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Are witness accounts “evidence?” | The power of voice | The nature of belief.
86 Plays18 days ago
Let's dig in. Email me at: UFOFocusPodcast@proton.me
Somewhere In the Skies (check out "Witness Accounts" episodes!). https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/somewhere-in-the-skies/id1227858637
NUFORC recordings and more by Isaac Koi
https://uploads.isaackoi.com/2023/12/huge-audio-collection-now-added-to-my.html
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to UFO Focus. I'm your host, Isaiah. And I should just disclose, I'm i'm a bit under the weather. I'm quite stuffed up.
00:00:14
Speaker
i gotta I'm going to have to edit out all these snuffles. But if you listened to my last episode, you might be thinking, well, this guy said he had an epiphany and all that, but let's see the next episode.
00:00:28
Speaker
Well, fair enough. So I'm going to try and bang this one out with perhaps, well, hopefully sort of minimal but necessary exposition.
Skepticism and Credibility in UFO Discourse
00:00:41
Speaker
So I titled this episode, least provisionally, ah so that I would remember what to talk about. So I titled this episode, Our Witness Accounts, Quote Unquote, Evidence.
00:00:57
Speaker
The Power of Voice. and the nature of belief, which is a lot to tackle, especially when I'm just trying to bang this out because I'm sick and tired. But let's see if we can do it. Okay, so when we talk about UFOs, et cetera, right, um the skeptical always ask more or less the same question, which is, what's the evidence And this gets complicated because it's like, what's the evidence for what?
00:01:32
Speaker
Right? Like, what what do you... And what people usually mean is what is the evidence for what we call the ET hypothesis, the ETH, right? The hypothesis that UFOs represent extraterrestrial life, which, you know, has generally meant... ah Some other life from another planet... In another solar system... From wherever.
00:02:02
Speaker
Now of course... Once you get deep into the UFO thing... You might begin to doubt the extraterrestrial hypothesis or feel that it it's sort of maybe be insufficient.
00:02:13
Speaker
That's certainly where I'm getting to. But um anyway, that doesn't matter. The the thing is that the that the skeptic, and there's nothing wrong with skepticism, right? But I always say, what's the evidence, right? Or the scientists, the scientific community, the academic communities that generally still shun this issue,
00:02:34
Speaker
That's sort of what they would say, right? They think go, well, what's where's the evidence?
00:02:41
Speaker
And the answer to that, I mean, there's lots of evidence. Proof is not evidence. Evidence is not proof, but there's tons of evidence. There's evidence in the form of...
00:02:54
Speaker
ah you know, documentation, for example, from, you know, extremely credible sources. For example, the United States government.
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, ah not entirely credible sources, but you know what I mean. There's... You know, there is scientific research on this. And in in fact, some very interesting stuff lately. We'll get to that in another episode. um But then, of course, there's also what we could call witness accounts.
Journalism vs. Science in Assessing Truth
00:03:29
Speaker
There's also people who have seen And...
00:03:36
Speaker
and
00:03:39
Speaker
what One thing I find sort of frustrating is that not only does the kind of skeptical community, ah not only do they tend to dismiss these witness accounts...
00:03:58
Speaker
So do the people in the UFO community. There's almost this idea that it's like, ah, it's just another story, you know. Okay, so-and-so so saw a light in the sky. You know, that doesn't mean anything. it doesn't add anything.
00:04:11
Speaker
But that's exactly wrong. I mean, any individual account, any individual account by an individual or a group of individuals, um Yeah, we might poke some holes in or we might say that's sort of insufficient. But what about the accumulation of, you know, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these accounts over, you know, let's say the last 80 years?
00:04:44
Speaker
um There were are there's a huge volume of accounts. Now, this, of course, is evidence
00:04:55
Speaker
And not only that, but it's data. You know, yeah, okay, sure, it's fair to say, like, ah if all you you're if you're asked to judge the UFO topic based on one person's story, okay, yeah.
00:05:15
Speaker
But if you have 10,000 stories as a data set, well... The question becomes more interesting, doesn't it? And this is where I advocate.
The Power of Firsthand Accounts
00:05:27
Speaker
I think I've said this before on the podcast, but I look, I'm a journalist. That's my trade. It's my career.
00:05:35
Speaker
But I think that journalist. So journalistic truth is no doubt ah more prone to error than scientific truth, which itself is more prone to error than mathematic proof. um However, for the higher degrees of proof, you have to exclude more and more stuff because it just doesn't cut it.
00:06:02
Speaker
Where I think journalism can be very good is journalism tries to, the the the proof, the level of evidence, etc., in good journalism, tries to meet the world that we actually live in.
00:06:20
Speaker
So like, well, I had a metaphor, not a metaphor, but an example. What was it? um Let's say you want to go see a movie at the theater.
00:06:31
Speaker
and But you're trying to decide, yeah, is is is it worth the the cost of the ticket plus, you know, your partner or maybe your kids, you know, to see this film?
00:06:44
Speaker
Is it good enough or does it suck? Now, what are you going to do? How are you going to try and get to the answer to that question? Well, I mean, if you had sufficient funding, right, you could hire an entire sort of committee, an entire so of staff to go and survey 1,000 people, ask each what they thought about the movie, and you could get that data.
00:07:14
Speaker
But you're very unlikely to do that. What you're much more likely to do is to call your friend. Say, oh, did did you like that movie? Oh, it was good? Okay, yeah, I'll go see it.
00:07:27
Speaker
Right? We have to... In the real world, we have to... assess truth as best we can in real time with limited resources and using our intuition about the world we live in you ask your friend is it a good movie because your intuition says that if your friend says yes then it probably is and if you know so to bring this back to ufo I think that the testimony, the accounts of people who have seen alleged UFO, UAP, is highly relevant.
00:08:09
Speaker
It's perhaps the best data source there is on this topic.
Main Segment: 1980s UFO Report
00:08:13
Speaker
Okay, so I think I covered my first bullet point. Maybe the third, too. I don't know. But I want to move on to the one I call the power of voice. And here is something else that I've really come to appreciate is that, OK, so let's accept that witness accounts, witness testimony, human testimony is evidence. It's not proof, but it's evidence that you can assess and weigh.
00:08:40
Speaker
Well, something that I think is amazing about the time we live in is that we have access to direct first-person testimony of UFO sightings.
00:08:56
Speaker
In other words, um until fairly recently, even if you were if you were just you know a regular person trying to research UFOs, and in reading about the accounts that witnesses have given, you are always reading it as mediated through third party, a newspaper, or whatever, right?
00:09:22
Speaker
And that can create a really two-dimensional image of the person giving the testimony. What audio In video, but really i think audio. I think it's better to listen to somebody than look at them.
00:09:38
Speaker
If you want to sort of get a picture of of them. that's That's me. But audio, of which there is suddenly abundance of um gives a very different picture of the individual giving this testimony. It allows you to evaluate who they are and, to my mind, the abundance of excellent knowledge.
00:10:08
Speaker
um audio testimony of ufo sightings uh by the way the best source for this right now is my colleague ryan sprague host of somewhere in the skies he has excuse me he has a series he just spun it out as its own podcast called witness accounts and it's just people telling their ufo stories ryan doesn't even ask them it's it's uh they They sort of record themselves just leaving a message almost. And it's amazing.
00:10:43
Speaker
And it's compelling. And that's the thing. That's what this all gets down to is what is compelling? What do you believe? How do you decide what you're going to believe? um I think that the ability to listen to people, ordinary people,
00:11:03
Speaker
describe their UFO encounters at their own pace, in their own words, with their own voice, that is so much more powerful than any sort of mediated account you might read somewhere.
00:11:21
Speaker
And with that monologue, I'm going to move on to the content of this episode. What I have for you tonight is, in my opinion, a real treat. ah We're about to listen to a recording, a couple recordings.
00:11:40
Speaker
No, wait, let's just do one. We'll just do one tonight, and then I'll come back with more. We're about to listen to a recording made by Well, a recording of a UFO report called into this UFO hotline.
00:11:59
Speaker
I don't have the exact date, but circa the early nineteen eighty s as far as I can tell. ah established by the National UFO Reporting Center, New Fork, which still exists today. You can report UFOs to them. They're the best database in America that's publicly available anyway.
00:12:22
Speaker
um You can submit reports online now, of course. But in the early days, this guy who founded it, Bob Gribble, had a hotline and would just take these calls and ah recorded at least some of them. And this is from an archive. Excuse me.
00:12:45
Speaker
This is from an archive of these recordings that was created by a woman named Wendy Connors. And I'll put a link to where I got this. It's from, i got this from a blog post by Isaac Koi, K-O-I. I'll put that link in there.
00:13:09
Speaker
It's an awesome resource, and I'm hoping to actually spend more episodes just going through these archives. They're amazing. But for now, and to just close off tonight, because, again, I'm sort of under the weather and need recover, let's just listen to this story, and I won't even comment on it.
00:13:29
Speaker
Check it out for yourself. Think about what a first-person UFO encounter sounds like. Does this person sound believable? i think they do. Listen to the incredible details.
00:13:42
Speaker
What do you think is going on? Does this sound like ah someone mistaking a conventional object? Doesn't to me. um you know, this is this is sort of where we begin to grapple with what I think is the best evidence at the end of the day that um
00:14:05
Speaker
whatever UFOs represent, it may be something incredible. And very real. Okay. Thanks, folks. Oh, thanks for... I have this music in the background.
00:14:18
Speaker
You know, it just made me more comfortable recording that way. So I hope you don't mind it or even like it. Okay. Thanks for tuning in. See you next
00:14:32
Speaker
incident. But it occurred some years ago in England on a military base. Okay. I'd like to hear about it.
00:14:42
Speaker
Let's see, it was about Chick Sands.
00:14:55
Speaker
What was that again? RAF Chick Sands. Okay. In Bedfordshire, England. I was a military dependent, and...
00:15:07
Speaker
The base is a satellite communications base. Yes. And it was in the afternoon, in the daylight, and a friend of mine and I were playing badminton in the backyard on the base.
00:15:27
Speaker
of And we were shouting and laughing and carrying on, and then we realized that we couldn't hear each other. There wasn't any sound at all.
00:15:39
Speaker
And we stopped and tried to talk to each other again and still couldn't hear each other and looked around and right above us at the top of the trees, they were very old oak trees.
00:15:53
Speaker
So they were maybe 40, 50 feet high, I guess. Okay. was a large, dark object. And We couldn't really tell anything from it because we could only see the bottom.
00:16:11
Speaker
And we got scared. We were just 14, 15 years old.
00:16:17
Speaker
she went inside the house to get her dad. And inside the house, he could hear her.
00:16:25
Speaker
And he came out to look at it, and we couldn't hear him talking to us either, and he couldn't hear us when he was outside. So he went back inside and alerted the post.
00:16:37
Speaker
And when he went back inside, it started moving off above the treetops. And as soon as it wasn't right above us, we could hear again. And I heard the siren.
00:16:48
Speaker
Post went on alert.
00:16:51
Speaker
And he came back out and watched it go off over the trees. And it was moving very slowly. And it moved over maybe, I don't know,
00:17:04
Speaker
three or four houses away. And they were housing units, so it was still fairly close. Yes. Oh, I see that. Okay. Mommy's on the phone right now, okay?
00:17:17
Speaker
Like I said, they were calling the alert, and he told me to go home, and I lived about two blocks away. So I ran home, and my father, who was
00:17:29
Speaker
senior NCO on the base, was just leaving. And all the people on alert went down in what we called the hole. All the satellite communication stuff was underground. Yes.
00:17:44
Speaker
And they went down in the hole, and the base was closed to all traffic. Whether you lived there or not, they closed the whole base. And he didn't come back until in the morning.
00:17:56
Speaker
My father didn't. And when he came back, I asked him what it was. And he said, I can't tell you. He said, all I can say is that it wasn't ours. And I said, you mean ours' ours, or you mean the earth's ours?
00:18:10
Speaker
And he wouldn't say anything else. Later, some years later, when we were talking about it in the family, I asked him again, and he said, it wasn't ours. And I said, well, I know that.
00:18:26
Speaker
he said, well, there are seven bases. like the one we were on and in the world, seven American bases like that. And he said there were sightings at all seven that same day.
00:18:40
Speaker
Oh, boy, that's strange. Yeah. Those bases are very small, extremely small. There's maybe, at the top, there's maybe 50 families there, plus, you know, a number of non-family people, unaccompanied people.
00:19:00
Speaker
Everything that's military is underground except the satellite antenna. And we called it the elephant cage. It's a great big circular
00:19:13
Speaker
structure, and it looks like a big round circus cage. Yes. And around the outside are these big white things that kind of look like missiles, but they're not missiles. It was a closed post at all times, except, you know, if you had some reason to go on, then the AP, the Air Police, would let you on and off. But you had to have some business there. It wasn't just open to the public.
00:19:39
Speaker
Okay. What shape did that object have? It was round. It was round from the bottom, anyway. And it was dark. Okay. I'd say, you know, dark black.
00:19:51
Speaker
But it was not shiny. It was a... It was just a dusky, dark color. Was there any estimate of size?
00:20:02
Speaker
It didn't seem very large. I'm not very good at size and distances, but I'd say...
00:20:21
Speaker
Okay. Stop that, please. Stop. Your mom is on the phone. I want you to be quiet. I should add, the reason I never mentioned this before was we were told not to talk about it.
00:20:38
Speaker
And my father, in that line of work, was in a very sensitive position, and it was not uncommon for us to be told that things that happened on base were not for public consumption.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yes. But it's always bothered me, and I know it's verifiable because other people saw it and the base went on alert. Okay.
00:21:02
Speaker
And Dad said it was tracked on their equipment. Yes.
00:21:13
Speaker
Okay. How close would that have been to you? How close was it to me? Yes. Like said, it was right at the top of an old maple tree, or an old oak tree, rather.
00:21:25
Speaker
But not quite overhead? It was overhead at first, and then it started moving off slowly. And then it as I was running home, I looked back because I was really scared.
00:21:37
Speaker
Okay. And it was moving off very quickly then. It just went zip. But before that, it was not moving...
00:21:49
Speaker
Like an airplane or a helicopter or anything like that, and there was no noise from it. Okay. um But it would move, like, to the right, know, 100 yards and then over a little bit, always on a level movement.
00:22:05
Speaker
Okay. Okay, and where did you get our number? I called the There was a... A piece on the editorial page in the Oregonian today about UFO sightings, and it said any witnesses of sightings should contact UFO Reporting Center in Seattle.
00:22:26
Speaker
Oh, great. Well, we sure appreciate your passing that on. Well, I'm glad I finally told somebody. Okay. It feels better. Well, you come up, remember any information that you haven't passed on to us, we'd like to hear from you. Okay. Thanks very much.
00:22:43
Speaker
Thank
Episode Conclusion and Reflection
00:22:44
Speaker
you. Bye-bye.
00:22:46
Speaker
Okay, it's Isaiah back again just to close out the show. I hope you enjoyed that recording. There's so much to talk about that's in there. ah Fascinating.
00:23:00
Speaker
But let's do it next time. See you soon.
00:23:20
Speaker
Space is the place. Space is the place. Space is the place. Space is the place.