>>12956972The more we rely on these heuristics the more we drift away from reality based on the latest evidence.
And for anyone paying attention, that evidence most importantly changed in Dec 2017, when Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, leaked three FLIR videos to the New York Times, to a shockingly limited amount of fanfare. These videos are the key to understanding how the phenomenon and its discussion have exploded recently. The one-sentence overview is that FLIR footage shows vehicles flying in the air moving in unexplainable ways, it captures the present-sense impressions of professional military pilots, and footage like this is hard to fake, especially when the Pentagon says it’s real.
As someone trained as a civil litigator, we are taught to leave discussing the technicals to the expert witness, as they are most knowledgeable and therefore able to convince a jury of lay people. In terms of credibility for a jury trial in Re: the Case of “What did you see, and what did it do?”, it doesn’t get better than fighter pilots. Most famously, Cmd. David Fravor, a Navy Fighter Pilot and squadron commander involved in the 2004 tic tac incident, but recently several other pilots, can be found on YouTube examining the FLIR footage and vouching for its authenticity.
This evidence is not hard to find and corroborate when people are curious enough to look. When you’re able to watch an F-16 pilot on YouTube watch these FLIR videos, explain how FLIR works, vouch for their authenticity, and then conclude, “I’m not going to lie, I was a skeptic but now I’m getting freaked out by this” it tends to stick with a juror more than someone in a top hat and an unkempt beard walking up to you on the side of the street outside a convention hall insisting he can prove to you the earth is flat.
