> Someone in this thread might scoff at testimony describing unmistakably unidentifiable phenomena that lacks compelling video evidence, while simultaneously reposting "I believe victims" on Twitter. Pick one. Do you think credible witness testimony is admissible, or do you not? Millenia of justice systems are built on this concept.
In a justice system, testimony is trusted to the extent that we believe those people saw what they did. Their opinions on what it might mean is completely inadmissible even for mundane phenomena. Even then, we test these accounts by asking probing questions, we don't just accept them at face value.
Let's take this example:
> I personally have sane family members, who, in a group, circa 1970, had a close encounter in broad daylight so unmistakable there is no way it could have been anything but an intelligently controlled flying object with incomprehensible capabilities.
In a court of law, their testimony that some light/object visible to humans displayed some behavior they describe could be accepted. Of course, the opposition lawyer would be free to ask probing questions about their mental and physical state at the time, their history of similar claims, their pre-existing beliefs about such phenomena, the extent to which they each personally observed these things versus being influenced by the others etc.
Let's assume that the lawyer didn't successfully cast any doubt in their minds. The next step would be to bring in expert witnesses describing known phenomena that could match the observations that were described, at least to a great extent - flares, parallax, even exotic phenomena like ball lightning or St Elmo's fire could be described, and evidence could be brought that people observing these understood phenomena had previously described them in terms similar to the witness testimony we heard earlier.
In the end, the jury would conclude something based on the preponderence of the evidence or on the beyond reasonable doubt standards - in the latter case, concluding aliens beyond reasonable doubt is impossible, and I believe it would still be extremely unlikely even for the preponderence of the evidence.
In a justice system, testimony is trusted to the extent that we believe those people saw what they did. Their opinions on what it might mean is completely inadmissible even for mundane phenomena. Even then, we test these accounts by asking probing questions, we don't just accept them at face value.
Let's take this example:
> I personally have sane family members, who, in a group, circa 1970, had a close encounter in broad daylight so unmistakable there is no way it could have been anything but an intelligently controlled flying object with incomprehensible capabilities.
In a court of law, their testimony that some light/object visible to humans displayed some behavior they describe could be accepted. Of course, the opposition lawyer would be free to ask probing questions about their mental and physical state at the time, their history of similar claims, their pre-existing beliefs about such phenomena, the extent to which they each personally observed these things versus being influenced by the others etc.
Let's assume that the lawyer didn't successfully cast any doubt in their minds. The next step would be to bring in expert witnesses describing known phenomena that could match the observations that were described, at least to a great extent - flares, parallax, even exotic phenomena like ball lightning or St Elmo's fire could be described, and evidence could be brought that people observing these understood phenomena had previously described them in terms similar to the witness testimony we heard earlier.
In the end, the jury would conclude something based on the preponderence of the evidence or on the beyond reasonable doubt standards - in the latter case, concluding aliens beyond reasonable doubt is impossible, and I believe it would still be extremely unlikely even for the preponderence of the evidence.