The debunkers use the science as a weapon and accuse UFO believers of viewing science in fuzzy, subjective, or metaphysical terms and downplay the fact that free inquiry, legitimate disagreement and respectful debate are a normal part of science. At every opportunity, they reinforce the notion that what is familiar is necessarily rational. The unfamiliar is, therefore, irrational and, consequently, inadmissible as evidence and, at best, an honest misinterpretation of the conventional. They also maintain that in investigations of unconventional phenomena, a single flaw or misstep invalidates the whole. They assert that if absolute proof is lacking, there is no evidence. Conversely, they claim that if sufficient evidence has been presented to warrant further investigation of an unusual phenomenon, evidence alone proves nothing. This will eliminate the possibility of initiating any meaningful process of investigation, particularly if no criteria of proof have yet been established for the phenomenon in question. And, in a seemingly logical argument, they insist that criteria of proof cannot possibly be established for phenomena that do not exist. No matter the weight of evidence proving the existence of UFOs, they simply claim that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" taking care never to define where the "ordinary" ends and the "extraordinary" begins. This will allow them to manufacture an infinitely receding evidential horizon, which always lies just out of reach.

Another common practice of UFO debunkers is by lumping all phenomena, popularly deemed paranormal, together. In this way they can indiscriminately drag material across disciplinary lines from one case to another to support their views, as needed. If a claim, having some superficial similarity to the one at hand, has been or is assumed to have been exposed as fraudulent, it is cited as if it were an appropriate example. As in real estate where "location, location, location" is the best selling tactic, UFO debunkers use "ridicule, ridicule, ridicule" to hammer at the concept they are attacking As, far and away, the single most effective weapon in the war against discovery and innovation, ridicule has the unique power to make people completely limp, and fails to wither only those few of sufficiently independent thought.

Trivializing the case by trivializing the entire field in question is common with debunkers. Simply characterizing the study of unorthodox phenomena as "bogus" allows the debunker to state emphatically that there is nothing there to study. They accuse investigators of unusual phenomena of believing in invisible forces and extrasensory realities. They also try to discredit the whole story by attempting to discredit part of the story, taking one element of a case completely out of context and finding something prosaic that hypothetically “could” explain it. With one element having been "explained" away, they can then claim that the entire case has been "explained". They know that most people do not have sufficient time or expertise for careful discrimination, and will tend to reject the whole of a concept, if only part seems to be in question.

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