Carl, I really do appreciate you taking the time to type that, so thank you.
Let me put my position into context. I research the historical record of the thylacine, now this animal has been extinct since 1936, and I have very good reason to be very confident of this. But, I frequently, really very frequently, hear from, or about people who claim to have seen one. Most are nonsense and obviously so, some are really shocking though because they really do seem to describe a genuine encounter with this animal. You couldn't ask for a better witness in one case, and I will always believe that he saw a thylacine, but not that there was one there.
Just recently I watched a very long standing question answered, this involved seemingly undeniable photographic evidence, and believe me when I say it convinced people from the hardest to convince demographic you could want, or at least who you'd think that would be. But it was a hoax, and the most obvious explanation turned out to be the right one. Despite expert opinion to the contrary. How this hoax came to be, how the hoaxer ever got his hands on the photos, and how they found their way into the hands of the mark that passed them on, and how the person he passed them on to missed the joke is something that seems so implausible to happen you'd just about dismiss it. Yet it's now been proved 100% that this is what happened.
And it's not just that people lie to me all the time, they literally change their story every time they repeat it. One lady is relentless in this, she will not stop. I know she's lying, I assume she knows that I do, yet still she carries on.
Add to that I have the reliable sources from the historical era. And that's where the real difficulty starts. The lies, the inaccuracies, the errors, you wouldn't believe.
So this is why I have to say that I can't be persuaded by eye witness testimony alone. Both our subject matters attract flakes, and the genuine ones are just as untrustworthy as far as detail is concerned. So believe me when I say, I really do appreciate you writing that and I'm not trying to be confrontational or dismissive, but to me it's still eye witness testimony only. And are, so far as the examples above go, uncorroborated.
I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm saying that there's not enough there to form an opinion about.
To be honest, I don't recall ever hearing of the thylacine, and I am amazed that you spend your time assessing all these strange hoaxes and alleged sightings of it! It explains why you have such a suspicious attitude towards eye witness testimony.
I don't believe what witnesses say automatically, but I do look for certain clues and indications that might point to deceit or fakery. In some areas of research, e.g. UFOs and especially alleged abductions, witnesses may be lying, or fantasising, or even the victims of mind control experiments or applications. That is a horribly complex and convoluted area. Time slips, at this point in time, are not in the same category. As far as the mass media are concerned, time slips don't exist, and for accounts to make it into the newspapers or TV news is something almost unknown. Very few cases even make it as far as magazines or You Tube, and these a tiny minority of the cases. There is very little incentive for people to hoax time slips. In fact, public awareness of time slips, a century or more since the Versailles case, is I suspect, still in single percentage figures. This means that the great majority of potential witnesses are unaware of the phenomenon and that what they are experiencing is not some unique, bizarre oddity, but a phenomenon that has some distinctive features and a quality of repeatability. Moreover, the handful of cases that are mentioned on some sites, or on You Tube, are only a small and often unrepresentative sample.
This is not a bad thing insofar that persons who do feel inclined to claim to be time slip witnesses often include in their stories some of the elements in those cases, elements that I now consider to be quite rare (e.g. strong subjective feelings of certain kinds), and this raises a red flag in those instances. I'm sure you must do your thylacine research in similar fashion.
Obviously if the real name of a witness is supplied, this gives a way of checking on the basic reliability of a 2nd hand report. Usually on the net, people use aliases or user names, and this makes things tougher.
Obviously the ideal is to make personal contact, and if I can do that and ask direct questions (whether by email, phone, or face to face) I can usually tell if people are being truthful or the reverse. In the Rougham study it was interesting to me that some of the witnesses really felt it was important to tell their stories, even when this impacted badly on their personal lives, and when there were certainly no obvious advantages to be taken in this regard. On the net, many seem relieved, often amazed, that other people have experienced something similar. Some seem almost pathetically grateful that someone is at last taking them seriously.
As for "reliable sources" from history, I have learned to take such sources with a pinch of salt. Often history is not what happened, not even what some people think important, but what someone wants other people to believe. I got a bit of stick from some people for referring, for example, to various German wartime experiments that could bear on time slips. There seems almost to be a conspiracy to deny that major advances were made by Nazi researchers (e.g. the atom bomb research). More recently we have a lot of evidence put forward that Hitler escaped from Berlin in the closing stages of the war, faking his own death, and that the scenario put forward by Hugh Trevor Roper (based upon interviews with Hitler's closest staff) was sheer disinformation. But he made a best selling book out of it, and it has now become part of accepted history.
As far as time slips go, I don't have strong beliefs about them -- I have a working hypothesis that some of them (my Type 4s) could be physical time travel, but if some alternative answer comes up I shall look at that.