I’m not sure as to your point. All sides agree there statistically are certain to be (or have been) alien civilizations. That is not the question faced here.

The question faced here is whether we have any evidence of their having visited here (past or present). The priors are low; e.g. even your teleportation scenario entails extreme improbabilities as to the technology alone, much less the ability and interest for aliens to know we even exist here and visit, despite the difficulties created by lightspeed and relativity in even making it possible to know we are here, much less get here in mere centuries rather than thousands or millions of years after visible data on our existence is received. And the likelihoods are poor; e.g. all evidence presented so far is far more probable on other explanations than this.

But since you introduced a new question: the teleportation you talk about cannot help aliens.

(1) Our teletech requires us to have already beach-headed the destination (the target satellite has to be sent to the destination already kitted to receive). We cannot circularly teleport the receiver tech to its location in order to teleport to its location. All plausible teletech requires this step. So aliens would still have to fly something out here the usual way, before they could teleport to it.

This limitation is correctly illustrated in the novel and film Contact. In that story, the aliens did it the already fastest way possible: they sent us the information to build the teleporter linkup ourselves. That still required them to have a signal station already physically built about fifty lightyears away, and it took those fifty years for their signal to reach us.

(2) Even quantum teleportation is limited by lightspeed. Although quantum entanglement can collapse instantaneously (at least theoretically), coordinated collapse (as would be needed for coherent teleportation of entire structures, like a person, or even a coherent set of instructions) requires a coordinating signal, and the only one available is light. So the speed of teleportation is still limited to lightspeed. So aliens thousands of lightyears away will still have to take thousands of years to get a coordinating teleportation signal here (and again, there still has to be a receiver station here ready to go before that would even be possible).

I think that was a coincidence. The image looked like a gimbal, and it was so-named. I don’t think it was intentionally named after the mechanical cause of the illusion. Likewise a “go fast” is a pilot term for any engine that produces high speed (e.g. an afterburner on a fighter is a “go fast” as can be called the fighter it propels). But yes, that there really is only one source for all this, and it wasn’t official (it was only officially acknowledged authentic after it was out, but no other details were officially acknowledged), is a red flag to keep an eye on. They have been able to control and frame the narrative, which has simply become baked-in to how everyone talks about these things, which is a classic case of memory contamination: people are seeing what they have been told to see, rather than looking at the images with uninfluenced minds.

The fact that such a small, interconnected cabal of folks are responsible for virtually the recent “disclosures” is super suspicious in my mind.

See Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences for general perspective. There are over six billion people. So that a few cases of extraordinary coincidence conjunction are observed is in line with natural expectation; not supernatural causation. For perspective, there will be by chance alone (no causal relationship whatever) six people with remarkable conjunctions between them that are collectively a billion to one odds against. This is the effect of such enormous numbers of people.

I have yet to see any data that exceeded this expectation (we don’t have anything like hundreds of cases, and we have no cases whose elements, after all dependent probabilities are assessed, are demonstrably much more unlikely than a few billion to one against). We also face the problem that we have no reliable corroboration of the anecdotes (just a few people in history even record details, and their reliability has never been vetted to the requisite certainty, especially given the rampant instances of fraud and innocent record distortion and memory contamination in paranormal research over the last hundred years). There is a reason none of this stuff ever claimed the million dollar Randi prize for the fifty years it ran. And now only appears after it has closed.

So for the reincarnation studies. The genius studies are not all that remarkable. We already have long documented people who exhibit high efficiency brain structures (eidetic memory being the most common, and more common in the autistic than neurotypicals). It’s just exceptional pattern matching and memory, usually for a particular thing (like harmonics or visual perspective or linguistic patterning). That injury to a brain could produce similar effects is not implausible. We know natural intelligence, for example, is a function of communication efficiency among synapses. Artistic savancy could be a similar result (by removing the right material, increasing efficiency of pattern matching among a certain block of the remaining material). I doubt we’ll find anything else as the cause ultimately. That it would require chance coincidences already explains why the effect is so rare. (This is all in the article you linked to.)

Children Who Report Memories of Previous Lives
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/

When Brain Damage Unlocks The Genius Within
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/when-brain-damage-unlocks-genius-within/

Notably, Fravor’s absurd over-confidence in his ability to overcome commonly documented pilot errors in perception speaks volumes here. This same problem plagued Arnold. His brain is primed to edit his memory to confirm his self-assessment, rather than get at the truth of what happened.

That’s what I think is most likely: Fravor simply fell victim to an optical illusion (possibly even caused by his brain’s false association of the unrelated sea-state event, causing his brain to misperceive the distance and position of the cloud), followed by subsequent “editing” of his memory just as happened to Arnold. (I doubt it was a balloon; that doesn’t fit the scenario, as the illusion requires a much larger object.)

I don’t see any evidence of lying. And the cloud’s existence is attested by the second pilot, though her construction is largely primed by his; a key reason police try to prevent witnesses conferring and prefer to find witnesses who haven’t spoken to each other. Yet their testimonies crucially conflict in ways typical of his own unique movement relative to hers causing him to “see” different things happen than she did, thus further confirming the perceptual explanation. And yet they still both tried (innocently) to align each other’s perceptual understanding and memories, so we cannot trust them as independent. But none of that requires lying, it’s all standard psychology of perception and memory and witness contamination.

No. I don’t think he makes any point about whether they are or are not. His point is not that the evidence is the same; his point is that a mere difference in evidence isn’t enough to entail what Craig claims. In short, Craig is ignoring the fact that you have to account for the prior and you have to account for the differential likelihoods. Craig pretends as if neither is the case.

Certainly, if Craig wanted to, he could come back to this and concede this and then insist the evidence is, say “ten times more likely” than the sum of all possible alternative explanations in the Jesus case (or “thousands of times” as the McGrews have absurdly contrived). But Craig has chosen instead to abandon and condemn Bayesian reasoning. He wants nothing to do with it. Frankly, I think he is scared of it, because as a tool it too easily reveals the con he is running. (e.g. see William Lane Craig’s Duplicitous Denial That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence for an example.)

But if Craig ever did try that (a classic example of abandoning a mistake in an attempt to replace it with a completely different argument, one that is at least logically valid for a change), he’d run up on the horns of another dilemma: the premise is false, and thus though now valid, his argument becomes unsound. You can see this by looking at how the McGrews twist logic to get an absurd likelihood differential. (e.g. see my discussion on that point here; vs. my coverage of Swinburne which only focuses on his contrivance of a bogus prior.)

Please actually read the article before commenting on it. I already cover all this there.

(1) There is no video of the object in question. Both pilots confirm, none was taken. You seem to be confusing different things.

(2) There were only two observers, and one of them was far away and unable to report the details of the other, yet was mostly relying on their construction.

(3) They thought it reacted to their (actually only the one pilot’s) movements. This is a common illusion that results from misestimating an object’s distance and position. That pilot, remember, is moving and banking at hundreds of miles an hour; they are not observing from a stationary position. Erroneously mistaking relative movement for objective movement is common.

(4) I also already cover that error of conflating two unrelated phenomena. Agitation of the sea is not an uncommon oceanic event. There is no reason to believe it was even near the object; as again, the pilots clearly misestimated its distance and position. Indeed, their mistake of thinking these things were near each other may have caused their entire erroneous construction of the distance and position of the cloud.

In short, we have no reliable evidence for any of this: no objective data confirming the pilots correctly read the object’s distance and position, yet their subjective description is exactly of a cloud. The entire point of my article is to explain there is no logical basis for assuming their mistake is any less likely than that what they reported was accurately perceived. All human knowledge entails it is far more likely they simply were not constructing an accurate perception. We need more evidence therefore to believe anything else happened than what always does happen, which so far, has always been that.