There
are times when I find sightings that seem to fit into a pattern and are
considered to be important. I was working on a book that dealt with the 1973
sightings, using a variety sources. The A.P.R.O. Bulletin published a
sighting report in the March/April issue that began on page three. It said:
At
about 4:30 p.m. on the 22nd of March, 1973, Mr. Ron Miller and Joe
King were enroute from Southeast Missouri State University, east of Patterson
in Wayne County on Missouri State Highway 34. They observed a metallic-looking
object which appeared to reflect the sunlight. They stopped the car to get a
better look, glanced away for a second and when they looked back the object was
gone.
I
was providing the context for the wave of UFO sightings in 1973 and this short
case added to the long list of reports from a specific area. In the rough draft
of my book, I wrote:
The
A.P.R.O. Bulletin
published another sighting made by Ron Miller and Joe King. They were described
as college students who said they had seen a metallic object that was
reflecting sunlight. The stopped to get a better look but the object had
vanished.
I
was preparing the second draft, reviewing the cases when I spotted something
that made me wonder if this sighting wasn’t a hoax. Give a look at the
information provided by Coral Lorenzen in her report in the Bulletin and
my short write up see if you can find the problem.
 |
| Jim and Coral Lorenzen, the leaders of APRO. |
I
decided that I wasn’t interested in a case with a witness named Joe King…
joking. Yes, I did find a long list of people with that name including an actor
born in 1883, a famous singer and the son of Stephen King who writes under the pen
name Joe Hill. I do wonder why parents would do this to a kid, but I digress.
The
trouble here is that we’re dealing with UFO sightings and there are dozens of
cases in which young men of high school and college age engage in pranks and
tricks and jokes. There simply isn’t enough information in the case to use it
even if the name is real. Given that, I mention this because we need to be
alert about this sort of information when investing UFO sightings. There is no
way, in the world today, for me to verify the validity of the report. Had I
been the original investigator, I would have asked for some sort of
identification to make sure that I wasn’t been pranked by Joe King.
Given
the few details of the sighting and the name of one of the witnesses, I took
the sighting out of the book. All it had added was one more UFO sighting in the
Piedmont area in 1973 and there are literally dozens of others. Many of those
sightings can be found in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin.
2 comments:
A humorous comment by you but there is a core truth about UFO phenomena in the jesting. I have been reading about UFO’s for 50+ years now and this highlights a general challenge in doing any sort of serious analysis. There is a great deal of chaff with a few kernels of wheat. To put it another way, I worked with radio frequency comm systems for decades, and we measured the quality of signals in terms of conveying information as a ratio of signal (the meaningful data) to noise. The UFO environment seems to have a very low signal to noise ratio useful information is buried by mountains of B.S.
On the name Joe King being an indication of a joke or hoax, there is a dimension to this phenomenon that likes such word plays in the spirit of high strangeness. I seem to remember that J. Allen Hynek thought it funny in the context of aliens that his name sounded like "high neck" for example. This doesn't prove or disprove anything, but I thought it was worth noting. Hynek's initials also spell JAH, which is how Rastafarians refer to JEHOVAH, should you wish to go down a Majic rabbit-hole. ON Jah in Hebrew, one can look here: https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/Insight-on-the-Scriptures/Jah/
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