Alabussy

This entire AMA could have been wrapped up with one question:

"Please answer this question with either "Yes" or "No," and no equivocating: Have you – a filmmaker who does his best to push and amplify the idea that aliens have visited the Earth – ever personally come into contact with verifiable, physical evidence of said aliens?"

I don't.

I leave it to the experts that I mentioned:

However, West said, this is an illusion of the two-dimensional video, one that can be demystified by the readout on the screen and a little trigonometry.

Once the camera locks onto the object, West said, the video presents the illusion that the camera is stationary. This isn’t the case, West said. The jet’s true air speed is 369 knots. After factoring in the altitude of the aircraft, the angle of the camera and the distance to the target, West determined the object to be flying at 13,000 feet above the ocean — not directly above, as it appears in the video.

“It’s not actually anywhere near the ocean even though it looks like it’s skimming over the surface,” West said. “Because of the extreme zoom and because the camera is locked onto this object ... the motion of the ocean in this video is actually exactly the same as the motion of the jet plane itself. You’re seeing something that’s actually hardly moving at all and all of the apparent motion is the parallax effect from the jet flying by.”

Still, West said the object in Gimbal is most likely just another jet.

Good luck convincing any of the die-hard believers in this thread of that.

Hell, good luck getting them to even consider that their purportedly pedagogical arguments are falling victim to the same fallacies that they think they're refuting.

Their utter lack of wonder and imagination, their inability to conceive of any explanation that might broaden their doctrinal framework by an inch, was so repugnant that it helped push me away from a lifetime of religious belief.

It's incredibly ironic that you're still stuck in that same framework.

You've traded one religion for another, and you're labeling attempts at broadening your perspective (by asking you to dismiss make-believe in favor of accepting a more-compelling universe) as "lacking in wonder and imagination."

The pot isn't just calling the kettle black here; it's actively painting the kettle with its own soot.

If a major UFO proponent had “former video game designer” as his distinguishing experience, you dogmatic skeptics would laugh him out of the room.

Replace "former video game designer" with "hack filmmaker."

Fun, isn't it?