I read the linked article. Not to say that it says nothing of merit at all, but...
A sceptic is not someone who doesn't believe in something. A sceptic is someone who doesn't take the truth of something for granted, but makes honest attempts to find whether or not it is true. Any outcome (true, probably true, probably untrue, untrue) is equally acceptable to the true sceptic, once the evidence and arguments have been tested as well as reasonably possible.
That aside, the article presents a classic case of what I personally think of as the Von Däniken technique, although many writers whose books I read in the 1970s used it to support their purported belief in their phenomenon of choice.
This colour denotes direct quotations from the article.
Step 1: point to the huge amount of potential evidence:
There are over 1000 eyewitness reports of which we can say certain things...
Step 2: dismiss a very substantial proportion of the evidence, acknowledging the explanations that sceptics have put forward:
- A proportion are misidentification or hoax.
- A proportion have witnesses with a camera to hand.
- A proportion use it and take some snaps.
- A proportion do not come out due to distance or malfunction.
- A proportion do not publish them.
Step 3: Throw in some arbitrary percentages:
You can play around with these numbers and come out with a varying number of photographs, but what proportions do you use to arrive at zero? Perhaps you decide 50% of these 1000 reports are real, 30% had a camera, 50% used them, 70% turned out and 80% published. That gives you forty two pictures over eighty three years. Or maybe you turn the screws and decide only 10% of sightings are viable, 20% had a camera, 50% were used, 30% turned out and 90% published.
Step 4: make sure you have some pieces of evidence left, and use expressions like "at least" to imply there are no doubt more.:
I know my position on that list and it is at least sixteen out of the twenty nine.
Step 5 will be to say as the ones left over at the end of Step 4 point to the phenomenon being real, maybe we ought to reconsider some of the items we discarded to hastily in step 3...