Reasoning pattern · logic

Argument from incredulity

An argument from incredulity moves from 'I cannot see how this could happen' to 'therefore it could not have happened' without establishing that the proposed mechanism is impossible or inadequate.

Also known as: personal incredulity

A hard-to-imagine mechanism may still be real. The corrective move is to replace intuition about plausibility with measurements, constraints, engineering or direct evidence.

In practice

Claims using this reasoning pattern

Unsupported Reviewed Sep 30, 2026

Did modern electronics come from recovered alien technology?

The best-known version of this claim comes from Philip J. Corso's 1997 memoir The Day After Roswell. The technologies he linked to recovered alien hardware have extensive, independently documented scientific and engineering lineages: semiconductor research led to the transistor in 1947, the integrated circuit followed from transistor and planar-process work in the late 1950s, lasers grew from maser and stimulated-emission research, and practical optical-fiber communication emerged from documented work on low-loss glass. No independently verifiable artifact, laboratory record or technical transfer chain has established an extraterrestrial origin for those technologies.

conspiracy theories technology radiation

Contradicted Reviewed Sep 29, 2026

Were the Egyptian pyramids built by extraterrestrials?

The alien-builder claim is contradicted by archaeological and documentary evidence from the Egyptian construction system itself: Fourth Dynasty support infrastructure at Giza, quarry and transport records, and Merer's logbook describing limestone transport to Khufu's pyramid complex while the project was active. Some engineering details remain debated; that is not evidence for extraterrestrial builders.

ancient civilizations archaeology conspiracy theories