Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy and UFOs

Well, I see that good old Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has struck again. I’m not sure why, if he is so convinced there is nothing to UFO reports, he feels the compulsion to return to the subject so often, but he does. And, surprising me if no one else, he makes grandiose claims that are not supported by evidence. Instead we are treated to his uninformed opinion and a suggestion that he "...got some amusement from it [arguing with we uninformed UFO nuts], I’ll admit, since trying to reason with some people is clearly a losing game."

Oh, Phil, I understand what you mean. I keep putting out facts and then have to listen (well read actually) your opinions. I quote the sources and you quote your own mind. Clearly this is a losing game... but it is somewhat amusing.

And then he retreats into his favorite, though unsupported argument that "Astronomers, both amateur and professional, are constantly viewing the sky. There are tens of thousands of amateurs out there out observing all the time: a large sample population, and far larger in observing man-hours than the regular population. If UFOs are so common, then why do we not see an unusually large number of reports from astronomers?"

Good question Phil... of course, I might ask who all these astronomers viewing the sky are since it seems that many of them are using instrumentation to view very narrow fields rather than standing around outside with a pair of binoculars, but I digress.

Or, I suppose, I could point out that pilots, especially those on long, overnight flights, get good views of the night sky and they do report UFOs frequently. Some have noted that their corporate leaders frown on UFO reports and encourage the pilots not to make them, but again, I digress.

I will point out, again, that there is a negative impact on the careers of astronomers would report UFOs. Once again, I’ll point to the study conducted for the Air Force by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, in which he suggested that if any astronomer reported a flying saucer, meaning an alien spacecraft (and as opposed to a UFO) it would be headlined the next day and the following day the man’s, or woman’s, career would end.

Hynek, in fact, was sometimes ridiculed by his colleagues in the field. I took an astronomy course while at the University of Iowa and we were treated to an appearance, guess lecture you might say, from James A. van Allen... yes, the radiation belt guy. Someone asked about Hynek and the answer was, "Allen always wanted to discover a new constellation..."

Which was strange because I had a couple of serious conversations with van Allen about UFOs. He seemed interested in the topic but was disturbed by the lack of critical standards. Too much passion in a field that could stand a little dispassionate research.

Hynek’s study, to get back on topic, showed that astronomers actually reported UFOs at a slightly higher rate than the general population. So, Phil’s comment about astronomers and sky observations is right. They should see UFOs at a higher rate and according to the available statistics, do.

I could, once again, cite some of those who have reported, not UFOs, but flying saucers. Clyde Tombaugh comes immediately to mind with his sighting near Las Cruces, New Mexico, of something with square, glowing windows. Donald Menzel, the rabid anti-UFO guy, a man who never met an explanation other than extraterrestrial that he didn’t like, explained Tombaugh’s sighting as lights from houses reflected in the light haze over the city...

Except Menzel wasn’t there and Tombaugh was. Tombaugh was a qualified observer who said there was no light haze over the city so it didn’t matter what Menzel thought. Menzel’s explanation didn’t work but Menzel didn’t care because he had explained the sighting.

Which isn’t to say that Tombaugh saw a craft built on another planet, but that he saw something sufficiently strange that he couldn’t identify it as Venus or a weather balloon. This would be a real UFO, reported by an astronomer, but not while he was working out at the observatory, but while he was sitting in his backyard looking at the night sky.

Plait also gets worked up because of the sheer number of UFO reports. Plait wrote, "My assertion is that this is because the vast majority of UFO reports from people are misidentified objects like Venus, the Moon, satellites, balloons, and so on. These are things every amateur astronomer has seen countless times, and knows are not alien spaceships bent on probing the backsides of rural citizens. While this does not mean every single observed object is something more mundane, it does mean that the huge numbers quoted by UFOlogists are most certainly wrong."

Well, again, this isn’t quite right. True, there are a large number of UFO reports but it is also true that the vast majority are of mundane things. Everyone who studies UFO reports will tell you that ninety to ninety-five or six percent are of mundane objects. We get it and we identify them.

I have reported here, and have mentioned in various lectures and speeches, that I investigated a case with a domed disk and alien creatures made by two witnesses. I solved the case because I went out and looked. For those interested in the details, see the Mount Vernon, Iowa sighting on the April 2007 blog.

And, yes, I have listened to people describe Venus, including those who suggest they have seen searchlights playing down from it. And people who saw very bright meteors. And listened to some strange stories but with no other witnesses, think of them as insufficient data though I suspect I might have an answer.

So, yes, there are thousands of UFO sightings and only a few of them are of interest to us here. And while Plait trots out that old cliche about rural citizens, those of us who have studied the phenomenon (meaning the UFOs as opposed to all the other things often lumped in) we know that the statistics show that the higher the level of education and the longer the sighting, the less likely it is to be identified.

And I have to wonder about the perception that everyone who lives in a rural environment is some kind of a rube unable to tell a weather balloon from Venus from a structured craft that out performs those we build. Does living in a city confer some sort of additional intelligence on an observer, or is this just another example of a cultural bias? Are we who live in Iowa, or Nebraska or Wyoming, or West Virginia somehow less intelligent than those who live in Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles?

I guess my question would be when is Plait going to take a look at the actual data rather than live by his personal bias? That is something most of these nay-sayers never do... oh, they’ll talk about no physical evidence, they’ll claim what we do have is anecdotal, but they won’t sit down to look at it.

If they do, and still feel there is nothing to UFOs, then hey, they’ll be in a better position to argue the case. But maybe they’ll understand that the evidence they desire is right there. All they have to do is look.

Amateur Astronomers, Bad Astronomy and UFOs

Not all that long ago we had a couple of discussions about amateur astronomers and UFOs, meaning here, alien spacecraft. I had mentioned a couple of instances in which amateur astronomers had seen UFOs, in this case meaning something unidentified which, of course could also mean alien spacecraft.

Once again, in just looking at the UFO Investigator (January 1974 issue, page 1)that came on the DVD supplied by the Center for UFO Studies, I found a couple of stories about amateur astronomers and UFOs. Terence Dickinson, of the Strasenburg Planetarium in Rochester, New York, said that he, with five students, were studying Jupiter, when they spotted five steady lights in the southern sky on October 24, 1973. The UFOs climbed higher and seemed to get brighter.

Dickinson watched the objects through an eight power spotter scope while students kept the objects in sight without an optical aide. They all said that the objects climbed for about two minutes until they were about 55 degrees above the horizon and all were as bright as Venus with a single exception at the rear of the formation that also had a "pinkish" cast.

The objects were flying in a "V" formation that in military terms would have been a heavy right, meaning it was more checkmark shaped than an actual "V." The lights of the object were steady, and were estimated to be about two miles away and at about 10,000 feet.

Dickinson and his students were not the only ones to see the objects. Richard Quick, Director of the Libraries at State University of New York at Geneseo, provided corroboration of the sighting in a detailed letter to Dickinson.

I suppose I should mention that Dickinson was a member of NICAP at the time of his sighting. Working with Dr. Stuart Appelle, a NICAP regional director, they attempted to find a prosaic explanation but civilian and military authorities, including NORAD, said that none of their aircraft were in the area at the time of the sighting.

A month earlier, meaning the December 1974 issue of the UFO Investigator, the headline in big bold type across the front was "President and Vice President of Long Island Astronomical Society Sight UFO."

On Sunday, October 21, 1973, Lee Gugliotto and James Paciello, were on the second floor terrace of Gugliotto’s home, looking for meteors when a reddish star attracted their attention. They watched it for a moment and then returned to their wives. About two hours later, they returned to the terrace and noticed the red light again. It seemed to move to the west and then began to come right at them until they could see a ball shape. Eventually the object was about the third of the size of a full moon and as bright as Venus.

As the object was about to disappear over the house, Gugliotto and the women hurried downstairs with the intention of following the object. Paciello stayed were he was, watching. A white glow appeared and was quickly replaced by three blinking lights that were evenly spaced on the object. One was green, one red and one white. Paciello noted that the lights were not blinking in a regular pattern, nor were the spaced as the navigation lights on an airplane would be.

Paciello joined the others and they drove down the hill, keeping the object in sight until it faded away in the haze. They then returned home and called the police.

NICAP’s regional investigator, Diana Russell, obtained a detailed report and learned that others in the area had also seen the object. She learned that small aircraft were spotted during the sighting so that everyone could compare the navigation lights on an aircraft, and the general shape of the aircraft with the object. They said that the airplanes looked like "pin dots by comparison to the size of the UFO."

Again, I should note, as did the UFO Investigator, that although the witnesses had an interest in UFOs, "they did not immediately leap to the conclusion that they were experiencing a UFO sighting."

Marc Levine, Director of the Planetarium at Vanderbilt Museum, who knew both the men, said, "If they say something was up there that did not belong there I would have to go along with them."

So, there are two more reports by amateur astronomers but in each case the object is called a UFO as opposed to an alien spacecraft. Of course, the reports also suggest that all other explanations, from man-made to natural have been eliminated. The amateur astronomers are familiar with what in the sky, as Phil Plait has told us repeatedly, and checks for aircraft, satellites, or other Earth-bound craft had failed. That suggests to me that we can say that here are two more reports of flying saucers (though none were of the objects saucer shaped).

I mentioned these because, once again I stumbled over them as I was looking through the UFO Investigator for something else... The 1973 date should give it away. That was during the big "occupant" wave of the fall when lots of people were seeing lots of UFOs and many of them had landed with the creatures from the inside being seen on the outside.

I suppose the question now becomes, how many of these sorts of sightings do we have to report before Phil concedes that amateur astronomers do see UFOs, and in many cases those UFOs are alien spacecraft...

Yes, I can hear him now, explaining that a light in the sky, even one under close observation, does not necessarily mean alien spacecraft. We don’t know that these were alien spacecraft. We just know that they were strange objects that seem to have no Earthly explanation but that doesn’t lead us directly to the extraterrestrial. We need something more to get there.

I suppose that the best we can hope for is Phil to concede that amateurs do report UFOs, but that doesn’t mean they have reported an alien ship. We are, however, getting closer.

Bad Astronomy and Phil Plait, Part Two

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame strikes again. This time, rather than making a pronouncement that is not backed up by facts, he raises a couple points that are worth examining because I am nothing if not reasonable.

He wrote, "What do I count as evidence? Hard, physical data. Not eyewitness reports (because even the most highly-credentialed person in the world can misidentify something, or not understand what they are seeing, or may suffer from an episode, or decide to lie, or just be simply wrong)."

Fair enough. He wants "hard physical data" and not creepy eyewitness statements, so I will ignore the highly-qualified, technically-oriented people who have reported UFOs. I will ignore the statistic that tells us that the higher the educational level and the longer the object, thing, light was observed, the less likely it would be identified in the mundane, which is, of course, the opposite of what the skeptics would tell us. No eyewitness testimony... well, not much, anyway.

And yes, I’m aware of all the problems associated with eyewitness testimony. I would think, however, a multiple witness sighting, with those witnesses separated by miles and independently reporting the same thing would go a long way to providing some strong, if not hard, evidence.

Yes, you always want examples and here I’ll refer to the Levelland, Texas sightings of November 2, 1957 with witnesses in thirteen locations reporting an object close to the ground that interfered with the electrical systems of cars, stalling engines, causing radio stations to fade and lights to dim until the object moved away and disappeared.

The Air Force investigated but only found three witnesses and to the Air Force, if they didn’t talk to the witnesses, then they simply didn’t exist. The Air Force attributed the sightings to thunderstorms in the area, though the storms were over when the sightings began.

In the end, we are left only with the statements of the witnesses, even though the object interacted with the environment, we only have the testimony of the witnesses to that. We have the witnesses making their reports prior to any media suggestion, and the reports match, generally, but in the end, we have only eyewitness testimony and Phil Plait said he didn’t want to hear it.

He also said, "Not fuzzy photos."

Again, fair enough. I will point out here that while about 99% of the UFO pictures were taken by teenaged boys and 99% of those are faked, there are some very good pictures out there and they weren’t taken by teenaged boys.

Here I think of the pictures taken by Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon on May 11, 1950 (seen here). According to their story, Evelyn Trent had been out feeding the rabbits when she spotted a slow moving saucer-shaped object coming from the northeast. She alerted her husband, who came out, saw the object and rushed back inside to grab a camera.

Trent took a picture, advanced the film manually (in those pre-motor driven or digital days) and took a second. Before the object disappeared, Paul Trent’s father glimpsed it.

Now, in what Phil Klass, the late UFO skeptic found strange, the Trents did not immediately have the film developed but waited to finish the roll. Trent did, eventually mention the sighting to his banker, Frank Wortman, who got the pictures for a display in the bank window, which lead to a newspaper interview, and eventual national interest.

The Condon Committee examined the photographs as part of their alleged scientific study. Dr. William Hartmann did the analysis and in the report wrote, "...it is unlikely that a sophisticated ‘optical fabrication’ was performed. The negatives have not been tampered with."

Okay, so Hartmann is telling us that the object in the photograph is real in the sense that it is not some kind of optical trick and he is telling us that the negatives have not been altered. What you see on the film is what was in the sky. He sees nothing to suggest trickery at this point.

His conclusion is, "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot by said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such of the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication."

For a report that suggested there was nothing to these UFOs, this conclusion seems to strongly indicate otherwise. But, of course, that’s not the point here. We just needed to find a sharp photograph (seen here).

The debunkers, and here I’m thinking again of Phil Klass and Robert Sheaffer, know that there is no visitation and therefore any evidence offered to the contrary must be in error. Klass, in his UFOs Explained and Sheaffer in his The UFO Verdict Examining the Evidence claim to have found proof of fraud. Klass claims that the shadows, underneath the eaves of the garage are too dark and given the orientation of the garage proves that the photographs were taken, not in the evening, but in the morning, and if this is true, then they were taken in the reverse order. Case solved and evidence dismissed.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist who worked for the Navy, and is a believer in UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, disputed this claim. He said that the shadows were due to random light scattering and based this on the clouds in the photograph. He said the shadows were not strong enough for Klass’ claim.

Two problems for Klass. He never explained the motive for saying the pictures were taken in the evening, if they were morning shots and he couldn’t get around the unsophisticated nature of the Trents. Not a single person ever expressed any doubts about the Trent’s sincerity and no one ever suggested they would have been able to fake a photograph using a 1950 box camera.

Of course, I could say to Phil Plait, I don’t want to see fuzzy photos of extra solar planets and I don’t want to hear about some esoteric wobble in the star that tells me there is something orbiting it. I want some hard evidence that these things exist and not theoretical constructs, but that would be splitting hairs.

I could say the same thing to palaeontologists who give me pictures of what dinosaurs looked like based on some bones. I could say how do you end up with a hunting strategy used by predators based on bones... and by the way, explain fossilization so that it makes some sense in the real world rather than this idea that minerals in the soil replace the structure of the bone. Real evidence and not just theory. But I digress...

Phil Plait also said, "Not fuzzy video."

Okay, how about 16 mm color film? Here I move onto shaky ground but only because the film is of two bright white lights moving across Great Falls, Montana in the middle of the day in the summer of 1950.

Nick Mariana, the manager of a minor league baseball team had gone to the field to check it out when he saw two bright objects in the sky (seen here over Great Falls). He ran back to his car, retrieved his 16 mm movie camera and made a short, color film of them as they crossed the sky, flew behind a water tower and then disappeared.

The sighting was also witnessed by Virginia Raunig, Mariana’s secretary. She told investigators she had seen "two silvery balls." Mariana said they had a definite disk shape and he thought they were about fifty feet across and about three or four feet thick.

Quite naturally the Air Force investigated the film and just as naturally, they thought the objects were two F-94 jets that might have been in the area at the time. Sunlight from the fuselage washed out the other details. Mariana and Raunig said they had seen the jets in another part of the sky.

Ed Ruppelt, the chief of the Air Force investigation in 1952, when the film was reexamined reported, "We drew a blank on the Montana Movie - it was an unknown."

Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, had looked at it in 1955, reported that if the objects had been the jets, given all the information he had, they would have been identifiable as jets on the film. He ran experiments using a similar camera and filmed objects at various distances to reach his conclusions. He reaffirmed them in 1972.

Quite naturally, the Condon Committee wanted to study the film (blow up of objects seen here), after it had been examined by other experts. Dr. Hartmann wrote, "Past investigations have left airplanes as the principal working hypothesis. The data at hand indicate that while it strains credibility to suppose these were airplanes, the possibility nonetheless cannot be entirely ruled out."

Depending on the exact date of the sighting, there might have been two airplanes in the area. Hartmann wrote, "Assuming the 15 August date was the correct date, Air Force investigators found that there were two F-94 jets in the vicinity and that they landed only minutes after the sighting, which could well have put them in circling path around Maelstrom AFB [Great Falls], only three miles ESE of the baseball park. However, Witness I [Mariana] reported seeing the two planes coming in for a landing behind him immediately following the filming... thereby accounting for those aircraft."

Yes, yes, these are points of light, but they are on film and clearly Mariana didn’t have the equipment or expertise to fake something like that, especially in 1950. He also said that the Air Force had removed the thirty-frames from the film and in those frames you could see the disk shape. The Air Force said that they had removed a single frame because the sprockets were broken and they just wanted to repair it.

I could mention the Trementon, Utah film made in 1952 by a Navy warrant officer, but again, it’s just bright lights in the daytime sky. The warrant officer said that he had seen the disk shape as the objects had passed over his car, but by the time he got his 16 mm camera out of the car the objects had moved off and only the bright glow showed against the bright blue sky.

Phil Plait said, "I want hard, physical data. I want an alien on the White House lawn. I want a piece of metal with clearly non-terrestrial isotope ratios of components, or be composed of some currently non-discovered element. I want some piece of predictive evidence — a map of an alien world that can eventually be verified, or an alien-given advance in physics that can later be verified with the LHC or some other cutting-edge technology. And nothing vague like ‘a unified field theory exists’; it has to be definite and precise, so that there is no controversy."

How about instrumentation with visual confirmation? In other words, radar sightings along with both commercial and military pilot observation?

In July 1952, radars at the Washington National Airport showed numerous blips. Air Traffic Controllers, when they asked pilots for visual confirmation received it. Radars at other locations confirmed the sightings as well, and jet interceptors, vectored into the area also saw the objects. In one case the fighter was surrounded by the objects before he was able to break away.

The Air Force said that the sightings on radar were the result of temperature inversions over Washington, D.C. at the time, but were unable to explain the visual sightings or why the radars in different locations, and different scopes had the same objects on them. Weather experts said that the inversion layers were not strong enough to create the blips and besides, the Air Traffic Controllers were familiar with blips created by the inversion layers (yes, I know that the inversion level bends the radar beam giving a false echo but that just didn’t fit the flow of my sentence).

The Air Force wrote off the sightings as weather related, but independent analysis by atmospheric experts suggest they overreached for the explanation. The Air Force abhorred an "unidentified" sighting which is why so many in their study were marked as "Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis." It wasn’t explained, but then, it wasn’t unidentified either. About 40% of their sightings were marked as "Insufficient." Condon, by the way, had about 30% as unidentified which doesn’t include the sighting identified "as a natural phenomenon that it has never been seen before or since," but which is never identified.

Phil Plait then asked, "Do you think this is too demanding? I have news for you: you’re asking me to believe in something that will revolutionize all of human existence. I think demanding some actual evidence for such a thing is not only not too much to ask, but is to be demanded."

As a note to Phil Plait, no, I don’t think this is too demanding. Yes, we’re asking you to accept the idea that we have been visited. No, not nearly as often as has been reported by some, but often enough to get noticed and certainly often enough to leave some of the evidence you require. The only question left is will you look at it all, believer and skeptic, or will you just assume that the skeptical information is somehow more accurate than that assembled by those on the other side of the fence? When the opening premise is that there has been no visitation and therefore anything that suggests visitation is in error, you are not going to learn much of anything.

This means that the skeptics have obscured the truth, provided ridiculous explanations and written off cases as hoaxes when they have absolutely no evidence of hoax.

You want an example?


Sure. The Lubbock Lights photographs (seen here). True, they show indistinct blobs of light, but they are flying in a "V" formation. Carl Hart, Jr., who took the pictures in 1951 said that he didn’t know what they were then and when I interviewed him in the 1990s, he said the same thing. He didn’t know what he had photographed.





Dr. Donald H. Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who attacked all things UFOlogical suggested, at first, the lights were mirages, but mirages don’t fly in "V" formations. He then said, without a shred of evidence to support it, that the photographs of the lights were a hoax. Not exactly the scientific method in action. Besides, if they weren’t a hoax, then Menzel had no scientific explanation for them, but since we all know that there is no visitation, it must be a hoax.

So, I suppose all we need to know now is if this brief survey of some of the evidence is of sufficient strength to create a desire to learn more by Phil Plait, or will we just hear more reasons to ignore it. True, I’m not talking about aliens on the White House lawn or pieces of debris with strange isotopic ratios, but I am providing cases where the UFO interacted with the environment, pictures that was not fuzzy objects and movie footage from the early 1950s that have been examined by some of the leading experts. The best they can do is suggest hoax, often without a shred of evidence to suggest hoax because the only other explanation can’t be right. If McMinnville, if Great Falls, if Levelland were not hoaxes, then just what were they.

Bad Astronomy and UFOs

Here’s something that I find incredibly amusing. An expert in one subject being asked an opinion in an related subject and then answering the question with misinformation. You would think that a scientist would want to know the facts before he made a claim that is so easily refuted.

I’m thinking here of Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy column in which he talked about UFOs just a couple of days ago. He was suggesting that when he lectured, he was often asked if he believed in aliens and flying saucers. His answer was, "Yes and no."

He meant, quite clearly, and he did explain it, that he believed there was life on other planets, mainly those outside the Solar System and that he didn’t believe we were being visited. His reasoning? He wrote:

Amateur astronomers, of course. They are dedicated observers, out every night peering at the sky. If The Truth Is Out There, then amateur astronomers would be reporting far and away the vast majority of UFOs.

But they don’t. Why not? Because they understand the sky! [Emphasis in original] They know when a twinkling light is Venus, or a satellite, or a military flare, or a hot air balloon, and so they don’t report it.

That, to me, is the killer argument that aliens aren’t visiting us. If they were, the amateur astronomers would spot them.

The problem here is that astronomers, both professional and amateur have reported UFOs, and if we add in atmospheric scientists, we increase the pool of those who understand the sky and who have reported UFOs.

Examples you say?

Certainly. The one that springs immediately to mind is Clyde Tombaugh who was credited with discovering the now dwarf planet, Pluto. In 1949, at 10:45, Tombaugh, his wife and his mother-in-law saw something strange in the night sky. The full report is now housed at the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, and I have held the original report in my hands (and I wonder what that document would bring on eBay?).

Tombaugh wrote, "I happened to be looking at the zenith... when suddenly I spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light... As the group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space of formation smaller... and their intensity duller, fading from view at about 35 degrees above the horizon... My wife thought she saw a faint connecting glow across the structure."

I’m sure that we’re about to hear that Dr. Donald Menzel, the UFO debunker and critic of anyone who suggested that any UFOs are anything other than misidentifications or hoaxes, was able to solve the sighting. He suggested that "a low, thin layer of haze or smoke reflected the lights of a distant house or some other multiple source."

Tombaugh, who saw the objects replied to Menzel, who didn’t see them, writing, "I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because in that case some similarity to it should have appeared many times... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since."

Well, a UFO sighting by one astronomer does not make the complete case, so let’s take a look at that paragon of scientific investigation, the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects now almost universally called the Condon Committee. They, of course, didn’t bother with their own research, but quoted from Project Blue Book Report No. 8 dated 31 December 1952.

The Blue Book astronomical consultant (which they don’t name but everyone today knows it was Dr. J. Allen Hynek, seen here) interviewed 44 astronomers about their attitudes about UFOs and found, not surprisingly, that most were completely indifferent to UFOs, or at best, mildly interested. Only eight said they were very interested.

The important point here is that five of them, according to Hynek, "made sightings of one sort or another. This is a higher percentage than among the populace at large. Perhaps this is to be expected since astronomers do, after all, watch the skies."

Hynek said that when he told these astronomers that there were some cases that were highly interesting and in which there was no easy solution, their interest was "almost immediately aroused."

This, of course, goes back to the original comment that amateur astronomers don’t see flying saucers and if they don’t, then there simply can’t be anything to them. But here we’re talking about the professionals, who confided in Hynek because he was a colleague. Hynek, because of his position with Project Blue Book had some inside knowledge about UFOs and he was taking the whole thing seriously.

Hynek, in his report added another comment that explains part of this perception that astronomers don’t see UFOs. Hynek noted, "And certainly another contributing factor to their desire not to talk about these things is their overwhelming fear of publicity. One headline in the nation’s papers to the effect that ‘Astronomer Sees Flying Saucer’ would be enough to brand the astronomer as questionable among his colleagues."

So now we learn that astronomers do see UFOs and they do not report them for fear of professional ridicule. I heard one professional astronomer, in the 1970s, when asked what he thought of Hynek’s work reply, "Allen always wanted to discover a new constellation."

What that tells us is that Hynek’s interviews of two decades earlier were still true in the 1970s, and we know that it is true today. We still have the professional scientists making pronouncements on the topic without benefit of personal knowledge. They are all too willing to dismiss the topic without bothering to learn the facts because, to do so, they would have to wade through oceans of ill-informed skeptical comment, such as Menzel’s dismissal of Tombaugh’s sighting.

But let’s ask one other question. When does anecdotal testimony become scientific observation? When does the training of the person making those observations suggest some sort of expertise? Does a pilot, military or commercial, with tens of thousands of hours in the cockpit, who is familiar with what is in the sky, make anecdotal statements or refined scientific commentary?

What about the use of instrumentation? Charles Moore (seen here), the man who claims to have launched the balloon array that explains the Roswell UFO crash has his own, unexplained UFO sighting. On April 24, 1949 Moore and four Navy technicians in New Mexico were tracking a weather balloon using a theodolite that consisted of a 25-power telescope equipped to provide readings on vertical and horizontal bearings. Given his observations as it passed in front of a mountain range, he estimated the UFO was traveling at 18,000 mph, before it disappeared in a sharp climb.

Here was a man who was familiar with the sky, who watched the object through a theodolite so that he could make educated estimates of the object’s ability, and who reported this to Project Blue Book. The sighting is labeled as "unidentified."

Menzel, of course, knew that this couldn’t be anything extraordinary. According to him he could identify the object. In a conversation with Moore, Menzel said that it was no object at all but a mirage, an atmospheric reflection of the true balloon, making it appear as if there were two objects in the sky instead of one. He was so sure of this that he told Moore about the solution.

Moore, however, describes himself as an atmospheric physicist and considers himself as qualified as Menzel to discuss the dynamics of the atmosphere. And, according to Moore in an interview I conducted on El Paso radio station KTSM, the weather conditions were not right for the creation of mirages that day. Since Moore was on the scene, and since his training qualified him to make judgements about the conditions of the atmosphere, his conclusions are more important than Menzel’s wild speculations.

Moore is no fan of the extraterrestrial, as evidenced by some of his statements about the Roswell case and UFOs to various writers, including me. But, his sighting stands as one that should be counted as a scientific observation rather than as mere anecdotal testimony.

I could go on, but what’s the point. I have refuted the original idea that astronomers do not see UFOs. I have provided the documentation for this claim, and for those interested in Moore’s sighting, it is housed in the Project Blue Book files. Only the names have been removed, but we can, in most cases, put those names back in. In my Project Blue Book - Exposed, I have a listing of all the Blue Book unidentified cases.

So, now that we know that astronomers do see UFOs and some even report them, where do we go? These scientists are familiar with the sky, they understand what is in the sky, but sometimes they see things that are extraordinary and that do not fit into the nice little categories we have created for them. Sometimes, you could say, they see flying saucers.