A little look at some CE1s--- but first: "Excuses, Excuses." The blog's been mainly dormant for several weeks for some "good" and some not-so-good reasons. My mother's care continues to occupy a lot of time, and a lot of energy. Currently I'm getting a "month-off", thus finally this posting. Secondly, the big UFOs and the Government book is in the final polishing, has been in the majority seen by the publisher, and is being read by the author who will write the foreword. In other words, such stress is about to float downstream. SITU is actually at the point where I can build the final interior shelving units in the garage, and begin shelving books and journals according to category. There is some psychological relief in that, and such relief aids in the day-to-day "optimism" which is necessary to do research and contribute to blogs. So, life is still not that of an irresponsible playboy, but just enough relaxation of issues is occurring to make a few occasional blog entries more likely.
So, to the material-of-the-day: this comes from my freedom to attempt straightening out my files which had gotten out-of-hand due to problems one and two above. I had probably 200-300 cases to log and file; that's how far behind things had become. Once I finished, I thought: is there something here relatively mindless that can be done which would be amusing? For reasons unknown, I pulled out the files from the CE1 drawer and began to idly page into them. The interest arose as I saw that, although in the minority, there were quite a few files wherein the witness had sketched a craft [or someone else did, but had gotten witness approval]. So, I began plucking them out, and here they are. [I've more than this first page --- waiting with the rest until later is good strategy, I think].
Here are twenty-one case drawings from the WW2 to 1957 era. It's interesting, I think, for anyone to just look at the array for a minute without me gabbling away making noise about them.
And here are the thumbnail case details for the sketches above. Hopefully you will be able to pop this graph up and magnify it if necessary; there are a lot of pixels in it. 
I'm not sure what to begin to say. I'll be bonehead obvious to start. UFOs don't look alike. They especially don't look alike if they are anything but smooth featureless globes or disks, or cigars or ovals. As soon as you get features, then the simple description of a "UFO" goes out the window. For those of you who have been around the subject for a long time, you know that this is one of the great and frustrating enigmas about the phenomenon. Why don't the darn things look more like they came off a high-tech assembly line? People will try to say that they all look like they are in a general class of shapes ["radial symmetry" would be the fancy talk], but even that isn't really true. They rarely look alike; they rarely are the same size or color; they rarely behave alike; --- even giving them the benefit of somehow "seeming" alike [some good percentage of them anyway], they are far from Model T Fords a la Henry's mass production concepts.
There are UFOlogists who dislike this very much. I used to be that way. Now I've done a "180". The fact that everyday Janes and Joes do NOT describe some fixed image "flying saucer" gives me a significant boost towards the credibility of the reports. Arrays like that pictured above show [to me] conclusively that the media does not control UFO report content, and probably controls nothing about UFOs at all.
Let's leave the general comments with that for now, and say something about a few of the specific cases.
The drawing way at the top was one of Edward Ruppelt's favorite cases, and it has become one of mine as well --- whether it happened or not. This was the "shooting" incident which he was told about on one of his trips to Holloman AFB. An officer there told him that a pilot had fired his weapons at a UFO [VERY controversial thing to do] and even showed Ruppelt the incident report WHICH THE OFFICER PROMPTLY BURNED!!! Ruppelt was thoroughly boggled by this, BUT HE BELIEVED IT. We know that he believed it because he presented this incident prominently before the CIA investigation panel [The Robertson Panel]. Could we have actually had a USAF/UFO shooting incident in late 1951? The next drawing down is my colored up version of the little sketch in the witness drawing panels. It's the 1952 Bainbridge, MD case where two women naval officers saw a large black disk hovering over the roadway which they were walking and spectacularly "pouring" sparks like a liquid fall down onto that road. This two-witness case has the necessary high credibility AND high-strangeness to make it one of my favorite "hidden" encounters.
The incident pictured just above [again my colored-up version of the witness sketch] is the Yuma, AZ case of 1952, and is another little-known report. The case has a very detail-oriented observer, picturing a rather unique craft, and with an intelligent credible report [there were allegedly two military observers to this but, as usual, the second wasn't around for an interview]. My favorite detail was that the object produced a distinctly different color-pattern when it decided to take off, from that which it displayed while hovering.
The case at the bottom is a 1954 case from the Pacific Ocean, off Yaron-Jima Island. In this incident, the crew of the ship saw a very bright neon-blue object approach, looking only like a line of blue in the distance, but a disk when close. When directly overhead it appeared to have a thick red-colored ring surrounding a black center on its underside. The thing was quite large, perhaps one hundred feet in diameter.
I'm going to leave off at this point. I'll try to get another set up tomorrow or soon, with some further commentary. Until then, Happy Valentine's Day.
Have you considered that there may be UFOs with more makes and models than Detroit pumped out in the fifties because aliens are part of a post-scarcity society which affords them the luxury of personalized conveyances?
ReplyDeleteActually, put into more rational terminology, that is exactly one of the theories that has been around. When put into cruder more simplistic terms however, it doesn't do well in explaining the phenomenon as experienced. I will try to comment on this type of hypothesis either in the next post or a follow-on one [depending upon how much entry-making I want to do]. The idea when cast in a thoughtful presentation can be seen as not as silly as you make it sound. And it is stimulating of some relatively novel thoughts about the whole phenomenon. But I did not include that idea in the first post because the theorizing part of addressing mysteries should nestle itself in a little more data.... but I'll give it it's time soon.
ReplyDeleteHello Prof, it's funny how this subject can have us trampling around in the same cases...often in circles.
ReplyDeleteI was looking to see who drew the '57 saucer sketch because the style seems familiar. This led to reading about the Jim Stokes case and was a mere side-track into Olden Moore's account. Moore's description of a steep cone returned me to your image where the small print is indeed Olden Moore.
In a broader sense, sometimes it's as if we're all in a small tidal pool being moved by the same currents. I've no idea if it's ineffable or my own silliness, but it's sometimes curious.
I look forward to your thoughts on the shapes of reported objects. The diversity has been (sometimes) misused to buttress the arguments of quite a few people and groups over the years.
Lovely work, as always, Professor.
ReplyDeleteI wish it weren't so, but the TTB story leads right into the heart of the UFO nest. TTB had founded NICAP. He had the Adamski ship drawn up by an artist friend who was visiting for the weekend.
The book was out....the cat was out of the bag, Perhaps this was his way of making sure daughter Linda paid attention to the shape of the ship, knowing it would be part of a historical reconstruction of the times later. (What it is we are reconstructing, I don't know.)
A year or so later, in Florida, after he had publicly separated from NICAP, secretary Rose Hackett was still sending him reports. Reports which he was giving to Linda to sort, saying the ones that wobbled were "ours."
But there is a very non-physical aspect to this story. After seeing the drawing of the ship Linda had a UFO dream in which UFOs landed and a man acccompanied by pale and faceless companions visited with the family. She has reported that she and her father had shared the same dream and that they found three burned circles in the field the next day.
I throw up my hands with it all and stick closer to the earth. Navy-gravy's (Flying) Pig Farm has my most of my attention these days.
Jan Lofton, co-author for THE GOOD-BYE MAN, Linda Brown's memoir of her life and times as Townsend Brown's daughter.
There never seems to be any end to the mysterious dimensions of this story. I believe that most of us try to encircle some, to us, thinkable piece of the thing, and then hope to not have too many home invaders nor prison escapees. UFOlogy is by far the "leakiest" non-bag of weirdness that I've seen by any measure.... but one heck of a fun ride.
ReplyDeletethe yaron-jima case you mentioned , very interesting indeed.. ufo encounter at sea, how many goes unreported by witnesses ? directly flying overhead ? of all the whole empty sea ? seems like that ufo intentionally did a flyby for the benefit of witness. Again personal feeling / opinion here, it seems like these phenomena behaving like they want to scare the witness out of that area , or they have other motivation like guarding the said territory.
ReplyDeletecases like the : Canadian Destroyer encounter west of hawaii and the Bethune encounter , that always fascinate me , with the ufo behaving like 'you looked at me now im looking at you' type of behaviour..
of course , im just as clueless as everyone here and all i got is these feelings/opinion..
one question prof, the case of pilot firing on ufo and officer burning report. is it (as you are familiar with US military workings) normal or even legal for officer to burn official report like that ? unless of course he was acting under orders , but still burning official report sounds extreme.
ReplyDeleteit is not normal and is in violation of military procedure. Although we only have Ruppelt's word for it, this almost certainly happened [I'm talking about Ruppelt being shown a formal report] as he took this case with him to the Robertson Panel. He would not be screwing around with those guys.
Delete