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In a vain attempt to save face, and show that SOME work was done at least, I've attempted to plot a list of [hopefully] good UFO radar-involved cases, as you see above. My own case files have around 120 folders/individual cases. Of these I could flash-determine that I could be somewhat "proud" of 43 of them... I am sure that many more of the 120 are in this "good case" category, but I was too lazy to re-read and evaluate the other files.
43 was a "nice" group, but it seemed smallish for the whole radar category. So I went to the Sparks/ Berliner/ McDonald "BlueBook unidentifieds" list and added in the non-duplicated cases there. Then I went to Dick Hall's UFO Evidence Two and added his radar cases. Lastly Jan Aldrich had sent me a first pass copy of his and Martin Shough's RADCAT listing, and I added those. This got the pile up to 232, and I thought that was OK.
The 232 number has a lot of bias in it. First and most obviously, there is the great lump of cases, mainly military, from the Project BlueBook era. They are shown on the graph in blue. Then there is the prejudice, whatever it is, that happens in my own mind when I decide to make a case file and then evaluate the case as "good". These are shown in the graph as red. Hall's UFOE two is biased by time period{ post-1965 mainly, through c.2000}. The draft RADCAT is only biased in that I started looking at the entries post BlueBook's close.
So, make of that what you will. For me, even with all the biases, I'm boggled once again by the desert which follows 1980 that we've seen in other case instances. The main "muscular" UFO waves [around 1952, around 1957, around 1967 (( "up yours Ed Condon; where are you??")), and around 1975], are all standing out. 1954 doesn't. Why?? With 1954 I believe everything goes out the window except weirdness. To put it another way, all these others look like Core UFOlogy, but '54 is like a freak hybrid --- check that, never use the word "hybrid" when talking about UFOs --- uhhh, '54 is more like a strange combination of different things.
... but given the earlier theme of searching for the UFO Core, it seems to me that we've found it again in the better radar cases. Advanced aerial technology that can easily outfly us.
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I could have specifically listed a lot of cases, but I had a template for 14 cases and, being a do-nothing goof went with it. I think that I chose some good ones, though --- cases #1,2,&4 are universal favorites and you'll have to fight Jim McDonald if you want to argue with them --- I'd suggest not. #3 was Colorado administrator Bob Low's favorite unknown, and it's one of mine too. There's so much corroboration in this case that it's an evidence mountain should people really want to find the truth. ... and down the list, there are Hynek favorites, a Bill Chalker favorite, a Claude Poher favorite, a Dick Haines favorite, a Jean-Jacques Velasco favorite, plus BlueBook unknowns. ... and the thing that I got to work on, Holland Michigan.
Since radar cases are notorious for having zero or lousy visuals to wow the spectators, here area a few things I made from my work on the Holland case to amuse you.
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This is a drawing I did using the commentary in the never-published MUFON field reports interviewing the Graves family about how a circular thing with cycling colored lights moved from across the street from their house and away.
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The above two diagrams are two of several that I made from the narration that the radar operator gave me and Dave Ford while we were there with him and his boss at the station. He did not see any color, of course; I just added that to make the blips stand out.
As to what these creme-de-la-creme may be telling us:
1). The object shapes, as usual, are very different. Disk, cigar, oval and generally radially-symmetric shapes dominate [also as usual] and there are some cases where all you could see were lights. But at Mainbrace one of those nuisance triangles even snuck in there for a while.
2). These things are fast and maneuverable. They can hover, or they can cruise at 2000-4000 mph. A case from Kirksville, MO [one of the notorious "case missing" incidents] estimated the speed at 6000 mph. Good old-fashioned Top Gun Alien Technology.
3). There are two size-monsters here, both later year ones. Rather than being weaker cases, their provenance is extremely strong. The JAL case said: "Two Aircraft Carriers." The '94 French case said : Disk 1000 metres in diameter. Yep. No doubt the planet Jupiter.
4). Some extra weirdness creeps in as well. The RB-47 object instantly vanished. And Hynek's Winslow, AZ case would show on radar when the lights were visually seeable, but when they would suddenly switch off, the ground radar would lose the object's blip. Do these things flip in and out of normal space, or do they just have a fantastic stealthiness which they switch on and off?
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So, there's another chapter. What does it tell us?
UFOs are real, baby, just ask the Air Force...... or practically anyone else.
And as to what's next?
"It was a dark and stormy night...."
b"h
ReplyDeleteI was a military radar tech for jet fighters, but that was many moons ago, so I'm only asking questions. In conjuction with these reports spanning decades, I would wonder how radar coverage has changed from the '50's to now, i.e. are there more radars now in more places providing more coverage? Also, how has radar design changed, i.e. modern aperture radars are extremely sophisticated compared to the relatively simple radar I serviced. Then, when did ATC interogating radars become predominant - where a plane equiped with a transponder will reply to the radar pulse, and thus be displayed on screen. If an object does not reply to this pulse, it is not plotted. I gather that there is usually a "skin-paint" radar in operation with transponder types, so that uncorrelated targets can be displayed if operators want to display them, such as (I presume) during the 1986 JAL 1628 where the objects were plotted by military radar. I'm just thinking that the drop off in radar reported anomalies might be due to these factors, and not to a change in actual numbers, though of course, perhaps the numbers have actually dropped.
Best wishes
You're smarter than I am on the radar topic so my thoughts are poor on this. But for what they're worth:
DeleteA). It must be true that technology has improved. But it seems to me that such should allow greater rather than lesser anomalous flight detection;
B). Even weather radar has better coverage, and satellite radar is of course a whole new ballgame. Again, greater coverage;
C). Right or wrong, it seems to me that the drop-off in reports is at least in part strongly sociological. To clarify: the military no longer makes any of these reports available due to no dedicated project and everything passing through "regular channels" to which [they feel] the public has no business knowing. Secondly, there is a great reluctance among commercial pilots to make anomalies sightings public, and the companies REALLY don't want them too. ... just viewed as a no-gain/possible loss scenario. Somehow Dick Haines at NARCAP has gotten some cooperation on this via the argument that unknowns in flight paths constitute a safety hazard.
Other than that, it probably is true that, like all the other close encounter incidents, we just don't get as many as in the 1960s et al.
Hello. I've heard that modern radar equipment is programmed to ignore extremes in the data as glitches: a UFO that suddenly shoots away at astonishing speed just doesn't register and is not shown to the the operator because 'nothing flies like that'. So the radar operator reads an edited screen, and no one sees the radar data directly anymore. Perhaps this is the reason why the UFO radar has dropped off. Have you heard of this? Could it be true?
DeleteYes, much modern radar does do as you say due to pragmatic decisions about what is related to its dedicated job and what isn't. However, most radars can be put into another manual mode which would allow painting an object lower than programmed, or in a different direction, or in a specific location. This is in fact exactly what the Muskegon operator did in the Holland, MI case when alerted by the 911 operator.
DeleteBut beside all of that, most objects in the cases in those "good old days" of UFO flaps were positioned in the sky so that any old ATC or sky-sweeping military radar would still paint them as long as they weren't going too fast. So I don't believe that the modern massaged-functions of radars have had much to do with missing the UFOs. The Stephenville, TX case had plenty of radar data.
Hi Professor, I noticed the big drop in reports after the '52 flap. As I have been looking through old newspaper articles from 1953 onward, it seems that ufos were covered less in the media and being called fireballs, light barrages, mystery lights, etc. Many small newspapers had stories that weren't carried nationwide and they don't seem to be showing at all on many sightings lists. Doesn't it seem like such a shame, all that missing info?
ReplyDelete---Mrs. C
Absolutely a big shame.
DeleteWe have a few heroic characters who have tried to dig laboriously through newspaper microfilms in an attempt to indicate better the extent of the phenomenon. Barry Greenwood, Jan Aldrich, and in the old days, Ted Bloecher have been some of those heroes. George Eberhart did a phenomenal search for his GeoBibliography of Anomalies [a somewhat rare and priceless information source.] These herculaean efforts are valuable particularly for mapping and statistical study. What they won't do is give us the reporting depth that we need to establish either "credibility" or the confidence we need in the descriptions to assess strangeness --- the Yin and Yang of a good case. That sort of level of trust demands a solid interviewing and some documentation. Nevertheless, I find even individual newsclipping reports useful if they at least reference some authority being involved taking, say, a police report, and the case details matching a pile of better documented case types already in my files. That scenario gives me some confidence that I'm reading something close to truth.
Yes, I agree. The more backup the better.
ReplyDeleteI've never read Eberhart but I will keep an eye out at the used bookstore. Someday I will find an out of print treasure!
Thanks for the reply. :-)
--Mrs. C
the famous alaskan JAL sighting , do you think it has any connection with the yukon giant sighting ? they were about a month apart and occured on almost the same region (the JAL sighting was very near the border of alaska and canada, yukon sighting further south). too bad there are no info on UFO flap in that area at that time, maybe the desolateness of the region coupled with the lack of populated areas is the reason.
ReplyDeleteone other thing prof, lets say this is for BS discussion , from the behaviour of that UFO in alaska, how do you categorize the encounter ? the plane encountered a UFO, the UFO followed them , then after certain distance they seem to lost interest and go away, all while detectable by military radar (skin paint)..
... cases are ten years apart.
DeleteJust a comment, with regards to the Yukon sighting there has been much speculation that it was caused by a satellite re- entry. There has been little response from ufologists with regards to critiquing some of the prosaic explanations that have been offered to significant cases. Shough easily refuted the debunkers on the Exeter sighting. However the RB47 case has been ' debunked', however I am aware that at least 2 researchers have critiqued Printy, or however you spell his name, however have not published their material. Very frustrating!!
ReplyDeleteFrustrating it is. The recent satellite/rocket decay explanation for the Yukon Giant must await actual detailed facts about the exact witness testimonies and precise locations [space and time] of the suspect decay. Merely saying that something happened at around the same time as something else is by itself not a strong causal statement --- it requires a lot of "tying together." "Somethings", after all, are always happening at the same time. Does one REALLY match the other? A philosopher of science once, puzzlingly, said: "Coincidence does not mean Isomorphism", and in fact it is unscientific to even imply that it does without a lot of depth work, as one needs to dig beneath the surface of the How [behavior of things] and demonstrate the Why [the cause]. Another philosopher said: it is much easier to accept a simple falsity than a complex truth. Whereas every side of a UFO issue can be guilty of this, it is usually the debunkers who just hit-and-run. As to Yukon, if Martin Jasek doesn't take up this cause, we'll not get clarity, as it is he who could answer the details needed to evaluate the size, time, direction, and single-thing-ness of what was seen.
DeleteRB-47 still stands without serious challenge. Some of this debunker crap is just "something I just thought of" type of cherry-picking. This is like any situation where someone has built something and some other people enjoy throwing a rock at it, because they happened to stumble across the rock. Even when the "rock" turns out to be a puffball, and despite that no real honest effort went into it, the public feels that the presenters of the original must respond. These responses are rarely allowed to be brief, and the fellow on the positive side of things is drawn into constantly wasting his time dealing with nuisance and usually disingenuous argument. Thus, many UFOlogists don't bother when the objections are crap, and merely discuss the situation among themselves --- as has been done with this in semi-private discussion amongst the group that Fran Ridge [of the NICAP site] calls his "A-Team."
Why do "we" handle it this way? Part is the waste of time as above. Part is the fact --- yes fact --- that all of us serious veterans of this field know two things: A). these debunkers have no role in the future of this field. Almost no one gives a damm about them and shouldn't. As I've said before, we listen to their chatter, and if there's something worth continuing to analyze there, we do ... without their "benefit", since in their shallowness they have nothing more to say. They are muddiers and destroyers, whose ultimate "life's work" here is futile. Their attempt to eliminate the field of study is already a bankrupt malicious hobby, as the book UFOs and Government will prove to anyone with an open mind. And B). the field, as I am demonstrating to myself at least [and I know that I'm doing it for a lot of others] is hundreds, probably thousands, of cases larger than any one cheapshot target that these --- boy, I'm having a hard time not using some horrible-sounding labels for these knowledge-criminals --- persons choose to rattle about with their noise.
UFOlogy will survive both me and them. While they choose to behave like immature trolls, I choose to try to ensure the survival of the information that they try so puzzlingly to censor.
.... and, as usual, the debunkers have succeeded again in tempting me to waste too much of my own time, though in this case I am sort-of happy to have done so.
Here at NARCAP.org we have done some digging into radar-related UAP cases and there are some interesting correlations between varieties and reported detections (or reported non-detections). When people see UAP it could be of any variety. Take a look at the phenomena appearing at Hessdalen, Norway and those at sites here in the US that have been examined - we aren't totally certain what these things are and while some of them have no returns others demonstrate almost impossible properties like those reported by the EMBLA team under Teodorani at Hessdalen in 2001. Some of these things seem to have properties of objects and of, say, transparent quantum systems... The other half of the data set that reflects reports of objects, much like those reported by the official teams of the world like the French and Chileans, also contains many examples of observations that were not detectable on radar and then others that clearly were. My point, really, is that the presence or absence of radar detection doesn't make or break a UAP case when they are often reported to be seen but not detected... Our work at NARCAP.org is pointing towards a number of profiles with specific qualities that may be defined as much by the inability to detect them on radar (for example) as the idea of radar "confirming or discrediting" a report.
ReplyDeleteHello, Ted. Good to hear from you. Hope that you and Dick are doing well and that NARCAP flourishes.
DeleteAs to Hessdalen and the other lightfields: Biggest mystery in UFOlogy in my opinion is whether they belong with the UFO craft-like cases or are an entirely different thing. Teodorani's suggestion that these things are energy basically but at the same time "intelligent" is wildly intriguing and mind-blowing. [If this were to be true.] If I was forced to guess, I'd go with a lower percentage of BOLs which are technology, a larger percentage of BOLs which are unclassified "natural" phenomena, and maybe a dash of Faerie tossed in for spice. Some of these cases look like technological "intrusions" from some distant and nearly unguided technology. {I.E. "experiments."}
As to "ordinary" cases: I agree that the detection by radar or not of a seen UFO is by no means grounds for case dismissal. How could it be, if we're honest? Heck our own Boys in Blue have already gotten that trick pretty much solved, certainly more advanced technologists would.