What Are The Most Impressive UFO Cases?

[smoothvirus]

Cash Landrum is an interesting case, although there is at least one hole in the story: if the witnesses had been suffering from exposure to ionizing radiation, then they would have died. If the symptoms of radiation sickness appear that fast then the victim would have been exposed to a HUGE dose of radiation and will almost certainly die within a few days.

So it seems likely that they were exposed to something toxic but most likely chemical rather than radiological.

One more interesting thing, there were actually houses fairly close to where the sighting took place but as far as I know there were only one or two other witnesses that reported the helicopters.

On a side note, the spot where this occurred is literally only a few hundred yards from former boxing champion and countertop grill salesman George Foreman's house. However I don't think the house was there when the sighting occurred.

 

[eburacum]

No. The conclusion that other phenomena were involved was reached by all open-minded investigators.

There were certainly other processes at work, but they include poor observation, misremembering events and observations, and downright fabrications.

There were no physical triangles in the sky that night - but people still reported them. Possibly the individual portions of the re-entering object briefly formed a triangular shape-but a far more likely explanation is bad recollection or post-hoc fabrication, either deliberate or unintentional. In many, many cases a core of reliable observations is surrounded by a halo of unreliable ones, which occur because of human psychological factors.

I suggest that we wonder why this happens so often when the actual cause of a sighting is found; the simple truth is that we can't rely on witnesses.

 

[eburacum]

The sightings took place often around 19.00, sometimes in a similar direction. But with features inconsistent with the reentry ; not vaguely, but definitely inconsistent.

If they happened at the same time as the re-entry- then they were almost certainly the re-entry, or fabrications- this shows just how bad the reports of observations can be.

Like : shape bearing no likeness to a re-entry ;

poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication;

hiding stars sometimes on a huge distance ;

a common illusion, seen in many cases- this was a re-entry, so no stars were obscured by the phenomenon itself. Once again poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication,

fixed lights relating to each other

Quite a common illusion; see the Zond IV re-entry

; above witnesses despite that it took place at a great distance from the re-entry, up to hundreds of kilometers (including above the sea, west of Britanny) ; different direction ; changing direction, sometimes more than once ; below clouds etc...

Again, poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication. The re-entry occurred- there is no denying it. All these diverse reports occurred because of the interaction between the stimulus of that event and the minds of those who reported the sightings. Many, most or all may have seen the re-entry- but they all reported very different things.

Over time reports like this will eventually prove just how diverse the interaction between a stimulus and the final reports can be.There will always be UFOs; but using test cases like this will eventually allow us to understand them.

 

[eburacum]

Engineer Claude Lavat used it to estimate that his own sighting would have been 15 km wide if it happened at an altitude of 110 km.

This one deserves a closer look. I have seen a bolide myself, and I'd estimate that the full length of the luminous area was around three degrees, or maybe six times the angular diameter of the Moon. At a not-unreasonable distance of 110 km that means the phenomenon was around 5.7 km long.

Since the solid part of the object was probably less than a metre long, the engineer's observations seem not unreasonable.

 

[Analis]

The sightings took place often around 19.00, sometimes in a similar direction. But with features inconsistent with the reentry ; not vaguely, but definitely inconsistent.

If they happened at the same time as the re-entry- then they were almost certainly the re-entry, or fabrications- this shows just how bad the reports of observations can be.

Like : shape bearing no likeness to a re-entry ;

poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication;

hiding stars sometimes on a huge distance ;

a common illusion, seen in many cases- this was a re-entry, so no stars were obscured by the phenomenon itself. Once again poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication,

fixed lights relating to each other

Quite a common illusion; see the Zond IV re-entry

; above witnesses despite that it took place at a great distance from the re-entry, up to hundreds of kilometers (including above the sea, west of Britanny) ; different direction ; changing direction, sometimes more than once ; below clouds etc...

Again, poor observation or poor recollection or fabrication. The re-entry occurred- there is no denying it. All these diverse reports occurred because of the interaction between the stimulus of that event and the minds of those who reported the sightings. Many, most or all may have seen the re-entry- but they all reported very different things.

What I wrote about these sightings and witness perceptions stands untouched. Adding "poor recollection" or "fabrication" options suggests media contamination, perhaps. I.e. witnesses changed their memories unconsciously or hoaxed their claims to be in agreement with an expected UFO wave.

In this case, data available shows that in all likeness, this mediatic influence was minimal or non-existant. As soon as 6th november, the media, including local, were systematically endorsing the re-entry explanation. Witnesses who tried to present diverging sightings were simply rebuffed and considered to be loons.

 

[eburacum]

Witnesses who tried to present diverging sightings were simply rebuffed and considered to be loons.

On the contrary, their reports are vital to an understanding of the UFO phenomenon. Take a well-established initial stimulus such as a satellite re-entry, and record the reports that occur around that time. Those reports can be reasonably relied upon to demonstrate the wide range of human subjectivity, and to a lesser extent the tendency for certain attention-seekers to elaborate or invent accounts.

These 'diverging sightings' might be discarded by some authorities as irrelevant- but in fact they are the most important, as they show just how bad at estimating form, direction, elevation, size and distance many observers are.

 

[Analis]

In this case, this supposes simply an impressive number of people who suffer hallucinations (and this is indeed what it supposes) and hoaxers. This is unrealistic. And those attention seekers, unable to reach the press, would be so desperate that they are driven to tell their stories to obscure ufologists ? Well, they would really suffer of a big attention seeking syndrome !
Contrarily to what you say, the mechanics of human testimony are already studied and well understood (including from, yes, the study of fireball meteorites fall). Nothing of the sort supposed by you emerged. This is why it is and will remain used as a major source of evidence, despite its flaws. I said earlier, a small motorbike will never become a huge truck.

 

[oldrover]

I said earlier, a small motorbike will never become a huge truck.

What a good quote

 

[eburacum]

n this case, this supposes simply an impressive number of people who suffer hallucinations (and this is indeed what it supposes)

Not at all. This case proves that people can be very poor observers.

I said earlier, a small motorbike will never become a huge truck.

A distant, large object can easily resemble a smaller, closer object if
a/ you don't know either the size or distance of the object and
b/ you have no other visual cues.

When a driver makes an estimate of the size of an approaching vehicle, he or she is able to estimate the location of the vehicle on the road, as vehicles are invariably in contact with the road surface. So the distance can be estimated reliably.

In addition drivers are familiar with the form and pattern of lights on motorbikes and trucks, so can make good estimates of their size at any time.

To make a good analogy with the size and distance of an unknown flying object, you would have to suppose that trucks and motorbikes can manifest themselves at any size from a metre long (or less) to several kilometres long, and appear flying at any arbitrary height above the road surface at any distance, from 100 metres to 110 kilometres away (and more). And have any random pattern of lights one may care to imagine.

Not so easy to tell a motorbike from a truck now, it it?

 

[eburacum]

The road driving analogy can be extended to the difficulties some people might have in estimating direction, as well. On a motorway it is very easy to tell which direction traffic is coming from; and even on a two way road or at a crossroads or roundabout a driver will know the direction of traffic - but only with respect to the origin and destination of the roads concerned. Ask the same observers to determine the points of the compass at such a roundabout or cross-roads and they will often be wrong. If a road leads to a location roughly north of the observer's current location they might assume that it points north, which is often not the case.

An observer may be aware of the destination of local roads on the ground nearby, but this information might easily cause them to make a mistaken estimate of the azimuth of an object or other phenomenon in the sky, where there are no roads.

 

[Analis]

It can be extended to the estimation of sizes as of directions, right. People who see an object in the sky have many repairs to estimate its apparent size, or even more easily its direction and azimuth : buildings, trees, pylons, mountains etc... That was the case in each of these sightings. There's also no point to imply that we should suppose that a truck or a motorbike could fly or appear at any size. A relatively small object at a great distance will always look smaller than it is, not bigger (for this reason labelling them hallucinations is right : this would not be an instance of bad observation, but litterally of perception without object).

 

[eburacum]

Estimating an object's apparent size is completely different to determining its actual size and hence its distance. The re-entry on 5/11/1990 was caused by a Proton rocket stage re-entering, about 7 metres long, and generally more than 100 km away from the observer; but that small object broke up into several portions, which flew together in formation and spread out over several kilometres of sky, glowing with the heat of re-entry and trailing plasma.

This phenomenon, several kilometers long and a hundred kilometers away or more, was mistaken for an object with similar dimensons to an aircraft and much closer. Very few observers would make the difficult perceptual leap to identify this phenomenon as much larger, and much more distant, that it appeared.

 

[Analis]

Estimating an object's apparent size is completely different to determining its actual size and hence its distance.

But it is an essential part of estimating the true size. And there you are essentially rehearsing the same arguments. Here it is a matter of objects looking much bigger than an aircraft, close or not, flying in front of marks.

And we know what a re-entry looks like. It is more than mere speculation, we have photos and videos of some of them, of vehicules of any size (internet is decidely a useful tool). They consist essentially of a trail, with a plume of lights when they disintegrate. Ironically, some of the strangest cases reported this night, mentionned in Franck Marie's book, looked exactely like a disintegration of a re-entry or a meteor. But too early, and the resulting lights coalesced into a huge, motionless object.

 

[eburacum]

Of course the observations resembled re-entries; that is exactly what they were. The discrepancies concerning time, vector and motion are due to witness error and memory error, not because another almost identical object magically turned up at almost the same time.

During the Zond IV entry 30 detailed reports were received, with 13 describing the phenomenon as being much closer than it really was, 7 describing a cigar or saucer,3 describing windows, 6 describing a change of direction, and 17 describing the lights as flying 'in formation'. There were 48 reports that were too poor to give any usable information.

In short- eyewitnesses are not reliable in the slightest.

 

[MinusType]

Do you guys recall the UFO crash in Brazil?
It went a little something like this:

A UFO crashes in the mountains,soliders are deployed to contain the crash site,but its too late.An alien escapes and runs into a small town being seen by a couple school children,& towns people.
Finally it passes out.
Solider comes along and they drag it to a hospital in town.
It dies.
So does the soldier due to radiation poisoning.
Widow sues government and wins?

Personally it was one of the cases I found to be by far the most interesting south american ufo case I've ever read about.

 

[eburacum]

Is this it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varginha_UFO_incident

High strangeness indeed.

 

[Analis]

Of course the observations resembled re-entries; that is exactly what they were. The discrepancies concerning time, vector and motion are due to witness error and memory error, not because another almost identical object magically turned up at almost the same time.

No. They could be liars, mad or deluded, but mistaken they were not. And the poor memory is in fact a poor explanation. Back to the start : a small motorbike will never look like a huge truck.

I don't know the Zond 4 case well. If some reported change of direction or other very divergent features, it is possible that they saw something else. Sometimes other phenomena can be present at the same time than a falling meteor or rocket, as now seems established in the case of Kecksburg.

 

[eburacum]

Back to the start : a small motorbike will never look like a huge truck.

I cannot stress this enough; this is utterly wrong.

Human stereoscopic vision is not useful for estimating the distance of an object more than a hundred metres away or so. An unfamiliar object seen in the sky further away than this distance can be any size. If you know that it is a normal-sized motorbike, you then know the size, and therefore can estimate the distance; but an unidentified aerial phenomenon is, by definition unidentified, so without other cues it is literally impossible to determine the size or distance.

If you saw a giant motorbike and/or a miniature truck in the sky outside the range of stereoscopic vision, then without any other perceptual cues you quite simply could not tell the difference between these objects and a normal sized bike or truck.

Perception and eyewitness testimony are both increasingly recognised as unreliable; only by understanding this will we ever have a chance of uderstanding the UFO phenomenon. Cases like the Proton and Zond IV re-entries give us a good idea of just how unreliable eyewitnesses are.

 

[Analis]

Back to the start : a small motorbike will never look like a huge truck.

I cannot stress this enough; this is utterly wrong.

Human stereoscopic vision is not useful for estimating the distance of an object more than a hundred metres away or so. An unfamiliar object seen in the sky further away than this distance can be any size. If you know that it is a normal-sized motorbike, you then know the size, and therefore can estimate the distance; but an unidentified aerial phenomenon is, by definition unidentified, so without other cues it is literally impossible to determine the size or distance.

If you saw a giant motorbike and/or a miniature truck in the sky outside the range of stereoscopic vision, then without any other perceptual cues you quite simply could not tell the difference between these objects and a normal sized bike or truck.

Yes, I know everything you wrote. I suppose you read that I said it is a matter of apparent size. The human eye can't estimate sizes, including at very short ranges, shorter than 100 m, and need marks to compare apparent sizes. Yes, motorists are in an environment where they have plenty of them. And then ? This was the same in every case I mentioned, each witness and group of witnesses had plenty of marks to compare apparent sizes, the same was true for directions and azimuths, I suppose you could realize that ?
Surely you realize you're quibbling ?

 

[eburacum]

This was the same in every case I mentioned, each witness and group of witnesses had plenty of marks to compare apparent sizes.

It doesn't work like that; the sky doesn't have convenient 'marks' to compare things to. Even comparing an object to a cloud or cloud-layer can be problematic; clouds may be semi-transparent or further away than they appear. Since bolides are self-luminous, they may shine through a cloud, and appear to be in front of it when it is in fact tens of kilometres further away.

The apparent size is not the issue- more important is the actual size, which in the case of a re-entry is often a plume of glowing ionised gas several kilometres long, with a variable number of brighter spots where fragments have broken away.

Very few people expect to see a phenomenon in the sky which is several kilometres long, and maybe a hundred kilometres away, so they automatically assume (or 'estimate') that it is much smaller and much closer.

 

[eburacum]

Triangulation is impossibly difficult to use in such a context, by the way; you have to make sure that both sightings are synchronised accurately, or the result will be quite wrong. In any case it seems that at least some of the Proton witnesses got the azimuth quite wrong; they would be counted among the outliers in any attempt to accurately determine the location of the re-entry, but they are much more important as living demonstrations of how bad eyewitnesses can be.

These are the 'damned data' that Fort talked about. Normally thrown out with the bathwater as outliers, they are important in themselves.

 

[rynner2]

Triangulation is impossibly difficult to use in such a context...

Difficult but not impossible; it has been done for some big fireballs, and this has made it possible to locate the area where most of the debris reached earth, so helping to recover some of the resulting meteorites.

The ever-increasing number of security cameras helps, since times and directions can be got from the images. There are also wide-field telescopes used for asteroid searches which often pick up meteor activity too. Perhaps one day we'll track a UFO as well...

 

[eburacum]

Some UFOs have been tracked by unmanned cameras; one example, from a meteor-watch skycam on Hawaii, caused some controversy until it was found to be a fuel dump by a rocket launch.

Fixed cameras are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses since they have well-determined orientations and are generally time-stamped as well. On the downside they are generally much less able to see small objects than the human eye.

 

[Analis]

Triangulation is impossibly difficult to use in such a context, by the way; you have to make sure that both sightings are synchronised accurately, or the result will be quite wrong. In any case it seems that at least some of the Proton witnesses got the azimuth quite wrong; they would be counted among the outliers in any attempt to accurately determine the location of the re-entry, but they are much more important as living demonstrations of how bad eyewitnesses can be.

These are the 'damned data' that Fort talked about. Normally thrown out with the bathwater as outliers, they are important in themselves.

Now you're just splitting hairs, and make up difficulties that are not. Believing that a huge object hovering in the same place for minutes, for example, is just a re-entry, is more extraordinary than believing in an extraterrestrial craft. Although that's not so surprising if you believe that a witness is not able to discrimate a bear from a man-ape at a close range...

 

[eburacum]

Some Bigfoot sightings might be misidentified bears; that is a real possibility. But most such sightings are almost certainly humans in disguise. This doesn't really count as a misidentification, as the whole purpose of the disguise is to fool the observer into thinking they've seen a Bigfoot.

There have been quite a few successful UFO hoaxes of this kind, too.
Here's a good example.
http://magonia.haaan.com/1976/experimental-ufo-hoaxing/

The stated elevation of the object and the duration of the sighting are obvious errors in observation, whilst the reference to clouds is misleading. Perhaps the most interesting part of the report is that section dealing with the movement of the purple light. Instead of noting it as stationary, the description is consistent with the implied movement recorded on the fake photographs.

Both articles noted car headlights in the background scene, but incorrectly placed them on the hill beyond the street lights. Neither author seemed aware that they were to the right of Battlesbury Hill and on a main road.

It is difficult to apply the scientific method to UFO sightings, but studies like this show how easily people can be fooled, and how poor people's observational skills are.

 

[Analis]

Triangulation is impossibly difficult to use in such a context...

Difficult but not impossible; it has been done for some big fireballs, and this has made it possible to locate the area where most of the debris reached earth, so helping to recover some of the resulting meteorites.

The ever-increasing number of security cameras helps, since times and directions can be got from the images. There are also wide-field telescopes used for asteroid searches which often pick up meteor activity too. Perhaps one day we'll track a UFO as well...

If you're interested, you have this link in French, which provides detailed reconstructions of some sightings of this night. Ambiguous or imprecise testimonies, that the witnesses could have distorted or embellished, are not included. It contains some of the cases I already mentioned, plus others like the giant 'submariner' of Melun.

http://www.forum-ovni-ufologie.com/la-v ... -t8675.htm

 

[eburacum]

Thanks! Very interesting. I suspect my interpretation of these data is different to that of a UFO proponent; but this is data which should not be ignored.

 

[eburacum]

[Here is a montage of the eye-witness depictions from the 5 Nov case;

They look quite similar, but I suspect that some these images have not been made by the witnesses alone; they show signs of graphic manipulation.

However the phenomena were observed in roughly the right direction, allowing for the poor eyewitness effect. At Sauzet the trajectory was almost correct, and at Melun the witnesses only made a mistake of 50 degrees.


For comparison, once again here is the Zond IV witness drawing which is known to have been a fireball caused by re-entering debris

Note the broad similarities; rows of lights, with beams or exhaust issuing from the apparent body of the craft.

The chances that a vast, totally unaerodynamic, brightly illuminated black vessel appeared in the sky at the same time as a rocket re-entry that would have produced very similar visual stimuli is fantastically small, but if you wish to continue to believe otherwise, you are welcome.

 

[eburacum]

Here's Jim Oberg on UFOs which correlate with Russian rocket launches and re-entries:

Soviet space and missile activity has provided us with a near-perfect "control experiment" in which startling visual apparitions were seen over a wide expanse of time and space, while the prosaic explanation was not published due to military secrecy.

In 1967, a series of orbit-to-earth thermonuclear warhead tests were conducted, with final reentry occurring at dusk across the Ukraine, Volga Valley, and Caucasus regions of the southern USSR. Hundreds of thousands of witnesses stepped forward, including pilots (who saw a "pseudo-UFO" circle their aircraft causing its engines to stall), astronomers (who estimated the solid crescent-shaped "UFOs" to be a thousand feet from wingtip to wingtip), engineers, teachers, chemists, mechanics, and representatives of practically every other respected profession. The were seeing a series of classic "fireball" UFOs, with timing and motion coincident with the descending warheads but with perceptions identical to those associated with "classic" true UFOs.

Since 1977, multitudes of witnesses in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and southern Brazil have described "circular UFOs" which occasionally fly across the evening sky.(snip). All these particular cases can be traced directly and unequivocally to excess propellant dumps from Soviet military missile observation satellites launched an hour earlier from Plesetsk.

Most recently, in January 1985, the Soviet newspaper TRUD described an encounter between an airliner and a UFO on an early morning flight from Rostov to Tallinn.(snip) The visual stimulus was the booster exhaust plume; everything else was provided gratis from the imaginations of the involved percipients.

http://www.debunker.com/texts/black_box ... tions.html

 

[Analis]

The discussion veering off-topic, I'll answer only briefly.
Relating to Bigfoot sightings, when it comes to hunters, I think they're more competent to assess what they saw.
People in ape suits ? Likely, it happens sometimes, and maybe a few alien cases can also be explained this way. But is it realistic to think they're more than marginal ? Too often, the self-proclaimed hoaxers don't substantiate their claims.
About the Westminter experiments, the lessons are less about poor observational skills, and more about the dangers of being influenced, and trusting blindly colleagues. It seems that a number of witnesses made their testimony to match the photos. In his last book, written shortly before his death, Pierre Guérin explained that his greatest wrong had been to trust blindly Charles Bowen and his appraisal of the photographer's honnesty, which had led him to draw hasty conclusions.

I never thought Oberg as reliable. His tactic is to find a time match with any other event, and not look further. Such a correlation doesn't exempt him of a serious study of any sigthing.

As I understand, the drawing of the object attributed to a Zond IV sighting consists of a fiery cylinder, not a dark mass. But it could be understood as quibbling, I'll just give a few precisions about these cases, so that anyone can have his own idea.

1) It took place near the Belgian border, at 170-190 km from the trajectory (they were facing east on a road with an orientation of exactely west-east), it should have been to their south, low on the horizon.
If the thing indeed apparead at an height of only 30°, it came to position itself at 70° above them shortly after, flying parallel to the road. It changed direction again to cross the road, and went away to the north, which is inconsistent with the position of the re-entry as it should have been seen from this place. Additionally, the apparent size would tally with a real size of close to 200 km if we suppose it was at 170 km.

2) In this case the direction was roughly similar, but the position was not. The object was really low (on the illustration, it is shown behind some urban structures ; I don't know if the witness approved the drawing, but it is in accordance with his description). A re-entry consists of a big light followed by a plume of small spark-like lights. There, we have three big lights at the rear end, preceded by a tapestry of small fixed lights. In any case it would not stand motionless for a few minutes...
As to suppose a trance state... Years ago, the PSH was filled with speculations about "mythical experiences" (sic). But lacking of grounding in the real world, this notion has slowly died.

3) "Only" is not really the right word to use. The other problem is that 50° is only a minimum, the multiple witnesses were facing west. They couldn't spot the re-entry while it was above the Gironde estuary (position used to estimate a 50° divergence), because of the presence of small mountains in this direction. They probably couldn't see it at not more than 200 km. Which gives a difference of at least 80°.