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Case 20-023 CE 1 (California) closed as Unidentified

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Our investigation of a close encounter with a black rectangle in San Francisco, California on the early morning of the 30th of August 2014 has been closed as Unidentified. We found the witness credible and note the existence of contemporaneous documentation, but were unable to find any corroboration.

Read our redacted Report of Investigation.

Artist’s Sketch of Close Encounter

 Unidentified Science 10 – Images as Evidence

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There are two things we hear a lot about photographs and videos of UFOs:

  1. It is so easy to fake a photo or video now that they can’t serve as proof of anything.
  2. If UFOs are real, why aren’t there more compelling, bulletproof photos and videos?

It would seem that these two questions are at odds, and to some extent I think they are. However, let me just deal with the first one now – are photos and videos useless?

Proof, Evidence and Truth

Let’s start with a distinction I think I have made before, but needs to be reasserted from time to time – that is there is an important difference between proof and evidence. I’m not splitting hairs here.

Proof is something we basically never get in the real world. In the abstract realms of mathematics and logic, we can prove a proposition, and if you have ever taken an abstract mathematics course, you know that proofs can be very hard to come by. Outside of mathematics, proof is basically not available, nor is it necessary, or even desirable. Some doubt, some willingness to question, is healthy. So, we should never look to a photo or video as “proof” of anything.

What we do ask for is evidence, and the more the merrier. As Christopher Hitchens once said, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

If you have more than one line of evidence, that is far more convincing than just one, and if you have multiple lines of  evidence that all converge on the same consistent set of ideas without serious contradiction, then we can, in time, reach a level that we call “truth.” Let me take the liberty of defining truth operationally  as some assertion (or better yet, a system of consistent assertions) about the world that you can act upon and think in terms of with confidence.  We tend to take our truths for granted, but they require generations of careful, hard work and emerge from many years of bitter controversy. It is also the case that some truths may one day have to make way for stronger, more powerful truths.

But let’s not throw the word “Evidence” around too carelessly. A video or photo isn’t evidence, unless we specify meaningfully what we think it is evidence of.  Actually, without a hypothesis in play, images are just a collection of numbers.

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Conversation 19 – Dr. Joan R. Bird

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Recorded: May 5, 2022
Duration: 1 hour 47 minutes

Marsha Barnhart talks to Dr. Joan Bird, author of the book Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials: Extraordinary Stories of Documented Sightings and Encounters.

Dr. Bird is a Zoologist who specialized in animal behavior. She moved to Montana in 1973 to pursue graduate studies in zoology at the University of Montana, and in 1983 she completed her Ph.D. on inter-island variation in West Indian finches. Dr. Bird worked as a conservation biologist for the Montana Environmental Information Center, The Nature Conservancy, and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. She has also worked as a fire lookout in both Washington and Montana. Joan freelanced as a nature interpretation writer and has written numerous articles for scientific and conservation publications. Actively involved in women’s empowerment, she was a columnist for Crone Magazine. A lifelong student of unexplained phenomena and long-time member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, she has worked as a community educator and change agent. 

When Joan was a teenager, her mother had a near death experience. This engendered a lifelong interest in exploring paranormal and esoteric subjects. And, although steeped in scientific materialism from her academic training, Dr. Bird eventually began to study and attempt to understand the inexplicable.

In this episode of API Conversations, Marsha and Dr. Bird discuss the contents of her book, Montana UFOs and Extraterrestrials, and delve into a host of related philosophies, concepts and theories regarding UFO’s, the ET Hypothesis, the Nature of Reality, the possibility of Past Lives and the value of Consciousness Studies. 

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