Skeptics' cormer

[IanR]

See here for the latest edition of Tim Printy's online magazine SUNLite, which has several pages on Rendlesham:
http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite2_6.pdf

Tim, a former US Navy nuclear engineer familiar with the AN-PDR 27 and its ilk, gives his expert opinion on the radiation readings on page 10, which are certainly worth taking note of, while on page 9 he has a story about how a fireball like the one seen at Rendlesham can be misinterpreted by military guards.

Some other good stuff elsewhere in the issue as well, including Belgium and Malmstrom.

Ian

[stephan]

Ian,

that looks like a nice article. I've skimmed it through and I think it's a good guide about stuff that can be mistaken for UFOs. I know those things, sundogs, satellites, Jupiter, Venus (have a look at some of my YT vids, they are in there ) ... I've even seen a huge fireball with a long tail once.

Still Ian, there's stuff out there that CANNOT be explained by what is already known. I can say so because - being familiar with stuff crossing the nightsky - I've had two sightings where I have absolutely no explanation for. Unfortunately they do match popular UFO reports. One was a ''blinking fleet of UFOs'' and the other one was what I can only describe as a double explosion in space. Both sightings were completely different from what I've ever seen before, in between and after. And, probably like you, I hang around hours at night watching the sky. I KNOW if there is something that does not ''belong'' there. That fleet was very far away but it also moved very fast. And the double explosion was also quite weird. Even talked about it on a popular british astronomy forum and guess what ? They had no explanation and said ''well, then it must have been a UFO''.

So, yes, there's pretty much stuff up there that can be mistaken for UFOs (alien spaceships) but once in a while they are genuine UFOs, i.e. absolutely unidentifiable flying objects. We are not alone. You can also ask a few former astronauts about that or former President Jimmy Carter. Someone or some ''phenomena'' is out there and we have no definite idea who they are or what it is. Some say it's God or angels. I won't go that far though

[IanR]

Still Ian, there's stuff out there that CANNOT be explained by what is already known. I can say so because - being familiar with stuff crossing the nightsky - I've had two sightings where I have absolutely no explanation for.

Same old logical fallacy, though Stephan: just because you couldn’t explain what you saw doesn’t mean that someone standing next to you might not have been able to. None of us knows everything natural and man-made that appears in the sky and it's incautious to claim otherwise.

We are not alone. You can also ask a few former astronauts about that or former President Jimmy Carter.

Then you undermine yourself by quoting a well-known ‘explained’ sighting. I thought everyone knew that Carter’s sighting was Venus. I don’t know which astronaut sightings you might be referring to but Oberg has looked into the most high-profile ones in detail.
http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo.html
Of course, some astronauts might claim to have discovered God on the Moon, but that’s a different sort of religion.

[Frank]

The reports that we were interested in were the 26.94 per cent or 429 "Unknowns," so we had studied them in great detail. (…) We did find that the most often reported shape was elliptical and that the most often reported color was white or "metallic."
(…)
Then the UFO's were habitually reported from areas around "technically interesting" places like our atomic energy installations, harbors, and critical manufacturing areas. (…) According to the laws of normal distribution, if UFO's are not intelligently controlled vehicles, the distribution of reports should have been similar to the distribution of population in the United States - it wasn't.
(…)
The next item on the agenda (…) was a review of a very hot and very highly controversial study. It was based on the idea that Major Dewey Fournet and I had talked about several months before - an analysis of the motions of the reported UFO's in an attempt to determine whether they were intelligently controlled. The study was hot because it wasn't official and the reason it wasn't official was because it was so hot. It concluded that the UAP's were interplanetary spaceships. The report had circulated around high command levels of intelligence and it had been read with a good deal of interest. But even though some officers at command levels just a notch below General Samford bought it, the space behind the words "Approved by" was blank - no one would stick his neck out and officially send it to the top.
(…)
Since such critical methods of evaluation had been used, these few reports proved beyond a doubt that the UFO's were intelligently controlled

1953, Edward J. Ruppelt
(Edward J. Ruppelt (July 17, 1923 in Iowa – September 15, 1960) was a United States Air Force officer. He was the director of Project Grudge from late 1951 until it became Project Blue Book in March 1952; he remained with Blue Book until late 1953.)

I find it fascinating how people keep looking for - and accepting – inadequate “explanations” that do not fit the data for this phenomenon. Just think of the recent estimation that our galaxy “has at least 46 billion Earth-size planets, and that's not counting Earth-size planets that orbit farther away from their stars in the habitable zone.” (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-357)

46 billion is more than 6x the number of people on Earth..

Facing this data, you could at least try to open up your mind to the possibility that some UFO reports may have an extraterrestrial cause. Maybe this will make you consider the possibility that actually, the witnesses accurately describe what they saw and simply tell the truth instead of having been under the magical spell of a small beacon light going round in the distance. After all, apart from the general direction where they saw the UFO and a forester that once mistook the lighthouse for a poacher’s flashlight, there really is not much ground for the lighthouse theory.

[stephan]

well, perhaps you can explain it ? I had my camcorder with me when I witnessed it but I couldn't make the necesseray adjustments in time. So I made this animation:



Jimmy Carter did not see Venus. He said that the ''strange light'' got closer and closer and right above the pine trees it stopped... and then it just disappeared into the west. Now, a planet does not get closer and closer, stop and then just disappear - at least not within a few seconds or minutes.

The astronauts I'm talking about are Gordon Cooper and Ed Mitchell. Former saw flying saucers for himself and Mitchell is a supporter of the ''ET is here'' hypothesis. There were also a few others that saw things they could not explain (Story Musgrave and I believe there was a russian cosmonaut who saw a craft with wings)

you can find a few of Gordon's, Mitchell's and Carter's statements (among others) in this video:



unfortunately Cooper is already dead so you won't be able to ask him anymore. Where did Oberg obtain all this information about him ? I mean, here in Germany we have something called data protection. Are his sources reliable ? The interview recordings you can find on YT ARE reliable in the sense that it can be verified that it was Cooper who made the respective statements.