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thank you Bill nye!

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I think the notion that superstition, spiritualism, and religious notions of the origins of mankind and the universe ever going away is completely unsupportable. The problem is one of education and the abandonment of culture and tradition. Historically speaking that just doesn't happen. Religions mutate and reform occasionally but there is always one haven or another for supernaturalism, spiritualism, and that sort of thing to gravitate to, and if not, new ones are created on the fly. The history of religion and spiritualism if full of just that sort thing.
 
You may be right there Angelo, there are plenty of 'classic' cases that are nothing of the sort and should indeed be debunked in public at each opportunity -I remember watching Bill once on Larry King and he annoyed me beyond belief when Robert Hastings was on with a few others. The thing that annoyed me was that none of the guests once mentioned aliens or alien space-craft but Bill kept on bringing it up in what I can only imagine was an attempt to muddy the waters deliberately.

Every event mentioned was only mentioned in terms of the known facts, nobody made the leap to aliens and where everyone was being careful NOT to make assumptions about aliens etc but Bill I think, realised that the guests were indeed being careful and reasonable so it looked like he felt that because their arguments were so reasonable that he should at least 'debunk' them in the eyes of the viewing public by mentioning aliens.

The only thing the guests were there to say was their own experiences to do with unknown things in the sky and certainly not to make the jump to aliens (we know that the public too often take 'ufo' as 'flying saucer') and I think Bill deliberately threw the guests in with the true believer lot unfairly as none of them could be called true believers.

As to whatever Bill Nye does otherwise I don't have a problem with him. Rant over!;)
 
I watched that interview, and to be fair, Hastings kept saying "we" have nothing like that. The "we" seemed to imply the human race.

Listen to what he says in this clip:


I like how calm Bill Nye was compared to the rest. He was also respectful, unlike Jacobs.
 
Angel of Ioren said:
I watched that interview, and to be fair, Hastings kept saying "we" have nothing like that. The "we" seemed to imply the human race.

Listen to what he says in this clip:


I like how calm Bill Nye was compared to the rest. He was also respectful, unlike Jacobs.
Click to expand...
I took it as meaning "we" as in the U.S. military. Though I could be wrong. The science guy annoyed the shit out of me too on that show. He is a classic example of merely suggesting impropriety on the part of e observer or other facts not in evidence to support his side of the argument. To suggest that the guards were drinking on duty is freakin' outrageous. Where is the documentation? If you are gonna play the "show me evidence" card you can not toss out unsupported bullshit statements and expect to see it passed over. He is as uninformed as most debunkers are. He can not discuss the particulars of a case because he goes into the subject with a preconceived notion of what he will find. Therefore, he just doesn't care to really take an objective look. Skeptics are extremely important to this bastard community. But, wholesale debunkery should garner as much real respect as those who believe every Colleen Thomas video chronicles the "truth".
 
Ron Collins said:
I took it as meaning "we" as in the U.S. military. Though I could be wrong. The science guy annoyed the shit out of me too on that show. He is a classic example of merely suggesting impropriety on the part of e observer or other facts not in evidence to support his side of the argument. To suggest that the guards were drinking on duty is freakin' outrageous. Where is the documentation? If you are gonna play the "show me evidence" card you can not toss out unsupported bullshit statements and expect to see it passed over. He is as uninformed as most debunkers are. He can not discuss the particulars of a case because he goes into the subject with a preconceived notion of what he will find. Therefore, he just doesn't care to really take an objective look. Skeptics are extremely important to this bastard community. But, wholesale debunkery should garner as much real respect as those who believe every Colleen Thomas video chronicles the "truth".
Click to expand...

Listen to what Jacobs says at the end. He specifically mentions that no one on Earth had this technology.
 
So he thinks the object he filmed was probably extraterrestrial. What's wrong with that? Dr Jacobs surely was overreacting, but try to imagine having some experience you think is definitely real and significant, reporting it, and afterwards indirectly being called a liar and/or kook because of that. I would probably get a little agitated, too, especially if I thought of the many credible witnesses (not talking about true believers or charlatans here) whose sighting was probably just as convincing as your own, who have been ridiculed over the years with the help of these "scientific" debunkers.
 
But that's the thing - Bill Nye was just saying it's okay to just say it's a UFO. Why jump to the conclusion that it's an alien. That's the problem with this field. People seem to have a problem with saying, I don't know. You can throw out ideas, which is totally fine, but don't get mad when someone says you may have been mistaken that it was an alien space craft.
 
Bill Nye was just saying it's okay to just say it's a UFO.
Click to expand...
But what he really means is that it was probably nothing unusual at all. At least that's how I understand it (and Dr Jacobs probably too). But Dr Jacobs clearly thinks that it was very unusual. I'd have to look at the film to decide if he might be right, but unfortunately that film has been confiscated. So I can't judge about that. But Dr Jacobs is right, Bill Nye can't either.
 
I don't know how this works, if these guys who are consulted as sceptics on shows like this Larry King UFO thing, volunteer at all or if they just think, well, someone has to answer that. But I guess, part of their motivation is to be more present on the screen. If you are a popular scientist or science show talking head that means people should see you on the screen as often as possible.

But for most of them it also means that you can in no way admit to any personal interest in the matter discussed. So even if Bill Nye had researched the better UFO sighting cases, he couldn't say so, because that would probably mean that most of his fellow scientists and a big part of his fandom get suspicious of him. I wonder what the repercussions were after Michio Kaku commented favourably on Leslie Kean's UFO book.
 
Polterwurst said:
But what he really means is that it was probably nothing unusual at all. At least that's how I understand it (and Dr Jacobs probably too). But Dr Jacobs clearly thinks that it was very unusual. I'd have to look at the film to decide if he might be right, but unfortunately that film has been confiscated. So I can't judge about that. But Dr Jacobs is right, Bill Nye can't either.
Click to expand...

Are you sure that's what he really means? Listen to what he says. He's implying that it's unusual to jump to the conclusion that it isn't a human vehicle. To counteract that, Jacobs had to make fun of him and incorrectly imply that Bill Nye saying "it's quite a leap" was some sort of personal attack. That's not an attack, it's an observation. Jacobs was the one attacking him by making fun of what was and still is a highly successful career teaching science to children.
 
As I said, Jacobs was overreacting without any doubt. And no, I can't be sure that Nye just wanted to debunk his story. But I get that gut feeling when I see people like him or Dr Shermer, Dr DeGrasse Tyson etc. who are invited to these shows as "the voice of reason".

I really wish, Jacobs hadn't reacted that way, because that obviously doesn't help his credibility. But people reporting unusual sigtings always get ridiculed and smirked at so I guess he was expecting an attack and didn't even stop to thnk much about what was actually being said.

I'm afraid many people don't trust these "science guys" any more, regardless of what they say, thereby ignoring the fact that science is the one thing that can shed some light into these dark fringe areas.I've had some discussions with "true believers" about that.

That's the reason I was totally gobsmacked when Dr Kaku came out with his review of Leslie Kean's book. "Lookit that, here's a poular TV science guy saying the unthinkable". Haven't heard anything from him since, but I do hope that this didn't turn out to be a career stopper.
 
Hi Angelo. Ok, I'll stipulate that Hastings overreacted and I'll even stipulate that Hastings eagerly moved to the ETH explaination. Will you stipulate that given that the reported circumstances were true and happened just as reported that the ETH conclusion could be a valid explaination?

What are the more down to Earth explainations?

Did you watch the entire show? Can you identify anything the Bill says that is incorrect, overreaching, or otherwise unsupported by documented fact?
 
Hi Ron,

Yeah, I watched the show. The notion that some of the people on the base were drinking is silly and unsupported. He should not have said that.
It could have been a military test of some kind. It could have been mis-identification. It could have been a lot of stuff that we know for a fact actually exist. We don't know for a fact that aliens are visiting this planet.
Who knows though. I just thought Bill Nye was calm, and the UFO guys came off looking nutty.
 
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