Friday, April 5, 2013

LITS: Are they worth anything??



This is a trivial post. But, there has been some discussion here lately about whether it is even worth the bother to collect information on Lights-in-the-Sky cases and put them into the UFO data collections. I read all these posts of course, and it struck me that people were making that most common of all human "in-the-heat-of-the-argument" errors of overstating what they really, upon more reflection, would think to be sensible.

Obviously the clogging up of case files and statistical attempts at learning UFO characteristics with huge study-bending numbers of weak-to-bad data is a poor idea. If I were doing some statistical work, I'd surely make SOME attempt at "scrubbing" the input. And I wouldn't do it without a describable methodology, determined beforehand, for the scrubbing work either. One plays a dangerous scientific game if one "wings it" as one goes. But having said that, what's the other side of this story? Are LITS actually worthless?

Here is a list of just a few LITS cases from my files which I am EXTREMELY HAPPY that past researcher/collectors decided were worthwhile:

What are these 38 things?

I could have made several kinds of lists. This one is composed of [in the majority] my case list of some phenomenon quite close to my UFOlogical " heart". The cases spelled in GOLD are my 25 case pile for what I call "astro-alignments". These are incidents wherein the moving light does something in apparent deliberate spatial relationship between it and the witnesses. This particular relationship involves moving in a way where the observers are in a unique {"privileged"} viewing spot, so as to see the Light taking an apparent relationship with some astronomical object. [ex. the "anchor case" here is the Long Island/ Lake Ronkonoma incident of 1955, where a number of astronomy buffs saw a Light move {from their vantage point} in a precise "orbit" around Saturn, then move linearly to the Moon and cruise a precise half-circle around it.] What the witnesses in all these cases saw was a Light/astro-object relationship only viewable from the spot on which they were standing --- persons "off" by only a small distance would not have had the same perspective. The Light in other words did its act "just for them".

The majority of the rest of the list is in GREEN. These are twelve cases from Allen Hynek's personal folder on Project Moonwatch reports. That's interesting for several reasons. 1). Allen thought them worth saving, and I'm VERY reluctant to think that he was a poor judge of cases worth thinking about. Allen, for his time, saw/read more UFO reports than any human alive. You "get a sense" of things after a while. 2). These cases were witnessed by some of our most experienced skywatchers. And they were people seriously on the job. 3). The cases were somewhat vetted by the scientists in this country who knew more about high flying objects [satellites] than anyone. 4). And several of these unknowns were not only unknown, but had no feasible mundane explanation. The Bethpage case was photographed by a professional optical tracking station and has never been explained. Others also took photos of the "ECHO" companion, or the ECHO going the wrong way, or the ECHO going faster or slower than the real ECHO. At the Van Nuys station, these unexplainables happened three times in a month.

The last case that I threw in there for fun is in RED . The Deadwood case is one that Hynek himself investigated. Why did he bother with a light in the sky? A whole lot of witnesses including police officers in four stations saw this thing. The objects, a larger light and two smaller ones, made various aerial maneuvers and even sent out shafts of light. The central larger light would sit in the sky, AND THEN DRAW A RECTANGULAR PATH in the air. Hynek was so boggled by the very high credibility of the many witnesses AND the equally boggling strangeness of the "Geometrician-in-Space" that he included the case in his talk to the AAAS symposium post-the folding of Colorado, and his book, The UFO Experience.


So, yes. There are a lot of Chinese Lanterns up there screwing the work up.... but there are Other Weird LITS up there too. It is a wise person to sort them out.

But, in the end: What could they possibly tell us about UFOs?

Well... That the agency behind them is Intelligent for one thing. Apparent Rings around the planets and the Moon, Geometry in the Sky? These matters are not the product of random activity in a chaotic atmosphere. They are not the product of animals flying whither thither about. There is higher thought behind this.

And, "IT" is interested in US. Displays JUST for a human or a small group of humans in a privileged viewing spot. Display.... Display.... the LITS say: Display.

Hmmm.... the LITS phenomenon is involved with intelligence and interest in us. An insight of any value??



Admit it. YOU KNEW that behind those Golden Orbs, some THING was watching you........

Peace, my friends.


13 comments:

  1. Are they worth anything?? It might take some time to answer this question. But if you have look these LITS photos that I took from my encounters, you might sort out something. Are they the swamp gas or……???
    Pictures of Orbs flying in a peculiar formation
    http://ufo-spacelife.blogspot.co.nz/2011/04/orbs-flying-in-peculiar-formation.html

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  2. Considering them (LITS) is one thing; making compelling cases is much, much harder: this is especially the case with blurry, night-time, cropped photos (a la the ones on the reply just above this). A daytime 'object' gives, even in its blurriest form, much more information about size, shape, details, etc.; LITS give really nothing in still photos 90% of the time, and shaky video isn't much better. LITS don't have to be discounted, but they'd have to be a few orders of magnitude better (more compelling, clearer, etc) in terms of evidence. Then again, we could probably weigh a witness testimony of a LITS with a UFO equally, lacking any corroborating evidence.

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  3. Dear Prof

    Considering how most of these sighting occured on limited number of people (or should i call isolated) and at (mostly) noctural timing , shouldnt that indicate that the 'agency/entity' behind all these phenomena want to create some kind of propaganda to mankind ? i mean they are doing all this but never to the point of provability, always in the shadows, always keep to the mysterious thus making human's imagination ran wild with their conclusion like ghost, aliens and UFO.. Its kinda like a false-flag operation in intelligence where the entities/agency behind this phenomena are showing everything that they are NOT.

    Regards
    MiloMilo

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  4. Folks: a]. as to UFO photos --- I've discussed what they're worth and what they're not in a series of posts earlier on the blog. Photos, in the sense of only what's on a piece of film, are NOT going to give us the answer to all our questions about UFOs. What photos do is support the witness testimony which accompanies them. It's the testimony which is primary, not the film. I can imagine some well-testified film which could give some physical parameters which would constrict certain theories about UFOs, but frankly the UFOs seem to have so much technological wherewithall that I'd be very slow to think about constricting what they can do at all.

    b]. And Milo: I've said in several areas here on the blog that the data shows that we are "privileged" to see only what the controlling agency wants us to see. You can assume that by taking a type of UFO event [I did it with motor vehicle interference cases] and seeing that it makes no difference whether the UFO is shaped like X Y or Z, nor whether it has lights nor even if it has a beam. We are like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ but unable to pull aside the Curtain and see the real action behind the outer shell.

    That said, we're doing as well as we can as amateurs with no funding. We have accumulated plenty of evidence that these experiences are overwhelmingly likely to be technologically physically real, and comprise some guarded overtness aimed at least in part at us humans, while remaining brilliantly covert to the reality-speakers of our cultures. LITS have played their role in those findings.

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  5. Display indeed
    like "a laser pointer playing with a cat"
    Hm

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  6. Just a thought, this is 'the place to be' for good discussion of the phenom for insights from respected knowledged folks. My inclination: don't tell! haha. Perhaps that's a statement on 'the field' or just culture these days in general....

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  7. the amazing thing to me is that nearly every post by the prof provides data which has been scrutinized, examined, and maybe in a cool kind of retro graph format basically been çoded'or tagged'for future researchers.'I hope someone organized is somewhere keeping such data as it accumulates..

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  8. The LITS I have seen demonstrate a personal evidence for UFO. I've seen LITS making dismissal and denial of UFOs personally impossible... I suspect that's their value, to buffer the other 6 categories of evidence:

    (1) the Historical textual documents glyphed in soot and cut into stone or otherwise writ in ancient inks on cracking vellum,
    (2) the extant Artistic Historical from primitives on the walls of their caves, through Middle-Age wood-cuts, to the masterpieces of the masters on rough canvas and slick gesso later on
    (3) the quality Anecdotal reports backed up by multiple vetted witnesses and corresponding radar
    (4) genuine Photographic efforts prior to digital photography provided by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, et sig al
    (5) extant Physical Traces of landing UFOs as laboriously outlined by Ted Phillips and others
    (6) even the Mathematical, reader, as it is described in modern physics regarding the consequences of satisfying requirements accounting for "the formality of the actual occurrence" of something physical in this multi-verse (humanity "happened" so "others" must) but, specifically, as it is described in Probability One by Amir D. Aczel, PhD.

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  9. My dear Professor,
    I humbly draw your attention to my ode to the humble nocturnal light courtesy of the Silver Jubilee issue of FSR back in Spring 1980, Vol. 26, No.1, pgs. 12 - 18, "A Reviewing of the Great Nocturnal Light", which had me waxing lyrical by the end with my quotation of Pope, Alexander, not Nick: "So Man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown. Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal, 'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole." Anyway beyond the poetry the article might be interesting grist for the mind mill. Best wishes, Bill

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    Replies
    1. Hello, my good buddy, Bill.

      Who would have guessed that a Chemist could be a Great Poet too?

      Wait.... I'M a chemist too. .... hmmmm.... maybe we're all closet poets at heart. [I have to pull my old FSR off the shelf and read that].

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    2. This chemist is no poet but I do enjoy good poetry!

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  10. hello mr Chalker

    hows the current UfO phenomena in Australia? i read some horror stories from FSR about the nullabor area flap, is it really true that these entities also pull cars and drop them ? im still reeling at the unusual khoury case, is it UFO or occultism/ Demonology?

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  11. Alas guys, I was not the poet, Pope was, and he was no chemist. So Robert, me to, not a poet, but I do like good poetry and literature, all in the eye of the beholder of course.
    In terms of the "horrors" of the Australian UFO experience, hard to answer "Anonymous"'s question. My "solid light" obsessions have highlighted cases were beams of "light" have allegedly lifted vehicles, and we also have the striking vertical displacement effect in the presence of an unusual "beam" in the 1973 Coyne helicopter case. In the case of the Nullarbor Knowles case, a very complex case, something clearly happened, but I am not certain that it played out in a simplistic way in that case, in terms of a straight forward UFO interpretation. The current scene in Australia is a potent mirror of the complexities observed world wide. Given the physical evidence in the Khoury case - the hair - something real occurred and I don't see it as "occult" or "demonic", mind you there was a rather interesting mythic resonance with Peter Khoury's "nordic" blonde entity with a strange Scandanavian folk tale - re "Elle-maids" (see my OZ files blog entry back in July 2005). Food for thought. Regards, Bill

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