I hate to keep picking on Philip Klass, but I’ve
just stumbled on another of his solutions and thought we might look at it. Back
in 1975, at Loring Air Force Base in Maine, Sergeant Steven Eichner, was
working with Sergeant R. Jones, when Jones saw a red and orange object over the
flight line. To both of them the object looked like a “stretched out football”
that hovered and then seemed to disappear as the lights went out. It reappeared
over the north end of the runway, moving in what they described as “jerky
motions.” They began to give chase, maybe just get closer for a better look,
and when they turned onto the road that led to the weapons storage area, they
saw the UFO some 300 feet in front of them. It was about five feet off the
ground and the air around it seemed wavy, such as heat coming off a desert
highway. They saw no doors, hatches or windows on it.
It wasn’t long before sirens sounded and Eichner
said that he saw many flashing blue lights on the Air Force security team
coming at them, or rather toward the weapons storage area. They didn’t want to
be close by as the Air Police tried to identify the lights and find out what
was happening.
That is a quick rundown of what Eichner and his
buddy saw that night. I mention it only because in the newspaper column that
we’re going to talk about, Eichner was mentioned and his story recounted. This
gives us all a view of what happened without getting into a discussion of
whether it was something from space or something from Earth.
Philip Klass decided to see what he could learn
about this and investigated. He told John Day of the Bangor Daily News, that “…he investigated the 1975 Loring incident.
Among other things, he was given access to base Telex communications during the
four or five nights when the mysterious object repeatedly hovered over Loring’s
nuclear storage facility. According to Klass, the cable traffic shows that
Loring officers had strong evidence that the mysterious object cited by Eicher
was a helicopter. Their concern was not that the SAC base was being penetrated
by spacemen, but that a radical anti-Vietnam group had rented a helicopter and
was trying to steal a nuclear warhead.”
I will only note here that any messages that might
have affected national security would have been highly classified, even five or
six years after the event and I doubt that Klass had access to them. He
certainly would have seen the regular traffic, but in this case, with someone
or something attempting to penetrate the nuclear weapons storage facility, the
classification of the communications would have been increased.
Day wrote, “According to Klass, the cable traffic
he obtained pertaining to the Loring UFO incident indicated that authorities
established that a well-financed crew operating out of a motel near Moosehead
Lake, was flying on the nights the mysterious object was observed hovering over
Loring’s nuclear stockpile.
“Klass has no proof that the Moosehead Lake
helicopter was the object which buzzed Loring. He says it is unfortunate that
the Air Force never followed up on their suspicions, or made public the results
of their investigations.”
Let’s just think about this for a moment. Klass
claims that the cable traffic suggested a “well-financed crew operating out of
a motel near Moosehead Lake, was flying on the nights the mysterious object was
observed” but that the Air Force didn’t follow up on it. We have this
helicopter (and it does sound like a helicopter meaning the maneuvers,
hovering, sound like a helicopter but there is no sound associated it which is
odd) which the Air Force apparently knew was flown by a crew staying in a local
motel, but they do nothing about it. These guys and girls, these anti-Vietnam
radicals (who apparently didn’t know that Vietnam War was over, US forces had
long been withdrawn and Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, was in the hands of
the communists) were attempting to steal an atomic bomb. But the Air Force
didn’t follow up on it, so Klass has no proof for it.
I’m surprised that Day could write this without
phoning out to Loring to ask them a couple of questions. Oh, I doubt he would
have gotten much in the way of an answer, but he could have asked where these
radicals went after they failed to steal an atomic bomb. I would have thought a
reporter would wonder why the Air Force didn’t care enough to find those
trespassers and have them arrested. Isn’t deadly force authorized to keep
intruders out of those weapons stock piles? I mean, if they can shoot you for
trespassing, it would seem that they would want to arrest you, even if you were
aiding the local economy by renting helicopters, staying in local motels, and I
would guess buying food, and probably more than one bottle of bourbon.
But no, even though they knew the name of the
motel, and surely could have learned where the helicopter was parked and who
owned it, the Air Force didn’t follow up on it… or maybe as Klass said, never
made public the results of their investigation… which also seems odd. They
would have arrested the people and wanted others to know what would happen if
you rented a helicopter and flew it over their weapons storage facility.
So, no, I don’t believe Klass’s anti-Vietnam
radicals, which is not to say that aliens were responsible, only that there is
no evidence of Klass’s theory (ah, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of
absence, or does that apply here?). Anyway, I thought I’d give everyone a
chance to see this wonderful explanation for the Loring UFO sightings.
Day finished up writing, “When you think about it,
there’s more logic to Klass’s contention that UFOs are more the product of
overactive imaginations on earth, than they are of little green men from
another galaxy. I’ve chased UFO stories as a reporter and found the bottom line
was somebody saw something but only God knows what it was.”
I wouldn’t have mentioned this last paragraph,
except it does provide a bit of a clue as to Day’s attitude about this, which
is basically even a crummy explanation is better than no explanation. But
really, I just wanted to note that he probably meant another solar system
rather than galaxy.
28 comments:
ha,ha,ha,that was great,yea,his story was a joke,but,heh,our govt.,other explainations about hundreds of unidentified objects a year flying in american airspace over military bases,missle sites,ect,is just as bad,they say,what?!?!,we did not see nothing,or it was swamp gas,or,hhhuuuhh it was venus,,it is just that most people can not handle the truth,it shatters there safe little world,but,with mountains of evidents coming out,it wont be long before the truth comes out..
Further evidence that Klass had no class. What a putz.
Klass mentions this case in chapter 12 of "UFOs, The Public Deceived". I assume it is the one you are talking about. There is no mention therein of the Vietnam war, radical anti-Vietnam protestors, or that anyone was trying to steal a nuclear warhead. Nor is there any reference to a "well financed crew".
Did Klass ever make such statements and then decide to tone down the rhetoric for his book, or has some journalist put these words into his mouth?
When you know deep in your little skeptie heart of hearts that UFOs couldn't possibly be ET, then any stupid "explanation" is better than none. And as Vallee once commented, the stupider the better.
...so Kevin, may I suggest that your blog-guests consider the serious research of one Robert Hastings?
Hello all
An interesting case in that it is one of those in which there seems no debate that something was present, but the debate (as ever) was over what it was and the consistency or inconsistency of the data with various explanations (sounds familiar doesn't it!).
I am quite interested in cases that have reports of optical refraction or other effects (e.g. the Coyne helicopter case) that could be interpreted as being conisistent with modification of the space-time metric. The origins of the idea that UFOs use such technology goes back to the 1950's with people like Professor Herman Oberth etc but have been more developed by the late, great, Paul Hill and more recently by Putfoff and co-workers (and in an entirely mainstream context I await with some interest the results of the experiments being undertaken by Dr H White at the Johnson Space Centre).
This particular 'heat haze' like effect could also be consistent with varying amounts of ionisation of the atmosphere, of course, and I do have a concern that we don't seem to see reports of siginificant optical refraction of distant objects from inside a region of modified space-time. I am not a specialist in this area but I do wonder if any physicists out there might wish to comment on this sort of refractive optical effect that we see in this case?
I love how reporters, even today, always add that "little green men" comment (usually accompanied by an eyeroll if they're on TV) somewhere in the story. It's like their little wink that "...Nobody really believes in UFOs and I don't want you to think I do either."
As a helicopter pilot (and one who lives in Pensacola, Florida near the infamous Gulf Breeze), I know that the audio signature of my main and tail rotors are unmistakable. Nobody who sees me hovering (even at night) confuses me with a UFO. Even the latest military rotorcraft, the tiltrotor V-22 sounds like, well, *two* helicopters when it's hovering around.
If you absolutely reject the very idea that there can be life on other planets, or in other places or dimensions than good old planet Earth, then you will therefore dismiss all such UFO sightings as explainable in some way that is logical and rational to our human brain.
I do know that the Gulf Breeze sightings have diminished markedly since Ed Wolters departure. Perhaps the ET's found no other sign of intelligent life here?
Bob -
As a former helicopter pilot myself, and reading that Eichner was within 300 feet of the object, I cannot see how he would mistake it for something unusual. The noise would have been obvious, the flashing lights would have been obvious, and the spinning rotors, both main and tail, would have been obvious.
The one thing that struck me was that it was about five feet in the air, hovering in ground effect, which would have picked up the dust and debris on the ground and could have given the impression of heat on a desert highway... but then this was late October in Maine and I would think that there would be little on the ground to pick up and swirl around... not to mention this was an Air Force base so the ground would be fairly clean.
When you have witnesses as close as Eichner and his buddy Jones were, there really is no way for them to mistake a helicopter for something unusual.
CDA -
Type Loring AFB UFO Klass into your search engine and then look for the Bangor newspaper. You can read the article yourself and decide if Klass was misquoted, or if he had just thrown out a dumb explanation that the reporter didn't bother to check because, as we all know... there are no alien visitors and therefore anything that suggests otherwise is in error.
Anthony Mugan said:
“I am not a specialist in this area but I do wonder if any physicists out there might wish to comment on this sort of refractive optical effect that we see in this case?”
I have an undergraduate degree in nuclear physics and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering, so I consider myself somewhere between a physicist and an engineer. I share your interest in the hypothesis put forth by Paul Hill and advanced by Puthoff, et al, that some reported Unconventional Flying Objects are objectively real vehicles that are using “low-energy” (to use Jack Sarfatti’s term) space-time warping” to move around.
Paul used the term “acceleration field” to describe what was happening in the vicinity of the UFOs and showed that this one assumption would, at a single stroke, explain many of the effects reported, including hums and buzzes, suppression of shock waves and aerodynamic heating, high accelerations, disturbance of bodies of water, foliage, etc. Paul, of course, was educated in the 1940s, when Newtonian mechanics was still the prevailing paradigm, and Einstein’s Relativity was considered an esoteric subject that had almost no importance for common experience.
It wasn’t until 1967 that John Wheeler showed mathematically that space-time could be sufficiently warped to create closed-surface and self-stable “acceleration fields” and introduced the term “black hole” as an example. Since then, we’ve had Alcubierre and others show that there is no mathematical impediment to the propagation of free-moving, closed domains (bubbles) of space-time. In more modern times, the term “acceleration field” would be interpreted to be the perceived effect of “localized space-time warping”. Both terms are describing the same effect.
The main theoretical difficulty with this scenario is that the only way we know of at present to create space-time warping is with large static concentrations of mass/energy and/or exotic matter. Currently, no one has produced a consistent mathematical model of space-time warping using a quantity less than about 1 Jupiter mass. If UFOs are really using space-time warping, they are probably not carrying around Jupiter-sized mass concentrations with them. Paul Hill made a good argument that the field effect surrounding UFOs is not static, but rather, oscillatory, and this may ultimately provide a clue as to how “low-energy” space-time warping” is possible.
With respect to the witness description in the Loring case that “….the air around it seemed wavy, such as heat coming off a desert highway.”: one could imagine two different hypotheses to explain this. One hypothesis would be that they were perceiving direct gravitational lensing (i.e., the direct bending of light when it passes by a massive object, like a star, or a black hole. Without doing the calculations, I would have to assume that if the witnesses were close enough to observe fields large enough to produce direct gravitational lensing, they would probably also be experiencing direct physical sensations (such as being torn apart by the gravity gradient). So, I would not pursue that hypothesis.
The other explanation is that the witnesses were seeing localized variations in air density (and therefore index of refraction) around the object. This, of course, is exactly what produces wavering optical effects, “coming off a desert highway”. Also, variations in air density are exactly what Paul Hill predicted would occur as a result of an oscillatory acceleration field, especially when in proximity to a solid surface (such as the runway). This condition can set up standing waves when the secondary oscillating pressure pulses reflecting off the solid surface interfere with the primary pulses coming off the UFO. For what it’s worth, I have sometimes observed similar index of refraction effects due to variations in air density in the downwash of a hovering helicopter. It doesn’t take a lot of power to produce this effect.
"...And as Vallee once commented, the stupider the better."
Truly! ROTFLMAO!
Extreme stupidity stuns credulity; discussion simply ceases. See, in this fashion an errant passion rends the truth to pieces. Then the errant, incoherent, proclaims a higher ground; it matters not that what he's got is at its best, unsound.
Larry
Thank you, that is very interesting. The possibility of similar optical effects coming from a helicopter close to the ground means this is probably not an ideal case to use for dicussion of possible metric-engineering effects (fully recognising the problem the lack of sound creates for the helicopter hypothesis).
You are quite right, in terms of the general point, to highlight that the field would seem to be cyclic rather than static, as Hill rather convincingly argued. I had missed the implication of the current data that we are not looking at large (or perhaps more accurrately, spatially large) gravitational effects that would produce lensing of distant objects noticeable to observers - mea culpa. (my little brain is now struggling to factor time dilation effects into a framework without such large modifications though...but that isn't a factor in this case so lets leave that for the moment).
That does indeed suggest that our current hypothetical models of modified space time such as the Alcubierre model are still some way off the mark, although the theoretical model being pursued by White (e.g. White, H. and Davis, E. 2005, 'The Alcubierre Metric in Higher Dimensional Spacetime') does to my uneducated eye appear to go someway towards such a cyclic field approach. That particular experperimental program seems to rest on some (mainstream) theoretical assumptions that are themselves pretty much untested though, so we shall just have to wait and see how that one pans out!
Thanks again
Mr Lehmberg:
8-letter acronyms leave me speechless & dumbfounded.
In plain English please: are you saying that Klass was guilty of a 'terminological inexactitude'?
Mr. Cuhduh;
You ask that question like it has the remotest relevance... it doesn't. See, for that question to have any relevance at all it is required that the—indefatigable even in death—personage of Philip Klass is anything other than a purposed scourge in ufological history, a bad journalistic apple in a barrel of bad journalistic apples, or a person with a scintilla of honor, a constructive imagination, or a sense of fair play. He had none of these things and was instead a back-shooting psychopath as mean-spirited as he was mendacious and a faux skeptic as pernicious as he was pixilated. James McDonald, were he alive, and Stanton Friedman can bear me out. I offer that this is English abundantly understandable and counters stupid explanations, true to form, "the stupider the better."
Anthony wrote:
“The possibility of similar optical effects coming from a helicopter close to the ground means this is probably not an ideal case to use for dicussion of possible metric-engineering effects (fully recognising the problem the lack of sound creates for the helicopter hypothesis).”
After I pushed the “publish” button on my last comment, I realized that it could be misconstrued as to support the helicopter hypothesis. That’s not the case. Let me elaborate:
The witnesses reported seeing a phenomenon resembling “heat waves”, so let’s start there. In my previous post I pointed out that localized differences in air density (and therefore index of refraction) between one parcel of air and another parcel lying nearby is exactly what produces “heat waves” on a desert floor. In that case, the air is basically static and the variations in air density are produced by different temperatures in the different parcels.
However, differences in temperature are not necessary to produce differences in density. Any phenomenon that produces sharp pressure differences in a confined region will also produce density differences and therefore differences in index of refraction. One of the more common phenomena in aviation that produces this effect is the vortex, or tornado-like rotary air flow. A vortex produces a very sharp pressure gradient between the inside and the outside and therefore an observable change in the index of refraction.
Sometimes you can see this phenomenon stretched between the intake of an air transport aircraft jet engine and the ground in front of the engine when the aircraft is idling or taxiing. It looks like a miniature tornado or waterspout and can suck foreign objects into the engine. The phenomenon is predictable enough that certain models of 737 aircraft that are intended to operate on unpaved runways are equipped with special devices that use bleed-air from the engine to blow the vortex away when idling or taxiing.
The other common phenomenon that produces visible vortices is lift being generated by a wing or similar surface. Checkout Wikipedia on the topic of “Wingtip Vortices” and you will see many images illustrating the concept. Helicopter blades, when generating lift also produce trailing wingtip vortices. However, a helicopter rotor also produces a general downward flow of air (the “downwash”) that causes the vortices to wrap into a helical configuration. The downwash also creates large amounts of turbulent mixing which creates a lot of perceived noise and also smears out the boundaries between the trailing vortices. Usually, the individual vortices are no longer distinct by the time the downwash has moved one rotor diameter below the rotor plane.
I’m a fixed-wing Private Pilot, not a rotary-wing pilot like Kevin and Bob, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in and around helicopters and tilt-rotors in my professional capacity. What I have observed when watching a hovering helicopter for an extended period of time is that very occasionally and very fleetingly, sometimes an individual rotortip vortex can be observed in the downwash. Because of the extremely dynamic and turbulent nature of the downwash, the vortex is obliterated about as quickly as it becomes visible. This is what I was referring to when I wrote “ I have sometimes observed similar index of refraction effects … in the downwash of a hovering helicopter.” I’ve never seen a stable “field” of index of refraction variations under a helicopter rotor that could be interpreted as “heat waves”.
Also, I can certainly endorse the observation that it would be virtually impossible to be within 100 meters of a hovering helicopter and not see the main rotor, the tail rotor, and the fuselage and not hear the very substantial associated aerodynamic and engine noise, if they were present.
Part 1 of 2:
"Type Loring AFB UFO Klass into your search engine and then look for the Bangor newspaper. You can read the article yourself and decide if Klass was misquoted..."
Unfortunately, Kevin, just using the 4 search terms "Loring AFB UFO Klass" in Google search brings up over 9,300 references, and does not bring up a Google listing of the actual article you derive your quotes from in any of the first several pages of links Google lists for those terms.
Using, instead, snippets from the actual quotes you used from John Day's 1981 Bangor Daily News article did yield a news.google citation and the entire article, which interested readers here can check out directly:
See: http://bit.ly/UasCXT
[Bangor Daily News, Nov. 7 - 8, 1981, "Encounters of a Dubious Kind," by John S. Day, BND Washington correspondent, page 26]
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loring_Air_Force_Base#UFO_sighting for more general information.
Barry Greenwood and Lawrence Fawcett's 1984 book, "Clear Intent..." also contains more detailed information on this incident. This book is still available and in print under the revised title, "The UFO Coverup..." in paperback.
What I find rather intriguing about this incident, and several others at various other military bases with nuclear weapons in secured weapons storage areas (WSA's) and at some nuclear missile launch sites, like Malmstrom for example, during this period of the mid-70's and earlier, are the references to mysterious, silent "helicopters" being the suspected culprits for these multiple intrusions within highly-restricted U.S. nuclear weapons locations.
These unknown "helicopters" (and that term is used in some of the declassified military records of these kinds of incidents) are nearly always silent, or have a low hum, do not display any indications of being actual helicopters, and instead indicate some very strange and unusual objects that to all rational observations reported by on-site witnesses would be more logically termed unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, not helicopters.
My surmise is that the term "helicopter" became shorthand for dismissing actual UFO sightings in these incidents as something prosaic, or not unknown, instead of the more accurate term UFO, most probably for national security purposes and cover.
Also of interest is that none of these supposed "helicopters" was ever identified as such, or found, as far as is publicly known, despite pursuit, by scrambled U.S. military choppers or even by rapidly dispatched jet fighters.
Imagine that. Sneaky, those "helicopters." 8^}
And, as the Greenwood and Fawcett book shows, with U.S. declassified documents, these UFOs showed "clear intent" and behavior near or hovering over WSA's, which would seemingly imply some form of both deliberate and reactive behavior, or possible non-human intelligence of some kind.
Part 2 of 2:
According to the John Day article, Klass was allegedly given "...access to base TELEX communications during the four or five nights when the mysterious object repeatedly hovered over Loring's nuclear storage facility. According to Klass, the cable traffic shows that Loring officers had strong evidence that the mysterious object cited by Eichner was a helicopter. Their concern was not that the SAC base was being penetrated by spacemen, but that a radical anti-Vietnam group had rented a helicopter and was trying to steal a nuclear warhead."
"Four or five nights"?!?
The military records indicate "only" two consecutive nights.
The 1981 John Day article goes on:
"According to Klass, the cable traffic he obtained pertaining to the Loring UFO incident indicated that authorities established that a well-financed crew, operating out of a motel near Moosehead Lake, was flying on the nights that the mysterious object was observed hovering over Loring's nuclear stockpile."
Really? And Klass bought that ridiculous tale?
Day's article continues, "Klass has no proof that the Moosehead Lake helicopter was the object which buzzed Loring. He says it is unfortunate that the Air Force never followed up on their suspicions, or made public the results of their investigation."
I think my bullshit meter just went off the scale.
Klass was either misled, and didn't check out the obvious absurdity of the alleged USAF story fed to him, supposedly using what would seem to have been classified documents considering the extremely serious nature of the intrusions and the national security implications thereof, perhaps because it suited him to repeat it to deny any UFO involvement, or maybe he simply lied about it.
Either way, Klass was neither an honest nor serious investigator, but just a rabid and perpetual debunker, as this BND article illustrates, and is only one of many examples of Klass' amateurish pseudo-skepticism.
In any case, Klass served the USAF's dismissive purposes quite well.
His credibility, IMHO, is sub-zero. YMMV.
Larry
Thanks for the clarification. I also find the helicopter idea strained. Not least it seems odd that such an operation would try to penetrate the base lit up like a Christmas tree, and as for returning on different nights....well!
Steve said:
"His credibility, IMHO, is sub-zero. "
Where is Don Schmidt's credibility for ya?
Lance
Lance -
First of all it is Don Schmitt and second of all, this isn't about Schmitt but about a reporter who listened to a ridiculous explanations without question... not to mention Klass, who gave it apparently after the Air Force told him.
@Lance:
Bait much? I'd rather fish.
I'd also prefer to stay on topic, as commentary here often goes astray.
The issue is Klass, and his immense lack of credibility, not Schmitt.
Jeez Mr. Moody... why would you even go there; how is it remotely germane or pertinent; moreover, I offer that Mr Schmitt has paid abundantly for admitted transgressions and is not deserving of the suggested aspersions cast; he's a paragon of integrity compared to many in his opposition, eh? ...Like the late Philip Klass for instance.
So, if I may attempt a summary, we have a situation in which a highly sensitive and secure installation was penetrated on at least two nights (undisputed point as far as I can see as this is in official documentation) and possibly on other nights around the same time (alleged Telexs)by an object that didn't look like a helicopter, didn't sound like a helicopter but did hover. The object did not behave a manner consistent with normal tactical thinking in that it was brightly lit, returned to the same location at least once and remained in situ for some time whilst a security response was underway.
The object was not intercepted and we have no information on any actual follow up, arrests etc. in such a profoundly serious breach of security.
Some elements of witness testmony are consistent with what current theory (non-mainstream) would suggest could be advanced technology although other explanations may be possible.
Obviously a helicopter then...
Why not look at page 93 of Klass's "UFOs The Public Deceived" where you will find an official memo from the chief of security policy of the SAC, written on Jan 6, 1976 detailing the events from Oct 27 - Nov 1, 1975? (NB The object is described as a helicopter, not a UFO).
The memo is entitled UNIDENTIFIED HELICOPTER SIGHTINGS, Loring AFB.
So in answer to Anthony Mugan above, yes the thing WAS obviously a helicopter. Can he, or anyone else, show it was a visiting form of advanced technology, such as a snooping ET craft?
If Kevin has dug up this case purely to show Klass' frailty when dealing with UFO sightings, he has picked the wrong case.
This does NOT mean each and every aspect of the sightings is explainable by helicopters, any more than each and every aspect of the Rendlesham case can be explained by a lighthouse.
And yes, I am waiting for our Mr Lehmberg to point out that lighthouses do not fly. How right you are, sir!
Yes, after reading Klass's account in his book, I can see why Kevin would prefer (as always) this account of something Klass told someone that someone else told him.
Because Klass must be vilified at all times, a 4th hand account years later is what Kevin (and the UFO faithful) focus upon. As always, there is NO CHANCE that the reporter misunderstood or mischaracterized Klass's comments (which are mostly paraphrased--a form much loved by UFO enthusiasts).
Klass gave a full account in his book and never mentioned some of the elements above.
To be sure, Klass uses some of the same bad tactics that the believers use: liberally saying something is "beyond a doubt", for instance. He made, what I consider mistakes on occasion.
Unfortunately, this does not mean:
Therefore OMG! ALIENS!
Lance
CDA -
Thanks for the solution. I mean, why pay attention to the witness statements, taken within hours of the sighting? Ignore the fact that two of them were within 300 feet, and that a helicopter is loud and easy to identify. Ignore the fact that an intrusion into a WSA would be a matter of national security regardless of the source of that intrusion and that it would be highly classified. The witnesses said it hovered and therefore it is a helicopter.
Lance -
Is it possible for you to make a comment without showing your ass?
And, of course, it was the reporter who got it wrong, not Klass... of course, Klass was repeating what the Air Force said, which doesn't make it right. He finally asked a question, but my post was about the story in which Klass is the source.
cda
hello. I am reminded a little of my old research supervisor who always used to try to impress upon us the importance of considering alternative hypotheses. A third possibility (to add to helicopter or an unconventional flying object) could be a tectonic strain light, for example.
TSLs, or earthquake lights as they are sometimes called, are atmospheric plasmas generated by exo-electron bombadment of the atmosphere in areas experiencing high seismic strain. Their existance was not accepted in 1975 and was indeed the subject of much derision within the geophysics community against those who argued in favour of their existance (sounds familiar doesn't it).
The question of existance was settled in 1984 by Lockner et. al (in Nature, when a group of geologists who were far too senior to ridicule actually saw some. The correlation with raw UFO reports was resonably well established by Persinger and Derr in a series of papers between 1976 and 1990. I have myself looked in some detail at this phenomena as I did think it could finish off the whole question. it doesn't (UFO reports described as a structural form have a statistically significant different pattern of occurrance etc.
In this case it is possible that what was being described might have been a TSL. The proximity to the ground, the optical refraction and the duration of the sightings, together with the return visit suggest this is unlikely, but the overall similarity of form suggests it may be an alternative hypothesis. One way of testing this is, if they were TSLs, you should be able to find a significant increase in seismic activity within about one month after the sightings and in a area of 10,000 square km (which sounds large, but isn't - a square 100Km on a side has this area for example).
No idea what the actual seismic records show, but might be possibility. of course if you were a general faced with making a report on such an incident in 1975, then I can quite understand why it would have to be helicopter.
@CDA:
"(NB The object is described as a helicopter, not a UFO)
"The memo is entitled UNIDENTIFIED HELICOPTER SIGHTINGS, Loring AFB.
"So in answer to Anthony Mugan above, yes the thing WAS obviously a helicopter."
No, CDA, not necessarily. At all.
How can you possibly be such an absolutist, when the facts, and related documentation, belie that conclusion as being anything but a certainty?
As I noted above, "My surmise is that the term 'helicopter' became shorthand for dismissing actual UFO sightings in these incidents as something prosaic, or not unknown, instead of the more accurate term UFO, most probably for national security purposes and cover."
Consider this: there were at least 5 or 6 separate incidents, within the U.S. in the mid-1970's alone, at various military base nuclear weapons storage facilities and nuclear missile launch sites which allegedly involved, at least according to declassified military documentation, supposed unknown "helicopters" intruding into and at times hovering over restricted areas of the highest national security concern.
Sometimes, as in the Loring AFB case, repeatedly. Yet, from actual eyewitness testimony and related declassified documentation of several of these same incidents, UFOs, meaning simply "unidentified flying objects," and not helicopters (and not ZOMG! ALIEN SPACESHIPS!) were clearly described. And noted as "unknowns" or by the term UFO.
[See the updated version of the Greenwood and Fawcett book, "The UFO Coverup," among other online sources, for facsimile copies of the actual documents I'm referring to if you'd prefer not to accept my word for it.]
Care to explain how very large, silent, self-illuminated, balls of light, etc., could be construed as any known helicopter, of any kind, not just today, but particularly almost 40 years ago, by anyone rational or logical? And how none of these rather peculiar "helicopters," as far as is known, was ever found, tracked down, or seized?
Doesn't that inspire at least a tad of cognitive dissonance in you as to what may have actually been observed, according to some direct eyewitness testimony and formerly classified documentation, as something other than noisy, obvious helicopters?
No? Well, I tried. It's up to you to do the research, and not just cherry-pick from reproductions of very selectively chosen documents from books by someone like Philip J. Klass, a known and at times quite vicious debunker and pseudo-skeptic.
And, I doubt to an extreme degree that John Day would have "put these words into his [Klass's] mouth?"
That's ludicrous, and grasping.
The interview of Klass by Day about Loring was done at least two years before Klass published "UFOs: The Public Deceived" via Prometheus Books (of course! CSICOP's "go to" house publishing arm) in 1983.
Oh, and Lehmberg's "ROTFLMAO," acronym that "dumbfounded" you?
"Rolling On The Floor And Laughing My Ass Off."
See: http://www.urbandictionary.com for any additional unfamiliar internet acronyms.
LOL as LM might say. YMMV. LULZ 2U.
Whether it was a helicopter or not (and I think not), I am surprised that the military didn't fire on the unidentified craft. Someone breaching the base and then hovering near the nuclear storage facility!?! This object didn't just suddenly show up--it remained near the base at various distances for an extended period of time. Any theories on why the military didn't fire?
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