The Tinfoil Chronicles: Erroneous Thinking in the UFO Subculture.

Greetings. The enigma of unidentified flying objects. A fascinating problem to explore, a complex scenario to examine. A mystery trapped in a tinfoil prison. 

The universe we reside in has presented our species with a long, long list of unsolved questions, unexplained enigma, and challenging mysteries. Some have been solved as a result of scientific endeavors, with many more left totally devoid of answers. Even those questions that have been answered have only offered up even more queries for our species to ponder and wonder about. 

The vast majority of the unexplained questions that the natural universe has presented our species with have not motivated so many to embrace religious, emotional, and nonsensical belief structures like some of the so-called fringe topics; ESP, Ghosts, Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, and of course, UFOs. Why is this so? Why are people relatively grounded, but completely off-the-ground when it comes to more pseudoscientific topics and mysteries? Why do people abandon their critical thinking skills when it comes to fringe topics? I haven't the foggiest idea, but I can write about it.

The belief that UFOs are flying around the planet is welcoming to many millions of minds and hearts. As of this particular writing, nobody has produced credible, physical, tangible, and irrefutable evidence for independent scientific analysis and objective confirmation. Decades and decades of unsubstantiated claims, stories, have produced absolutely nothing. 

No contact with extraterrestrials.

No physical wreckage of an alien spacecraft. 

No recovered bodies of extraterrestrials. 

All we have are fuzzy videos, inconclusive photographs, and innumerable eyewitness accounts, stories. 

The belief in extraterrestrials is not an outrageous one simply because there is a reasonable possibility that intelligent life exists somewhere in the cosmos, the real question being "Have aliens visited the Earth?" When considered from a numerical point of view, given the immense number of stars and planets in the universe, the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is actually quite high. Here on Earth, at least at this moment in human history, there are no scientifically compelling reasons to think that anyone has visited the planet, but that does not stop people from believing. 

Unidentified means unidentified, but to the UFO faithful, anything and everything is alien. Nonsense. 

People all around the world have seen weird things in the sky that they cannot make sense of, a situation that is not that unexpected when one considers how crowded the skies above our heads are with drones, clouds, civilian aircraft, balloons, flares, satellites, meteors, planets, stars, and military aircraft. Despite this, many people just cannot help assigning far less likely explanations in an ill-fated attempt to explain what they are unable to accurately interpret. This is a fundamental failure of critical thinking that is easily prevented by remembering that ignorance is not evidence. UFO people don't believe that, at least a good majority don't, and that is disconcerting but not overly surprising.

The belief that sane, sober, and honest people see and remember everything with reliable accuracy is strong in UFO circles, but that belief is erroneous. Memories change, and the human brain is not equipped to accurately interpret and chronicle environmental observations, which logically means that most witnesses are fallible, not all, but certainly most. Topping this off is the dogmatic belief in the UFO subculture that anecdotal information is evidence. In a court of law, yes, but not when it comes to the scientific method and its methodologies. Sorry UFO people. 

There is no logical reason to willingly abandon one's own critical thinking skills when considering the UFO problem, none whatsoever. So take off your tinfoil hat and use your brain. Please.

Thank you for your time and consideration.