Delbert Newhouse and the Utah Movie

There are two things that have happened recently that impact this blog. First is a statement, again, by someone who should actually know better, that there is no evidence that UFOs are alien craft. He asks, demands really, just one example of a solid case for the UFO. Ignoring the fact that the debunkers have worked wonders in marginalizing UFO reports by throwing all sorts of ridiculous explanations for the sightings out there, some of which are contradictory, there are some very good cases that have multiple chains of evidence and some very good research attached to them. Any explanation, even if it doesn’t fit the facts will do, just so long as they can claim the sighting is explained in the mundane.

The second point is that, for some reason, there has been an on-going dialogue into the July 1952 UFO sighing near Tremonton, Utah. This is the tale of a Navy warrant officer who filmed a formation of bright objects over the tiny Utah town. The film was studied for months by a number of different organizations but in January 1953, the objects were identified as birds by the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel. (For a lengthy analysis of the motivations of the Robertson Panel see Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, 155 - 174)

Here’s the thing about this movie. Almost everyone talks about what is shown on the film but few mention what the witnesses observed. In 1976, when I interviewed Delbert Newhouse, the Navy photographer, he told me that he and his wife, Norma, saw the objects at close range. He said they were large, disc-shaped things that were brightly lighted. By the time he got the car stopped, dug his camera out of the trunk and put film into it, the objects had moved off so that they looked like bright blobs of white on a bright blue background. It was then that he began filming the formation or cluster or mass, which was now much farther away.

Sure, you could say that in 1976 he had heard more than twenty years of comments about the film, had been interviewed repeatedly and his story certainly could have changed. Ed Ruppelt, the chief of Project Blue Book when the film was shot in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects wrote:

After I got out of the Air Force I met Newhouse and talked to him for two hours [in 1954, I believe]. I’ve talked to many people who have reported UFOs, but few impressed me as much as Newhouse. I learned that when he and his family first saw the UFOs they were close to the car, much closer than when he took the movie. To use Newhouse’s own words, “If they had been the size of a B-29 they would have been at 10,000 feet altitude.” And the Navy man and his family had taken a good look at the objects – they looked like “two pie pans, one inverted on the top of the other!” He didn’t just think the UFO’s were disk-shaped; he knew that they were; he had plainly seen them. I asked him why he hadn’t told this to the intelligence officer who interrogated him. He said that he had. Then I remember that I’d sent the intelligence officer a list of questions I wanted Newhouse to answer. The question “What did the UFO’s look like?” wasn’t one of them because when you have a picture of something you don’t normally ask what it looks like. Why the intelligence officer didn’t pass this information along to us I’ll never know.

So, it’s clear from the beginning that Newhouse was telling those interested that he had seen the objects up close. He said, from the beginning, that the objects were disc shaped. I don’t think anyone, in those early days, thought to get statements from the wife and the kids. They had the “important” information from a naval officer and were satisfied with that. And even with that, the Air Force didn’t bother to complete the investigation, failing to ask basic questions or seemingly failed to ask them, and according to Ruppelt, didn’t bother to pass along some of the answers.

In the months that followed, the Air Force analyzed the film and when they finished, they had no solution. Ruppelt wrote about that, saying, “All they had to say was ‘We don’t know what they are but they aren’t airplanes or balloons, and we don’t think they are birds.’”

When the Air Force finished, the Navy took over, and they weren’t as restricted in their praise as the Air Force. The Navy experts made a frame by frame examination that took over a thousand man hours. The Navy concluded that the objects were internally lights spheres that were not reflecting sunlight. They also estimated the speed of the objects at 3,780 miles an hour which ruled out aircraft of the time and birds of any time. They had no explanation for what was seen on the film.

But, as I say, never let an independent analysis stand when you can throw cold water on it. Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who never met a UFO sighting he liked and who wasn’t above providing explanations as quickly as he could regardless of the facts, claimed that it had been proven the film showed birds. Such was not the case, except to those with closed minds but Menzel made the claim anyway.

Dr. R. M. L. Baker made an independent study of the film in 1955. He agreed with the Air Force that the film didn’t show aircraft or balloons, and he didn’t think it was some sort of airborne debris or radar chaff either. In disagreement with Menzel, he found the bird explanation “unsatisfactory.”

Given what we know about the University of Colorado UFO study led by Edward U. Condon we could guess what they would conclude about this film. I won’t mention what we now know about the reasons for the study or the directions Condon and his team had been given by the Air Force (see the Hippler Letter March 21, 2007; June 5, 2013) but that certainly influenced their conclusions.

William Hartmann conducted the analysis for the Condon committee. He provided a quick history of the investigations and did mention that during Baker’s investigation Newhouse provided “…substantially the same account, with the additional information: ‘When he got out [of the car], he observed the objects (twelve to fourteen of them) to be directly overhead and milling about. He described them as ‘gun metal colored objects, shaped like two saucers, one inverted of top of the other.’…” (Which sort of reinforces the idea that Newhouse had not radically altered his tale over time.)

Hartmann then made his own analysis, finally concluding, “These observations give strong evidence that the Tremonton films do show birds… and I now regard the objects as so identified.”

But this comes only after Hartmann rejected the statements by Newhouse seeing the objects at close range. He wrote, “The strongest negative argument was stated later by the witness that the objects were seen to subtend an angle of about 0.5 degrees and were then seen as gun metal colored and shaped like two saucers held together rim to rim, but the photographs and circumstances indicate that this observation could not have been meaningful.”

Or, in other words, the statements of Newhouse were unimportant and I suspect the reason being that if they were accepted, then the bird explanation was eliminated. Birds are not shaped like two saucers held together rim to rim.

To add to all this, Baker, in 1969, at a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that while Hartmann’s analysis might be appealing “[The] motion [of the objects] is not what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds; there are erratic brightness fluctuations, but there is no indication of periodic decreases in brightness due to turning with the wind or flapping. No cumulus clouds are shown on the film that might betray the presence of thermal updraft… The motion pictures I have taken of birds at various distances have no similarity to the Utah film.”

Here’s where we are. This is a case of multiple chains of evidence. First is the eyewitness testimony that has been virtually ignored. It is clear from what Ruppelt and others say that some parts of the Project Blue Book file on the case have disappeared. But that doesn’t change the fact that Newhouse and his wife saw the UFOs and what they had to say about it is an important part of the report. Hartmann rejected it almost out of hand.

The second chain of evidence, which is independent of the first, is the film. It provides something that can be taken into the lab and analyzed in various ways. It seems to me that those without a bias (or in the case of the Air Force who leaned toward finding any explanation which now suggests they were arguing against their own interest) couldn’t positively identify the objects. Those who know that there is no alien visitation however, found what they believed to be the solution. The film showed birds.

Here’s the point, finally. Those who know that there is no alien visitation claim that there is no evidence to the contrary. I say the Tremonton, Utah film is evidence of something unusual flying through the atmosphere and if evaluated from a neutral position is not explained by birds. I will freely concede that eliminating the accepted explanation does not lead directly to the extraterrestrial; I will also note that we do have some evidence of an unusual event. I will further note that if Newhouse’s description is accurate then there is no terrestrial explanation for the sighting. Give it an unbiased reading, look at everything through a neutral prism, and you have something that suggests there could be alien visitation. It is, therefore, some of the evidence that many claim does not exist

I Understand the Skeptics

I have always, in the past, rejected the idea of producing a top ten list of UFO sightings. I thought of it as a trap by the skeptics and the debunkers. They would take the list, find implausible solutions and then report that they had identified the UFOs as something mundane. They wouldn’t care if the solutions made sense or not. They would report that they had solved the cases and UFOs were nothing more than misidentifications and hoaxes.

There is good reason to believe that. Philip Klass was infamous for finding solutions that didn’t fit the facts. In Socorro he suggested it was a conspiracy between the then Socorro mayor and police officer Lonnie Zamora. Klass believed that the mayor had wanted to find an excuse to develop some land he owned and believed a UFO landing there would create a tourist attraction. We have since learned that the mayor didn’t own the land in 1964 and no real tourist attraction was ever developed.

Donald Menzel offered multiple explanations for the photographs taken over Lubbock, Texas in September 1951 but finally settled on "Hoax!" There is no evidence that it was a hoax and when I talked to the photographer, Carl Hart, some forty or so years later, he told me that he still doesn’t know what he photographed.

But there is no evidence of a hoax, unless, of course, you have the Menzel mindset. That is, there is no alien visitation and anything that suggests otherwise is either a misidentification or a hoax.

I now find myself in the same dilemma as the skeptics when it comes to the UFO subset of cattle mutilations. I entered the investigation in the early 1970s when Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of APRO, asked me (and several others in several other locations) to look into some mutilations in Minnesota. After a week or so there, I had the answers to the questions about those specific mutilations and the extraterrestrial had nothing to do with it.

And in the years since, I have investigated other mutilations and I have kept up with the current literature on mutilations. I have read from both sides of the controversy including the two works that I think of as most important: the Rommel investigation done for the state of New Mexico, and Mute Evidence. I believe that anyone interested in cattle mutilations should have read both works but that isn’t the case. When I asked a proponent of mutilations about it quite recently, she said that she was unfamiliar with them.

Here’s the deal. Every case of mutilation that I have investigated has a rational, terrestrial explanation. Every one.

The answers ranged from scavengers to humans who thought it funny to carve up an already dead animal, but nothing with an extraterrestrial influence. There were suggestions, but those were based on speculation and the observations of those who didn’t understand the process of decay.

Periodically, I would look again at cattle mutilations, believing that as time passed, new information would surface. Instead it was the same sorts of arguments that hadn’t seemed all that persuasive in the 1970s. Ranchers who said they had never seen anything like it in the past. A surgical precision that couldn’t be duplicated by vets or doctors. Laser instruments that suggested a technology that was far beyond ours.

But, in the end, no one could explain why the aliens were doing it. What was the motivation? Why not just take the whole animal and not leave the remains?

As I have mentioned in the past, some one over at UFO UpDates asked for a list of reading material about mutilations and, of course, all those saying that UFOs were responsible were noted. I merely suggested that they also look at Mute Evidence and Rommel’s investigation for the state of New Mexico. I wasn’t advocating a position, merely providing, what I thought to be some useful references.

The response was typical. I was asked how I would explain various anomalies that some investigators had reported. I was asked how I would explain a lack of copper in the blood of the mutilated animal. I was asked how I would explain the lack of scavenger tracks on the ground near the dead and mutilated animal.

Well, the answers were there. Today, I would point to Fact or Fiction: The Paranormal Files on the SyFy Channel. They showed a picture of a dead and mutilated cow and said that there had been no animal tracks around it. But they didn’t mention the bird droppings that were quite obvious on the animal, even in the picture. There are many bird scavengers and no one seems to think of them.

They also tried to duplicate, using various instruments, the precision of the cuts on a mutilated animal and failed to do it. But they did run an experiment that suggested that some of these precise cuts were the result of the natural decomposition of the animal including some seemingly straight line incisions.

Their conclusion, which I’m sure annoyed not only some of the local ranchers but those who studied cattle mutilations, was that there was no evidence to suggest anything alien was involved.

Here’s the real point. Every time I believe that we had ended the conversation, someone says, "Yes, those are solved but what about this new and different case. How do you explain...?"

Usually it is just more of the same. What is anomalous to one is explained in the mundane to another. The solution, I suppose, would be a list of the ten most mysterious cattle mutilations and see if we could find solutions.

There are some truly mysterious cases and I learned of one in England not all that long ago. While mysterious, the solution, I believe, will be terrestrial rather than alien. I won’t say that I would be delighted if is was alien, but if that is the direction it took, then we who argue for the extraterrestrial nature of some UFO sightings would have some good evidence.

In a similar vein, Chris O’Brien, out there in Colorado, in the San Luis Valley is attempting to put up web cameras that could be used to spot the mystery mutilators and any space craft they might be flying. While I sort of trivialize it here, I do think it is a good idea. Anything that is done in an attempt to further our knowledge and to resolve an issue is a good thing. But the question is how long does it go on before he decides that there are no alien mutilators...

Obviously, if he caught something on tape, that would prove his point and we would have a very interesting bit of evidence. But I wonder if the same thing I heard about the lack of "classic" mutilations while Kenneth Rommel was investigating in New Mexico would be said in the San Luis Valley. While the cameras were operating, there just were no classic mutilations in front of them... Or if there was evidence of scavengers in what might look to be a classic mutilation, it would be dismissed because the damage didn’t mirror, exactly, some other mutilations.

The skeptics, I imagine, think the same thing about UFO sightings. They wonder just how many of the once classic cases that are now solved, at least for many of us, have to be defined as mundane before we give up the argument. In the last decade or so, many of them have fallen. I now believe that the Chiles-Whitted case of the cigar-shaped craft that rocketed past their aircraft was a bolide... an extremely bright meteor that seemed to come directly at them and fooled them.

I believe that the Mantell case, in which Thomas Mantell was killed chasing a huge object, is explained by a Skyhook balloon. I base that on the descriptions of the object that were provided by those who saw it as it drifted at 80,000 or a 100,000 feet above the ground.

I do not believe that a Project Mogul balloon is responsible for the debris found near Roswell. That doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial, only that it wasn’t a balloon. I get to the extraterrestrial by other means and I reject Mogul because it doesn’t work, for all the reasons I have outlined here in the past.

So I understand the skeptics desire to have a list of the ten best cases so they could tackle them. I can easily think of ten cases with multiple chains of evidence but I fear that we have lost the opportunities that those cases would have supplied. We were so busy arguing about whether or not some UFOs represented alien spacecraft that none of us looked at the really good evidence when we had the opportunity.

I also know that some of the skeptics, but by no means all of them, would fail to make a dispassionate argument. They truly believe there is no alien visitation and therefore no evidence can prove alien visitation. Others would take that dispassionate look, but they would insist an very compelling evidence and rightly so.

I have no hope that anything will ever be resolved. Even if the spacecraft landed there would be those who believed it was some kind of fake. These are the same kind of people who believe the moon landings were a hoax, that the president’s birth certificate was faked, and that there is a colony on Mars (where I suspect the really rich will hide when the asteroid collides with Earth on December 21, 2012 and remember you heard it here first).

My real point is that I understand the skeptics frustration with UFOs, but then, I understand the other side of the coin as well. And I understand that nothing will be resolved until we can remove the emotion and belief structure from the equation. Humans haven’t been able to do that in all of recorded history and I doubt we’ll do it here. We can try, but I have little hope.

Disclosure Poll

The results are in and not too surprising. More than half of the voters in this unscientific poll believed that Disclosure wouldn’t happen for years (that is 54 of the respondents or 56%).

The next large bloc of votes (24 and 25%) thought there would be Disclosure, but it wasn’t coming soon. That means that more than three-quarters of the respondents don’t believe in Disclosure anytime soon.

Fewer than ten voters (9 and 9%) thought that Disclosure was at hand. I don’t know why they’d believe this, given the history of this phenomenon. It’s been around, in the public consciousness for more than sixty years and at times it seems we are no closer to a resolution than we were at the very beginning.

And the smallest group ( 8 and 8%) think Disclosure is coming soon. That’s a fairly vague term and is, of course, my fault. I should have defined what I meant by soon... which is sometime in about a year or so.

All this means is that the majority of us have no faith in the government coming clean about UFOs. The majority of us realize that the status quo is going to remain, well, the same...

Unless some outside force acts. By this I mean that the aliens land to tell the world they are here. In the world of secrecy you do not say that which you know to be classified to those not cleared to hear it, even if the secret is out and everyone knows it. You are still required to keep it a secret. This explains why sometimes you hear a government employee denying something that we all know is true. We are not cleared and he is going to obey the law about the disclosure of classified information.

But once the aliens land further confirmation of their presence will not be required. We’ll all know the truth. Until then, we will continue to argue alien visitation. We will cite proof which the debunkers will reject based not so much on evidence as on their belief that aliens couldn’t reach here from there. The distances in space are too vast... and they will reject the proof available because they know there is no alien visitation and if there is no alien visitation there can be no proof.

And yes, this is a little bit more supportive of the ETH than I wanted, but sometimes I just get tired of the arguments. Donald Menzel says that the Lubbock Lights photographs are a hoax because there is no other answer except ETH... Phil Klass rejected McMinnville because it was either alien or a hoax and since there are no aliens, it must be a hoax.

Disclosure is a different matter. There were those, in the 1950s, who believed the government was preparing us for Disclosure with the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Others believed, in 1977, Disclosure was at hand with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the world today, there isn’t that sort of movie tradition, though science fiction films that deal with alien invasion, alien visitation and alien reality do very well at the box office (It’s amazing to me that the Oscars have not recognized how well science fiction does with everyone but the pretentious voters who claim they don’t watch science fiction, but I digress).

This survey says that most don’t believe Disclosure is near and that is my attitude as well. Back in the mid-1990s we came close, with the massing of evidence about the Roswell case and the general interest in UFOs, but the opportunity was lost. The big propaganda machine was able to divert attention and provide explanations for Roswell... It made no difference that those explanations didn’t fit the facts as long as there was an explanation and the news media, who are too sophisticated to believe in alien visitation was right there to promote the message (Don Schmitt and I, at one point in the mid-1990s were at a major Chicago newspaper (No, not the Sun-Times) for a scheduled interview. We were met by an intern who told us that she had the assignment because her editors didn’t believe in UFOs... let’s not check the facts, let’s just make sure that our belief structure is kept intact... but I digress again.)

So, barring some extraordinary event outside the capability of the government to control, there will be no Disclosure. Those on the outside think that throwing rocks at the glass house of UFO secrecy will eventually work. Unfortunately, the glass is bullet proof and the rocks bounce off.

Trindade Island UFO Revisited

Back on January 1, 1958, a photographer on the Brazilian ship, Almirante Saldanha, took four pictures of a "Saturn-shaped" object as flew over the island of Trindade off the coast of Brazil. Almiro Barauna developed the film about an hour later. He and Captain Viegas entered the ship’s darkroom together. After developing the negatives, Barauna at first, thought that no image had been picked up, but Viegas, looking carefully, spotted the UFO. (One of the photos seen here and another below.)

That, in a nutshell, is the story. There are, according to some sources, many witnesses to the craft. Skeptics suggest that few others saw anything at all. That is a matter for another time.

What brings all this up is that a Brazilian TV network, Fantastico, just broadcast a story that suggests, finally, an answer about authenticity of the pictures has been found. According to Fantastico, "This Sunday (August 15), for the first time Fantastico reveals the truth about the Trindade Island UFO. A friend of the family told what she heard from the photographer himself [Almiro Barauna] he had hoaxed the images, it was a montage. ‘He got two kitchen spoons, joined them and improvised a spaceship, using as a background his fridge. He photographed the fridge door with the object in perfect illumination. He laughed a lot about it,’ revealed Emilia Bittencourt. Barauna’s files are in possession of his niece, who didn’t want to record an interview, but confirms the hoax."

The idea that the pictures were faked has been around almost from the moment they were taken. Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who never met a UFO case he liked, claimed, at first, that an aircraft, "flying through humid but apparently super-cooled atmosphere," could become so completely enveloped in fog that it could take on the appearance of a Saturn-shaped object.

Okay, but I’m not buying this.

And apparently Menzel wasn’t either because later, in his book The World of Flying Saucers, he wrote that the case was a hoax. He said that Barauna had faked the pictures with a double exposure.

More likely than the fog-shrouded airplane but a statement without a fact to back it up. You can’t just declare something a hoax because you don’t like it and have no other evidence except your opinion that it is a hoax.

My first thought on reading this latest revelation from Fantastico was that the explained the case.

My second thought was, "Not so fast."

Yes, I’m aware of work done by many researchers in their analyses of the pictures and that some have said they found evidence of fraud in the photographs. Some of it is impressive work.
But I’m also aware of the claim that there were many witnesses to the object’s flight, and it would mean that a couple of dozen were in on the hoax and never breathed a word about it... until now.

But the person making this new claim of hoax is not a relative, or a witness for that matter, but a neighbor and she has no evidence to back up her accusation. There is also a niece, unidentified other than as a niece, who says she has Barauna’s files and she confirms it is a hoax.

Here’s the deal... and I’m sure even the skeptics will agree with this. Let’s wait on the final pronouncement until the files surface and prove the hoax. In the last few years, we’ve had several people come forward explaining that their UFO photographs, none quite as famous as these, were faked. I have no problem with the photographer telling me he or she faked the pictures. That seems to be solid evidence.

In this case, however, we don’t have the photographer, but a neighbor. And the niece who has the files. Let the documentation from the files be reviewed before we completely close the case. If it is a hoax, so be it, but let’s wait until we have the absolute proof before we label it. That might be coming soon.

The Levelland UFO Sightings

At the most recent MUFON Symposium, I talked several people about creating multiple chains of evidence for our UFO cases. I based this on the study done in France in 1803 that proved rocks could fall from the sky... rocks we now call meteorites. The French Academy of Sciences had rejected the idea until a French researcher, Jean-Baptiste Biot, put together a study, with multiple chains of evidence, that proved in at least one instance, rocks had fallen from the sky. (As we say in ufology, it only takes one).

Which leads to another point. I had been discussing UFOs with a skeptic (Hey! I talk to them... most are reasonable people) and I mentioned, as one series of good sightings, the Levelland events of November 2, 1957. There were many reports of the close approach of the UFO interacting with the environment, meaning that it stalled car engines, dimmed headlights, and filled radios with static.

My skeptical friend said something like, "Oh yeah. The Condon Committee investigated that but even with the most powerful magnets available could not duplicate the alleged effects."

To him that meant the case had no merit because the electromagnetic effects (EM) claimed by the witnesses could not be replicated in the laboratory. But as I thought about this, I realized it could be taken another way. If the witness statements were accurate, then the UFO was displaying a technological capability that was beyond our science and could therefore be seen as proof that some UFOs were superior technological craft and were of alien manufacture.

In other words, we had a second chain of evidence, the first being the eyewitness testimony. See, in the French case, the eyewitnesses, who described the rocks falling from the sky and the resulting sound effects and smoke trail were counted as reliable. No one then thought to reject the eyewitnesses simply because they had only seen the rocks in the sky. Their testimony was collected, regardless of social station. None was rejected because he was merely an uneducated farmer, or because she was only a farm wife, or they were only children or because they might have talked to one another about the fall. All testimonies were carefully recorded so that a complete record could be made.

In Levelland, and contrary to what the Project Blue Book files allege, there were witnesses in at least thirteen separate locations who reported the EM effects without the time necessary for the news media or the local grapevines to pass that nugget. Although you could argue that one or two of the witnesses who surfaced the next day might have heard or read something about the sighting prior to making a statement, the majority of them told their tales without knowing there were other witnesses in other areas who had seen, heard, and experienced the same things they had.

Now, today, it is impossible for us to make any sort of meaningful measurements to corroborate, or disprove, this bit of observation. That so many made it, in such a restricted time frame, it seems reasonable to conclude that most, if not all, such reports were made without contamination. These EM effects are not reported in most of the UFO sightings, so we have something here that might provide a clue about the nature of some of the UFO reports.

The third chain of evidence is one reported by Don Burleson, based on his reinvestigation some forty years after the fact. Burleson said that he had talked to the daughter of the sheriff, Weir Clem, and Clem had been called out to a ranch north of Levelland where there were markings on the ground. In other words, a "footprint" of the UFO.

Had this bit of evidence surfaced in 1957, meaningful measurements might have been made. Coupled with the work of Ted Philips, who has cataloged some 4000 landing trace cases, we might have had the UFO sighting that would have moved UFOs from myth to accepted fact, just as the French study moved thunderbolts (rocks from the sky) into the realm of science.

But here is the problem... The French were interested in the truth, and in 1957, the Air Force was interested in explaining all UFO sightings in the mundane. It mattered not what the facts were. If they could generate an answer that stopped the interest in the case, they were happy. They had fulfilled their mission.

Yes, the Project Blue Book files prove this. On a Joint Messageform prepared by Captain G. T. Gregory and dated November 3, 1957, in PART III, paragraph a., it says, "Contrary to Keyhoe’s and Washington Press reports only three, not nine persons witnessed the incident."

Later, in his book, The World of Flying Saucers (and found in the Levelland papers and reports in the Project Blue Book files), Donald Menzel would write, "Three persons, not ‘dozens,’ had seen the phenomenon near the ground. Some ten or fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky."

Neither the Air Force statement nor Menzel’s words reflect the reality of the situation. There were people at thirteen, widely separated locations who were close enough to the craft to report EM effects. And, there were more than fifteen people who saw the object at a distance but none of them described the UFO as a flash of light in the sky.

The other evidence of this is that the Air Force explained the sighting as "ball lightning." In 1957, you could get any number of scientists to argue that there was no such thing as ball lightning. In other words, the Air Force was attempting to explain one phenomenon with another that had yet to be proved. And they forgot to mention that ball lightning was short–lived and rarely larger than eight inches in diameter.

The real point here, however, is that this case, the Levelland sightings, had they been treated with any sort of scientific curiosity at the time, would have yielded a report with multiple chains of evidence. We would have been able to develop some very interesting evidence, if the government in the form of the Air Force and the scientific community in the guise of Donald Menzel hadn’t been more interested in proving themselves right than they were in gathering the information. In other words, we would have had those multiple chains of evidence that would independently lead us toward the extraterrestrial. Instead, we have another controversial case that has been compromised by those who know that there can be no aliens visiting Earth.

The Socorro UFO Landing Part 2

I seem to have been deeply drawn into the latest investigations of the Socorro UFO landing. The latest theory to be floated was that it was a hoax perpetrated by students at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. One of the items in support of the theory is the cardboard found at the landing site and the suggestion that this cardboard was the remains of some kind of pyrotechnics that gave the object its alleged blue – colored flame. I say alleged because there is some discussion about this flame and whether or not it was ever there, but that is a discussion for another time.

I have read, carefully, the file that was held by the Air Force and Project Blue Book and I find no mention about how this cardboard was recovered. Hynek, in his reports, sort of brushed by it and I did find a list of materials submitted for analysis that does mention it.

The first real discussion about the cardboard is in a letter from UFO debunker, Dr. Donald Menzel, who questioned Dr. J. Allen Hynek about it. Since it, the cardboard, was found on the site, though no one seemed to have noted exactly where it was collected which seems to be a little sloppy for both the police officers and scientists involved, there was a question about it being related to the sighting.

In a letter dated February 19, 1965, Menzel, writing to Hynek, noted, "There was also a piece of charred cardboard. ... How big and what shape was the cardboard? Maybe it played a significant role in the enacted UFO drama. Did it, for example, support part of the aluminum foil? Were there holes in the cardboard to which aluminum might have been attached, or indentations carved by paper clips or the like?"

Hynek, in his notes to the chief of Blue Book, wrote, "As far as the cardboard is concerned, Menzel’s conjectures here fall completely flat. The cardboard was portions of very old and weathered corrugated [emphasis added] paper from a packing box [which also seems to answer questions about shape and holes]. There are many examples of this all over the region. There is a city dump not too far away, and when the wind, which blows tumbleweeds all over the place, gets hold of some of this stuff, it scatters the papers pretty well all over the region. Many of the bushes, I noticed particularly this time, have papers caught on their underneath side. In any case, some of this paper was still there, and I shall send Menzel a sample of what this cardboard really looks like. I would say that the cardboard had been there through many rains and had suffered successive dryings [emphasis added]. The original piece I picked up was definitely charred."

The charred cardboard was not part of a tube, but of a packing box so it did not contain pyrotechnics. Hynek, who recovered it, seemed to believe that it was only associated with the sighting by proximity but had nothing to do with the case. It was Menzel who tried to turn it into evidence of a hoax, which is, of course, something that is going on today.

The records are quite clear about this. The cardboard was old and weathered. The landing site was near a dump and there was a lot of cardboard, and paper, and other debris blowing around the area. The most logical conclusion is that the cardboard had nothing to do with the sighting.

There is an ancillary issue here and that is the suggestion that this charred cardboard was part of the pyrotechnics used to create the original flame and give Zamora a reason for driving off into the desert. The Project Blue Book files and our old friend Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere provides an answer for us. In his May 28, 1964 letter, which was sent to "Hq USAF SAFOI PB (Mrs Gaiser)* he wrote:

(5) Soil Samples: The soil samples obtained at the sighting were given to Dr. J. Allen Hynek by Capt Holder. They were turned over to Captain Quintanilla who in turn submitted them to ASD for analysis. Laboratory analysis of the soil was completed on 19 May 64. It included spectrographic analysis which revealed that there was no foreign material in the soil samples (emphasis added). Also, no chemicals were detected in the charred or burned soil which would indicate a type of propellant (emphasis added). There was no significant difference in elemental composition between the different samples.

The evidence that was collected at the time of the sighting including the charred cardboard and the soil samples seem to rule out a pyrotechnic display. That is, all the evidence and not just the pieces that fit into a narrow window, seem to rule it out.

And again, I can ask, "Where does that leave us?"

Right back where we were. One side saying it was a hoax, but without the evidence necessary to sustain that conclusion, and the other side saying it was an alien spacecraft, but with only the eyewitness testimony of Lonnie Zamora to the strangeness of the craft. What he reported doesn’t lead us to the extraterrestrial.

In other words, this case is unidentified.

*I believe the translation of this is Headquarters, United States Air Force, Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information and Mrs. Gaiser is the point of contact there.

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.

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.