Digging to the Core, last time this season.

One last time on this theme ... I have to stop this line of blog preparation. It takes WAY too much effort to plow through several hundred UFO case files per entry, and people probably aren't overly fired up about the "research thing" anyway. I leave it behind though with some definite regret, as the work has forced me deep into the phenomenon, and it gets a little clearer all the time.

Still, this "hundreds of cases per post" is nuts, and I have to get more time efficient with packing up the research collection for the end-of-summer move. So.... this one took equal work, but I'm going to be short and sweet with the post.

Close Encounters of the Second Kind: Electromagnetic Effects cases.

Here's what I did: A). Go through the CE2em case files and try to select ones which, as far as my own files were concerned, seemed fairly strongly credible and to clearly involved an E&M effect. 94 of those case files survived that cut. B). Out of those, I looked for the anchoring core of the phenomenon --- translation: the best cases. I picked 27 of the 94 for special "honors". C). to supplement my own files, serendipity led me to Dick Haines' study of effects in cases involving aircraft --- dropping a few which were duplicates of my own [surprisingly few, Dick is a VERY fine researcher in this aircraft incident area which in my opinion is his greatest strength], and added 133 more cases to the clump. Thus, the graph above.

I am tempted to say that the graph feels like it's telling me that the UFOs emphasized messing about in aircraft situations before they began to more intently turn their attention to the ground, but I should resist that sort of thing as the amount of data, and the unknown of exactly how Dick searched out his case pile, puts too big a question mark in this to make such a weighty comment. Still.... the front end of that graph is mighty funny.

I'm now just going to repost the other two mass data graphs from the previous posts so that they are easy for you to look at and compare.

Again, I should just shut up and behave conservatively, but the front end of the E&M graph seems to have the same "attitude" as the radar cases graph, and the middle of the E&M graph the same "attitude" as the CE1 graph. It's like the phenomenon in more than one way got itself established distantly and technologically first, then turned on the Variety Circus Show. ... lots of "dancing" and wildly "showing off" during the Condon Study era [makes you wonder, doesn't it?] and the 1970s decade, before turning the Music way down. 

That turn-down of the Close Encounters [and almost ANYTHING which is really good as a case from the eighties on] MIGHT just be my unconscious fault as far as these graphs are concerned, but I don't think so, and the fact that Dick wasn't finding many good cases of his type either is just one more example that it's not simply some bias I have, consciously or not. {Other examples of these drop-offs come from long-term statistics of the stable-and-able Tasmanian investigating group TUFOIC, from MUFONs case receiving website, from CUFOS, from perusing Fran Ridge's NICAP site, from the fact that GEPAN could find very little after the late 70s despite having national cooperation, etc etc etc.} Sure there have been tons of low-grade hit-and-run reports to NUFORC or things like Filer's Files, but even in the rare instance of a follow-up these cases are almost entirely mediocre. 

So, I believe that the turn-down of quality cases is real. That does not mean it will remain so, or that we should just pack it in as far as new investigations are concerned. 

But I am at least actually going to turn it down as far as these massive data ploughing posts are concerned, so this is probably the last of this type. But I should soften this painful blow by showing you one more great revelation about the UFOs....

At least some of the UFOnauts are made of ....

IRON!!!!

Just Kidding!! [Lord, only on the Internet would anyone have to say that.] 

Peace and good times, friends.

Digging for the Core: Close Encounters.

Soldiering on with the case file reconstruction and case category appraisals.

Today: Close Encounters of the First Kind [sightings with details at about 500 feet or so.]

Once again, a tougher job than either of the last two. Why? because every case has to be read to determine if the proximity criterion is met, or there is some mitigating circumstance whereby it's rational to expand the criterion in some case [example: the witness used a telescope or binoculars.] Because of this re-read issue, it was harder to just sweep up cases which weren't already in my CE1 files to make a larger pile.
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So, OK, enough whining by me: what did I do? CE1s are a large file drawer --- over 300 incidents. So, it was a good base to work with. I added Allen Hynek's select CE1s from his UFO Experience, as I trust him, and he defined the darn category afterall. Going through the file folders and making credibility judgements about which cases seemed to be strongly founded, I chose 45 foundationstone cases [33 of "mine" and Hynek's 12], plus enough other good ones to get to just over 150. That was pretty good but still felt a little light for something as well-observed as CE1s. I went to Fran Ridge's NICAP site, which has a CE1 category page, and picked out those cases listed there which someone thought were important enough to create a documentation directory rather than a simple listing. With those as a supplement with some confidence to them, the total numbers of promising cases went to just over 230. Since that was, weirdly, almost the exact number of the previous radar file, I accepted the synchronicity and went with it.

Here's the yearly occurrence graph. My select best cases are in RED. The rest of my cases files judged to be good ones are in PINK. The supplements from Fran's NICAP site are in BLUE. To give you the potential fun of imagining all sorts of correlations [WARNING!! Don't take me or you too seriously while doing so!!], I'm going to re-post the radar graph from the previous post.

They are sort-of-the-same and sort-of-different aren't they?? The accumulations and deficits tend to fall in similar areas, and that must mean something either about the phenomenon or about the blogger. I'll plead some guilt in the issue, but I honestly do not believe that I am entirely the causal agent here. I've seen this pattern too often elsewhere in this field. And THAT has, in its strange way, convinced me even further of the objective reality of what's going on.

On the other hand, there is at least one big difference in these graphs for me: the phenomenon got closer. Between WWII and about 1958, the phenomenon seemed happy to display itself as extremely advanced aerial technology to, perhaps, boggle the engineering and military mind. From the mid-1960s through at least the decade of the 1970s, it seemed to preferably "move in" a little closer. Maybe it enjoyed the "personal" individuality of the "60s" as much as we did {Just Joking!! --- don't start another internet rumor!!} Whereas the bulk of the best radar cases are early, the bulk of the best CE1s come in the "middle." Of course the "end" of the graph is a UFO desert in both.

One might speculate upon what this possible shift in display means --- and go and have the fun doing that. Just keep a VERY open mind to be healthy about what any of this might really mean.

I've put these pages on the blog already in the past, but it doesn't hurt to re-publish them in this context. Obviously what they're doing is giving you a group of illustrations from CE1 witnesses, or polished up versions of cruder sketches that they made. They, as is usual in UFOlogy, demonstrate the bewildering variety of detail that we're constantly presented with. I have said before that I believe [always with a willingness to be flat wrong] that this variation is much more deliberate on the part of the Agency-behind-the-UFOs than either foggy observation by witnesses or every UFO driver having his private hot-rod.

I believe that this is just very clever deliberate pattern-breaking which allows the individual impact of the encounter without our cultural aura of uncertainty being threatened.

I don't know if a listing of the better cases in this first "draft" would be useful to anyone, but as briefly as possible, here they are: {the first twelve are Allen's cases} Parshall, ND [1967], Meyerstown, PA [1966], Nederland, TX [1966], Rocky, OK [1965], Beverly, MA [1966], Freemont, IN [1966], Jefferson, MO [1967], Kenora, ONT [1955], Monticello, WI [1964], Mt. Airy, MD [1965], Weymouth, MA [1963], Mendota, CA [1967]. ... and my additions ... Red Bluff, CA [1960], Springfield, PA [1962], Millersport, OH [1963], St. Albans, WV [1958], Exeter, NH [1965], Mackay, Qnsld [1965], Portage County, OH [1966], Sheffield, OH [1958], Seville, SP [1961], Newton, IL [1966], Warren, OH [1968], Lowell, MA [1976], btw Willard//Greenwich, OH [1971], Colby, KS [1972], Willow Grove, PA [1966], Brunflo, SWE [1986], Bainbridge, MD [1952], East Peru, ME [1962], Vicksburg, MI [1966], Weston, MO [1967], Milledgeville, GA [1967], Gilroy, CA [1975], Camp Delaware, CT [1976], Kansas City, KS [1961], btw Handen//Tungelsta, SWE [early 70s], Waipukurau, NZ [1969], Baytown, TX [1966], Juniata, PA [1956], Hampton, VA [1965], Mannum, SAus, [1972], Woodbury Twnsp, MN [1976], Colusa, CA [1976].

... and again just for fun, here's some of the CE1 art:

Some UFOs showing themselves, even one giving a little peek at its "driver."

...chasing a train, and half-way hiding.

Making an electrical nuisance of itself, and being downright harassing of some car drivers....

...showing that they can be the shape they want to be.

...putting on a good show down under, and maybe even leaving a trace...

... really showing off ...

... and bye-bye? 

Mysteries, wonderful mysteries.

Till next ... watch the skies, friends. Even in this UFO desert, we might get lucky.

Peace.

Digging To The Core, four

Distant object UFO cases... last set of thumbnails on these, though if you worked at it there could be plenty more incidents both believable and intriguing. As we get up towards modern times, my files become shallower and weaker as to both numbers and the levels of confidence that I had in those reports. Some of this is The Internet which facilitates non-discipline in both reporting and investigation. Some of this is just a drop-off of striking cases, as has been discussed several times here. Some of it was probably me just getting too tired to keep running after the fox.

Anyway, here are a few more....

This is an adventurous fascinating lot. A few remarks:

1). The level of strangeness is higher [smack-in-the-face-odd] for more of these incidents than the "simple" flying technology core of the early days;
2). This set contains two examples of what you know is one of my favorite types of cases: astro-alignment. [you will see that one of them was posted fairly recently]. When you consider the extremely tight geometry of these cases to achieve the "privileged viewing positions" necessary for the effect to take place, arguments that these are not directed displays demand a level of faith in coincidence that reduces those odds to the microscopic [even given the number of total UFOs ever reported]. I've heard enough casual wave-off debunking on stuff like this that it is clear that if one decides to buy coincidence, adding a dash of incompetence, one might as well stop thinking about any of this at all; {if I sound a bit irritated by this sort of "analysis", well, yeh, I am};
3). We still are fortunate enough to get a pilot case here and there, or the superb Ludington Coast Guard case, but "official" involvement is mostly connected with policemen;
4). Scandinavia shows up with some very good cases, a tribute to less impact on those cultures giving them prejudicial hang-ups, plus some well-organized investigative bodies. The Navelsjo case is an instance of what is to my intuition one of the most significant elements of the total mystery: a tremendous "OZ" or entering-into-a-changed-state-of-the-environment effect, manifest by cancellation of sounds;
5). The famous "Yukon Giant" case has been included because the debunking, which could be correct, is something that I need to see critiqued by someone not in the debunking community and who also knows what he or she is talking about. There needs to be a LOT of remanufacturing of the witness testimonies and some forcing of the time and placing of the satellite decay in the sky to make this work. Because the Giant is potentially an important case [it could say something about control of mass and huge air displacement effects] I'll not just throw this into the trashbin until I hear more and better analysis;
6). I include the Timmerman files cases because I knew John so well, and his friendly unthreatening demeanor got people to talk very frankly to him. Of the two cases above, the doctor's case seems strong, the other maybe not as much. But if that second case were true, it would be a mindblower;
7). Lastly Father Hesburgh's case: I graduated from Notre Dame and Hesburgh is one of the great men of the last 100 years. The only issue in the case can be if the reporter made the whole thing up, since, if he did not, Hesburgh and the two witnesses were of highest credibility. I must go with some "faith" here, as the article contained not only direct quotes, but a picture of the other two witnesses recreating the fishing scene [with drawing of the craft] at the lake. "On paper" I wouldn't normally include such a poorly documented thing, but my intuition says differently on this one.

So, we can move on from the distant object cases, What I believe that I found from them is a clear strongly documented core of advanced aerial technology, beyond our abilities at the time and even yet to manufacture and fly. Layered onto that core, I find clusters of cases demonstrating directed display behavior, as well as creepy control effects like "OZ". None of the "simple" distant object cases are by definition CE2s, so no such physical effects can be expected in this case cabinet. But we know that such cases exist in abundance in file drawers with different labels.

But, for now, advanced aerial technology beyond our means, which demonstrates a desire to display "locally" and control environments locally seems a large harvest of credible information to me.

I don't know how much of this "best cases in categories" I'll do, as it's more work than I thought, but sooner or later I'll get back to it and we can walk through the Forbidden Portal together to see what's on the other side.

Till then, peace friends. Kenneth Arnold, the General Mills balloon experts, and Kelly Johnson didn't see satellites decaying.

Digging To The Core, three.

Part three of these "distant object" selections. One of the things which has happened here is that, since I'm posting these thumbnails roughly in yearly order, we are now past the infamous Robertson Panel by over a year and it has had time to permeate its "dumb-down UFOs" message through the many military services locations. The good solid military cases become scarcer [there will still be some now and then which slip out, but the Robertson Panel has changed the game.]

Well, here are the next set:

Much to contemplate there, but before making my usual few brief comments, I thought that some of you might like to see the original art [in color] from the Homer, NY case. I showed this on the blog some time ago, but other than that almost no one has seen the colored originals, so we can share a secret wonder moment.

.... would that all our witnesses were artists.

Well, to the cases....

It's pretty obvious that for at least my files, and specifically my "distant object" files, that the emphasis has shifted away from the United States. This is due, in my opinion, to two main factors: a). The aforementioned Robertson Panel influence, and b). the rising in several non-US nations of excellent researchers [of whom I could get enough information upon to trust.] As we will see if I can continue these postings, there will be MANY more good non-UFO cases, and could be far more so if I could read foreign languages --- the French and the Scandinavians, and the modern Italians have been loaded with fine investigators. This language barrier, by the way, is a major deficit in almost all US researchers, and frankly we could always, and even now, have used good translators.

The next thing that this set of cases seems hinting to me is that the time has come for more "strangeness." There was always strangeness aplenty as I said last time, but it was mainly a subtle technologically-hip sort of strangeness --- i.e. you had to think a bit about what you were seeing with these things do to get the Wow impact. But now, the Wow is beginning to hit you smack in the face.

We're getting displays of impossible dancing in the skies, and programmed activities with several disks. We're getting wild non-inertial showing off, uninterpretable color effects, and one particularly intriguing possibility: instant vanishment.

Unless we get the UFOs under extremely good instrumental observation, we're never going to be able to say that any one of them actually instantaneously vanished. You're one of the more sophisticated audiences on the Internet. You know that the human brain doesn't get continuous flow input, but rather a rapid set of "snapshots" taken by the eye's mechanism, which our cortex pieces together mysteriously to create the motion picture of consciousness. If any change in the external world takes place in, say, less than a sixth or an eighth of a second, our consciousness will register that change as "instantaneous." In plain English, anything moving out of sight quicker than that will not be seen to have moved but just disappeared.

Note however that any technology able to disappear from "frame" in less than a sixth of a second should be quite "advanced-ly alien" for anyone. Maybe not absolutely "non-inertial" but "close enough for government work. "

But it is the possibility that the technology REALLY DID vanish that is the big deal here. We can't claim that this happened, but if it did.... there---right there---is the shadow of the hyperspatial entry/exit technology which would change the entire game about deepspace travel. All of a sudden, maybe, Tau Ceti is just a blink away.

Much to meditate upon...

I'll try to get to more --- one more D-objects type posting, and later digging into the other categories in their turns. Till then, peace, and a bit of fun in this great Creation.

Digging To The Core, Two.

Back for round two quicker than I thought --- things fell into place faster, and I had unexpected energy.

So, ready or not here are 15 more. These are from the 1952-1953 era.

Once again, at least in my opinion, the cases speak for themselves. Powerfully almost over-the-top credible witnesses, in almost every illustrated case multiple witnesses, even occasionally from different locations. Dr. Hynek used to try to tell people that far from the UFO phenomenon presenting no good cases, it rather had an "embarrassment of riches." People, it seemed to me, never could understand what he was talking about. That is because people had little to no familiarity with these sorts of cases which you and I are looking at here. [and it would be even more assuring to you if you were reading the original documentation from which these thumbnails come.]

Criminal persons like Donald Menzel insisted on misdirecting attention by focussing on single cases, and then fogging the situation by making up preposterous "explanations" which even scientists couldn't credit, and which required the ignoring of significant elements of the testimonies. Nevertheless the strategy worked. Why? because nobody but a few like Hynek had the testimonies to read, and simultaneously were genuine explorers rather than intellectual game-playing trolls. People tended to read about just one case, and there was a Menzel or a Klass taking liberties with it and confusing each in its turn.

But, some might say about the above 15: these aren't very spectacular. Why should we believe that they're something special. Well, the best people in the world to view them were viewing them, and THEY thought they were impossibly mysterious. AND they thought them to be flying technology. AND they thought them far beyond what we could do. AND they thought sharp-angled turns, excessively rapid circling, descent and disappearance into very high altitude, were pretty astounding. All that without any visible propulsion mechanism.

One wonders, really, what exactly we have to complain about.

One can choose to stand with Donald Menzel, he who in desperation told Captain Nash that he thought that Nash and Fortenberry must have seen the lighted tips of cigarettes they were smoking {they weren't smoking, need I say} or, if not that, lightning bugs trapped inside their cockpit window. No one can convince me that Menzel was not a Criminal against Truth and genuine scientific exploration.

I rather choose to stand with Nash, Kelly Johnson, Colonels Donald Blakeslee and Curtis Low [the Chitose/Misawa case], Charles Moore, Joe Kaliszewski and the General Mills balloonists, and on and on. I like everything about their "company" more than Menzel or Klass --- especially their clear, clean forward seeing.

.... and, yes, once again, having indulged myself in these grand old "bulletproof" cases, I feel unusually relieved of the lead weight of having to listen to the interfering noise created by these debunkers over the years... and free to run in the wind without garbage sticking to my feet like flypaper.

Next set? When I can't say. It will be when I'm feeling good with free time. Till then, peace friends. Don't let the anti-science "scientism believers" debunk you down.

Digging To The Core

I haven't been able to post anything recently so here's a little something at least. {my project to scan my files is now essentially over; approximately 6-7 full filing cabinets worth of resources scanned and about 11+ weeks work. Also, health intrudes in the form, I think, of an inner ear something-or-other causing much lightheadedness and feeling of low energy --- blood pressure, thankfully is OK}.

Due to the scanning project, somewhere around three thousand UFO case files having been passing through the field of vision over these 11 weeks and good and bad ideas come from that experience. The bad one is that the project has created a mess which now must be dealt with. The good one is that maybe it's time to make a pass at filtering out the gold from the dross, at least a little bit better.

So, I've started to assess the "three thousand" --- just the beginning. I'm going to begin with the Objects-at-a-distance category [what Hynek called "Daylight Disks", causing all sorts of borderline confusion, and what I label "Distant Objects" or "D" cases in my system. I've winnowed through my D-file and picked out around 50 cases, which I will ultimately present briefly.

But I need you to be patient as these take time to thumbnail-catalog, as you will see in the first group below. I'd also like your help. You, upon perusing these, might think: That one's not very good. If so, tell me why { please don't tell me why I'M not very good, I know all about that already. Let's stick with the cases. } Also, when I'm finished with a category, and your own favorite case isn't in there, tell me about it and why you like it. Maybe we can together winnow ever finer.

So, now, a few initial "D" cases. Just the thumbnails without much other comment by me. I realize that this is not much stimulation for comment yet, but I'm just trying to get started on what seems to be a long road.

.... and there are 15 to start. Here are a few "immodest"? statements:

The dates here are 1947-1952 [more '52 will come] and yet, in my immodest opinion, the "game" as to whether UFOs exist or not is already over. Each one of these cases is, to my eye when reading the full documents, "bulletproof" at least as to whether the observers were terrific, and their reports indicated strong reasons to believe that they were not experiencing conventional phenomena, either natural or artificial.

Secondly, there's a awful lot of peculiar messing around our balloon launches. The "itch" constantly affects me that the agency behind the UFO phenomenon WANTED in these early years to show itself to the very categories of people [pilots, missile engineers, plane designers, experimental balloon researchers] who would know with certainty that what they were watching was not these common things so familiar to them. It is as if "they" are establishing their reality, without giving up too much.

Thirdly, and this is just me being purely subjective: when I read these cases, I "feel clean." All the crud associated with the years of accumulating weirdness and nasty individuals and wasted interactions with people consciously or unconsciously bent on messing up the research and the thinking processes which could have some chance of moving forward a bit, all goes away. There, full in the light of day, are the UFOs, magnificently and clearly mysterious.

Well, sorry about that last "loss of cold objectivity", but it is real anyway.

I'll try to get another cluster of these "D" cases thumbnailed as soon as I have time and energy, and maybe we can experience more "clean clear marvels."

Till then, peace, folks.