THE UFO BEAUTY CONTEST, part five {and last, I think}.

One last time .....

The above is how you see this case represented on the internet [if it shows up anywhere at all].

The case: Waterdown, Ontario [often called Hamilton], March 18, 1975. A young man {19} was an amateur nature photographer, who was particularly interested in photographing raptors, in flight or otherwise. He'd been totally unsuccessful this day, and was beginning to go home.

He saw an unusual object flying strange flight paths, and decided to try to pick it up in the camera. His first shot hit the target, the second missed, and he got two more hits before it was out of range. In some ways this is weirdly like the Cluj situation. He went home and called the Hamilton newspaper. They asked him to bring his camera in and the film was developed there. People at MacMasters University, a local Astronomers organization, and finally an APRO field investigator were all impressed, and the photos deemed untampered. In Bondarchuk's UFO Canada {a pretty good "unknown" UFO book, by the way}, the photo series is referred to as "one of the most respected pieces of UFO evidence". This is a bit over-the-top in my view, as few people have even heard of it.

I hadn't heard of it either until I was sent two boxes of chaotic photographs by John Timmerman. He had neglected the job of trying to organize them for so long that he couldn't remember anything about the contents and was happy to stick me with the task of attempting identification. I was a failure on the majority and still refer to them as "John's Junk" affectionately. Some I could identify, and some were actually, blessedly, labeled. One of these labeled was an envelop with the Waterdown pictures.

These pictures {I found no negatives} were allegedly sent to Hynek to analyze. Except for him finding someone to play around with the exposure and magnification, I find no evidence that he did much, nor that he published it .... could be wrong here, and anything could be back at CUFOS.

These photos turn out to be sharper and somewhat different from the typical picture of this case as seen on the internet. In fact, what they show is either absurd or high strangeness.

This thing looks to me like an opaque "ball" {most of one anyway} sitting on the surface of a transparent thin disk. I'd not object to the hypothesis that it is a whole ball which protrudes slightly under the disk. Now what the heck is THAT?

Is it a "simple hoax"? Despite other aspects of the report? Could a small constructed object of these proportions sail well enough to get any distance in the air when thrown? Weird hoax construction regardless, if so.

If no hoax, then alternative hypotheses go rapidly towards zero. And, if no hoax, odd thoughts pass through ones mind as to whether there's any reason for the disk parts of crafts at all.

As to the theme of our last four posts: credibility is worse than with Cluj, though film development right out of the camera is a winner. Still, we have just one witness. Strangeness would be higher than Cluj, as the flightpath of the object was phenomenally loop-de-loop. The transparent disk is a bit strange as well.

I'll leave you to your meditations.....

or whatever you're doing today ......

..... and I'll end with my infamous Ohgi uh Bokum, and a hearty Happy Thanksgiving!!

THE UFO BEAUTY CONTEST, part four: Do We Have a Cluj?

So.... several iterations of ogling UFO photos accompanied by hand-wringing and soul-searching. Have I learned anything at all? {You fine folks will have to answer that for yourselves, assuming you've put yourself through the pain of reading the last three posts}. I truly don't know. I'm going to pick a photo which I have paid almost no attention to {despite others trying to get me to do so}, and see if this leads anywhere. 

The case: Cluj, NW Romania, {yep, that's in Transylvania}, August 18, 1968 just early afternoon. 

Four adults of middle age were having a picnic. Two are publicly named, two others begged off being named but names were known to the investigators. One of the women noticed the object first, and called to her boyfriend. He gaped at it momentarily, but had the presence to grapple with his backpack and successfully haul out his camera and fire away for shot number one {above}. As excited as he was it is lucky that he got a fairly sharp image, but it was quite off-center. 

The object dove towards the ground, made a sharp turn and almost hovered. Less excited now, he composed himself and got a well-centered shot {number two}. Then the thing rapidly shot away, giving him time only to take two departing more distant shots {Photo three is one of these; the other photo has been seen by several investigators, but is never printed as the two witnesses wishing anonymity appear in it. It, like our photo numbered three, is more distant a rendering and doesn't add much to the viewing sequence.}

The above graph tells the flight's tale. Imagine the missing fourth photo somewhere along the upward path. The photographer knew the lead UFO investigator through a business connection. He, an employee at something called the Institute of Building Design in Cluj, had met Florin Gheorghita during a work project, where he learned of Gheorghita's interests in UFOs. He, Emil Barnea, waited a few days until Gheorghita returned from a trip, and then took the negatives and the story to him. 

Gheorghita conducted many interviews and did the fieldwork. The photos were analyzed by several different parties. The witnesses passed character references easily, being solid "average" citizens with no previous interests [at all apparently] in UFOs. The photos likewise passed their scrutiny by a professional photographer in town, in his own lab, plus a famous specialist from Bucharest, who was visiting. Still another laboratory was enlisted, and then lighting effects experts from the local university's Institute of Fine Arts. These latter determined that, though difficult to notice casually, the object DID radiate some amount of its own light, and this seemed to increase with its movement. Later, labs in other countries looked at the photos as well, and pronounced them sound as to tampering, shading, and the like.

Because the case seemed to have such a careful field investigation, it was not only published widely but with unusually upbeat commentary. The only negative element at the time was "self-inflicted" by the lead investigators [both Gheorghita and later Ion Hobana], who insisted on trying to compare it to the controversial Rex Heflin photos, just because they felt they looked alike. This is the sort of stupid red herring that often clouds one's responses to a case, and we humans seem weirdly susceptible to such noise in our brainboxes. {Translation: what goes on with one case need have nothing to do with another}.

As I said above: I never paid attention to the case. I have my hang-ups about UFO photos and what you can get out of them, and my own self-inflicted stupidities about whether I like the way they look or not. This, I must remind myself, is MY problem, not the case's.

As fate would have it, I was at CUFOS some years ago when someone there told me that he thought this photo series was the strongest piece of evidence of the reality of non-terrestrial flying technology in the whole pile of UFO literature. ...... I MIGHT be lying about this [unintentionally] as it was many years ago, but the Bells of Memory are ringing loud on this one. I was politely skeptical [I'd just met the guy for the first time], but he saw through that and was "cool" for the rest of the afternoon. My memory says that he told me that Hynek was VERY impressed by this one as well.

OK. Let's give me "credit" for creeping Alzheimers [my 73rd birthday just passed] and admit that my memory has a short in it, but just for fun: how could Hynek be so impressed?

A). There was a group of witnesses, all credible and all UFO-disinterested;
B). There were multiple photos taken;
C). There were multiple field investigators;
D). There were multiple photographic experts and labs.

When Allen would assess "Credibility", he'd have to give these photos very high marks.

When Allen assessed "Strangeness", well.... the strangeness is there, just not as strange as alien entities or sudden right-angle turns [this thing's direction shift was not "instantaneous" in the report]. Strangeness of a subtler nature [a technical device with no observable method of propulsion capable of awkward stops, dramatic directional change, near-hovering, and rapid upward acceleration] should really be strange enough.

But still I'm whining about it. Why didn't it look like that pretty domed disk in that Vancouver photo? You know the one. The one with no witnesses to it at all, no movement descriptions, no... anything.

But it sure is pretty.

Peace friends. Happy Thanksgiving.

THE UFO BEAUTY CONTEST, part three.

Let's walk this path again.

Photo #1b: Manchester, GA, 1973. NICAP liked this one greatly.

Photo #2b: St. Lorenzen, Austria, 1971. GSW liked these photos by Nagura.

Photo #3b: Roswell, NM, 1949. Mysterious thing from Hynek's files.

Photo #4b: Varnamo, Sweden, 1974. Clas Svahn was impressed by this witness.

Photo #5b: Faribault, MN, 1967. Sent to Hynek at Northwestern.

Photo #6b: Blue Springfield, MO, 1974. {new to me}.

Photo #7b: Corsica, 1971.

Photo #8b: Colfax, WI, 1978.

Photo #9b: Cincinnati, OH, 1974.

Photo #10b: Belotic, Yugoslavia, 1973. One of those prejudice-inspiring {"looks too much like a hat"} cases.

Photo #11b: Kenora, Ontario, Canada, 1969.

Photo #12b: Yungay, Peru, 1967.

Photo #13b: Wall Tap, NJ, 1966. Blue Book case.

Photo #14b: Bareau Bay, NSW, Australia, 1972. Ozzie Air Force case.

Photo #15b: California, maybe. 1950. Uhhh, What!? John Timmerman had this passed onto him rather surrepticiously and, as it looks like the legendary concept of the AVRO disk rocket plane, I thought you'd like to see it.

Photos, photos. What a conundrum.

As I plough through these files,  I'm coming to the "wrong" conclusion vis-a-vis received wisdom. Instead of facilely writing off UFO photos [and even UFOs themselves BECAUSE OF LACK OF GOOD PHOTOS], I'm beginning to think that this is not so damning at all.

To begin, what would we need to expect a good [whatever THAT is] UFO photo? A list:
1]. A Close Encounter. Narrows the field quite a bit;
2]. A Close Encounter in Daylight --- we've discussed this here. CE's are almost all at night. See the old post about The Law of the Times;
3]. A CE which hangs around and stands relatively still. Not many of those;
4]. A handy camera with at least one shot already loaded in it;
5]. A person who can use that camera well; helpful to the rest of us if that person is not alone and is a reputable character;
6]. A person not so stunned or mesmerized by the CE that he/she actually and immediately thinks of grabbing that handy loaded camera and shooting a non-shaky picture.

Meditating on that for awhile, I become more amazed that there are any potentially "good" photos at all. If I add my belief that Close Encounters are displays under the controls/plans of the ones doing the displaying, then my hopes become slim indeed.

So as I look through my set of photo files, and as I try to strip away my inappropriate prejudices about shape and clarity, I wonder if it is not a viable hypothesis that we may in fact have quite a few, a respectable number, of UFO photos --- even though they, as all other UFO evidence, cannot "prove" whatever one would like about a detailed UFO nature.

So as we walk off into the setting Sun... Wait!!.... is that a Setting Sun UFO parked there in the central European countryside??

.... or are the gnomes opening an entrance to Faerieworld?....

.... or is it the Treasurecave of the Dragon? ..... or....  well, forget it.

Maybe there will be more to say on this topic. I'll have to muddle about to see.

Peace and a Happy Thanksgiving. {Even to you Across-the-Ponders}.

THE UFO BEAUTY CONTEST, TWO.

.......... another dozen.

Just knee-jerk responses for the moment; a little talk later.

Photo #1a: Picacho Peak, NM, 1967.

Photo #2a: SW of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 1967. {ignore the "Sun" at the top of the photo: I had to photo this from a glossy sheet and that's just light pollution}

Photo #3a: Location unlisted, probably White Sands area [This is a Blue Book photo stolen by Allen Hynek with the only label being that it is a Nunn-Baker {mobile telescope} tracking photo. This would likely place it in the 1950s and taken while observing a night launch or during the Moon Watch program.] ... for what it's worth, I believe that the "UFO" is the pill-shaped light form rather than the large burst which seems possibly to emerge from it.

Photo #4a: St. George, MN, 1965.

Photo{s} #5a: Insert: Lake Urmia, NW Iran, 1978; and Shiraz, Iran, a few years later {John Timmerman was boggled by the shapes and that these came to him from Iran from two very different sources. This oddity overcame his immediate perceptual biases, though few others of his CUFOS friends.}

Photo #6a: Honolulu, Hawaii, 1974.

Photo #7a: Alberton, South Australia, 1967. { the lower picture is a blow-up of the central area.}

Photo #8a: Ipameri River, Brazil, 1966. {I've cropped the "context" out here --- sorry --- the object hovers over forest beyond closer water.}

 

Photo #9a: Some location in Norway --- as often happens, Allen Hynek is not tidy enough in his labeling --- 1957.

Photo #10a: Lake Baskatong, Quebec, Canada, 1978.

Photo #11a: King Mountain, NC, 1968.

Photo #12a: nr. Holloman AFB, NM, 1957.

soooooooo........ knee-jerks, doubtless abound.

I'm still not ready to launch into specifics on these things {though I'll be happy to respond in comments}. Instead I'm going to do a little introspection.

Somewhen, "somebody" has gotten into my head and told me what a UFO should look like. I'm not saying that this is automatically helpful or harmful, it's just reality. Some of these photos match that imprinted visual better --- well let's phrase it "smoother" --- than others. I'm not good enough at self-analysis to explain all this subtlety which has gone on, but part of it resulted in this: when I say "UFO" I have a definition personally-formed and not necessarily like the person's that I happen to be talking to.

That definition is not so vague as to be {for me} utterly unhelpful and useless, nor is it so precise as to restrict growth through analysis and synthesis. "U" is unidentified. That's a no-brainer for me. "FO" however says to me: "object in this sense means material --- not gas, liquid, nor plasma", and "flying in this sense means technology". When I'm reviewing a potential UFO case, whatever possible evidence is presented is subjected to judgment of whether that evidence seems to be coherent with observation of some solidly material flying technology [whether WE can do it comes later], or is readily congruent with such a technology.

I'm not looking to see if there's just something odd in the air; the witches on their broomsticks, or the would-be dragons, pterodactyls, and moth men can have their airspace --- I'll put them in a different file folder. I'm looking for technology --- technology tough to identify. Others are free to look for whatever they want.

So, when a picture shows up, my mind says: does it look like it might be flying technology that I can't identify? .... and then the other prejudices come in? Is it LIKE the great pile of other cases that I trust? Does it have radial symmetry or at least SOME clean symmetry? How's it moving? Can I buy its behavior in the air? All that happens at once without words. The mind settles down to take some calmer time with the case... but the explosion of prejudice has happened.

I'll put up some more of this later.

Peace and calm and wise minds, friends.

Can We Learn Anything From UFO Photos, part seven?

The USAF was at one time just about desperate enough to employ a scheme like that pictured above. To my knowledge, their idea to place diffraction-grating-equipped cameras in interceptor aircraft never paid off with a single shot. With UFOs "Simple Logic" often fails.

Barra da Tijuca, Brazil, 1952... yep, that one. Why bother ye wise persons may ask?; and I often ask myself the same question. But I'm allegedly going down through my UFO film case files and this is certainly one of the more famous. AND it's one which I haven't looked at closely at all, always swallowing the general cant that this is a hoax. I've finally looked at it. It is far from obvious to me what its status should be. Well, let's tell the story and you can decide.

Two guys, relatively well-known media guys in Brazil, were after a story when something showed up unexpectedly in the sky. Since they were on the hunt of news, one of them had a loaded camera. One guy yelled at the other to shoot the film, rousing him out of his stunned inaction, and the photographer took five pictures. By the way, this is a good spot to dismiss one piece of negativist garbage which is on the net about this. It has been said that wasn't it convenient that Keffel had only five negatives in his camera? ..."that should tell you he was planning a hoax right there". This remark is another of those pure lies that people put out. Keffel had a full roll in his camera and all the film was shot except for the last five frames when the thing showed up. Keffel shot all the frames he could. [there is actually a description of what was on the previous frames on the web]. This doesn't mean that these pictures are good UFO pictures by a long margin, but it says "go carefully, honest seeker of the truth. There are nasty people out there."

Ed Keffel and Joao Martins took their story and the yet undeveloped film to the news magazine O Cruzeiro and the editors published it. Since Martins and Keffel worked for the magazine, the film was not considered theirs, and they got nothing but their normal wages out of it. Before the story broke, the magazine, or perhaps the first newspaper, alerted the Brazilian Air Force and naturally the Brazilian government was interested. They were having several strong encounters involving their own military at the time, and were not indisposed towards giving alleged pictures an open hearing.

This is an interesting picture. It shows Joao Martins at the left, a Brazilian Air Force officer at the right, and in the middle, the USAF Air Attache, Colonel Hughes. The American military was being called in on this almost immediately, and the picture above is from the very next day following the sighting and the rapid return home by Keffel and Martins. [Brazil at the time was trying VERY hard to be "best friends" with the US military, as there was an arms race of sorts going on in South America, particularly as regards Argentina, and Brazil was looking forward to being given high-performance US aircraft]. [On a note of near irrelevancy: I've blotted out the bold initials of some UFO organization who insists on degrading all these photos even though they have no copyright... thus the funny-looking "photo splotch" you see Hughes looking at].

It is also interesting to see Martins there. If he's hoaxing, he's hoaxing both his government AND the United States, right in their faces. A Brassy move. Keffel and Martins are said to have taken their negatives to their Air Force and, perhaps at this very meeting, Hughes himself accompanied them to the darkroom to oversee the development. Both Hughes and the Brazilian Air Force said that the photos looked good at first analysis at least.

These are the five photos on the film strip. I think that I have them in the correct order, but...? The thing flew quite an arc while Keffel was trying to get off his shots, and he had to turn his body significantly to follow its path. The object also flew in, then backed out, during the flight. The last three photos have greater clarity than the first two, and much hullaballoo has been made of shadows. Because this thing flew a significant arc, the Sun angle will change picture-to-picture, something not paid attention to very well by some analysts. Such analysis would properly be done only by going to the site with the witnesses and getting precise directions. Picture four is by far the most famous, both for clarity of the UFO, and for being THE main battleground about these photos.

Let's dispense with another really trivial thing now. Humans are nearly hopeless in their instinctive biases. One of these I've come across consistently in regards to UFO pictures. People will instantaneously take a position of sympathy or disregard just on the first impression that the photo makes on them. UFO photos have the worst task of overcoming such bias that I've witnessed. If the photo is too clear, it is a fake. If the photo is too dim or fuzzy, "it could be anything". There is almost, to my hearing, no middle ground wherein a photo can make a good first impression.

And there is another thing: "That just doesn't look right to me". This means: that's not what a UFO should look like. In the case of Barra da Tijuca and others, I have had persons doubt their validity for reasons like "that's too flat". Concerning Barra da Tijuca, I'll just present the flat aspect of the Stealth bomber above. Even though it's triangular and Tijuca is round, edge-on they present very nearly exactly the same aspect. Unless something is REALLY ridiculous, we need to dump the prejudices.

Because it was judged that these could be "good" UFO photos, the Brazilian Air Force got a team of photographers/analysts to try to see if they could be faked. One of these photographers was regularly employed by the Brazilian government: Almira Barauna. Hip readers will recognize him as the photographer of the later Isle de Trindade encounter. The team tried to simulate the photos by throwing models into the air. Because the pictures taken by Keffel show so much "air" between the object and the ground vegetation, and because the apparent diameter of the object is significantly different from frame to frame [matching the witnesses statements of approach and flyaway], you could calculate how big/small a model would have to be to account for the five shots, and therefore minimum distances that you'd have to throw the thing. It became obvious pretty quickly that this could not be done with human arm strength, leaving the only viable "hoax" hypothesis a photo montage. Because this is the only viable hoax hypothesis, you will see debunkers state this flatly as the explanation, although no proof of that exists at all. It's another one of those: it can't be real, so it must be ...X.

While the Brazilian photographic team worked fruitlessly to explain the photos, Colonel Hughes ultimately wrote a mainly negative report back to Washington. The case became simply a hoax. Why did he say what he did on his report, when he admitted that the negatives looked good to both the Brazilian authorities and to himself?

These are Hughes' reasons as taken from his report to the Pentagon:

1). "The fact that the object was first seen looking almost directly into the Sun seems unlikely". What a weak statement! This is further disregarded as the first shot is clearly NOT looking anywhere near the direct line of sight of the Sun.
2). "That there were no other observers and the photographer evidently did not look for others seems peculiar". First of all: who says that there were no other observers? Secondly, Martins and Keffel specifically say that they made some attempts to find other observers in the very article which is appended to Hughes' report AND TRANSLATED!. Good grief!
3). "That no satisfactory supported reason for the photographer to be at this particular place further causes doubt". The same article describes exactly what they were doing at that spot on assignment from the magazine. You really wonder what's going on with some of these people.
4). NOW THE BIG DEAL. "And finally, $25,000 is being asked for the world-wide rights, which indicates that profit is more desired than verifying the identity of the object".

This last statement needs some commentary. Let's dispense with one thing immediately. Keffel and Martins were working on assignment for O Cruzeiro. Under that relationship, the photos were not theirs, but the magazine's. Martins said in later years that he never sought anything from the photos, and in fact continuously agreed to give free talks about the subject. So if Keffel and Martins could not "sell" the photos, what was biting Hughes?? Hughes wanted to get the negatives or at least "first" copies to ship back to the Pentagon for analysis. O Cruzeiro's appetite for selling this new windfall blocked that. When you read his quote above, you can see that this is exactly what he's talking about. Also, there is his phrasing: "verifying the identity of the object". It is difficult to read that as saying anything but that HE DOESN'T KNOW what the object is --- which would be perfectly in concert with the situation at the time of his Air Intelligence Report.

Hughes is upset at O Cruzeiro and searches for any reason to label the photos hoaxes. What he comes up with are three almost embarrassing bonehead comments and an unsubstantiated allusion to profit-making. If that latter played in the story, it would have meant that O Cruzeiro higher-ups were in on an organizational hoax which only included Keffel and Martins as the low-level operatives. I guess one can imagine that but it's a bit of a stretch with no evidence.

So, the photos stood there as disregarded hoaxes at least in the US view when APRO led by its Brazilian UFO-Knight, Olavo Fontes, went to bat for them. In my judgement, at this moment the photos should have been looked upon as very intriguing potential UFO evidence. Along then came the elite saucer debunker Donald Menzel. Menzel decided that the pictures looked phony. He felt that the sun-angle in some was off [that's no good due to the turning arc of the photographer though] but most importantly the Sun shadow in picture four did not match the shading on the tree below. Voila! said he, the thing is a photomontage!. Well, I've got to give him credit. He at least had come up with a reasonable theory of fakery based upon some actual element of the case. Other people jumped on board this hypothesis for the exact reason. This continued right on up to the Colorado Project and today.

Fontes and APRO were having none of it. Fontes pointed out that the offending tree had broken branches and it was these which gave the out-of-place shadows... some skeptics have actually credited this observation with explaining some but not all of the "bad" shadows. Jim Lorenzen simply said: that tree and the surrounding vegetation create a complex Sun/Shade situation from which you cannot derive simplistic deductions. Well, that's sort of correct too. Other skeptics have given thumbs down to the pattern of shadows on the "craft" as it flies, saying that these admit of no feasible Sun position. The Brazilian photo analyst, however, presented one which he felt worked just fine.

Well, what have we got here? I'm trying to be honest about this. I don't see that any of Colonel Hughes' bullet-points to the Pentagon have anything going for them at all. Menzel's point did, but there is at least a reasonable counter. Same thing with modeling the Sun angle. If we'd just have had an independent witness.

Maybe we did.

When Olavo Fontes passed away relatively young, Brazil needed a replacement. The great early triumvirate of Simoes, Perriera, and Faria were not coming out of retirement, so it was left to someone new. That someone became the Grand Lady of Brazilian UFOlogy, Irene Granchi. She ultimately assumed much of Fontes' role and his causes. Those causes included the two spectacular photo cases of Barra da Tijuca and Isle de Trindade. Granchi used to blister when she would hear commentators making light of either case. She was in the US attending an APRO convention [1971], when she heard a speaker waving off the case. Angry, she returned to Brazil, re-interviewed Keffel, Martins and the Brazilian analyst. This firmed her opinion that the case was good. She then gave a talk in Lima in 1973, which led to a letter-to-the-editor correcting a bungled coverage of the talk. Two weeks later, she received a completely unexpected surprise: a letter from a Barra da Tijuca witness.

She passed the substance of the letter [and the witnesses' names, to be treated anonymously] on to Coral Lorenzen who published it in the APRO Bulletin of July/August 1973. The witnesses, a doctor and his wife-to-be, saw an object hovering and then moving rapidly in the same area as Keffel and Martins' experience. It was stunning enough to be quite memorable at the time. Within that week they read of the case and noting the location realized that the photos had correlated "to the date and the hour" to what they'd witnessed. Moreover, the object was heading towards the very hill showing in some of the photos when they saw it disappear. Coral said that the doctor's reputation is "good" implying that perhaps Ms Granchi had checked that... but we don't know.

What to say? If that late-coming corroboration of the case is solid, then the photos are solid. If not, they are still at least in the graybasket. I haven't seen any grounds on which to go to the dumpster in this case [though, actually, I'd been biased against it, and thought that I would reject this one when I started this].

Stay loose, my friends.