Which makes total sense.

I do have to call you on an inconsistency, Thom. You claim in the above that ‘“Professor Doctor John Something saw a UFO” is about as bad an evidence as is “Bubba saw a UFO while driving his truck at night”.’

However, you had posted something on nine eleven ‘conspiracy theories’ before, and there you say that the Delft University people that you claim debunked the nine eleven conspiracy theory/ies “actually know what they are talking about.” This is an ‘authority argument’ as well.

“And so every argument was torn apart..”, you claim.

How unfortunate that this was one of the worst exercises of junk science ever performed.

- First, it uses straw man tactics: first select what claims you will debunk, then debunk that. Nothing on WTC7 here. It also uses the Pentagon hoax which to serious nine eleven researchers is unimportant. Whatever went in there, to discuss it is to distract from the much more convincing evidence. It’s just one of the planes. More interesting is why the billion dollar air defense system at the Pentagon it-bloody-self totally failed - unmentioned by the “Independent” 9/11 Omission Report.

- Second, it uses a “grass is usually gree - if it isn’t green, it isn’t grass” argument. This is the argument “the building went down where it was hit - therefore it was not a controlled demolition, since controlled demolitions are performed in such a way that the building starts collapsing from the bottom. You might as well say that since airplanes usually fly, it can’t have been an airplane that crashed into the mountain. The fact is that, for one reason or another, the skills that the military possesses to blow up stuff in a very sophisticated way is greatly underestimated.

- Third, what does using a flight simulator prove? Do you seriously believe that flying in a flight simulator is in any way psychologically the same thing as personally trying to crash a plane into a building?

- Fourth, what calculations? What actually did they “calculate”? Why did the buildings keep standing nice and quiet for an hour after the collapse and then suddenly “gave up”? Even though the fires were far from powerful enough to do anything substantial to steel, and even though the energy of the impact of the planes, naturally, was immediately absorbed by the steel (the buildings, flexibel as they were, actually shook a bit at impact) and couldn’t have played any role whatsoever in whatever moved that building down to the ground.

-Fifth, how can one study the hypothesis of a controlled demolition without using the available steel samples - saved from the destruction that faced most of the steel, which was of course immediately shipped to China. These samples, as demonstrated by Steven Jones - o my god, a real scientist! - are very suspicious, showing clear signs of targeted, extremely high temperature explosions.

There is motive, means and opportunity on the part of intelligence agencies, the notoriously treacherous neocons (how many times do these people have to lie before people get enough and stage a coup d’etat in the States?), the lease owner of the WTC complex, and the military, and there is abundant evidence that something happened in those buildings that was more than a mechanical collapse. No steel building produces so much energy when it collapses that pools of molten metal are found in the rubble for weeks after the collapse.
It is also impossible for those buildings (without a controlled demolition) to not have toppled - how on earth can they (twice, for holy mother statistics’ sake!) take the path of most g**damn resistance? Have the NIST guys enjoyed at least *some* physics education?

Now, according to Thom, I am a, quote, moronic idiot, unquote, because I don’t believe what Fox News and the White House have been telling us for the past six years. On the other hand, I assume that, for example, the New York Times are not moronic idiots, although they have completely failed to expose the fraud called the 9/11 Omission Report, for example by failing to notice that the collapse of WTC7 was mentioned there more or less in a footnote, although this is the very smoking gun that proves that “fishy” is a bit of an understatement here.

There is nothing about the WTC7 collapse that any sane human being with any brain cell left can explain in any other way than as a carefully planned controlled demolition, as, Thom, you know has been admitted on the very tv program you referred to - an open ending that means nothing is resolved by the TU people at all.

Now I wouldn’t care if this thing was just an isolated event in the remote past that doesn’t affect any of us. Sadly, we are still being brainwashed by this terror threat crap every day.

You mean THIS Stanton T. Friedman?

“He has published more than 80 UFO-related scientific papers, though few, if any of them have been published in peer reviewed journals.”

And of course this gem:

“Given his engineering background and work on the Hill Star Map in addition to Roswell, Friedman has concluded that in July 1947 an electrodynamically propelled scout vehicle from a large, interstellar “mothership” originating from Zeta Reticuli crashed in the New Mexico desert, perhaps due to a lightning storm.”

And he means this Zeta Reticuli, right? The theory that “greys” come from ZR mostly stem from the Betty and Barney Hill abduction - Betty Hill drew a vague starmap… Under hypnosis, for crying out loud - a technique which, as said by the APA, cannot be used for retrieving memories, as it is impossible to distinguish fake memories from real ones.

Yeah, Eugenia, this Stanton sounds like a very reliable source. He builds most of UFO premises regarding Roswell on a most likely fake abduction story, a story with no empirical evidence whatsoever.

You only strengthened my point here.

Look Eugenia, there’s money to be made in the UFO industry. Hence, anything that’s not properly peer reviewed is unreliable.

He never did. But he researched for it. That’s what matters.

So, all those people who said, for centuries, that the earth was flat, had a point? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

So, all those people who believed god created lightning and thunder, had a point? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

All the people who still say the white “race” is superior to others, have a point? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

And so on. Not a very convincing argument, Eugenia.

Don’t talk nonsense.

I’m sure open to the possibility, but if there is NO tangible evidence AT ALL, then I’m sorry, but I won’t waste my time on it. And contrary to what you seem to think, “Professor Doctor John Something saw a UFO” is about as bad an evidence as is “Bubba saw a UFO while driving his truck at night”. Eye witness reports mean fcuk all. A few years of psychology will teach you that if there is one thing in this world that is not to be trusted in any way, it’s eye witness reports.

Until anyone can show me tangible proof, other than unreliable eye witness reports, aliens visiting this planet is just nonsensical, baseless mass hysteria. That is not to say aliens don’t exist (statistically, it’s hard to argue they don’t, but again, proof is non-existent).

It’s the quality of having an open scientific/scholarly mind that enables one to not straightly dismiss the below claims. I’ve met an astonishing amount of people even in “academic circles” that are simply *not* ready to even consider the below list if what they’ve always believed was the above list.

I’m more than willing to accept the second list of bullet points you presented. If you provide me with decent research and good arguments, I *will* change my mind, no doubt about it.

No. 5 is interesting, as proof of Jesus’ actual existence is meagre, at best. Oh and about no. 6, don’t question Erasmus [insert smileyface]!

Let me give Thom a few examples, and I’ll try not to make it about 9/11 although that is imho still a major lie, if not *the* major lie of our time. But this is all about “generally accepted” vs. “actually critically appreciated”.

I studied Hebrew, Arabic, Judaism, that kind of stuff. Before and during studying I was exposed to a series of common, if not virtually universally shared, assumptions. Here are a few of them:

1) Christianity is a descendant of Judaism.
2) The dead sea scrolls were written by a sect of religious extremists who had escaped to the desert to lead a pure life. Their settlement (well, its ruin) can still be observed to this day.
3) Muhammad was the founder of Islam, he was a historical person and we know more about him than about any other great founder of any major religion.
4) After being converted to Islam, the Arabs conquered a vast portion of the world known to them.
5) Jesus, some kind of eschatological prophet/revolutionary, was killed by the Romans and buried in Jerusalem.
6) Erasmus, one of the great Humanists, wanted to publish the New Testament in its original, Greek, and so he did - the first scholarly edition of the Greek NT, bringing Christianity back to its roots.
7) The single most used past tense in biblical Hebrew depends on a common conjunction (skip that, it’s Semitic linguistics :P )

I stumbled upon very compelling reasons to stop “believing” in every single one of those very commonly accepted “truths” (no matter of one is interested in it or not, it’s of relatively major importance for a fair amount of people).

1) Historically, linguistically, culturally, etc., it is safe to argue that both Christianity and Judaism share one and the same ancestor (call it Hellenistic proto-Judaism or whatever cool academic term you can think of).
2) The Dead Sea Scrolls, popular with people watching National Geographic Channel, was not written by a sect of desert dwellers, it was most probably a hurried repository of books from Jerusalem that could have been written by virtually anyone of the literate elite (remember that the Romans were trying to destroy the city, what better thing to do with scrolls than dump ‘em in the desert?).
But, what about the sect? That myth was all based on one badly informed line in Pliny (but hey, who do you trust if you’re a 20th century catholic priest: the Romans of course!). Their fictitious “settlement” was really a military fortress.
3) It is entirely possible that Muhammad, as a historical person, did not exist. His name can be quite easily translated as an adjective in Arabic, and (don’t be shocked) is only mentioned 4 or 5 times in the Qur’an. The other “sources” on his life are from more than 200 years after him, which is much longer than the 40 years in Jesus’ case (with multiple sources). Hence, we know much more about the earliest origins of Christianity than we know about Muhammad.
4) Probably, the Arabs didn’t conquer a thing. Islamization was gradual and hard to trace, and the conquest stories are just that.. stories by rulers trying to embellish their glorious ast (proof is in the coins of the time).
5) Jesus’ grave has never been found by archaeologists, but apart from that, there are fascinating textual aberrations and hints that makes one wonder what Jesus actually did after “resurrection”: eat fish? Medical and text proof has been offered for the thesis that he did not die upon the cross, but instead was bought off of it by rich friends who bought off the guards, then treated his wounds and taken out of the land.
6) It has been proven recently that all Erasmus wanted was to republish the Latin NT in the way he thought it was best. In order to give more prestige to this work, he added to it one random and actually very bad Greek manuscript (which was in no way the original for the Latin version he had printed), partly out of misjudgment, and partly because it was the only manuscript he could lay his hands on.
7) .. never mind. :)

Now why on earth do I mention this?
It’s the quality of having an open scientific/scholarly mind that enables one to not straightly dismiss the below claims. I’ve met an astonishing amount of people even in “academic circles” that are simply *not* ready to even consider the below list if what they’ve always believed was the above list.
Entire academic careers have been partly built on number 2, 3 and 4, and to completely revise that means to render useless years of work.
In a similar fashion, after having believed for decades that JFK was killed by a lone gunman, or after having believed for years that 9/11 was (.. you know the drill), something inside every one of us (including yours truly) instinctively resists the thought of this having been completely different in reality.

Now all you then have to do is check some facts in the most ruthless way that you can. Take the red pill, or.. :P

Closing your mind completely to the possibility, is as bad as the absolute fanatics who are the ones who give a bad name to these things anyway. For example, you can choose to read Standton’s UFO research books (he is a nuclear physicist scientist btw with an interest in the phenomena), or you can go read absolute crap that Fat-Johny who posted on a UFO forum.

Filter the information. But do NOT take it out of the picture. Especially if you want to become a journalist.