Through an interview on Whitley Streiber's Dreamland podcast regarding a new documentary by Caroline Cory on evidence for UFOs called "A Tear in the Sky" (which I mentioned in an update here, and now an satisfied it is worth people considering - more shortly), I also came across an earlier documentary of Ms Cory's: "Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible", which focuses on ESP / psychic / paranormal abilities.
Both documentaries adopt an investigatory approach based on quantitative measurement and interviews with people identified as (and I am satisfied likely are) experts in relevant areas. It is an approach aimed at being objective, and described as scientific by the film maker. I have a minor quibble with that, but I'll get to that.
The UFO documentary uses multiple types and locations of sensors, with results coordinated by time, direction and location, and downloaded and compared by various techniques.
This provides good evidence of actual existence of what could be UFOs, and I understand it will likely lead to a peer-reviewed technical paper.
This sort of evidence - especially if it does lead to a peer-reviewed technical paper - is a key part of the scientific method, but the scientific method also involves aspects such as repeatability / replication: for this to be compelling in the world of science, multiple measurements using these techniques by other people, in other locations and times, of that phenomena must be made.
When Newton split a beam of light into a spectrum of colours using a prism, that wasn't proof, it was evidence: when lots of other people had done that enough times for people to be convinced it wasn't a one-off occurrence, then the accumulated evidence could reasonably be considered proof.
There are other aspects of the scientific method I'm not going into here: that is because it is the aspect of evidence vs. proof that I wish to focus on.
I consider the evidence found and reported on for the UFO documentary fantastic - I love it.
I want more of it.
We NEED more of it.
And that takes me back to the idea I had for a UFO camera - a few hundred or thousand sets of data from such cameras at CE-5 events would go a long way towards getting enough evidence for us to be at the stage of "reasonably" saying "OK, yes, that could be considered proof of the objective, physical reality of UFOs" (I'm deliberately refusing to use the acronym UAP, which I consider a deliberate attempt to belittle the whole field).
The UFO documentary shows what can be done: others now need to step up and meet that standard - time and time again.
There is an exception to this, which is evidence from a single event that is so compelling it can be regarded as proof on its own. The shaky, low resolution handheld camera evidence is nowhere near that, and neither is the evidence presented in this documentary.
The first explosion of a nuclear weapon was compelling proof that such could be done, but UFOs and psychic phenomena are not is the same category.
Notwithstanding that, the evidence in the "Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible" IS VERY compelling - watching the children doing tasks while blindfolded is, in my opinion, compelling (I trust the documentary crew enough to have ruled out obvious fraudulent behaviour, and consider those who resort to it to be egregiously disparaging). However, it is still compelling evidence, not proof.
I actually personally consider sufficient evidence exists of psychic phenomena to be proof (see, for instance, this, this, & related publications, and the books of Russell Targ, Lynne McTaggart, and Ingo Swann), but there is still resistance, and thus there is still a role for documentaries such as this, and for other continued gathering of evidence using "scientific" approaches.
There are some excellent explanations on all this in Dean I. Radin's book "The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena", and I thoroughly recommend consideration be given to buying that book, and recommend consideration be given to buying the two documentaries.
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