It was one of those picture-perfect late summer afternoons in the Rockies. Forty years ago, on August 10, 1972, I was a teenager on my last real family vacation before starting my senior year in high school. We were camping in Grand Teton National Park. The sun was high and a dark blue sky was blotchy with white clouds. My sister and I had been swimming in a surprisingly warm Jackson Lake, getting sunburned, and lazing around our family's campsite. After lunch we all decided to pile in the car and drive through the pines to the Indian Arts Museum at Colter Bay.
When we arrived, we noticed that something out of the ordinary was going on. Groups of people on the lake shore were engaged in animated conversation, looking at the sky, and gesticulating. There was some kind of electricity in the air, and their excitement was contagious. I asked a man what was going on, and became the first of perhaps hundreds of people to listen to the story of what he had just seen.
A UFO, he said, had just streaked across the sky from south to north. I remember his words and the exhilaration in his voice as he described it. It was a ball of flame, almost too bright to look at. Maybe as big as the moon, shedding sparks. It left a trail. And it was moving so fast. Others chimed in with their own descriptions. No way was an airplane, they said. It was a UFO. People lingered, wanting to talk about it. I felt left out, because I had been in the car, and I missed it. My whole family had missed it.
When I was a kid, I loved to read about UFOs, and always wanted to see one. I read popular accounts and watched TV shows about them. Once I found a book at our local library, called "UFO's--Identified." The author was Phillip Klass, a skeptic who investigated UFO reports and explained them in terms of natural or man-made causes. Klass's book changed how I thought about unusual phenomena. It is much more fun and challenging and honest to try to explain such things with science and the laws of physics. To attribute them to some mysterious or supernatural "unknown" is intellectually lazy. It is a shrug at the glory of nature. Paranormal explanations are an uninteresting copout. Klass put me on the path to science and skepticism.
That afternoon at the Tetons I remembered one of his case studies, in which he had meticulously plotted out sight lines and calculated the timeline of one famous historical UFO observation. He showed that it was almost certainly a meteor that had been seen by others, but that the angle of the observation (from directly downrange) made it appear to hang in the sky and move in an unnatural way. I wondered if somebody couldn't do something like that for this Teton event, and figure out what it actually was.
It turns out, that somebody did. The object was seen by hundreds of people across several states and Canada. Its path could be worked out, demonstrating that it was a large meteor on a grazing trajectory. It also became the very first meteor fireball ever recorded by an infrared sensor on a U.S. Department of Defense satellite. It entered the atmosphere over Utah and descended to about 53 kilometers above Montana before its momentum carried it back up to its escape over Alberta. It was probably about 3 meters in diameter when it entered, but much of it was melted and vaporized.
Because of this careful science, we now know that somewhere out in space there is a tiny asteroid with a thin glassy crust it got from the minute it spent rocketing through Earth's atmosphere as the "Great Daylight Fireball of 1972." Such is the glory of nature.
Darren Perks: UFO: Flying Triangles
For the last 50 years the skies of our planet have been monitored 24/7 by thousands of amateur astronomers unafiliated with any government, and thousands of scientists of all disciplines have been active on every continent and ocean monitoring and measuring and observing. And in all that time no one has produced anything that can be tested and verified, in a laboratory, as coming from a place beyond our solar system.
Unidentified doesn't mean extraterrestrial. It means unidentified.
There was an excellent astrophysicist by the name of Dr. J. Allen Hynek who was hired by the US government to head Project Blue Book. He was hired because he believed that UFOs could be explained by science in nature. However, being a true scientist, he discovered that not all cases could be explained. There were scientifically credible witnesses, and even scientifically credible evidence that pointed to the fact that some things in the air were unidentifiable. He believed that by sweeping credible evidence under the rug, a true scientific study of the phenomena was impossible.
So when is science going to catch up and admit its inability to explain everything and stop copping out with the notion that everything is explainable? I think that's a valid question to ask.
1. The reading of one book and a few anecdotal stories determined his life long views...how pseudo scientific of him. If a psi 'believer' determined their entire lives based on one book and a few anecdotes, they would be crucified by people like him.
2. There are two possible errors that can be made in science...a) accepting a hypothesis when it is in reality false, and b) rejecting a hypothesis when in reality it is true. Funny how he forgot about the other half of that equation...almost, what would you call it, intellectually lazy...or is it just psychological dissonance.
3. Name the fellows of the CSI who are actively researching in the fields of psi, UFOs or the such. 'Crickets chirping'. The CSI commenting on anything of this nature is a bit like having a mechanic comment on astrophysics. On the whole they are a discredited group.
For the record, I don't know what to make of UFOs, as such, I often don't comment on them, but lazy thinking and dogmatic thinking in science truly offends me, whether it comes from religious fundamentalists or dogmatic militant atheists disguised as scientists.
The craft was caught in flight and it is stopped in 2 places. There is no way it's a natural phenomena, plane, helicopter or street lamp. It may be man made but that would be equally amazing as we are not "known" to have the capability to fly that fast, stop in 2 places all in 1.6 seconds---and do all of that in a circular craft. I will be having it validated and I will be taking a lie detector test....and yes, if possible I will be trying to monetize it--I'm an America for god's sake.
1. The blown up & cropped one: http://ow.ly/i/A4By
2. The whole image at 34.5 MB's (that's why you can blow it up and actually SEE something): http://ow.ly/i/A4FU
There's only one street lamp in could be and I confirmed that it could NOT have been that lamp.
There's more then one way to prove that it wasn't a lamp. The lens is fixed, so you can't take a picture of the bigger object in the picture and then get that same object to look 40-50% smaller in the same picture; you could do that if you had a telephoto lens, but not with my camera which is a Nikon 700D. At least you can't do it in 1.6 seconds.
Anyway, any independent analyst can easily rule out that street lamp as it's not shaped exactly the same and it's impossible, given the camera used, that it was a street lamp.
I took the picture so I know it wasn't that anyway. I will take a lie detector test.
To describe a UFO every time with the most likely human made or natural phenomena explanation will at times be a copout in of itself. Some things will defy explanation simply because they are not explainable, and yet they are not ours or natural. So what are they Mark? I don't know, but neither do you. And quite frankly, I don't think the government knows either.
Good story, nonetheless. That must've been cool to see a fireball. I saw a prolonged green meteor trail once. That, was something! And, for the record, my brother, sister and I had some weird aerial phenomena occur in 1969 that cannot be easily explained. I'm pretty certain that the only thing that could hover, or move quickly in silence back then wasn't natural or human made.
There is a mindset among any people that resists even the most convincing evidence, and it is based on either ego or fear. Some ego's are so predominant in their assurance of knowing all that they refuse to accept even hard core evidence, and fear of new paradigms in which their intellects are no longer able to assuage the innate calamity possible in an unknown scenario causes these skeptics to embarrass themselves with denials that simply fall short.
There are more than enough cases, more then enough photo's, more than enough reliable witnesses; what is ndded is the admission that the odds are that UFO's are real and do visit earth, and that the long odds lie with the flimsy excuses made by the naysayers and doubters. fear is a terrible impediment to scientific inquiry, yet it controls the study of this subject to a degree that makes one realize that those who defy all logic in their denials are to be pitied.
name one physical thing that you can hold in your hand or point to somewhere on earth that is known to be from some alien species..
http://www.educatinghumanity.com/2012/08/Dr-Botta-UFO-Crash-Incident-South-America-1950.html
Experts in what?
Just because it's on the interned does not make it true. Just because somebody wrote it in a non-peer reviewed book does not make it true. Just because it was in the news does not make it true.
So what is out there that actually has enough credibility and information content to rule out any and all natural causes?
What evidence is reliable?
UFO reports often appear to defy explanation, but the evidence tends to crumble upon careful examination. Often, reports are sensationalized; people are genuinely imagining things, often with 'help' from psychologists who should no better; and so on.
Interestingly, with more and more security cameras out there, and with more and more people with cell-phone cameras and the like, the quality of the evidence does not seem to have improved much.
This argues that the phenomenon isn't real.
"Let's just call them .... the phenomena." ---- [Firesign Theater, "Everything You Know is Wrong!", 1975].
So, in your world, before Louis Pasteur, you would not have believed in even the remote possibility of bacteria. How's that spontaneous generation thing working out for you?