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What Are The Most Impressive UFO Cases?

SkepticalX,

...For whatever reason, I don't find Stevensville compelling at all. In the 21st century, you don't have football-field size UFOs without a single credible photo...

But people do believe Kenneth Arnold who reported seeing some objects from a distance of around 80 mile . And there was no picture of those either. Yet it was the case that more or less started the ufo movement.

I tend to agree that the size of the object reported at Stephensville aught to have drawn more attention. However there is quite a lot to this case.
At least as much as the Phoenix lights.

INT21
 
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SkepticalX,

...For whatever reason, I don't find Stevensville compelling at all. In the 21st century, you don't have football-field size UFOs without a single credible photo...

But people do believe Kenneth Arnold who reported seeing some objects from a distance of around 80 mile . And there was no picture of those either. Yet it was the case that more or less started the ufo movement.

I tend to agree that the size of the object reported at Stephensville aught to have drawn more attention. However there is quite a lot to this case.
At least as much as the Phoenix lights.

INT21


I'm surprised by the reliance you place on pictures.

First, pictures were pretty easily fake-able even in the chemical film days, and while some kinds of fakery back then were easily detectable, other kinds, especially on B/W film, were not. And nowadays no picture is remotely trustworthy.

Secondly, how many people will, when confronted with something utterly strange, have a first reaction of pulling out a camera and taking a picture? That may be changing, but as it goes hand in hand with the ability to manipulate images and also the poor and aberration filled lenses of phone cameras, I wouldn't trust a picture any more than verbal eye-witness reports.
 
Sometimes pictures can help to identify the phenomenon in question. For instance the films of the Phoenix Lights show that they were distant flares. Yes, I know there were two events, but no-one filmed the 20:15 event. Perhaps if they had they could have been identified more easily.
 
Eboracum,

I linked to it because it held a reference to the radar plotting work that was done.

Skepticalx was condemning the sighting because of the dearth of pictures. One tends to overlook the other aspects of it.

INT21
 
Phoenix.JPG
 
INT - sorry for the late follow-up. Rather than Stephensville, if I had to pick a radar case, I would much rather go with the 1957 RB-47 incident.

Again, I just have a hard time with massive UFOs that somehow get noticed by only a handful of people. It is far too easy for a witness to draw imaginary lines connecting lights in a night sky.
 
An interesting radar case that sort of sums up the problem is the one where a flight to, I think, Guernsey, saw a large yellow object. This was joined by another one.

The air traffic control couldn't see it on the normal ATC radar, nor could they see it on the primary radar.

Until the operator reset the machine to detect stationary objects. Then they saw it.

This is logical as why would they be looking for stationary objects in the sky ? Anything in the sky would have to get to their position by motion, and they could be detected by primary radar if moving.

This is possibly why some ufo are not detected by radar.

I'll come back and correct the above flight details when I find them.

I also find it hard to understand why so many people in a given area do not see massive objects in the sky.
I believe there is a whole school of thought about this.

Coal,

Not sure what you mean by your post above.

INT21
 
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An interesting radar case that sort of sums up the problem is the one where a flight to, I think, Guernsey, saw a large yellow object. This was joined by another one.
The air traffic control couldn't see it on the normal ATC radar, nor could they see it on the primary radar.
Until the operator reset the machine to detect stationary objects. Then they saw it.
That's probably the Alderney UFO.
Analysis here
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/165a/6bd42a959e51eff6baedd2ff933c215b6080.pdf

The stationary radar return may have been a surface vessel- a ship.
 
Eburacum,

Yes, that was the one.

..The stationary radar return may have been a surface vessel- a ship...

I can't remember whether or not they gave an elevation figure for the object they detected. Or if their primary radar even detected down to sea level.

INT21
 
I also recall a case where a hunter/camper hid up a tree in the woods to avoid some weird 'aliens' who then tried to bring him down by blowing gas at him while he sat in the tree.
He described the 'alien' more like a robot machine than an actual being.

That's the Cisco Grove Incident, which involved two entities and two robotic figures. There's a book about it called Aliens in the Forest, and Timothy Good also covers it in his book Alien Base.

See Also:

Cisco Grove / Donald Shrum (aka 'Schrum') Incident (California; 1964)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...um-aka-schrum-incident-california-1964.66278/
 
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That's the Cisco Grove Incident, which involved two entities and two robotic figures. There's a book about it called Aliens in the Forest, and Timothy Good also covers it in his book Alien Base.
That's the one....but what are we to make of it? Would advanced aliens from another star system really act like that? To what purpose?
It sounds more like a ghost story or a fairy tale than anything else. Where do we go with a tale like that? Do we keep it in the ufo area or do we dump it in the supernatural area or do we simply reject it out of hand as being too ridiculous?
 
More and more I find I am reclassifying things supernatural/jungian folk mind/tulpa... :(
 
I quite like the Alderney case actually, though some details of the observation make me think they were actually seeing some kind of strange optical effect involving reflected sunlight. I've read Martin Shough's exhaustively detailed paper on the case (at https://martinshough.com/aerialphenomena/index.htm) which does say a reflection of some kind is possible.

Edit to add: the supposed corroborating sighting at Alderney by a second pilot seemed a bit dubious in that he was looking back and seeing what he thought was a faint yellow object in haze, but it wasn't self-luminous as Bowyer's objects seemed to be; in any case it wasn't unambiguously the same thing viewed from a different angle.

The thing about my mental list of 'most impressive' UFO cases is it gets so heavily coloured by what are really just my favourite UFO cases.

But I'd say:

- Stan Hubbard's first sighting at Farnborough in August 1950, closely followed by his second sighting

- Michael Swiney and David Crofts, Little Rissington, 1952

I've no idea what this lot were seeing but something odd was going on.

In no particular order, some others I quite like are:

- Levelland 1957 (there are serious issues with the 'evidence' here, but I still think it might point towards some kind of as yet undescribed electrical phenomenon)

- The Egryn Lights, 1905, because who can resist a Welsh earthlights case from over a century ago

- Minot AFB 1968 (nicely re-researched in modern times at https://minotb52ufo.com/, lots of multiple-witness chaos and possible misidentification, but the fact a bomber was asked to take a look at something on the ground puzzles me; also Blue Book had to resort to a 'plasma' to explain part of it)

- Cussac 1967 (probably a helicopter rather than a craft and entities, but oh well)

Ones I used to think were interesting and am now less sure are the Mansfield case from 1973 and the RB-57 case, which Tim Printy has explained quite convincingly; also perhaps Tehran 1976.
 
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I quite like the Alderney case actually, though some details of the observation make me think they were actually seeing some kind of strange optical effect involving reflected sunlight.
Shough and Clarke suggest in their report that the 'mile-long glowing object' was a reflection from greenhouses onto a thin layer of haze in the sky. That seems quite feasible to me. Reflections of this kind are called 'caustics' and they are much more common than most people realise, but once you start noticing them they are everywhere on a sunny day, especially near glass-fronted buildings.

This is why 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' is a more realistic label than unidentified flying object'; a layer of illuminated haze is not really a 'flying object' at all. Quite often these sightings are caused by an optical phenomenon rather than a physical object.
 
Shough and Clarke suggest in their report that the 'mile-long glowing object' was a reflection from greenhouses onto a thin layer of haze in the sky. That seems quite feasible to me. Reflections of this kind are called 'caustics' and they are much more common than most people realise, but once you start noticing them they are everywhere on a sunny day, especially near glass-fronted buildings.

This is why 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' is a more realistic label than unidentified flying object'; a layer of illuminated haze is not really a 'flying object' at all. Quite often these sightings are caused by an optical phenomenon rather than a physical object.

Yes, I think the fact that one of the passengers thought they were sun reflections and described them as 'sunlight coloured' (rather than the yellow stated by Bowyer) pointed very much to this explanation. If they were genuinely large jet-sized objects just off Alderney at about 2-3000 feet then they would likely have been noticed from the ground, surely, as despite haze all the cloud seems to have been well above this level.
 
Betty and Barney Hill were upstanding people in their jobs and church.

I just can’t see these two people as being dishonest about their UFO abduction.
I agree - Betty and Barney Hill were extremely impressive in the way they handled their abduction details. They had so much to lose and certainly did not want to become the public figures that they did.
Pascagoula, with Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, also stand out.
There are countless others, and one has to wonder how many people kept quiet about their experiences, for fear of ridicule or media coverage.
 
Betty and Barney Hill were upstanding people in their jobs and church.

I just can’t see these two people as being dishonest about their UFO abduction.
In my personal opinion this is the one book everyone should read about the Hill's case:

"September 2000: Nearly 40 years after the original incident, a symposium of seasoned, independent UFO researchers is held at Indian Head, New Hampshire, to re-evaluate this classic UFO abduction case.

Among the participants are Hilary Evans and Peter Brookesmith from the U.K., with Thomas ‘Ed’ Bullard, Karl Pflock, Dennis Stacy, and Robert Scheaffer from the U.S. Sociologist and veteran anomalist Marcello Truzzi chairs the meeting. Betty Hill joins the group for an evening’s entertainment and a morning tour of the sites where, she says, she and Barney encountered aliens. What the participants concluded is recorded here, along with additional commentaries written especially for this book by the Hills’ first investigator, Walter N. Webb, and critical analyst Martin Kottmeyer. The result of this unique meeting of minds was more than an exercise in diverse interpretations: it became a common quest to establish, as far as humanly possible, what actually happened to the Hills so many years ago.

Was the “first” UFO abduction the result of a genuine alien encounter or the product of some well-primed imaginations?"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ENCOUNTERS-INDIAN-HEAD-Abduction-Revisited-ebook/dp/B004H1TCZ2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AXOCOH3PIU1U&keywords=encounters+at+indian+head&qid=1684666370&sprefix=encounters+at+indian+head,aps,91&sr=
8-1

This is a book for both believers, skeptics and those who are undecided. Arguably its greatest achievement is to get the actual facts of an encounter that has been retold so many times in the popular media and as a result the actual events have become narrowed down to the more sensational - and alter- aspects of the story, with some of the original testimony (eg the humanoid's peaked cap) overlooked.

It does not debunk the case but it does offer alternative scenarios, too.
 
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The Mariana film is certainly the most interesting of the early UFO films.

In common with some other 'classics' (notably the 1952 Newhouse film and the 1953 Drury film from Port Moresby, the latter of which almost certainly showed an actual high altitude object) the story has the usual "film taken away for analysis and returned with the best bits allegedly cut out" narrative attached to it. Whether this is a quirk of memory, the defensiveness of a witness faced with sceptical questions, or something else, I've no idea.
 
One of the greatest UFO event that was witnessed by 12 United Airlines employees, ramp workers, and supervisors called the metallic UFO hovering over gate C-17 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on November 7, 2006.

The UFO finally climbed straight up punching a hole in the clouds.

The air traffic controllers did not see the UFO and it was not on airport radar.

The FAA and United Airlines refused to investigate because of no radar data.

At the time the Chicago Tribune criticized the FAA for no investigation.
 
The air traffic controllers did not see the UFO and it was not on airport radar.

The FAA and United Airlines refused to investigate because of no radar data.
No radar data does not mean it did not exist.
 
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