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The UK's X-Files: MOD Files / Condign Report / Etc.

From the Nature article:
"The science it's been based on is very questionable," agrees Clarke. "When meteorologists and physicists read it there'll be a lot of chuckling," he predicts.
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It wasn't made public in 2000, says the ministry spokesman, simply because they didn't think it added much to the debate.
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Very true!
 
As an exercise in pure imagination, there is nothing wrong with the Klass Plasma Conjecture ("Though dead he be, it belongs to he"), it would be interesting if ball lightning really did have a more resilient cousin, that could take on various shapes and sizes, hover motionless or go hypersonic, etc. It is okay to dream up all sorts of fantasy "what ifs", even if there is not one iota of evidence that they exist. Not unlike imagining the technical details of various superheroes, or things like that.
 
Another heavyweight has entered the UFO Updates discussion. In response to the question of why the report is called the 'Condign Report', Bruce Maccabee offered the pithy response:
Sounds suspiciously like "Condon Report".
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Nigel Watson has also written a quick summary for Wired in which he praises the report but strangely fails to mention the rather contentious theory about plasma affecting the temporal lobes.
 
Condign, "fitting" or "appropriate", probably some civil servant demonstrating his word-wanking abilities.
 
i wouldn't dismiss the possibility that some (but by no means all) "ufos" are balls of plasma.

certainly the two i saw about 10 years ago were balls of light and i reasoned that they had to be some form of plasma - but i suspect they were artificially generated rather than natural phenomena.

esp as they were being followed by a military plane (a Herc)
 
Without technological assistance, does anyone have an idea of how long a plasma ball will last for and how far it could travel (ball lightning seems to be a lower atmosphere/ground phenomena and short lived - so what about larger volumes higher in the atmosphere?)
 
The Condign report is a little more sophisticated than it's being credited with...but a bit wackier too.

What they seem to be suggesting are clouds of 'dusty plasma', charged but not necessarily ionised, produced by meteors (!).

This could last as long as a cloud of anything else - ie depends entirely on the exact configuration, weather conditions etc. Basically we are talking freak events. Thy suggest that increased atmopsheric dust could be producing more UFOs. Hm. They also link UFOs with overflights by 'friendly' black aircraft.

The report is quite comically naive on the issue of the military research into use of plasma for radar effects, suggesting that it might be worth looking into.... I think we've been there, done that and got the glowing stealth t-shirt already...
 
Forgive me..but surely a non ionised cloud would not be able to generate an electromagnetic effect as is being suggested. Integrity for starters?
 
GadaffiDuck said:
Forgive me..but surely a non ionised cloud would not be able to generate an electromagnetic effect as is being suggested. Integrity for starters?
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I still like the idea that some plasma balls, spook lights, etc. might be caused by some form of tectonic activity, unusually high piezo electric effects, higher than usual magnetic fields in the environment, that sort of thing.

Perhaps, the phenomena mark the occasional appearance of some particularily intense, but unstable, EM field? Like ping pong balls on suspended on a jet of water, or like St Elmo's fire on a ship's rigging in a thunderstorm? Water, in one form, or another, might well play a part.
 
Two balls of plasma being followed by a Hercules, Mal? Hercules are not very good pursuit planes, let's face it.
Much more likely that the ights were assocaiated with the plane in some other way- perhaps they were projections of some sort - a high intensity spotlight or laser, or something more sophisticated.
 
GadaffiDuck said:
Forgive me..but surely a non ionised cloud would not be able to generate an electromagnetic effect as is being suggested. Integrity for starters?
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Well, I'm not going to defend their physics. But the sugegstion is that that a charged cloud (ie one with dust particles charged with static) could produce such effects.
Without checking, I think thunderclouds are charged but not ionised. The inner roe of lightning is ionised.

The idea that this could produce enough radiation to cause sunburn is , however, IMO, mumbo jumbo.
 
re my plasma balls

:roll:

i don't think the herc was being used as a pursuit craft.

the speed of the balls and the Herc were similar (i won't say identical as there was no way i could properly measure it). certainly the lights were moving faster than any wind (and there wasn't any appreciable wind anyway). i'd estimate in the region of 150 knots. (I notice from:
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/hercules/specs.html that the Herc has a stall speed of 100 knots and cruising speed of 340 knots. my guessimate is the speed was nearer the former and not the latter. certainly slower than the Hawks that fly round here.

as for the possibility that the herc was projecting them - i agree that could be a possibility, although there was approx 5 minutes between the balls and then another 5 minutes before the Herc passed along the same track.

no beams of light were observed, height of objects was approx 250 feet (i live in a military low flight area) - height v approximate due to hilly nature of terrain. but from my bedroon window i was looking almost horizontally at the balls and the plane and the area they passed over is higher than my house. distance to objects approx 300-500 feet.

re plasma weapons there's an interesting discussion on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-based_weaponry
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plasma-based_weaponry
 
Interesting and very fortean. The balls of light might not have been directly associated with the Herc - five minutes delay seems a little too long for a beam emitted by the plane itself to cause the effect, which was my first thought.
At 150 knots the balls, and the plane, would each be more than twenty kilometers apart. I can't imagine a weapon or beam which makes a moving spot of light twenty (and forty) kilometers away.

And the Hercules could not have been scrambled to pursue these lights- that would take considerably longer than five minutes. The Herc might have been in flight already and diverted to follow them however.

So perhaps the balls were independent craft on the same flight plan - a pair of UAVs with bright marker lights perhaps.
Or the UFO pilots had predicted the Herc flightplan using prescience.

Or the whole thing was a coincidence- the lights were completely unassociated with the plane. As I am sure you know, it is not possible to estimate the distance of an object of unknown size more than about 100 meters away; our eyes are not far enough apart to get triangulation. So these objects might not have been on the same flight path as the plane at all, but could have been anywhere between 100m away and the cloud deck.
 
Right, lets all download the 400 page report and read it for ourselves, shall we?

Go here.
 
Some good comments here
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/upd ... -012.shtml


despite its length, this report leans toward an inadequate explanation for UAP phenomena and veers towards pseudoscience in the sections where it mentions the effects of EM on the observer.

I suspect that it was written by a couple of Ministry of Defence desk bashers in a series of lunch hours.
 
further to eburacum's comments

both balls of light and aircraft were observed against the background of mist lit up by street lights around midnight. the lights were from a housing estate approx 100-200 yeards from my house. the mist comes from the stream which forms the far boundary of the estate.

i observed the flight path from them entering my view from the right until the objects disappeared in front of me over nearby hills. direction objects were flying from initially was the sw but they changed course to disappear in an easterly direction. the Herc was observed against the mist initially banking but had levelled off by the time it disappeared.

(it was only due to the plane being silhouetted against the mist that i could recognise it as a Herc)

I understand that a couple people who live on the estate also saw the balls of light on their approach to the village coming from the south. they were in a car travelling north and saw them ahead of them IIRC.
 
A scientifically unsuspected form of electromagnetic radioactive meteor dust energy plasma, which is sculpted rather than dissipated by the wind, and has the power to cloud men's minds.

Don't you just hate it when that happens?


(and a bit of a footnote)

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=6732
 
dreeness said:
(and a bit of a footnote)

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=6732
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More than a footnote, methinks: here it is:
Magnetism does not cause paranormal experiences
Medical Studies/Trials
Published: Tuesday, 7-Dec-2004

Previous research has shown that paranormal experiences can be achieved via electromagnetic stimulation of the temple lobe. Now scientists from Uppsala and Lund universities in Sweden are calling into question how the experiments were set up and therefore questioning the results. Their study involving identical magnetic field equipment produced no such relationship.

Previous research has reported that as many as 8 out of 10 individuals have religious or paranormal experiences when their brain's temporal lobe has been exposed to ultra weak, complex magnetic fields. Study participants have experienced a sensed presence of a sentient being, although the participant has been sitting all by him- or herself. Many participants have made religious interpretations of the sensed presence.

A conclusion that could be drawn from these findings is that religious experiences can be easily accomplished through electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe. Accordingly, these sensational results have been given wide media attention. Such a magnetic field stimulator can also be purchased on the Internet. However, in the previous studies, it is unclear if participants and experimenters have known about research questions and experimental conditions, which is referred to as experimental "blindness".

For an experiment to yield credible results, it should be "double-blind". In this context, this means that neither the participant, nor the experimenter that interacts with him or her, knows whether the participant belongs to the experimental condition (magnetic fields activated) or control condition (no magnetic fields activated). The reason for this methodological rule is that any differences between the groups may otherwise have been caused by some irrelevant factors. For instance, participants in the experimental condition may unconsciously have been treated in such a way that the experiences have been induced for other reasons than the magnetic field exposure.

In a joint project, researchers from Uppsala and Lund University, Sweden, performed a double-blind experiment to test if results from previous studies could be reproduced. Approximately 90 undergraduate students in theology and psychology participated in the study. The magnetic field apparatus utilized was identical to that used in previous studies. Results showed that the magnetic fields did not cause religious or paranormal experiences. However, highly suggestible individuals had paranormal experiences to a larger extent, but this had nothing to do with the magnetic fields.

Paranormal experiences were particularly pronounced among participants with personality traits indicating openness to shifts in consciousness and a new age lifestyle orientation. Hence, our results show that the sensational conclusions about the effects of magnetic field exposure that were drawn in previous studies should be questioned.
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Perhaps the fields they're using in the experiments just aren't strong enough? Many UFO witnesses are left with burns and rashes on their body, and experience nausea and various other physical symptoms for days after their encounter. That would suggest that whatever they're encountering, it's far more powerful than Persinger's helmet.
 
"Now scientists from Uppsala and Lund universities in Sweden are calling into question how the experiments were set up and therefore questioning the results. "

Because, as Persinger pointed out, they did not follow the correct protocols.

The key isn't the field strength - Persinger uses a field less than 1/100 of the strength used for TMS - it's the modulation. That is where the magic lies.
Now, if they can explain the modulation in EM produced by dusty plasma I will be really impressed.
 
just a quick word on the MoD report.

if you're on dial-up and not broadband, it'll take hours to download it, there's so much of it.

hopefully i shall be getting it on a dvd!
 
The Persinger team had many complaints about the Swedish experiments, the test room was too small, the participants may have known something was afoot, etc. (Apparently knowledge of the effect is enough to nullify the effect, that is the effect can be countered by force of will, which seems odd.) The Persinger effect only works in what amounts to a "sensory deprivation environment". Similarly, sensory deprivation only works in a sensory deprivation environment, and it produces effects similar to the Persinger effect, without the supposed influence of modulated magnetism.

http://www.factbug.org/cgi-bin/a.cgi?a=423938
 
More of MoD report

The MoD document compiles UFO sightings reported to the ministry over previous decades. But the top-secret nature of the project meant that none of the UFO witnesses were questioned further about their experience. "That's the weakness of the report," says Ian Ridpath, an astronomy writer and UFO-debunker from Brentford, UK, who was a guest speaker at Clarke's press conference on 8 May. No scientists were directly consulted, and the author relied instead on literature searches, says Clarke. It even appears to rely on some pretty "dodgy" theories put about in UFO folklore, he adds.

"The science it's been based on is very questionable," agrees Clarke. "When meteorologists and physicists read it there'll be a lot of chuckling," he predicts.
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The full Monty at:
http://www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndat ... ature.html
 
Well, I see "Real-Life-Fox-Mulder" Nick Pope has finally got around to sharing his thoughts on the Condign Report with us. As usual, he adds nothing to the debate:

Project Condign
 
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