A logical approach to the analysis of the airliner videos

I think people are losing sight of a few things with the analysis. I thought I’d break it down logically. I’m not going to get into any of the actual evidence or analysis here, this is more of a big picture view of how the analysis of the videos should be approached.

There are two claims here that may be proven or disproven:

A. The videos are fake
B. The videos are real

The two claims are mutually exclusive, meaning they cannot both be true at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t both separate claims that should be expected to have their own evidence.

Critically note that we aren’t making claims about the existence of aliens here. There is no implicit burden of proof on one claim, like there would be if we were instead discussing theology. These are both claims that should have evidence, and may be proven or disproven.

Specifically the discussion of whether or not it would be possible to create these videos digitally can only be used to disprove claim A. If it’s not possible to create them, or wouldn’t have been in 2014, then that means the videos can’t be fake (implicitly proving claim B).

However, if it is shown that it would have been possible to create them digitally, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were created digitally. That doesn’t prove or disprove either claim. After all there are countless legitimate videos out there that could have been created digitally. The ability to do something doesn’t necessarily imply that it was done.

Analysis from that angle would need to be taken a step further, and find evidence that these videos were actually created digitally. I don’t know enough about the process to know what that would look like, however I know the discussion of whether or not it would have been possible doesn’t get us very far.