Breaking Down the Un-filed Pile Looking for Strange Stuff

Still trying to find organization in Chaos in the Quixotic search for clarity.... none of that will break open today, but it might be a bit of fun anyway.

Of the still un-filed categories of UFOlogical phenomena, I sort-of arbitrarily grabbed the handful marked "High Strangeness." Arbitrarily grabbed and equally arbitrarily piled together. Whereas the other case categories have a type of sense and discipline about them which could almost be called the rudimentary first stage of science, the High Strangeness file drawer is an intellectual mess. There is only one aspect of it which has a little method to it {I put all cases of "solid light" in here --- and there are a few dozen}, but the remainder of the drawer makes it in there just because they "feel" particularly weird to me. This is just the kind of subjective thing we don't want to be doing, but it's my knee-jerk we're talking about here, so it's my file drawer and go make your own. We're all Out in our own Proctor's as we must admit.

But to the cases.....

Becker, MN 2011. {cleaned-up version of the witness' own drawing above}.

It's nice to have a near contemporary case is it not? {One should always remember, however, that ALL UFO reports are of things-past and so the prejudice against "old" cases is largely reduced to a prejudice against ALL cases. It is in that simple fact of UFO Studies that one finds the root of the difficulty making UFOlogy "scientific" in the strictest sense of the lab-based, retesting "method", and the debunker's ability to take cavalier shots at anything and everything. Doctor Condon was, of course as an ingrained physical scientist, unable to overcome this very thing --- among his other difficulties.} But I digress....

The Becker case proceeded thus: An older male witness saw an object hovering over the back of his neighbor's yard. It initially presented itself as two dark brown domes sandwiching an extremely bright central area. From each end of the object, beams [two] extended downwards. They were bright white and sawed off, stopping before reaching the ground. [thus "solid light" and why this is in the High Strangeness pile.]

Coming down along each beam came BOLs, also white. At a certain elevation, the BOLs left the beams and took off horizontally in opposite directions. As they left, one solid light beam switched off and the other remained. Approximately one minute later, the BOLs returned to the remaining beam, merged with one another, and ascended back into the craft. The remaining beam then just switched off.

A "flame" then projected from the bottom of the object and. although this is not said, the object moved away. No sound occurred during this performance, and no effects on the neighbor's grass were seen the next day.

Plenty enough strangeness for me. The not-so-hidden aspect of this is that this is almost undeniably a display for the witness' benefit. Note that the orientation of the object and the positioning of where on the object the solid light beams and the BOLs come from is symmetrically directly to the witness' line-of sight. Once again the agency behind the phenomenon wants to show some Earthling that it is real, what it can do, and that it knows that "we" are watching. Why? That's not included.

Coastal area near Havana, Cuba 1966 {?}.

This thing is particularly odd in that it is apparently an NSA document [TERRIBLE condition] released for Lord 'lone knows what reason. I'm pretty sure that it IS a legitimate document because a friend of mine knows a person from the NSA at that time who verified it [without me bringing up this document at all --- the NSA guy was just talking about cases that he'd seen, and the details of this one came up in the conversation. That conversation is also why I've put the 1966 label on this despite the date not being readable, by me anyway, anywhere on the document.]

The case: The map above shows the approximate location of the informant who was looking directly north out to sea. What he saw: There was a bright white light at 15degrees elevation over the sea. This light's brightness pulsated at one second intervals. Then it's behavior changed to two minutes worth of sending out concentric rings of light "flowing from the central source in a rippling shimmering fashion." Then, beginning with the fourth minute, the source generated a blue-green beam from its central core. This beam extended to the left at an angle of 45degrees towards the sea surface. This beam reached the same apparent radius from the central object as had the rippling rings before stopping. The beam gave the appearance of a searchlight. The radiating circles then switched off leaving only the core object and the beam. THEN THE BEAM RETRACTED TO THE CORE. As it "arrived", the core object and the beam merged into a "nebulous cloud-shaped mass" and drifted away.

Yep, that's normal. ... that description gives one LOTS of meditation possibilities on the stealth technology of the UFOs along with the display behaviors.

Fort McCoy, WI 1980. {I owe my information on this event to Mark O'Connell's fine High Strangeness site.}

40 or 50 military personnel were ringing a Cuban refugee detainee camp. Guys traded off standing guard and getting some sleep all night long. The reporter of this experience was just getting off his "shift" and about to get to bed when a UFO interrupted that. Something shaped a bit like a rectangle was moving slow and low across the sky just behind a line of trees. For about two minutes this thing crossed from one treeline to another while people shouted, some taking pictures [none of these pictures have surfaced apparently.] During that flight, an opening was seeable in the side of the rectangle. This opening had the feel of being a window but not one of glass --- more as if it was protected by some forcefield {this seems to be a hunch, rather than concrete data-driven.} In that space, he was able to see the outlines of two entities. He strongly believed that they were looking at him [or in his general direction at least] as their silhouettes seemed to turn towards him as they crossed the sky.

He was also struck by the rear of the device. From the rear there seemed to project a "flaming exhaust" but it wasn't really like that. It was "just a stationary light {of limited length} coming out of the tail" which displayed no trail, exhaust, smoke etc. I have appended the comment "of limited length" above because the narrative calls this a lightbeam essentially, but compares it to a "trail" which is always limited in jets et al.

Because of the lack of precision in the description of the "trail" beam, this might not be a solid light candidate or it might. It is interesting nevertheless and would get VERY interesting if other witnesses surface. The witness ended his interview with the statement that at the end a "wall" came down in front of him and he decided [irrationally] to go to sleep. ... ?, uhhh weird plus.

Let's head off in a different direction {even if we can't tell what direction that is.}

Rural Ohio, 1962. {This is also a Mark O'Connell case.}

Credibility here is through the roof, as the witness is a close relative of Mark O'C. [Father-in-law.]

The witness was driving at night when he ran out of gas. Nothing to do but get out and walk along an empty country road. The starlight seemed then just to "go out." No light. He instinctively continued walking, and began to feel as if the surface beneath his feet was moving. With no lighted cues, this felt to him like some vast surface almost like a solider form of water --- walking on a strange ocean? For some reason, he had the impression that he was standing on this huge platform best labeled a "UFO", and that he was being taken somewhere. That "somewhere" never arrived as far as his memory was concerned, but he did see, some distance from him, entities. He remembered them as humanoids, but hazy, possibly metallic, and of various colors. They communicated telepathically to him that things were going to be alright.

Shortly the abnormal atmosphere was completely gone, the starlight was back, and he was again walking along the road. Later a police car drove up and gave him a lift back home. Mark O'C says that this man is a no-fooling-around solid person, and that's good enough for me. {I know Mark and he's a fine intelligent fellow.}

Is this a UFO situation? Or is this some kind of Parallel Reality Shift? Are both such anomalous experience types related? Out Proctor you can't ever be sure what direction you're headed.

There were a handful of other cases in the HS pile which seem to "surround" experiences like the rural Ohio case above. The simplest of these was Croy, UK 1979.

You can read the clip above but I'll condense it here. A guy and his mom are driving along an empty road in Inverness [nice touch that] when they see what they think are headlights well ahead. The lights keep coming on and grow brighter and wider. They think that this might be a crashing airplane coming straight down the road, stop their car, get out, and head for the ditch for safety. The strange part is this: the witnesses heard no sound of any kind during the close approach part of this. This meant not only no environmental sounds, but the revving of the engine made no sound, nor did the slamming of the car doors, nor did their footfalls on the ground.

As you all recognize, this is a characteristic of an [extreme] "OZ" effect, wherein the environment loses some of its qualities or seems isolated from the totality of  reality. Was this a part of the rural Ohio case?

Mendoza, ARG 1978. {wild South American case, so caveat emptor.}

Two adult males [father and son] were driving the son's car when they were passed by a truck. Immediately the rate of time seemed to slow down. Continuing at what seemed to be abnormally slow speed, they turned onto an expressway, whereupon the truck and expressway just disappeared. They were now driving blind --- total darkness. Nothing from their headlights could be seen either.

A few minutes later, their car, now apparently moving very fast, approached and entered a city. This city was composed of very high buildings all bathed in red light. The light seemed to come from everywhere, the ambient surroundings, the buildings, the sky. The buildings were caricature buildings --- no doors nor features nor people --- nothing but soaring faceless height.

The men could feel nothing under the car, as if it sailed along untouching the pavement, controlled by who knew what. One man grew extremely cold, while the other felt no change. Beautiful but unfamiliar music emanated from the tape deck. fifteen minutes went by as they raced along. Finally as the father asked again "where are we?", the son said "It seems the Martians have taken us." Instantly the Red City disappeared and they found themselves bumping along in a smaller city street six kilometers away from where they "left" the expressway.

When they finally got back home, they were asked where did they go? The son replied: "We went to a place where nobody goes."

Indeed. The question is: did even you go to that "place?"

Little Houghton, UK 1973.

A man was driving along through the village at night. He saw a bright light heading, apparently, right at his car. Suddenly he was walking on a rural road near an entirely different village. It was now nearly daylight [several hours later] and he was soaking wet. Knowing the area, he got to a friend's house and they went out looking for his car. They found it near an entirely different village. It was in a muddy field, but there were no tracks in evidence to show how it could have gotten in there.

Hmmmm..... this all seems threatening to become related somehow .... but how? {I'm not teasing, folks, I haven't a clue..}

Now this is different, but some [in a way] funny business is going on here too.

The above pictures are of NORAD [top] and Tinker AFB, Oklahoma City [bottom]. In January of 1973, a wife and her mom were on the phone to one another [in Oklahoma City] when a conversation broke in. It was so unexpected, and odd, that both called their husbands over to listen in. The conversation appeared to be a communication between NORAD to Tinker AFB [and perhaps other bases] about an alert. The women had immediately hung their phones up, but when trying to call back five minutes later the NORAD conversation was still going on. The alert seemed to be saying that it was an alert caused by some aircraft disaster and that bases were scrambling fighters for a UFO search or confront situation.

Naturally everyone at all bases and agencies denied any of this. Whether there was a real NORAD alert then or not, what caused the phone call weirdness, and what was the UFO reference all about? Did the universe glitch or jottle here?

Cisne, IL 1971.

A woman and her son were coming back from shopping in a town to the east and were in the last miles to home. She passed the brick house with the windmill on her right side and continued on through familiar territory to the fertilizer plant and then the high school grounds to her left. {the straight stretch of road in the picture above is the part of the road where the following experience occurred.} This was a bright sunshine-filled afternoon.

She had just reached the high school grounds when she realized that she was driving too fast and let off the accelerator. As she did that, her son abruptly asked why she had done "that?" By "that" he did not mean let up on the gas. He, and then she, noticed that they were back along the road by a half-mile or so --- near the brick house on the right --- and driving back into town again. The mother felt nothing at all during the transistion. She and her car and her son had just been flawlessly thrust backwards in space to a previous location [I believe that no one thought to ask about whether Time played any role in this.]

Well, heck. Space jumps, sound losses, alternate reality, partially alternate reality, glitches and jottles. How the heck are we supposed to make sense of that? It would be nice to know if this stuff happens "on purpose" due to some technology, or whether they are accidental, and the Universe has a lot of hiccups.

I have a few other HS cases, but this old man has gotten tired out today. There's a dog disappearing in a UFO beam, a couple of cases where forcefield barriers surround UFOs on the ground, a black hole in the sky, a UFO folding up, and a mountain getting entirely lit up blue from no known source. 

I know that The Truth is Out There, but unfortunately it's Out Proctor and no one, even us old West Virginians, have a map. 

Peace, friends.

UFOs and Force: Plowing Ahead?

Back to the rock-strewn fields of UFO encounters today.

Sort-of randomly, I picked up the pile that I call "Close Encounters of the Second Kind Everything Else" [distinguishing these things from "landing traces", electromagnetic effects, and physiological effects, since I'm too lazy and uncreative to come up with something better.]

The Big File of these CE2miscellani cases [the filing cabinet drawer] has things in it like "crashes" and "crash-intos" as well as "material stuff left behind {angelhair, slag fall, powders, alleged artifacts, Roswell debris et al}" but the chaos pile to be added to the cabinet was nearly entirely about forces felt by cars, planes, and in one case, water. So, that's where I'm headed with this entry.

Lets start with something simple, and something we've seen on the blog not long ago, but in a briefer form: the Bellwood, PA 1983 "car-tipper" case. Here above is our close-encountered lady showing the damage to her car. What you can't tell so well is that she herself is damaged in one of her arms and with neck whiplash. There isn't much doubt that physical effects of some kind happened when the unknown object rushed over her car and nearly tipped {blew?} it over. The reason that I am revisiting the case, which now you know well, is that some stuff about it was in the to-be-filed pile, but more so because I thought that you'd like to read a near-primary document on the case.

Regular readers of the blog know that I like to share "original" and possibly unique resources on these anomalies when I have some available {I hope that this is something that you like, and I at least think that this sort of thing gets me feeling that I'm a lot closer to real happenings of the past.} The above is a page of a letter sent to SITU by a member about his interview with Mrs. Burk shortly after her encounter. As you can read, Mrs. Burk had several effects to report, perhaps all of which can be ascribed to a massy object creating a powerful wake as it whooshed by, tipping the car and banging her around.

This second page should be valued in that it would put a stop to modern suggestions that she had an abduction or something like that --- some moderns try to make all CEs into abductions [which drives me crazy.] The interviewer makes an interesting comment --- that this encounter may have been "a surprise for both parties" [that is, the guys flying the craft didn't realize that they were so close coming over that hill to a car, or the telephone lines, which they also seemed to pull up drastically to avoid --- space cowboys?]

Rockford, IL 1973: Whereas Mrs. Burk's experience is VERY easy to accept, "Star Cab Driver" Daryl Worker pushes the credibility line. Even at almost 2am, a cab being picked up by a beam from a UFO and carried three blocks down the street in the midst of a city without anyone else seeing this closely, well ... OK, it's possible I suppose [more on how one might decide that it really IS possible later in this entry]. Worker went and reported to his dispatcher so that helps. That another cabbie saw an odd light more distantly also helps. The state police were only informed after Worker reported, so he may well not have done that, but his boss did. So, eh.

Giving him the benefit of a lot of doubt [he says this UFO was up there 5 or 10 minutes], he mentions something rather boggling: "I didn't know where I was going {OK} or WHERE I WAS for those three blocks." I suppose that we should say that this means that he was completely engulfed with light that he could not see through to any this-world referents. This comment plus the fact that he reports no eye injury makes one wonder what sort of engulfing-light environment he was in.

Another claim that was in the pile was from Farningham, UK 1978. {Look at the bottom of the two cases above.} The actual case mention in the to-be-added file was slightly more "positive" than this. It included some comment about knowing the case investigator Margaret Fry, and having confidence in her. Note that the case remarks about a UFO stopping a car, paralyzing the driver, and then sucking up a roadside derelict while the witness watched. ... well, uh, wow!

Is there any reason to believe any of that? I tried finding other information on this thing but came up with near-zero. The few other mentions all seem to go back to Margaret Fry and then end. An interview with her years later had her saying that she bought the case and the witness [despite the allusion above to uncoopperativeness and secondhandness of the report. I don't know what to make of that]. But there is another thing: on this same stretch of road there were two other 1978 cases, the one involving the "Michelin Man" entity thumbnailed above. Well, that's interesting but not related in any obvious way to this case. BUT Margaret Fry thought it was in that later interview, as she said that the two other cases took place on the same day --- hmmmm.... May 12th//July 16th .... overly romantically accepting?, or just a bad memory?

Caveat Emptor.

Ely, NV 1974. What I had here was a clipping from an article by [I think] Berthold Schwarz mentioning this case, but I didn't think that the clip had much oomph. I pulled out the cabinet file on this and saw a letter from one of the witnesses early on. So, in the previous spirit of showing primary case documents, here is that letter.

Page one above recalls the early stage of the encounter, which sounds like stalking.

Page two begins to get into high strangeness. The truck is hit by a force, starts to have engine effects, the driver loses control of the machine, and the drive shaft keeps turning despite the truck being stopped. Two objects seem involved.

Page three indicates that the experience lasted twenty minutes wherein they had what we'd nowadays call an OZ period --- feeling of total isolation with no traffic. When traffis did resume, the OZ and the experience ended. The witness says, reasonably, that he does not know how much of the truck's troubles were caused by the UFO or simple mechanical breakdown. He DOES however feel strongly that he and his brother had just had a close UFO encounter.

This is page four and the drawings of what he and his brother thought that they saw.

Allen Hynek ultimately interviewed the brothers [the old tapes are somewhere at CUFOS] and liked the case.

Another force case in the file pile was Lake Balaton, Hungary 1992. It was in a Jenny Randles article in Fortean Times. I don't know what to make of it. I tried to find another reference/study but no good. There was some UFO activity in that area and another case from Lake Balaton later as the other reference that I found [above] shows, but not this case. The Randles case states that a woman was driving near this lake when a white light charged straight at her windshield. She blanked out. When she recovered she found her car removed from the road into a snow-covered field with no tire tracks between. ... thus the idea that mass-transference force had been applied.

It would be nice to know if there was anything to this claim.

The logo above is for the Tasmanian UFO Investigation Committee, a particularly long-term-running excellent UFO organization run by Keith Roberts. The logo is there because the following several cases are all Tasmanian, which TUFOIC investigated. As a preface to the comments below, what stimulated this part of the blog entry were a few short paragraphs out of a newsletter called Fair Witness, which I don't necessarily trust but which sometimes gives good hints on things to look at further. So I did --- in articles by the Aussies themselves looking for credible references to these claims.

Between Bridgewater and Campania, TAS 1974.

Two witnesses were driving to their home when they noticed a bright light descend into a quarry and back up again. It then began to pace them and creep them out. At closest approach the thing looked triangular and "cloudy gray" with a white light in the center base and a red light out front. This pacing/stalking went on for 20 kilometers. Nearing Campania, the object rose, and as it did so the witnesses felt as if they were being pulled upwards and the car began to be hard to steer and was pulling off the road to the right which was the direction of the object. Keeping the car on the road was a big battle for about 8 kilometers. When the object finally left the driver ached all over from the struggle to control the vehicle. The driver said that he thought that the whole thing was "queerly silent" {possibly our famous OZ again --- OZ in OZ, seems right.} The driver also said that when they were in areas of the highway with occasional houses, the object went high up, but when they were in the real empty country, the object approached closely.

This case is "vehicle interference" but not in the normal CE2em way that is usually thought of. This seems like attractive or gravitational force --- just like lifting force that we've seen lately on the blog.

Echo Lake, TAS 1974.

Two folks are out fishing just before dawn. To the north a yellow domed object rises above a hill. It was a globe and it "floated" down to the lake surface. IT DID NOT REFLECT ON THE SURFACE WHILE HOVERING THERE. {this stuff puts me WAY Out Proctor every time.} The water's surface was "flat" and the stars could be seen on it. The globe just sat there without apparently disturbing the water, BUT the witnesses saw that the lake edge had risen significantly, pushing three meters into the beach [relatively flat shoreline but still....] Despite this change, the water remained still as a mirror. Then the object ascended and accelerated away. When the Sun rose sufficiently, the fishermen could see that several bottom-dwelling logs had floated to the surface and now were deposited on the shore. Others floated in the shallows. None of these objects were there the previous evening. Slowly the lake's edge retreated to normal levels and whatever logs still remained at the surface then sunk.

???? What the Heck???? Did this object affect the local space somehow here and the force effects only gradually return to normal? ... as they said in The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: we'll get back to you when we determine what is normal anyway.

Tasmania was in quite the high-strangeness flap in 1974. Here are a couple of their other "normal days Down Under."

Poatina Highway, TAS 1975.

The witness was driving around 3am. The car's steering began to malfunction, swerving the vehicle sharply to the right and into the path of the roadside guideposts. The driver missed them but slowed down, proceeding more carefully. There was a bright orange light to his right. A few kilometers later, the steering malfunctioned again, and he decided to stop. An object was once again visible in the distance. He got out. The thing had a "helicopter shape" [without the blades] and was blue on top and orange on the bottom. It had a little yellow "tail". After two minutes of staring, the object "slid away" sideways and went over the hill. Back in the car, the steering was normal and the witness continued home.

Are these UFOnauts just meddlesome frustrated back-seat drivers?

Murchison Highway, TAS 1979.

The witness was traveling on the west coast highway, a road that she knew very well, and with a full tank of gas. Halfway along, the interior of the car lit up with a strong green light. She looked and saw a green lighted object some distance behind her and no other light sources. Her car now decelerated without her consent, and she pushed the accelerator to no effect. The engine just seemed to ignore her prodding. Attempting to change gears, and even braking had no effect. She noticed that this happened at 9:28pm on her watch. The green light stayed at a distance behind her. This relative position stayed true regardless of any dips or curves or turns that she made. This situation continued for 8-10 kilometers. Suddenly the light was just gone, and the car returned to normal function. Her watch now said 9:29pm despite much more time having elapsed --- it must have stopped during this entire experience, and checking her dashboard clock, it had stopped too. As she was finally getting home, she noticed that her fuel tank was now empty, but her normal trip should have left it half full.

Messing around with engine function, timepieces, gasoline --- nothing is sacred to these space cowboys. But seriously... what constellation of projected force technologies can account for the variety in these cases?

Stanley River Road, TAS 1983.

The witness was driving to his home along the western Tasmanian highway [somewhat south of the previous story] when his car was lit up by a bright circle of blue-white lights overhead. The witness decided to stop his car to look, but found that he could not influence the car's motion nor speed in any way. Brakes did not work, and even removing the keys from the ignition had no effect. The car just sped on, and he doesn't remember whether he was doing the steering or not. He remembers two cars passing him in the opposite direction, but doesn't know if they saw him with his low-flying bright blue-white circle overhead --- either they DID see him or he was in some sort of here-but-not-here condition. When the "driver" finally reached his turn-off, the object immediately sped away, being seen doing so by his wife. With the object gone, the car just stopped. He put the keys back in, and it started right up. He calculated his trip time. His watch indicated that the trip had taken 16 minutes. He should have taken 6 or 7 of those to get to the point where his car was illuminated and he lost control [8 kilometers]. But that meant that the final 25 winding hilly kilometers had been traversed in only 9 or 10 minutes, a physical impossibility in his vehicle. Did his watch stop during the experience and just start back up later? Even if so, why? How does one do that?

Keith Roberts had three other cases in which, he felt, some form of force was applied to automobiles to move them or slow them. He viewed this pile of encounters as encounters with UFO projected "invisible forces."

We've seen stuff like this before on this blog. Is this the heralded guessed-at anti-gravity technology of the UFOs? Do some of these cases hint that the devices manage this by altering the local space around the affected vehicles [or persons]? Does the rest of the world then go peacefully by unknowingly? Well, of course we don't know what we're talking about ... who could? But I still believe that it's important for us to keep pounding away at the mystery. We DO find things out, little brick by little brick. And they may build up into an understandable structure one day.

For me, shadows of that structure already exist. This is very advanced technology which can affect precise bits of our environment without messing up others. It is almost as if "they" can "beam" invisibly [or with a visible carrier] a suite of forces to whatever point-of-contact that they wish. Excitingly, this seems to include both attractive and repulsive forces, as well as electromagnetic. And, most excitingly for me, this technology seems to be able to "interface" somehow, to bring the local space partially into a different relationship to its surroundings, almost as if it were halfway portaling that bit of local reality into a parallel one. ... and, in doing so, changing the normal ground rules for those "captured" areas' functions.

But... I'm Out Proctor and in danger of going "All-The-Way-Fool" at this point, so forget that I said all that.

An appropriate Tasmanian cloud, methinks.

I can just hear the UFOnauts saying:

"USE THE FORCE, LUKE!!!" ... and the captain rolling his eyes and saying: "Zkornk! Relieve Quekar at the sporngebonker station. Tell him he's in 25 zortles time-out. And if he calls me 'Luke' again, he's in the brig."

Peace and good times, folks.

A Chance to Support Something Good in UFO Studies

Hello, folks. I'm going to do something completely out of character for the blog: ask you to consider supporting a young UFOlogist in a writing task. This is a writing project that needs [a little] funding. So, feel free to just skip on by if you don't want to read and do anything about this --- cash is tough nowadays and I understand --- this is not about me, by the way, although I am going to contribute something myself.

The project is a book about the spring 1966 UFO wave concentrating on Michigan and the famous "swamp gas" pronouncements, but painting a MUCH bigger portrait of the events. The prospective author is a young-ish man who is trying to catch on as a school system teacher in a tough marketplace, and a very good friend of mine. I've seen and heard about his [rather massive] research on this flap for years. It's impressive.

The bottomline is: he can use some "survival" money to free up his summer to write. SO: he has gone to Kickstarter and just posted his project and plea. If you want to help, go to Kickstarter and use their search with the words "Swamp Gas." The picture above should send you to a video describing the project --- even if you don't donate [please do, though], the video is worth watching.

That's it. Give him some support if you can. Like the "Good Minister" from the pulpit, I promise to minimize my "passing of the plate" here, but this is a good cause.

Imaging UFOs: Is It Even Possible?

OK. Back to work.

The filing boxes above are [WERE thankfully] filled with a backlog of UFO case information which managed to maintain Chaos Status due to all the house moving, archives creation, UFO Group get-together et al. All that's [largely] in the past now and good old fashioned Catholic Guilt arises --- GET AT IT!

Although that first picture doesn't look like it, there are about 250 different cases represented therein --- not full reports, but data to be added to files or new ones made. Above they are dominating the table and sorted into Hynek-like case category types, as a first stage ordering process. Now that this is at least started, where to go from here? I picked one pile......

The pile is the UFO "photo" pile. Due to modern technology I think that I have to change this name to "IMAGING" as there are movies with digital tech taking over. So my new imaging pile had 28 cases represented --- almost all older cases [this doesn't surprise me as the new cases, digital or not, tend to be unusable.] I color-coded the lines for my own convenience --- Red is "It Stinks", GreenBlue is "It's Good or very probably Good", Yellow is "I'm intrigued", and no color is "Meh."

So, a few comments .....

 =====================================================================

These things are two photos with essentially no information. I have vague bells ringing that I've seen them before, but maybe not. Intellectual honesty says that I say nothing as to their goodness without some facts, so here there are in all their vagueness. Maybe some of you know their stories.

This is an only slightly cropped version of an old [1952] photo by George Stock --- NO, it's not a UFO "Stock photo". But it IS intriguing to me. It seems to have come at a bad time for UFO investigation, and I have never heard much about it. I read a very much later interview with the photographer [by then an older man] and he seemed still humbly puzzled by what he'd seen. Is it feldercarb? I can't say. As with all these things, we bring prejudices to the game. If you reflect on your inner voice when you saw this image, you will locate some of yours. ".... streetlight ...."  ".... flying disk ...."  ".... lamp top ...." etc. The point is that without the case story, other witnesses, photo analysis investigation, we shouldn't automatically praise or ridicule this picture.

I know. It's hard.

I came across an original newsclipping of one of my favorite UFO imagings: the "Echo of Echo" picture taken by a lady who lived in Charleston WV probably at the same time that I was going to high school there [1955-1958 --- I was at Notre Dame when she took this 1960 picture.] LOTS of witnesses to this and one good lady photographer.

This picture was one of many similar imaging events taken in that time era --- example: all the MoonWatch stuff that boggled Allen Hynek's mind. Our satellite watchers AND our satellite scientists KNEW that these weren't our space stuff nor even loose boosters and debris.

.... and that gives me a proper lead-in for this report from The Land of Oz received from their government through their Disclosure efforts. I have no picture, but the released thumbnail of the event tells a similar MoonWatch-like story.

Small potatoes? I don't think so. Meditate. Our best near-Earth orbit watchers were seeing true unidentifiables at satellite height throughout the mid-1950s and early 1960s [and probably a lot more.] What group of people HAVEN'T seen UFOs is my question? If one objects that UFO pictures don't let you see inside the windows, then I can't help you at that level of demand.

This is about the famous Tremonton, UT movie film taken by the Navy photographer Newhouse.

Here is the classic test of the instant prejudice. When people see this film the first thing in almost everybody's head is "birds." And so they go merrily unconcerned down the street. That is really lousy UFOlogy.

One NEVER STARTS with the imaging element and immediately quits. One starts with the witnesses. Newhouse and his wife were good witnesses, good people. What did they say? They said that the objects were clearly disks when seen at their closest point, and the photographer had to get his camera out of the car and set up before attempting a sequence. Their story hangs together with its surroundings and what you see. THEN the analysis....

The paragraph above is from Ed Ruppelt's draft of his famous book --- I can assure you of that since it's right here in the archives with me. The "Z" is our favorite Air Force guy editing his draft, thinking that these words are too wordy. Well, big fella, you cut out something WILDLY interesting. The Navy photo analysts, Woo and Neasham, had talked personally to Ruppelt and told him what they found prior to the CIA Robertson Panel. Ed has mentioned that conversation in the part he "Z'd" out. Read what he says that they told him. The things that your mind calls "birds" were oval lights which rotated in three groups of four lights as if attached to great wheels. As these wheels turned, the lights would brighten or blink out signifying whether they were nearer or farther away. To the analysts at our primary photo-interpretation laboratory, these individual lights operated as if connected albeit by some non-visible entity or force. This was something that casual glancing at a screen could never determine --- only serious analytical work. Ruppelt and apparently Dewey Fournet both bought this analysis, but someone else did too.

That someone else was the chief photo analyst of the 50s and 60s Art Lundahl. Lundahl saw Woo and Neasham's analysis, and of course the best copy of the film, and agreed --- these things were flying technology. Lundahl became a secret UFO enthusiast for his whole life, slowly emerging from his "closet" in the late 1960s, when he served as chief UFO data-provider for an ad hoc White House study requested by Lyndon Johnson [I have that study here too; it was never published.] The Tremonton UT motion film might be the most significant UFO Imaging evidence that we have in public view. I'm constantly astounded by the arrogance and flippancy of modern nay-sayers on this, who seem for utterly impenetrable reasons to NOT want this to stand as evidence. ... almost gets my blood pressure up.

Well, let's try to get to a happier state of mind --- almost said "frame", but that would have been a pun. ... sorry, did it anyway.

The above guy is Ralph Rankow, NICAPs early photo analyst and a decent one. His role in today's blog is that he was somewhere between puzzled and angered by something which had deliberately been done to deface some photo evidence.

A publicity/sales photo of a B-57 was found to contain an odd discoid marking in it. As such, this is no more remarkable at first glance than any film flaw might be. Still, honesty and curiosity calls for a look-see. Rankow felt that the "disk" was uniform enough and the shading on it "legitimate" enough to entertain the hypothesis that the camera had caught an object of some size in the air in the vicinity of the plane. That, and that the provenance of the photo was top quality, meant that the potential object should be studied using the original film. {it was also true that the original examination of the film by USAF personnel at Edwards AFB excited them enough to launch another flight to patrol the area looking for the object.}

The first [military] photo analyst believed that the three black dots on the left of the image were film flaws but the "object" image was not. His view was that the negative showed a discoid object shaded appropriately for the illumination available. Rankow's own analysis, once NICAP was given the photo to work with, indicated no crude solutions like "paste-ups" had occurred. He found that the image contained all shades of gray, indicating that it was of an object which had depth/dimension. This increased interest.

Later copies of the photo obtained from Martin Corporation had increasingly been defaced. Why? Rankow and NICAP researcher William Weitzel separately sent inquiries to Martin. For months they were stonewalled. Finally Rankow's persistence squeezed out replies which included no copies looking like the original, but looking instead like the third version. Martin's final explanation of the film was filled with large areas of photodevelopment ignorance which stunned Rankow. He eventually was left to wonder what motivated Martin to remove the left half of the object making further analysis impossible. {A reader of Rankow's FATE article on this fiasco felt that he had solved the mystery by saying that parts of the photo were just falling off. Rankow indicated in his response why that was not true.}

So, what went on here? As to what went on in the sky, we will never know, although the people there at the first development of the film thought that this was an aerial object. What went on at Martin? It seems to me that they wanted to get rid of the problem and did so in time-honored heavy-handed fashion.

This one always intrigued me. My prejudice didn't like it "flying" on its side, but when I finally read the  witness interview, the orientation was explained within the context of the sighting. Ozzie UFO leaders at the time vouched for the photographer as he was a member of their Victorian UFO Research Organization and a respected/prominent member of the community. This is another unscientific prejudice: in order to have a credible UFO case you may never be interested in UFOs before or since. I myself haven't noticed that UFOs care much about the UFO interest level in their witnesses beforehand. And asking a person NOT to remain interested in an astounding event in their lives is a stupidity without defense.

This picture came to the USA to be analyzed by APRO. Their guy at the time [a college prof] decided that it was of two different pictures stuck together --- evidenced to him by a "jagged" line running roughly through the photo's middle. Thus people in this country decided that the photo was no good [even a friend of mine still believes this.] Ozzie analysts have looked into this in more recent times and found no evidence for that [strange and undetectable] claim of a jagged line whatever. Attempts to cut thick polaroid film paper and stick the halves back together also create huge messy joins. Another Ozzie analyst is quite adamant that the photo is no good, basing views on an extremely complicated geometric argument based [it seems to me] on some assumptions as to where the color on the object is coming from --- which the witness and the pro-photo people say is a roof just below the object [and not for instance that distant tower]. The anti-photo Ozzie seems rather thinly anxious to debunk the photo to clear it from the discussion about the famous Westall school case [which he supports]. Jim McDonald was also interested in this case, but I don't believe that he had a strong opinion about it.

OK. I have to slow down or I'll never finish this blogpost.

Above are three images from a sequence filmed by an Ozzie MD in 1987. Credibility seems sky high [two witnesses, one scientifically trained, plus their young son]. In this case, the battery pack for the camera ran right out during filming, although fully charged previously.

Yungay, Peru 1967. VERY extensive report by Richard Greenwell on this case and pretty positive to the events. Richard had to undergo a lengthy and convoluted detective project to locate the photographer of these things, as they were never published or "pushed" in any way --- only coming to his attention by a wild accident of a schoolboy bringing a copy of one to school for show and tell [despite it being only a random photo in an album of his father's who had nothing to do with the case.] In every arena Richard tried he was stonewalled --- this included at Kodak Peruana where some first prints existed --- even Allen Hynek couldn't pry them loose. Ultimately legal hurdles were cleared and Greenwell got two of these first prints and gave them to APROs consultant.

There this story ends without a punchline. The photographer received a name but never was located for a personal interview. The photos were analyzed [allegedly] by APRO but I do not have any information as to what that analysis said {APRO was notoriously bad at this.} Still, what we have is a case which stands as curiously interesting especially in that it was "buried" as if never to be utilized in any way by the photographer. He was quoted by his camera-lender as saying that he had seen an odd technical air machine while hiking the mountains and had photographed it. He handed over the borrowed camera at that time with the undeveloped film still inside [which was then sent to Kodak Peruana].

What were the Yungay objects?

This is a computer mock-up and study by Dr. Irina Scott who photographed a UFO in the presence of her sister in 1968. Visually they saw a disk with several windows. The camera filmed a blinking object at distance. Dr. Scott, a close colleague of friend of CUFOS and myself, Bill Jones, is convinced that this was a "good" solid photo/film case.

This horrible photo is from the Project Blue Book files and represents one of a handful of stills taken with a Brownie camera in Covington IN in 1967. The following comments will be more frustrating for me than you, as I am sure that I spent some time fussing with this case and cannot find those notes. I will try to give you an accurate set of comments.

Two married adults were getting set to retire when the wife saw an odd light. She informed her husband and he got his camera saying that he wondered if he could get anything at all on film. He took several shots and two reference shots, one of the Moon and another of a star. The shots were of the final of two diamond arrays of lights, the leading light being significantly brighter. In one case, one of the smaller lights left the formation and seemed to enter [or merge with] the larger. Naturally boggled and interested, they wondered what these things were, but the wife especially did not want to get bad publicity and they shut up for a while.

Now here's the part of this tale that I can't locate but think that I once knew --- so, caveat emptor: We had a meteor-detection network set up in the mid-west nicknamed the Prairie Meteor Network [locations of all-sky cameras shown on the dots.] There was an ace semi-legend project manager [a guy who checked every station to make sure it was functioning properly and set up correctly] whose name [forgive me, I think that this is right] was Captain Don Arrington. At the time of the Covington IN case, he was in the Illinois station of the network and for some reason was brought into contact with this report in Covington. He was asked [by a mutual friend?] to help the witnesses out, and met them and did so, becoming the liaison between them and Wright-Pat.

Arrington was interested both in their photos AND a video taken by his Illinois location around [but not exactly] the same time. He corresponded to Blue Book on both situations [and thus there is confused blundering in Blue Book's records.] The bottomline line here is that Blue Book said that they couldn't say much about the Covington fellow's prints and doubted that his camera could pick up the lights at all even of the Moon --- Arrington went over there and proved that it could. They also stated that the Prairie Network video was just a meteor fireball despite it being sent by our "we know what a fireball is" experts. These two cases are loaded with credibility, but just not quite enough strangeness --- although the visual report of the Covington witnesses is quite strange enough. The other thing that it shows is that everyone "official" has been lying when they have said that there has never been a filming of a UFO by anything like the Prairie camera Network.

OK. I'm done. Great relief, eh?

I know that you want to see Constable's aerial space animals [again] so here they are:

As Dr. Who would say: "Anything's possible ... well, almost."

We are never going to prove ET-UFOs by imaging evidence, but that doesn't mean that we should stop taking pictures of them. Film or digital evidence is one element of a potentially good report --- it supports the narrative, not dominates it.

So keep your cameras ready. You can never tell what's sneaking up on you.

Peace.