Here.
As a hypothetical example, let's say you've recently been informed that the Ivory-bill still survives. Desperately wanting to see one for yourself, you head out to some good-looking habitat somewhere in the Southeast. You hear some intriguing knocking, and sometime later get a glimpse like Clip 6 here (QuickTime).
Given that one-time, real-time glimpse, can you reliably "remember" the exact location of white and black on the upper and lower surfaces of both wings? If you owned a PhD in ornithology, would it be very helpful in this situation?
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And the "false memory" issue just cascades from the hypothetical scenario that Tom mentions. What if based on what you think you saw you tell a bunch of people that they should come out and see if they can see it too. Not surprisingly some people do "see" what you tell them you thought you saw.
And then it gets even worse since, based on your “sightings”, you all decide to start a major "research" project and who do you recruit - people who would really like to see (or hear) the species you thought you saw. At that point do you think anyone who knows anything about the power of suggestion and the human need to please superiors will take any observation seriously? Would you ever have the hubris to ask the government and public to donate so you can send even more biased and/or suggestible people out into the field?
Sure it might seem tough to recruit a group of naïve and (according to the link) autistic observers but if you did, you could get observations that would be much more believable than those from people who “have always wanted to see this magnificent bird”. Most importantly you could save have saved yourself (and us) all that trouble if you simply figured out how to photograph birds in the wild and just shut up until you have a decent image to share.
The ability to make a bad call, particularly when all you get is a surprise 2 second glimpse of a bird, has long been understood by decent field birders. Hold all but one of the Auburn sightings up to this fact and they completely fall apart. They are more probably wishful thinking.
By the way, Cinclodes "earned" much of his "reputation" due to his lack of understanding of this most basic fact of field birding. He is truly a "one field mark wonder".
What's even more remarkable is that Fitz, Rems, et al. are then able to magically determine which of these false memory encounters are "credible." And, even for the ones that aren't selected as "credible," they still patronize and string-along the observers so as to maintain control of the entire charade as much as possible...
He's also a "it couldn't have been anything else" or "what else could it have been" type of birder.
On top of that he's a "which makes sense" birder, for example:
"There is an old report from a reliable source saying that IBWOs fly with their head stuck up their arses, which makes sense, since I have not been able to observe the bill colour or eye colour or head pattern of any of the IBWOs I have seen in flight."
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