Yep, I agree that the agnostic approach makes a lot of sense when dealing with UFOs. I haven’t read Kean’s book yet, but plan on doing it real soon!

And my, there are some crazies on youtube – “fake planes”, LED planes, chinese lanterns, it’s so depressing.

If only people would drop the credulous nonsense and focus on the interesting phenomena, as you suggest, then real scientists might be less repelled.

Amen to that.

But fuzzy shaky video’s don’t prove anything. If we don’t know what it is on the video, those video’s aren’t proof of intelligent life outside, only possible proof of unintelligent life on our own planet.

I know what you mean.

I try to separate the wheat from the chaff here at UFOEYES, and sometimes it turns into a debunking spree, but I guess I’m just trying to keep some perspective.

Thanks for your comment and insightful words!

Sometimes I try to ‘solve’ a video on youtube by suggesting that it shows lense flare, balloon(s), asian lantern, star or planet.
Often I get the reply “So you’re so stupid that you don’t believe in live outside out planet? Or are you waiting till the little green man land?” and such. As if by saying that 1 video can be solved, all can be solved. As if a “ufo-believer” must believe that every video is real an unexplainable.

Actually I am convinced that there are many civilisations on other planets that are much older then our own planet. I even think it would be possible that they found a way to visit other planets, including ours.
But fuzzy shaky video’s don’t prove anything. If we don’t know what it is on the video, those video’s aren’t proof of intelligent life outside, only possible proof of unintelligent life on our own planet.

I believe we have to be very sceptic, ruthless even, to investigate every ufo-sighting, in order to end up with a small hard core of totally unexplainable cases that will point us in the direction of a solution.

Keep up the good work!

And of course most of them fairly quickly become /identified/ flying objects. And this is much more the case now than it was in the 50s when radar tech was not so good and paranoia and secrecy were much worse too.

If only people would drop the credulous nonsense and focus on the interesting phenomena, as you suggest, then real scientists might be less repelled.