I am reminded of things like ball lightning, upside down lightning, cosmic ray visual phenomena, etc. All were reported by people with a lot of credentials and all were dismissed by the scientific community. That is until they were proven to be real phenomena.
As a rational person, I keep my mind open to all possibilities.
I have a story. Was going to make a separate topic, but what the heck I'll put it here.
After being an engineer for many years I finally quit and created my own company. I now own a real estate investment company.
Late last year, we bought a victorian era built house. Very big. It is one of those houses where there's a front staircase to the second floor for the family and there's a back one for the servants. Over the winter, I had a couple of employees work on the interior of the house for restoration. They kept seeing what they thought was a woman through the up stair windows. They called the police on multiple occasions thinking it was an intruder or a squatter. At one point, I brought in more guys to secure the place. We checked every corner of it. Attic space. Basement. Crawlspace. Etc. There are 3 doors into the house, and we secured all of them. Those guys kept seeing some woman. Eventually, I just told them don't worry about it finish the damn work.
In the spring time when it was warm enough, I hired a couple of painters to paint the outside of the house. These guys never met the other guys. Completely different party. I set them up and left to go to another project site. One of them called me after about an hour and asked me if I had someone else working inside the house? I said no, just you guys there. Why? He said the other guy said he saw some woman through the windows upstairs. I said nah just keep painting. A few hours later he called again and said hey are you sure there's nobody else here? He was on a ladder painting and looking through the window he saw some woman walking in the hallway. They went in to check it out but didn't find anyone.
Fast forward a couple months later. I had rented the house out to a nice family. A couple months after they moved in, the husband called me and asked if while we were working on the house if we saw anything weird? I said no, why? He said even though he's never seen anything his wife been swearing up and down that several times she saw some woman through the up stair windows but nobody was home. One of the daughters also said the same.
To be clear. I have never seen anything personally. I just find it odd that 3 different groups of people who didn't know each other saw the same thing through the same windows.
It's stuff like this that has made me question the belief that eye witness testimony is NEVER reliable. Why/how would 3 different groups of people who didn't know each other make up the same story about some woman through the same windows?
Why would someone with a boat load of credentials all of a sudden make up crackpot claims about aliens just for book sales?
If you say the word "gullible" slowly, it sounds like oranges. Go ahead and try it.