Has anyone gone from "UFOs are a joke" to "of course they're real!" and why?

I have always been ambivalent.
There are enough sightings, videos, physical trace cases, radar contacts, etc, to suggest that there is something there.
But none of the evidence gets anywhere close to the level of certainty that you could say: “Yep, definitely aliens.

If you are absolutely convinced that UFOs are alien spacecraft, you are irrational.
Conversely, if you are convinced that UFOs are definitely not alien spacecraft, you are equally irrational.

No.

I’ve never been one to say “UFOs are a joke” except the ones that are jokes or hoaxes. UFOs are Undentifed Flying Objects, of course.

And, of course no one would say “of course they’re real!” if only because so many have been identified, some as fakes, some as weather balloons or whatever.

And it’s not really possible to exclude the possibility that some of them have been, I think the phrase you mean might be more like “OMG space aliens!”

Given the number of stars and planets in the galaxy, and the number of galaxies in the universe, and the amount of time that we think has passed in this universe, and that we’re here flying things and so on, I am sure there are also intelligent creatures somewhere in the universe that are flying things around too. So in that sense, yes there are flying space aliens.

But whether they’ve ever been flying things around here… I don’t know. I don’t know how they’d get here, given the distances, but that might just mean I don’t know how.

But, there are also enough reports from serious professional and military people (e.g. pilots) with nothing to gain, who reported in detail things that seem like they might be some high-tech aliens, and that I don’t know of better explanations other than there was a conspiracy or something.

If you’re saying that UFOs are alien spacecraft then no, they do not exist. I disagree with @ragingloli in that I am not irrational by saying this. I am a Bayesian, and I understand statistical probability when you put priors into the equations.

Here is an old with poor video quality of an interview with Tyson about the subject. He represents my point of view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69qYusZyLrs

I am not convinced that they are alien spacecraft, and I’m not convinced that they’re not alien spacecraft. I think it’s possible that they are some type of spy vehicles from China or Russia, as has been speculated within the past year or two, or they could be from elsewhere in the universe, or they could be nothing.

I LOVE Neil DrGrasse. Is he married?

I once watched a “documentary” about UFOs. It was biased toward “They’re REAL!”
In it they mentioned that Jimmy Carter said he’d seen a UFO and that’s all she wrote for some people. They HAD to be real if a former president saw one!!
I dug a little deeper. He said he had once seen something in the sky that he couldn’t identify, hence it was a UFO from his perspective.

By that standard, I’ve seen a LOT of UFOs in my life. A lot. Well…5.

Or they could be American @jca2. Why would they have to be foreign?

They don’t have to be foreign, they could be American, @Dutchess_III. However, if people in the United States see something flying over the United States, I’m not thinking the US is likely to spy on itself.

Could be experimental.

Of course.

No, but I went to Dover Delaware a few times.

Now people are putting their UFOs on their phones. The Pentagon has come onto the news about a month ago discussing UFO’s. They are thousands of years ahead of us. People are taped doing the UFO taping in Alaska then they discuss the sightings.

I think they are nuts and bolts craft from elsewhere in the universe. We send craft to Mars, why can’t some advanced race send craft here? My only UFO issue is with more farfetched theories. Such as they are demonic, or from some alternate reality.

Mars isn’t that far from us. We don’t have the capability to go out side of our solar system, much less to go outside the Milky Way.

@Dutchess_III But maybe they do. Whoever they may be.

@Nomore_Tantrums And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt. That’s equally likely.

@Caravanfan Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. As vast as the cosmos is, but only one speck of rock in the entire Universe could possibly harbor life. Absolutely, absurd to consider otherwise.

@Nomore_Tantrums Two different questions. I agree that there is a high probability of intelligent life somewhere else. But the idea that they are sending spacecraft to our planet that people can only see with blurry videos is ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZDjel3dyv0