academy refute the paper, there’s still now an unfortunate perception that pro-UFO PhDs are equally likely to be correct. This is the problem of “false balance.”

To address this, we must move past simply comparing how many PhDs one “side” of the argument has and instead find ways of presenting the analysis of the evidence in a way that is more accessible to everyone so they might more accurately see the reality of the situation."


I sympathize with Mick West on that predicament, but generalize to other more sacrosanct arenas. For instance, GR as 'the' classical theory of gravity. The 'gold standard'.
Amusing to read the various inputs at http://www.sciforums.com/threads/there-i...le.165738/
Every participant takes it as a given that BHs exist, and only squabble over how to interpret the inherent weirdness. When 'all those experts can't be wrong' is uncritically accepted, thinking is narrowed.

I have shown elsewhere that a relatively simple analysis of a thin spherical shell shows up the internal inconsistency of Schwarzschild metric thus 'BH'. When pointed out to a member there who started a thread on 'How black is a BH' - he had a convoluted variant on 'Hawking Radiation' in mind - the response was to abandon his own thread and never come back!
Other members there who had some familiarity with GR just kept silent. That's how it goes in the real world. institutionalized inertia/prejudice.
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