Devil's Advocate

[webplodder]

I'm sure many people have taken on the role as Devil's Advocate in the past on this MB but, nevertheless, allow me to have a go.


All the so-called evidence surrounding this case is circumstantial and relies entirely on an 'interpretation' of events that were experienced by USAF personnel at the time. It has been shown many times in the past that people have often been mistaken about what they actually experienced as opposed to what really occurred so that one can never take anecdotal evidence as being of scientific value. Also, it is a fact that people tend to elaborate on their experiences, not necessarily on purpose, but because people have imaginations and tend to 'fill in' gaps that seem to make the event more plausible. All of the physical evidence in this case can easily be accounted for by mundane explanations so that in the end we are left with no 'concrete' evidence that could possibly be presented in a court of law without justifiable objection. I really do want this case to be genuinely strange and unexplainable in 'logical' terms but there are simply too many hanging questions surrounding this incident that remain unanswered and, therefore, science will never take it seriously. Were the witnesses acting on motives other than of the most noble, for example? I don't know, but in the absence of more compelling evidence incidents like this will always be seen as suspect by 'neutral' observers.

Now, can someone please shoot me down in flames because that is what I want.

[Observer]

webplodder.

The Metropolitan Police who I was employed by for 35 years will tell you as any other force will that witnesses to incidents such as motor vehicle accidents, street crime and any other crime, only ever gave about 20% accuracy in their statement. The rest they made up to fill the gaps. Also multiple witnesses to the same incident will give different versions of the event from their perspective and that is why we had correlators to sift through the different statements and evidence to try and establish a common pattern of events. If we could not get enough common/supporting evidence, then it was not presented to court and it was considered 'unsafe'.

Obs

[Ignis Fatuus]

Surely the beauty of the Night One statements is how they mesh together. One of the recurring themes of the RFI is the mantra of 'highly trained professionals', and in this case I think they would have a better idea of how to construct a witness report than a stunned civillian.

For me, the key is what the Man now making the biggest claims failed to include in his statement, compared to his two colleagues whom were only meters from him. It almost tells you what that fella was thinking at the time.

By the time he tells Halt and Conrad the story it's becoming laced with porkies.

Thirty years later those lies have become voices in his head. Is that the moral of the story or what?

[webplodder]

Yes, and we also have inconsistencies in the witnesses' accounts. For example:

"Jim Penniston and John Burroughs went to investigate the craft together. In an interview with Larry King on 9 November 2007, Jim Penniston claimed that he did a 45 minutes full investigation of the craft on the ground, touched the craft and took photos of the craft. John Burroughs apparently contradicts this in a separate interview in Robert Stack's Unsolved Mysteries. He states that after suddenly encountering the craft on the ground, 'we all hit the ground, and it went up into the trees'. The interviews with Jim Penniston and John Burroughs have subsequently been made available on Youtube."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham ... Scepticism


If both witnesses experienced the same phenomenon how could their accounts differ so widely?

[Frank]

It has been shown many times in the past that people have often been mistaken about what they actually experienced as opposed to what really occurred so that one can never take anecdotal evidence as being of scientific value.

Not all evidence is anecdotal. Halt's tape is a live recording.

LT COLONEL HALT: Three-o-five : At about err... 10 degrees horizon err directly north, we've got two strange objects, err ...half moon shape, dancing about with colored lights on 'em. But . . . .
(...)
LT COLONEL HALT: Three-a.m.-fifteen: Now we've got an object about ten degrees directly south...
LT COLONEL HALT: Ten degrees off the horizon, and the ones to the north are moving, one's moving away from us.
SGT BALL: Movin forward!
SGT NEVILLES: It's moving out fast!
LT COLONEL HALT: They're moving out fast.
SGT BALL: This one on the right's heading away too.
LT COLONEL HALT: Yeah, they're both heading north. Ok hey, here he comes from the south, he's coming in toward us now.
SGT BALL: Holy shit!
LT COLONEL HALT: Now were observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground.
SGT BALL: Look at the colours... shit
LT COLONEL HALT: This is unreal

These fast moving objects, witnessed by several people on a live recording, have never been identified.

[larry warren]

gents, as it seems to have become a sport for certain parties to re dirrect people away from even reading the book i co wrote some years back, and im not saying its any of the regulars on this site, if you want to see real physical evidence
of part of the events, soil anyalisis, effect on a person, ie med records, and everything else that would stand up in court
then steel yourself a 2005 edit of the above book cheers

[webplodder]

These fast moving objects, witnessed by several people on a live recording, have never been identified.

But wasn't there a satellite making a re-entry at about the same time as the sightings?

[webplodder]

gents, as it seems to have become a sport for certain parties to re dirrect people away from even reading the book i co wrote some years back, and im not saying its any of the regulars on this site, if you want to see real physical evidence
of part of the events, soil anyalisis, effect on a person, ie med records, and everything else that would stand up in court
then steel yourself a 2005 edit of the above book cheers

Larry, if there's compelling physical evidence where is it and why has it not been made public? What do the scientists make of it?

[Frank]

Weblodder,

Most scientists hardly look at the UFO data and the ones that do often chance from a skeptical to an open-minded attitude. But even then they will never put their career in danger by talking about the topic in public (with some exceptions like Peter A. Sturrock or J. Allen Hynek).

One of the rules in science it that a theory should fit the data. The cosmos re-entry was two nights earlier so no fit (some googling would have given you this answer real quick). But if you really want to convince yourself that the USAF personnel in the forest that night were just a bunch of hallucinating morons and Halt made an incredible fool of himself by sending his memo to the MOD: Check if there were any satellites, planes, flocks of birds or balloons in the air that night..

[webplodder]

Frank, we cannot know what actually occurred over those few nights so how can we be sure it wasn't just an elaborate hoax or even a conspiracy on the part of the so-called 'witnesses?' How do we know what peculiar events happened to coincide which appeared to be strange aerial 'craft?' In the final analysis all we have to rely on is the word of people who were present at the time which is simply not good enough. I'm afraid it all relies on a willingness to believe the alleged events did occur and no more. Frank, why would an advanced civilisation, if one actually exists, take all the trouble to travel to an ordinary planet like ours in view of the huge barriers of doing so? To observe us? If so, it seems an awful lot of trouble to go to when we probably will not be able to travel to even our nearest star for centuries, if ever! What possible interest could we be to advanced technologies that would have nothing to gain by visiting us?

[bignos]

it seems an awful lot of trouble to go to when we probably will not be able to travel to even our nearest star for centuries, if ever! What possible interest could we be to advanced technologies that would have nothing to gain by visiting us?

im open minded as to what 'it' was but answering your question, why fly half way around the world and trek into a remote and dangerous jungle just to observe a remote tribe untouched by the modern world? - this is presumably done to learn about where we came from. Archeology can only give us clues that we have to piece together, sometimes wrongly, whereas study can yeald more positive answers

[webplodder]

Weren't there several 'local' independent witnesses who said they saw several aerial objects moving about at the time of the incident? If so, this would appear to be corroborating evidence.

[larry warren]

i know where your coming from, the soil stuff was looked at by springborn enviromental labs in the states, the results should be published in our book i know the first one is ! yep the sad thing is that there are many factions in this thing and a hell of alot of personal politics, and im talking about the pro ufo side ! sadly i agree the aformentioned bunch have done very little to move the subject forward in particular, rendlesham...............and just a side bar, if i recall, the cesars beleived themselves to be gods ! and all met a rather unpleasent end, either by those closest to them or by there own hands .
cheers

[AdrianF]

But wasn't there a satellite making a re-entry at about the same time as the sightings?

Actually there was on night 3 as well, though not a lot has been made about it. Kosmos 1227, landed at Pletesk, USSR around 4.00 in the morning UK time, so it's re-entry ties in time wise. The problem with this, is it was probably too low on the horizon for the reentry to have been viewable from Suffolk. I'll dig out the details and post them later on for anyone who is interested.

[Frank]

Frank, we cannot know what actually occurred over those few nights so how can we be sure it wasn't just an elaborate hoax or even a conspiracy on the part of the so-called 'witnesses?' How do we know what peculiar events happened to coincide which appeared to be strange aerial 'craft?'

There is no such thing as 'sure' in the RFI, webplodder. That's the fun of it

Actually there was on night 3 as well, though not a lot has been made about it. Kosmos 1227, landed at Pletesk, USSR around 4.00 in the morning UK time, so it's re-entry ties in time wise. The problem with this, is it was probably too low on the horizon for the reentry to have been viewable from Suffolk. I'll dig out the details and post them later on for anyone who is interested.

To fit Halt's description he sent in an official memo to the MOD, on its re-entry it must have "moved rapidly in sharp, angular movements and displayed red, green and blue lights (...) and beamed down a stream of light from time to time." That must have been a very special satellite

[Deep Purple]

The fact that sum of the statements have changed doesnt necessarrily invalidate them. These were never statements given for the purpose of criminal investigation.
Now if you put your self in the shoes of the witnesses how much would you say? You wintnesses a truly confusing unusall incident and what do you make of it. This was no auto accident or bar fight you saw. Tell them everything and you could just expose your self to ridicule, demotion , the attention of the security services with no friends around to fight your cause. People for years to come might just say you saw the lighthouse. Your a young man in a foreign country with the weight of the US Military on your shoulders.
Say the wrong thing and Levenworth has plenty of cells waiting for you
think in these circumstances your statements might be a bit light and very careful what you actually said.
Remember in 1980 there were no " Human Rights" lawyers

[Shearwater]

I've been fortunate enough to spend time with many of the surviving Gemini and Apollo astronauts: forty years after the event, they contradict each other, change their stories and remember new details. Unless you are a member of the (unsupportable) Apollo deniers fraternity, you might think that the passage of time and advancing years are the main reasons: the same could easily be the case with RF
As Shakespeare wrote: "Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember, with advantages"

[Frank]

I absolutely agree, Shearwater. I experienced this myself when I recently viewed a home video of the solar eclipse in France that I went to see back in 1999. There were things that I remembered wrongly, like the number of other people that were in the same area (my memory clearly said “one other car out in the distance”, the video clearly showed “at least five other cars all around you”).

That’s why it is so frustrating to see each of the witnesses clinging to their own memories (including those from hypnotic regression!) like it is the absolute truth instead of trying to reconstruct what happened together based on the original evidence and common elements in their recollections. Literally each of the witnesses is telling a different story now ..

But, like Deep Purple stated, if these men truly witnessed something ‘otherworldly’ it must have had quite a big impact. On top of questions like “What am I going to tell my superiors?” there are also questions like “How does this fit into my world view?” or “Should I share this knowledge with others?” plus the frustration of people not believing you without any tangible evidence.

Funny that you mention the ‘Moon landing skeptics’.
In 1955, Edward Ruppelt already asked himself the question “What constitutes proof?” (http://www.nicap.org/rufo/rufo-fwd.htm).
If you think about it, there is no way to provide ‘undeniable evidence’ for a phenomenon that just happens now and then, cannot be replicated, and that hardly leaves any traces. You cannot provide undeniable evidence for the fact that Neil Armstrong actually walked on the Moon. If you play ‘the devil’s advocate’, you can take the edge of each piece of evidence for the Moon landings (like some people do).

Typically, acceptance of the ‘deniable evidence’ for such phenomena depends heavily on whether these phenomena fit in one’s own world-view. That is why it took science so long to accept the reality of meteors. For the same reason, the evidence for ball lightning has been discussed and debunked for many years and is now gradually accepted because similar effects can be created in the laboratory. The UFO phenomenon, in spite of many strong radar/visual cases, may share the same fate. So people who play ‘the devil’s advocate’ shouldn’t be too eager to reject the whole UFO phenomenon just because the evidence is ‘deniable’..

[Deep Purple]

Frank & Shearwater--- glad your listening to this train off thought ie what was said 30 yrs ago isnt necessarily the whole truth, many pressures can be felt by witnesses.
I think its something the forum really needs to consider at some length. We do know that US security servi8ces were quite happy to go along with UFOs as a cover for black projects etc, so this has to be factored in to the equation of truth

[Observer]

DP

In my last post, I suggested that what they may have seen or at least caught glimpses of was a deep 'Black' program with a highly classified piece of 'kit' or man made phenomena, Could this technology be in the public domain today, but in 1980 at the height of the cold war, it was so highly secret that the UFO story was its best cover and it could also explain why the witnesses were so harshly treated. Maybe this is staring us in the face and we just need to make the connection.

Obs