Oberg rebuts Elizondo

“If this was a court of law, we are beyond reasonable doubt.” --Luis Elizondo

        Elizondo is the former Pentagon official who was responsible for the recent (last December) release of gun camera images of UFO-type objects; the fruits of the five-year-long Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. More deets can be read in an online article by something called "Collective Evolution."

        At the time James Oberg wrote, on this blog, "ufology has sadly disappointed, never becoming a science." Now he reacts to this latest bid to give the fantasy some respectability.

James Oberg writes...
        The 'court of law' analogy is logically fallacious, and its widespread use does not indicate reliable rationality or serious intellectual capabilities on the part of those who use it. All the court of law is concerned with is the cause of a crime whose existence has already been established -- WHO is guilty, not whether or not the crime [or the anomaly] exists. Imagine how strong eyewitness testimony would have to be, against an accused murderer in order for a successful verdict of murder with no victim's body, no missing hypothetical victim, no means, no motive, nothing to connect the accused with the alleged crime.

        Equally fatal to this preposterous legalistic analogy is the onus probandi, the in-going presumption of innocence of the accused in a court of law [in the UFO case the 'accused' is science-as-we-know-it] -- whereas in the UFO debate, it is claimed that the failure to produce a prosaic explanation is by default proof of the guilt of the default assumption of normalcy, which assumes a non-extraordinary event. This is the classic 'argument by elimination' with the unspoken [because it's unprovable] cheater-assumption that a complete list of potential explanations is on hand for testing [with phenomena such as UFOs it never is].

        Reliance on that non-logical thinking about the implications of alleged explanatory elimination leads to the same malodorous result as bovine alimentary elimination.