C'mon Alan, it is not often that the criminal justice personal are dealing with 75 year old anecdotal evidence, be it physical or especially memorial. I think you will find that the same is true of archaeological as well. Mr. Coombe has carried this memory nearly his whole life. Do you really think he would skew it after all these years. You nor I can attest to his lucidity but I would imagine he is quite lucid. I had a very large family with many aunts and uncles who lived into their 90's and 100's who remembered things about me when I was five or six yo that I had long since forgotten.
"requires independent confirmation by factual evidence" Not always Alan, not always. That is just your opinion and is not a legal definition for evidentiary matters. Who is alive today that can do that for Mr. Coombe. Of course eye witness testimony "in a court of law" has it's problems, but that is not what this is. I will have to agree with Dave that, "Apparently the memory and credibility of Mr. Coombe, age 91, was not an issue."
C'mon, Bob. Let me first clear up what may be my misunderstanding of D. McDaniel's phrase "not an issue" and the way I address it in my post. I was trying to say that apparently a lack of general belief in Mr. Coombe's memory (as indicated by his own quote and by the time elapsed) caused the Spitfire search not to be pursued nearly as soon as it could have been, had he been taken at face value. Thus "memory and credibility" of an eyewitness, without other evidence, were major issues affecting whether and when a serious search began. Reading your and Mr. McDaniel's replies, I believe you may be using "credibility was not an issue" to mean "Mr. Coombe was right and his memory accurate". That is not the point I was addressing, I have no knowledge or prejudice whether he is right or wrong . . . when they explore further into the crate we will know more. I meant to cast
no personal aspersions whatsoever on his credibility or lucidity, and in fact my guess, based on finding even the crate, is that he is
right.
The rest of my post attempted to discuss more generally why the memory of a single witness (not Mr. Coombe in particular) was not, and perhaps should not be, taken as gospel truth without factual support. The fact that all the personal memories supporting all the different AE disappearance theories cannot possibly be true was offered as one example. As for the rest of it, and your numerous comments, I am going to take the lazy way out and provide a quote from our friendly neighboorhood archaeologist, Dr. King:
We have no basis for saying that any alleged eyewitness or other informant is or is not credible. For the purposes of this paper, we assume that all such informants were telling what they believed to be the truth, though perhaps shaded in some cases to meet what they understood to be social expectations. However, this does not lead us to assume that any informant described “objective” reality – that is, reality as it might be perceived by another party. There are good reasons to view all the eyewitness and other informant stories with skepticism, even while accepting the honesty and good will of those who have told them.
In the last fifty years, there has been great psychological interest in the reliability of memory, and a good deal of research on the subject – notably including the memories of eyewitnesses. Much of this interest and research has been stimulated by growing concern in legal and law enforcement circles about the conviction of innocent people by courts of law based on eyewitness testimony. Much has also been stimulated by concerns about the conviction and imprisonment of parents based on the uncorroborated stories of adult children who say they have recovered long-suppressed memories of childhood abuse. Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington is perhaps the best known and most widely published researcher in this field; her 1979 book Eyewitness Testimony (2nd edition 1996) is probably the most widely available generally accessible text on the subject, though many other scholars around the world have studied and published in the field.
What these studies tend to show is that memory is a highly malleable phenomenon; our memories can be significantly transformed by influences from outside our heads – notably by the suggestions of interviewers. As Loftus puts it:
"A growing body of research shows that new, postevent information often becomes incorporated into memory, supplementing and altering a person’s recollection. New “information” can invade us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence" (Loftus 1996:vii).
That excerpt is taken from Dr. King's recent paper
here.
Note that Dr. King clearly also makes a logical connection between archaeological and legal circles, as did I; I did not expect that to be controversial. Finally, as to "independent confirmation", I would not expect anyone alive today to "do that for Mr. Coombe" -- and even if there were another nonagenarian, that would simply be another personal memory. By "factual" I meant something much more tangible; in this particular case it boils down to: is there an airplane inside the crate? We'll soon know; I bet there is.