Of Nitinol, Roswell, Battelle, and the L-Word (Logic)

A newly-obtained research study has recently been obtained through FOIA that is being touted as stunning confirmation that what crashed at Roswell in 1947 was an extraterrestrial craft.¹ The main line of argumentation for this interpretation appears to be that the report’s co-author happens to be a scientist who had confessed to examining extraterrestrial metal from a crashed UFO while he was a research scientist at Battelle labs.

Readers are directed here to read a lengthy interpretation of the report and related events. After reading it, I have three simple questions in the vein of my recent posts about logic, UFO reports, and drawing conclusions from those reports:

1. Does the report obtained from FOIA actually say that the material examined is ET in origin?  This is certainly presupposed by the writer of the article linked above, but it isn’t at all clear. Do the authors of the report actually write that in the report?  If so, I’d like the quotation(s), the page number(s), and scan(s) of the actual pages.  In other words, where’s the evidence for the ET conclusion?

2. If the answer to the above question is “Yes, the authors conclude that the material was ET in nature,” then I’d like to know on what basis the conclusion is drawn.  Is the material not found on earth? The alloy not found on earth? Actually, we know already that the raw materials are indeed found on earth, so any ET conclusion must be made on the basis of the technological application or the smelting or the creation of the compound/alloy. Presumably, if the answer is yes, then the conclusion would be that humans couldn’t have manufactured the alloy.

3.  If my trajectory in number 2 is on track about the manufacturing being the basis for an ET conclusion, then I’d like to know how such a conclusion is coherent. In other words, how would these scientists KNOW that no one else (no human) had manufactured the alloy? It is not sufficient to say no human could do X because you couldn’t do X. To do so, it seems to me, is to sort of claim omniscience in this regard.

What I suspect is that, once again, we have a data point with layers of conclusions and conjectures accrued to it with little basis in real science and proof.  That doesn’t mean the material in question wasn’t ET in origin; it just means that conjecturing this to be the case shouldn’t be equated with real scientific data.