Proper Identification of Unidentified Flying Objects

reply to post by tmayhew01


Here is an interesting, but disputed article reportedly made by the Air Force Intelligence Command in 1948:

ATIC Estimate of The Situation

Here is some more important information related to the official investigations of UFOs:


cufon.org...
www.ncas.org...
www.ncas.org...
ufologie.net...
www.ncas.org...
www.cufos.org...
www.cufon.org...

Interesting tidbit I found throughout the specific Condon Report

Condon Report, Sec V, Chapter 2: 1957-1968

870:3a

That the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.

We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.

If our government "has" continued to study UFO's and claims of top secret black programs are true, this would be a probable alibi.



[edit on 1-9-2009 by tmayhew01]

Interesting little site, thought I would share. Talks about some of the most common misidentified objects leading to UFO sightings and reports. A good read for anybody interested in seriously studying UFO sightings.

Topics Include: Planetary Misidentification, Meteors, Comets, Fireballs, Lenticular Clouds, Ball Lightening, Weather Balloons, Satellites, Flares, Swamp Gas, Birds, Lens Flare, Reflections, Aircraft, and Experimental Military Aircraft.

Hope this may be of use to somebody out there...

UFO Identification

** and just curious - Smitts, any luck identifying what you saw?

reply to post by tmayhew01


Tmayhew01-interesting post
Regarding the Condon report (and other 'US Government sanctioned' UFO/OVNI studies) there are some interesting points at the link below which question the objectivity,agenda and motivations behind such committees:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

There have also been some interesting statements made about such reports:

"I was there at [Project] Bluebook and I know the job they had. They were told not to excite the public, not to rock the boat... Whenever a case happened that they coud explain--which was quite a few--they made a point of that, and let that out to the media. . .Cases that were very difficult to explain, they would jump handsprings to keep the media away from them. They had a job to do, rightfully or wrongfully, to keep the public from getting excited."
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, former Chairman of the Dept. of Astronomy at North Western University and scientific advisor to Project Bluebook from 1952-1969



"My study of past official Air Force investigations (Project Blue Book) leads me to describe them as completely superficial. Officially released 'explanations' of important UFO sightings have been almost absurdly erroneous."
Senior Atmospherical Physicist Dr James McDonald, speech to American Meteorological Society 1966



"Blue Book was now under direct orders to debunk...I remember the conversations around the conference table in which it was suggested that Walt Disney or some other educational cartoon producer be enlisted in the debunking process".
Dr J Allen Hynek, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University and scientific consultant for Air Force investigations of UFOs from 1948 until 1969 (Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book).



"Based upon unreliable and unscientific surmises as data, the Air Force develops elaborate statistical findings which seem impressive to the uninitiated public unschooled in the fallacies of the statistical method. One must conclude that the highly publicized Air Force pronouncements based upon unsound statistics serve merely to misrepresent the true character of the UFO phenomena."
Yale Scientific Magazine (Yale University) Volume XXXVII, Number 7, April 1963



"Project Blue Book was ballyhooed by the Air Force as a full-fledged top-priority operation. It was no such thing. The staff, in a sense, was a joke. In terms of scientific training and numbers, it was highly inadequate to the task. And the methods used were positively archaic. And that is the crack operation that the general public believes looked adequately into the UFO phenomenon".
Dr J Allen Hynek, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University and scientific consultant for Air Force investigations of UFOs from 1948 until 1969 (Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book).

www.abovetopsecret.com...
Cheers.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

Quotes and statements regarding thread subject:

"More than 10,000 sightings have been reported, the majority of which cannot be accounted for by any scientific explanation, eg that they are hallucinations, the effects of light refraction, meteors, wheels falling from aeroplanes, and the like. They have been tracked on radar screens and the observed speeds have been as great as 9,000 mph. I am convinced that these objects do exist and they are not manufactured by any nation on earth. I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from an extraterrestrial source."
Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, Commanding Officer of the RAF during WWII.



"We had a number of reports from reputable individuals (well-educated serious-minded folks, scientists and fliers) who surely saw something".
As Air Force Chief of Staff, in his 1965 autobiography, Mission With LeMay, stated that although the bulk of UFO reports could be explained as conventional or natural phenomena, some could not.
Many of the mysteries might be explained away as weather balloons, stars, reflected lights, all sorts of odds and ends. I don't mean to say that, in the unclosed and unexplained or unexplainable instances, those were actually flying objects. All I can say is that no natural phenomena could be found to account for them... Repeat again: There were some cases we could not explain. Never could."
General Curtis LeMay
Statement from 1965 autobiography Mission With LeMay, with MacKinlay Kantor, New York: Doubleday, 1965.



"Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitude and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles."
Dr .H Marshall Chadwell, former assistant director of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, in a December, 1952 memo to then-director of the CIA, General Walter B. Smith.



"Saucers exist (I saw two). They were intelligently flown or operated (evasive tactics, formation flight, hovering). They were mechanisms, not United States weapons, nor Russian. I presume they are extraterrestrial."
Lt. Colonel Richard Headrick, radar bombing expert, 1959.



"Every time I get skeptical, I think of the other reports made by experienced pilots and radar operators, scientists, and other people who know what they are looking at. These reports were thoroughly investigated and they are still unknowns.
We have no aircraft on this earth that can at will so handily outdistance our latest jets... The pilots, radar specialists, generals, industrialists, scientists, and the man on the street who have told me, I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't seen it myself, knew what they were talking about."
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt
Chief of Project Blue Book, from his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1956.



"The evidence that there are objects which have been seen in our atmosphere, and even on terra firma, that cannot be accounted for either as man-made objects or as any physical force or effect known to our scientists seems to me to be overwhelming... A very large number of sightings have been vouched for by persons whose credentials seem to me unimpeachable. It is striking that so many have been trained observers, such as police officers and airline or military pilots. Their observations have in many instances... been supported either by technical means such as radar or, even more convincingly, by... interference with electrical apparatus of one sort or another..."
Admiral Lord Hill-Norton (GCB), Chief of Defense Staff, Ministry of Defense, Britain; Chairman, Military Committee of NATO; Admiral of the Fleet; Member of House of Lords.



"I concentrate on the science. I'm interested in the UFOs seen by the police and military witnesses. I'm interested in the near misses that pilots report, where their aircraft nearly collide with these things. I'm interested in the visual sightings backed up by radar. I'm interested in the military bases that are overflown by these things. I'm interested in the cases where you have radiation readings on the ground.
These are no lights in the sky. These are not misidentifications of fantasy prone individuals. This is a cutting-edge technology being reported by reliable, trained observers, and it is something that goes beyond what we can do.
That to me suggests that if it is not ours, it belongs to someone else. If that technology is better than ours, then the extraterrestrial hypothesis seems to me the best explanation."
Nick Pope
Head of the "UFO desk" at Air Secretariat 2-A, British Ministry of Defence from 1991-1994.



"There are unidentified flying objects. That is, there are a hard core of cases - perhaps 20 to 30 percent in different studies - for which there is no explanation... We can only imagine what purpose lies behind the activities of these quiet, harmlessly cruising objects that time and again approach the earth. The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that they are simply watching what we are up to." (Redbook, vol. 143, September 1974.)
Dr. Margaret Mead, world-renowned Anthropologist.



"The opposite conclusion could have been drawn from The Condon Report's content, namely, that a phenomenon with such a high ratio of unexplained cases (about 30 percent) should arouse sufficient scientific curiosity to continue its study."
"From a scientific and engineering standpoint, it is unacceptable to simply ignore substantial numbers of unexplained observations... the only promising approach is a continuing moderate-level effort with emphasis on improved data collection by objective means... involving available remote sensing capabilities and certain software changes."
Ronald D Story - American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics UFO Subcommittee -New York: Doubleday, 1980



"There are some definite flight type characteristics that are seen now that I would say represent genuine UFOs...ie: instant acceleration; instant stop; vertical acceleration -up into the air and down to the ground; reverses in direction; right angle turns -all in silence -multiple objects sometimes separating and then going back into each other.
They are classic,what I would call,genuine UFO characteristics -things that we can not do in a conventional sense".
British Detective Constable Gary Heseltine - Police UFO reporting organisation,PRUFOS.
www.abovetopsecret.com...



"Reports of anomalous aerial objects (AAO) appearing in the atmosphere continue to be made by pilots of almost every airline and air force of the world in addition to private and experimental test pilots.
This paper presents a review of 56 reports of AAO in which electromagnetic effects (E-M) take place on-board the aircraft when the phenomenon is located nearby but not before it appeared or after it had departed. "
"Reported E-M effects included radio interference or total failure, radar contact with and without simultaneous visual contact, magnetic and/or gyro-compass deviations, automatic direction finder failure or interference, engine stopping or interruption, dimming cabin lights, transponder failure, and military aircraft weapon system failure."
"We're not dealing with mental projections or hallucinations on the part of the witness but with a real physical phenomenon."
(Haines, Dr. Richard, "Fifty-Six Aircraft Pilot Sightings Involving Electromagnetic Effects," MUFON 1992 International UFO Symposium Proceedings.)
Dr. Richard Haines, Psychologist specializing in pilot and astronaut "human factors" research for the Ames NASA Research Center in California-Chief of the Space Human Factors Office.
www.abovetopsecret.com...



"This thing had to be going double-digit mach making turns that I didn’t think were possible, breaking all the rules of physics,
The man that visited me later told me in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. He told me I would lose my pilot’s license and it would be the end of my flying days, so for 30 years I've said nothing"”
Retired Air Force pilot Milton Torres discussing his F-86D Sabre fighter jet UFO incident in 1957 in which he was ordered to shoot down a UFO hovering over the British countryside.
Air Force Times Interview, Oct 22nd, 2008.



"Unidentified flying objects are a very serious subject which we must study fully. We appeal to all viewers to send us details of strange flying craft seen over the territories of the Soviet Union. This is a serious challenge to science and we need the help of all Soviet citizens."
"Observations show that UFOs behave 'sensibly.' In a group formation flight, they maintain a pattern.
They are most often spotted over airfields, atomic stations and other very new engineering installations. On encountering aircraft, they always maneuver so as to avoid direct contact."
Dr. Felix Y. Zigel, Professor of mathematics and astronomy at the Moscow Aviation Institute



"The type of UFO reports that are most intriguing are close-range sightings of machine-like objects of unconventional nature and unconventional performance characteristics, seen at low altitudes, and sometimes even on the ground. The general public is entirely unaware of the large number of such reports that are coming from credible witnesses... When one starts searching for such cases, their number are quite astonishing. Also, such sightings appear to be occurring all over the globe." (Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, July 29, 1968.)
Dr. James E. McDonald, Senior Physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona.

[edit on 02/10/08 by karl 12]

reply to post by tmayhew01


Great post, good info to have!

Thought I would bump this, as to hopefully increase the level of intelligent threads on these forums regarding identification of aliens and UFO's. I would recommend anybody serious about posting in the alien/UFO thread to read some of the links posted in this thread.

These are some great explanations for some of the seemingly UFO type objects that lurk in our sky's...

reply to post by tmayhew01


Tmayhew01,good job in bumping this thread.
If you've not seen them before theres some interesting links below:

THOSE PHENOMENA THAT ARE NOT EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITORS NOR REALLY MYSTERIOUS:


Ball lightning:
www.ufologie.net...


Sprites:
www.ufologie.net...


Lenticular clouds:
www.ufologie.net...


Noctilucent clouds:
www.ufologie.net...


Notched UFOs on video:
www.ufologie.net...


BLURFOS.
www.ufologie.net...


The so-called "Orbs".
www.ufologie.net...


The so-called "RODS".
www.ufologie.net...


Those "invisible UFOs" that are only detected in infra-red:
www.ufologie.net...


Streetlamps reflections on photographs.
www.ufologie.net...


Reflexion in camera optics called UFOs?.
www.ufologie.net...


Pink artefacts on digital pictures:
www.ufologie.net...

Source:

UFOLOGIE 'Science and the UFO phenomenon'
Link:
www.ufologie.net...

Cheers.

CHARACTERISTICS OF IFOs and UFOs

Common characteristics of IFOs (Identified Flying Objects), which are naturally occurring by day, include clouds (especially lenticular), flocks of birds, atmospheric phenomena such as "sun dogs" and "mock sun." Common characteristics of IFOs which are naturally occurring by night include stars, planets (especially Venus), meteors and atmospheric phenomena such at St. Elmo's fire and ball lightning.

Common characteristics of IFOs which are man-made and observed by day include unusual planes, balloons of different types, and helicopters. Man-made IFOs observed at night are usually airplane lights, satellites, spotlights, and advertising on strips trailing behind planes.

Common characteristics of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) can be described in terms of their appearance, their behavior, and their unusual effects.

1. UFOs generally appear in four main shapes: the disc (or saucer), the enormous triangle, the cylinder, and the sphere. They often exhibit brilliant luminosity, illuminating the terrain beneath, and shooting out beams of light. These beams are sometimes truncated. There is often a pulsation of a full spectrum of colors. Frequently, they are surrounded by vapor, sometimes appearing in cloud-like lenticular forms. Often the objects are domed, have portholes, and have a metallic-looking, shiny, lightly-colored surface.


2. The behavior patterns of UFOs varies. Often there is a prolonged hovering, which is almost motionless, followed by an extreme acceleration which is frequently straight upwards. Another familiar flight pattern is an erratic, non-linear, non-smooth, zigzagging, darting motion. Sometimes the vehicles seem to flip end over end, or to stand upright in flight, or to fall like leaves. They are able to make very sudden right angle turns at enormous velocities. They exhibit super-sonic speed with no sonic boom. In fact, there is rarely any sound, sometimes just a high frequency, low volume humming sound.


3. UFOs have unusual effects upon their immediate surroundings. Animals may behave strangely, often panicking, cows' milk production ceases, etc. Electromagnetic effects cause electrical malfunction to occur - car engines stop running, as well as car radios, headlights, etc. - as soon as the UFO is in close proximity. Upon departure of the UFO, all systems often start up again on their own. Furthermore, there may be signs of radiation effects on humans, animal and plant life in the immediate area as well as feelings of cold or heat.


4. UFOs leave after-effects on the ground. Impressions are often left forming a geometric design. Soil and vegetation in the affected area is dehydrated and will not absorb water. Affected vegetation will not seminate, or regrow for a long time.

www.bibliotecapleyades.net...