There are two things we hear a lot about photographs and videos of UFOs:
- It is so easy to fake a photo or video now that they can’t serve as proof of anything.
- 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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