Leslie Kean: UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record (new book)

Discussion topic --

I suggest Kean misuses the “Weinstein List”. Dominique Weinstein is a French UFO investigator who has spent years collecting pilot UFO encounter accounts, 1300 as far as the latest published data base in 2001 (www.ufocasebook.com...). Kean’s book refers to the list on pages 136-137 as providing further evidence of the real physical nature of UFOs.

Both Weinstein and Kean describe the list as meeting a standard defined earlier by NASA scientist Richard Haines: it is supposed to contain ONLY reports where “the appearance and/or flight dynamics … do not suggest a logical, conventional flying object and which remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making both a full technical identification as well as a common-sense identification, if one is possible.”

But the list fails that fundamental test of ‘verified unknowns’. Just relying on my own familiar pseudo-UFO stimuli, missile and space activity, I found many cases whose prosaic explanations had already been published in the UFO literature but which were still presented on Weinstein’s list as provably anomalous.

Here's my preliminary list of bogus 'UFOs' that I easily found. I do NOT repeat NOT suggest that this category of prosaic stimulus is the cause of all or even most 'UFOs'. It is useful only as a calibration tool because it happens to be a well-documented human activity that can later be correlated with UFO reports -- in this case, from pilots.

So when Kean relies on a database so poorly verified as Weinstein's, what does that say about the reliability of her conclusions drawn from it?



1967 (September 29), “USSR between Zaporoje and Volgograd, an airliner (IL-14) pilot [reported] a UFO flying above the plane, engines stopped, started again when it disappeared. This was solved thirty years ago and reported in “The Great Soviet UFO Coverup”, MUFON UFO Journal, October 1982 (www.debunker.com...), as one of a series of top-secret space-to-earth thermonuclear warhead tests.
The engine failure must have been coincidental or caused by the pilot's panic.

1967 (December 12), “USSR, Kamenny Cape, test-flight; crew plus passengers (scientists) [reported] a very bright object ‘following’ the plane of the Soviet Civil Aviation Scientific Institute. This was solved decades ago and was reported in ‘Soviet Saucers’, OMNI magazine, April 1994 [www.debunker.com...]. The aircraft was near Vorkuta, crossing the path of the Kosmos-194 spy satellite during its ascent from the top secret Plesetsk space center.

1972 (May 19), “Over Chile, a light 'amber in color', seen by a pilot. Light yellow is the hue of hydrazine propellant expelled at the end of the second orbital insertion burns of a special class of Soviet satellites that often were seen over South America (this one was Molniya 2-2).

1977 (October 11): “At 18:00 local over Ryazan, a pulsating light flew 'alongside' an aircraft for 24 minutes.” But public records show that at 15:14 GMT, the Kosmos-958 satellite was launched eastwards from Plesetsk, north of Ryazan, but hardly ‘alongside’ anybody’s airplane..

1980 (June 14), “USSR: Moscow, Air Force pilot a round object (more than 300meters in diameter) ‘played’ with the plane and disappeared.” This was solved three decades ago and reported in “Giant UFO Over Two Continents”, FATE magazine, January 1983, as the documented Soviet ''Kosmos-1188" launching from Plesetsk at about 11:55 P.M
www.debunker.com...

1981 (October 31): “At 21:15, Argentina, Marcos Juarez A Austral Airlines and Aerolineas Argentinas / pilots [reported] a bright round object flying at about 180 meters.” This was explained in “Giant UFO Over Two Continents”, FATE magazine, January 1983 (www.debunker.com...), as the Kosmos-1317 missile warning satellite, which took off at 22:48 UT on October 31, 1981, and was seen over Argentina shortly after 9:00 P.M. local (midnight UT).

1985 (January 29): “USSR, 120 km. from Minsk, plane TU-134A (flight 8352) crew [reported] a glowing yellow object, shape changing from conical, to oval, then square [with ground radar confirmation].” The prosaic solution to this spectacular case was first published in the 1990s, and recently elaborated in “How to crack a case from the UFO files” www.msnbc.msn.com... where it was shown to be a sub-launched Soviet missile, also seen in Finland and Sweden

1985 (August 18): “Over South America, two objects, one of them 'banana-shaped'” This was an accurate description of the distant sunlit fuel cloud viewed from the darkness, spewing out as the expended rocket slowly turned after the launch of Japanese “Planet-A” probe towards Halley's Comet.

1987 (August 27): “China, area of Jiangnan, a Chinese Air Force pilot [reported] an orange bright rotating object climbed and disappeared at great speed.” This case was identified in “Sky Dragons Behind the Media Curtain: UFOs in China”, on space.com on Jan 14, 2000 [www.space.com...] as surplus rocket fuel venting from a tumbling Japanese rocket about 300 kilometers out in space (as the rocket spun, a spiral-shaped cloud larger than the moon formed in the dusk skies, moved rapidly from west to east).

1990 (November 5): “22:00, Germany, Rheindahlen air base: RAF F-4 Phantom fighters pilots [reported] after two huge explosions, fighters were scrambled, saw a formation of UFOs.” Also, same case: “North Sea, a British airliner crew [reported] 2 mysterious lights.” This case and its prosaic explanation (the burn-up of a discarded Soviet rocket stage) was described in detail in the 1996 report, ”Case Studies In Pilot Misperceptions Of UFOs", www.zipworld.com.au...
And also in an Internet-posted letter to the MUFON UFO Journal:
www.jamesoberg.com...

1994 (January 27): “Kazakhstan, night, a Tajik Airlines B-747SP pilot plus two crew members [reported] a brilliantly luminous object with a contrail maneuvered at about 100,000 ft.” This case, set off by a Russian rocket launched from Baykonur, was also discussed in detail in “Case Studies In Pilot Misperceptions Of “UFOs".
www.zipworld.com.au...

ufosontherecord.com...

Leslie Kean will be a guest on the Stephn Colbert show this coming Monday August 23. The show airs at 11:30pm eastern time.

Mr. Oberg's assertion that intelligent ‘normal people’ are the best kind of observers, preferable to pilots, is of course very subjective on the kind of event and conditions we are talking about. Not to mention that when someone — regardless of training or profession — claims to have seen a UFO, for denialists these people are automatically no longer ‘intelligent’ nor ‘normal.’

Maybe pilots do tend to perceive things they cannot explain through a certain filter — so does everybody else by the way — but since this thread is about Leslie Kean's book let's focus on the information in there.

Some accounts in Kean's book involve pilots who did more than see something they couldn't identify. In some cases they actually engaged the unknown objects in pursuits and even tried to shoot them down. In one case one pilot actually shot at it, although without resulting in any apparent damage to the target. This was more than unidentifiable lights in the distance. There were interactions between these pilots in their aircraft, and whatever else was out there evading them.

I'd like to know what is Mr. Oberg's theory on what these pilots were chasing and shooting at. Assuming he has read the book, or looked at the cases mentioned.

I'm asking how those cases look different from many others for which prosaic stimuli have been identified, followed by imaginative misinterpretations by the witness.

I offer no explanation for the cases Kean picked, because finding the real explanation -- if indeed it is prosaic -- is often a massive effort involving as much luck as sweat, as shown in cases where plausible prosaic explanations have been developed. Shoot-from-the-hip 'debunking' is silly.

The approach I suggest is to discuss whether the prosaic explanations suggested for that group from the Weinstein list are plausible. That will to a very large degree allow a definitive calibration of pilot testimony in general. It's not an arbitrary dismissal of it.

I'm comfortable with a case, or cases, being 'unsolved' and still proving nothing about the stimuli. It happens with murders, missing persons, accidents, lost personal articles -- we live in a world where we know we'll never know everything, and don't have to conjure up a legion of supernatural [even alien] killers, kidnappers, saboteurs, and purse snatchers.

Just because we never found Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater isn't proof they're on Zeta Reticula B 4.

Thank you for your reply Mr. Oberg.

I wholeheartedly agree with your statement that ‘shoot-from-the-hip debunking is silly,’ but that's apparently what you are doing here by suggesting all cases by pilots are, in all likelihood, unreliable — because, in your words, pilots are the worst observers — and there's no validity to Weinstein's list because it's a raw list of sightings by, well, pilots and you've identified a few sightings in it which have in fact prosaic explanations.

Regarding the number of ‘actual UFOs’ you are not telling us anything new. Most of us are aware that the majority of reported sightings and cases have prosaic explanations. We're still however left with a, albeit small, percentage of cases that remain unknown and unresolved. Even the Project Bluebook reports show this.

The problem I have with your approach, Mr. Oberg, is you seem to start from the conclusion that all UFOs are misidentifications of mundane things — weather phenomena, aircraft, astronomical bodies, etc — and it's just a matter of time before all sightings and reports have been identified and explained as such.

Regardless of how unlikely something is, you cannot investigate it by, from the start, having decided what that something is not.

But perhaps you, Mr. Oberg, are not interested in truly investigating or finding out the explanation behind the most well documented and baffling cases. I notice you tend to focus on the ‘simpler’ kind of UFO cases, the ones where single or few witnesses claim to have seen something — usually lights at a distance — they couldn't identify.

Don't get me wrong — I'm all for trying to get to the bottom of all cases, and I will be the first to give you credit when you successfully debunk a case. But being unknown and unresolved means just that. It doesn't mean it's from Zeta Reticuli, as you so frequently point out, but it also doesn't automatically mean it's a misidentified weather balloon.

reply to post by JimOberg
Since I've been on ATS, I've enjoyed reading a lot of your posts and might be amongst ten or so members who star some of them. From where I'm standing, it isn't about the messenger, it's about the message. Time after time, you've posted good evidence and you're qualified to do so. You have a professional, credible background, education and a long history of interest in the UFO phenomena.

You also present a slippery subject and a moving target. You've been asked several times to highlight any UAP/UFO cases that remain unexplained to your satisfaction. This usually results in a non-answer similar to, 'After all these years it would be remarkable if I hadn't seen some unexplained cases.'

You imply that witnesses with an interest in UFOs are immediately dubious and likely have a predisposition that renders them unreliable. You'll point out that witnesses in general are unreliable because they aren't informed or familiar with the 'prosaic' explanations for aerial phenomena. Aircraft crews are less reliable than the general populations so their claims can be ruled out, or at least not taken too seriously. Military pilots are amongst the worst witnesses available and you nod towards the Hynek study to qualify your point. Radar operators are fallible and don't always familiarise themselves with atmospheric phenomena...temperature inversions etc. *Some* astronauts had personality problems or issues with NASA (Gordon Cooper) and so shouldn't be taken seriously. Edgar Mitchell is likewise implied to have a doubtful veracity and should be overlooked.

Bad witnesses, bad characters or bad technology.

Essentially, no evidence or witness is acceptable. Witnesses we'd consider more credible through professional status and/or training are actually less credible, as you present them.

The list goes on. Whatever the case and whoever the witness, you pull out one of those nails I mentioned and drive it swiftly into the whole case.

The problem as I see it, is that some of these points refer directly to you and that creates a little paradox. By your own criteria, you are interested in UFOs and therefore your judgement is dubious. You are a professional and therefore you are less reliable than others. Can you understand how this impression is generated by your regular rejection of UAP reports? You've undermined the possibility of anyone being authoritative or credible. The paradox is you present yourself as just such a credible authority on the subject of UAP.

We're both aware of the core evidence that there are incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena. We're both aware that some of these incidents have been investigated and analysed over the years and remain unexplained. There are scientists who have worked with, or for, NASA and they are actively engaged in analysing these incidents. They aren't looking for aliens, they're investigating UAP and looking for answers.

So Mr Oberg, I'm respectfully pointing out that you can't logically refer to your own authority/credibility without accepting the authority/credibility of others.

Thanks for your clear and thoughtful critique.

Originally posted by Spangler
Thank you for your reply Mr. Oberg.

I wholeheartedly agree with your statement that ‘shoot-from-the-hip debunking is silly,’ but that's apparently what you are doing here by suggesting all cases by pilots are, in all likelihood, unreliable — because, in your words, pilots are the worst observers — and there's no validity to Weinstein's list because it's a raw list of sightings by, well, pilots and you've identified a few sightings in it which have in fact prosaic explanations.

You're not following me -- I am criticizing Kean's claim that the list consists ONLY of cases for which investigation has shown no prosaic explanation is possible. Weinstein says the same in his introduction. My argument, which you appear to concede, is that such a claim is demonstrably false.

I made NO claim that ALL the cases had prosaic explanations -- nobody has any way of proving that.

Regarding the number of ‘actual UFOs’ you are not telling us anything new. Most of us are aware that the majority of reported sightings and cases have prosaic explanations. We're still however left with a, albeit small, percentage of cases that remain unknown and unresolved. Even the Project Bluebook reports show this.

Agreed -- but the inability of investigators to determine a prosaic cause for a report could just as likely be a judgment on their research and on the contextual records of possible stimuli, not on the unexplainable nature of the report. This is a topic for serious debate. But claiming as Kean does that the small residue of unexplained cases exists because the cases are fundamentally without earthly explanation remains only a claim, not a fact.

The problem I have with your approach, Mr. Oberg, is you seem to start from the conclusion that all UFOs are misidentifications of mundane things — weather phenomena, aircraft, astronomical bodies, etc — and it's just a matter of time before all sightings and reports have been identified and explained as such.

I haven't made myself clear. I am quite happy to acknowledge the possibility that some UFO reports are of genuinely anomalous stimuli of significant interest to science, theology, national security, law enforcement, meteorology, perceptual psychology, dianetics, whatever. Knee-jerk rejection of them all, or knee-jerk clinging to a favored explanation, both get in the way of showing this.

Regardless of how unlikely something is, you cannot investigate it by, from the start, having decided what that something is not.

But that's exactly what most UFO believers are doing. They have decided that their unknown cases are NOT explainable in prosaic terms.

But perhaps you, Mr. Oberg, are not interested in truly investigating or finding out the explanation behind the most well documented and baffling cases. I notice you tend to focus on the ‘simpler’ kind of UFO cases, the ones where single or few witnesses claim to have seen something — usually lights at a distance — they couldn't identify.

You haven't been paying attention to the corpus of my work for the last few decades. I have concentrated on exactly some of the most famous and spectacular cases as shown by the popular books and TV shows. I base my work mainly on my professional experience in space and rocket operations.

Don't get me wrong — I'm all for trying to get to the bottom of all cases, and I will be the first to give you credit when you successfully debunk a case. But being unknown and unresolved means just that. It doesn't mean it's from Zeta Reticuli, as you so frequently point out, but it also doesn't automatically mean it's a misidentified weather balloon.

Please tell me which of the identifications from the Weinstein list, that I gave above, you find unconvincing. We build arguments brick by brick, not by handwaving generalities.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
So Mr Oberg, I'm respectfully pointing out that you can't logically refer to your own authority/credibility without accepting the authority/credibility of others.

Kandnsky, thanks for the thoughtful response, it's a keeper, worth filing and re-reading in the future to remind myself of improvements.

I don't think anyone should reject all eyewitness testimony by any means, and I'm sorry if what I've written has given you that impression. But one has to judge both the extraordinariness of reports and the characteristics of the witness. Also, the length of time that passes -- especially as regards to how often a story has been retold -- can be critical.

I'm not making those criteria up -- any investigative team learns them from experience and from their training.

I do recall specifying cases that I know of no prosaic explanation for -- Cash-Landrum, for example, or the Japanese pilot over Alaska. The claims and counter-claims about the 1964 Socorro case still shroud that event in garble. I'm sure I could -- and have -- come up with other examples.

One 'space UFO' that was genuine and I wish HAD been seen by astronauts occurred in January 2003, when the broken piece of Columbia's wing floated away a day after reaching orbit. Had anyone seen it in real time, a clue to the spaceship's lethal wound would have become available, and history might have been different. Seeing it wouldn't have been enough -- it would have to have been recognized as truly anomalous and important. But it didn't happen.

When I make reference to facts from my own professional experience, I hope they are of the nature that they can be verified by anyone who wants to try, from independent sources. So it's not just me as a sole witness making a claim whose veracity depends entirely on my personal credibility. Usually I try to cite existing documentation and other experts. If i don't, hold my feet to the fire.

The symmetry you referred to regarding credibility sounds clever, but you have to acknowledge that the argument is NOT symmetric. As in a criminal trial, or in a scientific debate, one side possesses the presumption of authenticity, and the other side has the burden of proof. It's not a college debate where both sides start from equal non-proof. The side with the presumption of proof does not have to RE-prove it against challengers (most of whom fail, historically), just raise a credible feeling that the challenging arguments may not be utterly gospel.

No, it's not a 'fair fight'. But it's proven remarkably successful at discovering and expanding authentic understanding, over the years.

Originally posted by JimOberg
I haven't made myself clear. I am quite happy to acknowledge the possibility that some UFO reports are of genuinely anomalous stimuli of significant interest to science, theology, national security, law enforcement, meteorology, perceptual psychology, dianetics, whatever. Knee-jerk rejection of them all, or knee-jerk clinging to a favored explanation, both get in the way of showing this.

I stand corrected in my erroneous characterization of your position. As we're on the subject of corrections I'd like to point out that I have never claimed an extraterrestrial ‘explanation’ for unknown/unresolved cases. Such a stance would be fallacious, and that was the point of my posts — that unknowns mean we don't know if it's aliens or weather balloons. I will grant you that the probability is on the side of mundane sources. You'll get no objections from me on that. Thinking otherwise would be unscientific.

But that's exactly what most UFO believers are doing. They have decided that their unknown cases are NOT explainable in prosaic terms.

And the denialists have decided that the unknown cases are not alien craft or some other extraordinary possibility. It's bad on both sides of the spectrum. We shouldn't, therefor, waste much time with these people on the extremes. We should focus the debate on what people in the middle — that agree there are unknown and intriguing cases worthy of scientific investigation — are saying.

Please tell me which of the identifications from the Weinstein list, that I gave above, you find unconvincing.

I don't. I don't think much of the Weinstein list, to be honest. I don't dismiss that there's probably a certain number of ‘real UFOs’ in it, but the list has too little information and supporting data to serve as a significant indicator other than pilots see things they can't identify sometimes. I'm sure that fact doesn't come as a shock to most thinking people.

Having said that, Kean's book does contain truly intriguing cases that have, so far, left us without an explanation. You've admitted to this. Most of us here are already aware of many, if not all, cases in it, but Kean's book is admittedly directed at an audience that isn't very knowledgeable or generally interested in the subject of UFOs.

Does Kean's work have some flaws? Yes. And I agree with most of your critiques. I still think it's a good book and certainly many times better than what usually gets published these days on the topic of UFOs. I hope it gets the attention and discussion Kean's work and the topic deserve.

I will say, however, that I doubt it will achieve the objective Kean hopes for — setting up a small government body to publicly and openly investigate UFO cases. I don't see that happening, particularly with the current political climate and financial situation.

Originally posted by JimOberg
Discussion topic --

Here's my preliminary list of bogus 'UFOs' that I easily found. I do NOT repeat NOT suggest that this category of prosaic stimulus is the cause of all or even most 'UFOs'. It is useful only as a calibration tool because it happens to be a well-documented human activity that can later be correlated with UFO reports -- in this case, from pilots.

Looks like a good, well-documented list. There's another one maybe not so well documented on that list that's is such an obvious meteor, I don't know why it's on the list. The date shown is 95.11.17 but according to this air traffic control audio record, the date was actually 95.11.18 so I'm not sure which is correct, but it's clearly referring to the same incident:

Google Video Link

First, they describe an object that sounds exactly like a meteor, bright light in front, smoky, green "vapor trail" coming off the back, and traveling at a "high rate of speed". Then they ask the military controller about it and he asks if it could be a meteor (based on the description), then another controller comes on about 5:28 and says they've had several reports of a meteor, that should have clinched it right there, but it didn't. The controllers reported that to the pilot and the Lufthansa pilot said it might have been and the speedbird pilot said it couldn't have been a meteor because it was in "level flight" which I think is consistent with the observation about a pilot not making a good witness regarding astronomical objects. I know of no reason why a meteor couldn't appear in relatively "level flight" even if that may be a little unusual.

Then the next pilot report in that video starting at about 8:30 is a pilot apparently reporting a planet as a UFO, "about 8 or 10 miles west", so much for distance estimates, if it's millions of miles away! And how do you like this comment by the pilot for a conflicting report all in the same sentence:

"He's stationary. He's about eight to ten miles and he looks like he's coming right at us. He gets real bright like he's got his landing lights on, then he turns away" So is it stationary or is it coming right at them? Those two statements have different meanings to me!

Then the Air traffic controller asks another plane, Cactus700 to look in that direction to see if he sees any traffic in the direction of the "UFO"

Then Cactus700 reports at 9:37 "That's that same planet that's been there for about three or four weeks" and they even misspell the word "planet" as "plane" in the video transcript, I wonder if that's intentional to hide the fact that what one pilot is calling a UFO another pilot looks at and identifies as a planet?

It's really hard for me to be favorably impressed with pilot observational skills after listening to these air traffic control recordings which appear to be such obvious misidentifications.

And no Jim, your word alone isn't authoritative enough either but you usually give us more than that, like the rocket launch schedule if you claim it's a missile or rocket launch, etc, something which can be verified. Actually I find most of your writing to be excellent and informative.

But seeing this thread about Leslie Kean reminded me of her involvement in the Kecksburg incident about which you wrote this:

www.jamesoberg.com...

To put it as kindly as possible, it's not your best work because it is rather ambivalent about what your thoughts really are about the Kecksburg case.

It makes me wonder if you got some "threats" for exposing the possibly true government conspiracy you did in an earlier story and had to change your story? Remember this one?

www.post-gazette.com...

Oberg proceeds to explain why the U.S. military would lie, or at least decide not to divulge everything it knew about the Kecksburg crash.
"In the 1960s, U.S. military intelligence agencies interested in enemy technology were eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could find. International law required that debris be returned to the country of origin. But hardware from Kosmos 96, with its special missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back."

After all, he concluded, what better camouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a Soviet probe, but a flying saucer?

Hmmm your latest article is quite a bit different from your old claim that we may be "pawns"

"The Russians would never suspect, and the Air Force laboratories could examine the specimen at leisure. And if suspicion lingered, UFO buffs would be counted on to maintain the phony cover story, protecting the real truth."

For that reason, Oberg concluded, the Kecksburg scenario produced "delicious irony."

"A famous UFO case may actually involve a real U.S. government cover-up, but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Instead of exposing the truth, they may be unwitting pawns in deception."

I don't see Kean listing the Kecksburg incident in her table of contents, so if it's not in her book it surprises me a little.

I do see the Dogfight over Tehran on page 86 which has always been a puzzling case to me. I initially thought maybe it was some secret US project until I saw the FOIA documents that showed apparently the US didn't know what it was either. I really don't know of any good explanation for that case.

Originally posted by JimOberg
I do recall specifying cases that I know of no prosaic explanation for -- Cash-Landrum, for example, or the Japanese pilot over Alaska.

The Japan Airlines case I'm assuming is the one on p222 of Kean's book, We have a picture of a cloud right where the radar return was and the radar return image was green like a cloud so why would anyone doubt that was a cloud causing that radar return and possibly the report of a giant mothership also? All the radar returns reported by the plane are in exactly the direction of the cloud, it's pretty well documented. The lights they saw are harder to explain but it may not be a coincidence that they look like airport lights and consistently came from the direction of an airport, Allen Army Airfield, though how they could see the lights at such a distance would be a mystery. However, Alaska and polar regions in general can have some interesting temperature inversions, including a rare type that allows observers to see the sun when it's 5 degrees below the horizon (the Novaya Zemlya Mirage), which one would also think is ordinarily impossible, because, ordinarily, it IS impossible. Unusual atmospheric conditions can and do occur however and if you can actually see objects that are BELOW the horizon at times it may not be implausible to be able to see some lights on a distant horizon in some type of temperature inversion (and there was a temperature inversion measured in the area at a relevant altitude).

I really have no reason to doubt anything Callahan says about the incident however. I'm sure it makes life easier for some people if they don't have to explain cases they don't know how to explain, so the "it never happened" claim Callahan makes referenced in Kean's chapter title 'The FAA Investigates a UFO Event "That Never Happened"' seems quite plausible to me. Maybe it's the same people that told Callahan that "never happened" who told you to stop exposing the government conspiracy about Kecksburg?

[edit on 20-8-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
I do see the Dogfight over Tehran on page 86 which has always been a puzzling case to me. I initially thought maybe it was some secret US project until I saw the FOIA documents that showed apparently the US didn't know what it was either. I really don't know of any good explanation for that case.

I don't necessarily endorse this theory or belief, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but just because the DIA documents describing the event make no mention of the object's origin, or whoever wrote it seems as intrigued about it as apparently the Iranians were, I don't think we can infer with any certainty that it wasn't a US secret aircraft.

We know that advanced military aircraft are developed in the highly compartmentalized black world. It's not that far-fetched to assume that whoever was charged with writing the report or sending this information to the Pentagon would not necessarily be privy to such a program or operation — assuming there was one. Again, I'm not endorsing this theory. I just don't think we can reach a conclusion either way from it.

I do agree that it's a very interesting case and I find it to be one of the best — there is supporting evidence and we have first hand accounts, and the object remains unknown and the case unresolved.

[edit on 20-8-2010 by Spangler]

I'd like to firstly say that despite the time here being past 4am, I felt compelled to respond and be part of a discussion where intelligent comments and mature exchanges are filling up the pages.

One of the most intriguing segments of Kean's book is the chapter she devotes to the history of "debunking", particularly the individuals behind Blue Book and the nature of the study's conclusions. i find it difficult to believe that an investigation carried out with such questionable attitudes to objectivity, and with a conclusion that was contested by vocal corners would accepted in modern society. If the subject itself may not warrant another official study, then surely the manner in which the study was conducted - and whom it was by - should be enough reason to at least seriously consider another investigation?


Arbitrageur

Your conclusion to the video of the pilot sighting is perplexing. Are you equating the value, or observational skills, of pilots in general to that of this individual example where it seems probably that there was a misidentification? I'm sorry if that wasn't your intention but that's the way it came across when reading it.

I listened to Keane on C2C last week and she was pretty knowledgeable but I couldn't help but think at times that she was a counter op.. kind of like Lazar.

Originally posted by Spangler
I don't necessarily endorse this theory or belief, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but just because the DIA documents describing the event make no mention of the object's origin, or whoever wrote it seems as intrigued about it as apparently the Iranians were, I don't think we can infer with any certainty that it wasn't a US secret aircraft.

Your devil's advocate position is appreciated and quite a valid point, one that I actually almost inserted myself but my post was already so exceedingly long I chose to leave that part of my observations out, but I think you're quite right about the possibility and I agree we can't rule that out. How likely that possibility may be, I really have no idea.

Originally posted by Shino
Arbitrageur
Your conclusion to the video of the pilot sighting is perplexing. Are you equating the value, or observational skills, of pilots in general to that of this individual example where it seems probably that there was a misidentification? I'm sorry if that wasn't your intention but that's the way it came across when reading it.

That's a valid question. I think if you take my comments in isolation, it may appear I'm using faulty logic to draw sweeping generalizations about a group of people such as pilots based on anecdotal evidence. That's not my intent. To determine my intent, please put my commentary in the context of the entire thread, with references to conclusions by Dr Hynek, the prolific investigator, and other claims by Jim Oberg regarding generalizations about pilots not being good UFO witnesses, and in particular their ability to misidentify astronomical objects. To remind you of one such earlier post to help put my comments in perspective:

Originally posted by JimOberg
www.zipworld.com.au...

Experienced UFO investigators realize that pilots, who instinctively and quite properly interpret visual phenomena in the most hazardous terms, are not dispassionate observers. Allen Hynek wrote: "Surprisingly, commercial and military pilots appear to make relatively poor witnesses..." The quote is from "The Hynek UFO Report", page 261 (Barnes and Noble reprint). (271 in original Dell, Dec 1977) He found that the best class of witnesses had a 50% misperception rate, but that pilots had a much higher rate: 88% for military pilots, 89% for commercial pilots. the worst of all categories listed. Pilots could be counted on to perceive familiar objects -- aircraft and ground structures -- very well, Hynek continued, but added a caveat:

"Thus it might surprise us that a pilot had trouble identifying other aircraft, but it should come as no surprise that the majority of pilot misidentifications were of astronomical objects."

Dell page 271

Posters in this thread have challenged that assertion about pilots not being good witnessses, and my anecdotes are not intended to make a claim on their own of pilot capabilities, but to show that in a UFOlogy record of pilot UFO sightings, the first two cases on the recording do appear to be misidentifications of astronomical objects as stated in Oberg's post, which lends some anecdotal support to the claims, however if your point is that it falls far short of a complete verification of the assertion, I agree, but that wasn't my intent. I've never investigated as many UFO sightings as Hynek and probably never will so I'm deferring to his experience in these matters to some extent for the bigger picture. However I would like to point out the language in that recording I posted which also includes what i perceive to be an anecdotal example for an assertion that Jim Oberg made, that the pilots tend to think in the context of their experience:

Originally posted by JimOberg
Here's a good example of why Kean may have it backwards.

Writes Kean,

Twenty-two military cases in the Weinstein catalogue involve near misses, and six include reported ‘dogfights,’ or combat maneuvers, between the UFOs and the military aircraft. I conclude that these incidents clearly demonstrate that in no way are these examples of natural events, but rather that UFOs are phenomena with a deliberate behavior. The physical nature of UFOs has been proved.

May I suggest an alternate explanation to why two different classes of pilots report UFOs so differently? Because they perceive the UFOs based on their experience and training and interpret unidentified visual phenomena in terms of what they expect to see?

Kean's view, that the UFOs deliberately behave differently when they know the type of pilot they are being seen by, seems a 'stretch' to me.

The pilot ruling out the meteor explanation because it was "in level flight" I thought was an interesting use of the word "flight" when there's really no evidence the object was "flying" in the sense that I would think of an airplane as flying. In other words, it made no types of flight maneuvers to suggest it was "flying", and we don't normally think of meteors as "flying", do we? Yet the pilot chose that terminology, in spite of the fact that the appearance and motion of the object appears to be consistent with a space rock colliding with the atmosphere. To the pilot's credit, he does say something like "Initially we thought it was a plane, but realized later that it may not have been" (a plane).

Jim Oberg's explanation sounds more logical to me than Leslie Kean's explanation of the discrepancy in observations between military and commercial pilots.

Originally posted by epicvision
I listened to Keane on C2C last week and she was pretty knowledgeable but I couldn't help but think at times that she was a counter op.. kind of like Lazar.

I wondered how long that would take... We see this over and over again in this so called ‘field’ — people who wish to deal in documented facts only, who don't talk about the ETH as a proven fact, are almost immediately accused of being government agents.

Care to at least share with us your theory on why Kean is part of a ‘counter op’? What's the reason behind your insinuation?

Michio Kaku will talk about this book at 4:45 EST today on MSNBC.

Uploaded it to Youtube: www.youtube.com...

[edit on 23-8-2010 by hinsch]

There's a lively discussion over at amazon.com including some particularly pointed rebuttals of some of my own comments! What do you guys here advise I respond with?

www.amazon.com...=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Originally posted by hinsch
Michio Kaku will talk about this book at 4:45 EST today on MSNBC.

Uploaded it to Youtube: www.youtube.com...

[edit on 23-8-2010 by hinsch]

Thank you so much for this.

Uforadio

Whoa. Well, I would advise you not to respond at all. That person doesn't seem to be well. The only wise thing to do there would be to click the ‘report this’ link. Other than that, you'll only be fueling the fire.