Leslie Kean on UFOs.

Originally posted by karl 12
Hey Jim, I know you like to set yourself up as a 'UFO expert' (link) and routinely advertise your homepage on these boards but, with the possible exception of the rather threadbare 'debunks' below, I don't think I've ever seen you address any of the incidents mentioned in the above post.

You don't think I'm an expert? Breaks my heart....

I've offered prosaic explanations for dozens of the top UFO stories, as measured by their popularity in mainstream UFO literature and TV documentaries. Is your complaint merely that I haven't solved them ALL? These were cases close to my professional specialization of spaceflight operations, so I brought some expertise to the arena that had hitherto been lacking -- you do agree?

Let's start on common ground: do you agree with my prosaic explanations for such classic cases as the crescent UFO wave over Russia in 1967, the STS-48 zig-zag UFO video, the STS-80 ('Musgrave') appearing dots, the 1984 Minsk airliner case [multiple pilot witnesses, EM and physiological effects, radar], the Gemini-7 'Borman bogie', Gordon Cooper's 1957 'Edwards AFB Landing", the recent Los Angeles "mystery missile", and the 1977 Petrozavodsk 'jellyfish'? If not, where do they fail? If you don't accept those explanations, it's kind of pointless for me to do others.

reply to post by JimOberg


Hey Jimbo, I'm sure you have provided prosaic explanations for some of the (classic?) cases you mention and your ego seems to reflect that - my specific point in the last post was more about dealing with your outright reluctance to address specific UFO cases whilst still dogmatically clinging to your belief in the 'null hypothesis' - I also brought up the fact that a great many 'official' government explanations appear spurious, contrived or just plain ridiculous and asked your opinion on Dr Mcdonald's statement - he seemed to think many USAF 'debunks' were 'absurdly erroneous' - do you share his views and if not why not?

Finaly I'd like to ask you why you haven't had the courtesy to reply to Leslie Kean's rebuttal:

Kean’s book has been received positively, but it hasn’t been well-received by everyone. MSNBC’s James Oberg wrote a highly critical article in September about it. MSNBC offered Kean space on their website for a rebuttal, which she took advantage of, and expressed much appreciation for the opportunity to do so. LiveScience quickly called the two articles the beginning of a “UFO Battle“. The speculation from LiveScience left readers waiting for a rebuttal from Oberg to Kean.

A rebuttal never came. The battle was over, just like that.

link

Originally posted by karl 12

Hey Jimbo, I'm sure you have provided prosaic explanations for some of the (classic?) cases you mention and your ego seems to reflect that - my specific point in the last post was more about dealing with your outright reluctance to address specific UFO cases whilst still dogmatically clinging to your belief in the 'null hypothesis...

.

After this opening, you lecture me on my not having courtesy?

Kean’s book has been received positively, but it hasn’t been well-received by everyone. MSNBC’s James Oberg wrote a highly critical article in September about it. MSNBC offered Kean space on their website for a rebuttal, which she took advantage of, and expressed much appreciation for the opportunity to do so. LiveScience quickly called the two articles the beginning of a “UFO Battle“. The speculation from LiveScience left readers waiting for a rebuttal from Oberg to Kean.

A rebuttal never came. The battle was over, just like that.

I must confess I've given and gotten some kicks at eye-gouging ball-crushing face-farting mud wrestling in this arena, but I'm tired of seeing it as blood sport. Kean never touched my points except to misinterpret and misreport them. There was no 'there' there to counterpunch.

Closer to home, the 'what-about-THIS-one?' gambit is an old, old piece of argumentative trickery that promises nothing but years and years of pointless effort by skeptical investigators. There's always another unsolved case. We still don't know where Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater went.

The heart of the argument, as I see it, is the claim that there exists a body of reports that are fundamentally NON-explainable in prosaic terms, so reasoning drives us to accept the existence of an unknown stimulus, or many of them.

When such a data set is presented, to disprove this hypotheses does not require a doubter to find explanations for ALL of the stories. What is sufficient to make the argument fail is to find cases in which the claim of utter non-explainability is unpersuasive.

When the subject is pilot cases, an investigation which finds numerous explainable cases among the sanctified NON-explainable data set is adequate to prevent the hypothesis of undeniably unknown stimuli from carrying the day. This is exactly what my article did, and which you (and Kean) evidently didn't even notice.,

The 'null hypothesis' is NOT that unknown stimuli do NOT exist -- you can't have been paying attention if you even read it -- but that no unknown stimulus is NECESSARY to create the entire gamut of UFO perceptions and experiences which flood our culture. Every type of report -- including those from pilots regarding motion and EMI and radar detection -- can be shown by example to be generatable by 'ordinary' processes.

Once that is established -- and you do not appear eager to dispute that -- there remains no need to multiply entitities beyond requirement for explanation. Somebody named Occam wrote that down first. If one cause works, additional causes aren't NEEDED.

This by no means rules out the likelihood of unknown stimuli -- in fact, I fully expect there to be numerous types out there -- or even of ETI visitations. These would be delicious to identify, characterize, and document. But as for modern ufology's approach to the problem -- how well has it been working lately? Why not try a little more intellectual vigor and discipline? It's worked elsewhere.

Originally posted by JimOberg
. Every type of report -- including those from pilots regarding motion and EMI and radar detection -- can be shown by example to be generatable by 'ordinary' processes.

EVERY? Or do you mean in every case we can twist the known facts, disbelieve the personal accounts and stretch our imaginations to force-fit a possible explanation?...

I must admit Jim that I have learned quite a bit from your posts and your skepticism has helped me to be more discerning in looking at some individual cases, but the attitude and ego sometimes makes reading your posts painful. You seem to think if you can find a possible explanation for an event (no matter how unlikely), then it must be true and all other possibilities are pointless and/or silly...


Once that is established -- and you do not appear eager to dispute that -- there remains no need to multiply entitities beyond requirement for explanation.

reply to post by Toxicsurf


This is what bothers me. The lack of interest for the witnesess. All we hear are people saying that we make bad witnesess. But it seems no matter how many people witness a ufo account, it does not matter because we make bad witnesess. It seems we are "bad witnesess" only when it comes to the paranormal.

Take the Coyne Helicopter / UFO Incident. Here we have more than one witness, plus a witness on the ground. The craft at one point was right by the helicopter. Close enough for the witnesess to get a close look. The object also filled the helicopter with light.


And what do some de-bunkers say? It was a meteor. Now, if you go by what the witnesess saw, then how the hell can it be a meteor? But these de-bunkers have that same old excuse to fall back on, and thats "we make bad witnesess" To these people human beings are completly dumb when it comes to Witnessing anything.

Originally posted by Toxicsurf

Originally posted by JimOberg
. Every type of report -- including those from pilots regarding motion and EMI and radar detection -- can be shown by example to be generatable by 'ordinary' processes.

EVERY? Or do you mean in every case we can twist the known facts, disbelieve the personal accounts and stretch our imaginations to force-fit a possible explanation?...

I must admit Jim that I have learned quite a bit from your posts and your skepticism has helped me to be more discerning in looking at some individual cases, but the attitude and ego sometimes makes reading your posts painful. You seem to think if you can find a possible explanation for an event (no matter how unlikely), then it must be true and all other possibilities are pointless and/or silly...

I'm glad you're learning, as am I. Let's proceed a bit farther.

When I said every 'type' I did not say, or mean, every ONE. The existence of humanly-unexplainable stories alone is not evidence for extraordinariness unless you assume human omniscience and eidetic memory and total rationality -- with a touch of omnipotence thrown in. But thats unrealisitc. In every field of human activity there's gonna be a fraction of events we never can explain.

And nothing 'must' be true -- if I've ever seemed to argue that, please excuse my unclarity and expressive clumsiness. We always judge ranges of possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. Isn't it one of the most obvious clues to a closed mind when you encounter the phrase, "I have no doubt that...X"?

By all means lets debate the interpretations, and the quality of discourse on ATS is remarkably imaginative and truth-seeking. What dismays me is the often expressed view that some investigation should NOT be done, or some contextual information should NOT be known, or that things MUST be true because of sincere personal beliefs.

reply to post by JimOberg


To be honest Jim, I've been asking you about those cases for years and you always find a way of not actualy addressing them - it's quite remarkable realy.

I also always try to ask you direct questions, it seems this doesn't work either.

Give me a shout when you're ready to discuss the realy interesting cases in Ufology... instead of posting lots of words without realy saying anything.

Originally posted by Jay-morris
Take the Coyne Helicopter / UFO Incident. Here we have more than one witness, plus a witness on the ground. The craft at one point was right by the helicopter. Close enough for the witnesess to get a close look. The object also filled the helicopter with light.


And what do some de-bunkers say? It was a meteor.

Jay-morris, I have to say the interview with the helicopter pilot is one of the most compelling UFO testimonies I've ever heard and it's one of the reasons I first became interested in the subject - I'm sure you've seen it before but for anyone who hasn't, here's the clip taken from the excellent thread by Internos - see 0:40

The Coyne incident, Mansfield, Ohio, 1973

Cheers.

Thanks Karl, I must have missed it the first time around but the "green light" sounds just like the Frederick Valentich incident in Australia...

Originally posted by JimOberg
The existence of humanly-unexplainable stories alone is not evidence for extraordinariness unless you assume human omniscience and eidetic memory and total rationality -- with a touch of omnipotence thrown in. But thats unrealisitc. In every field of human activity there's gonna be a fraction of events we never can explain.

Translation: I'm not going to discuss the strongest multiple-witness/triangulated UFO visual cases on record. I'm just going to pretend they can be explained, we merely need to assume no more than that the observers were simply mistaken about the core aspects of the event. And if there is corroborating physical evidence such as radar corroboration or film or photographs or landing traces, these surely must have been faked, misinterpreted, or just simply be flawed uncorrelated incidents.

Obviously, Oberg has set the goal posts for "evidence" arbitrarily high, observers need to have photographic memory, be omniscient and be fully rational human beings. Since even no scientist alive wil match these criteria, I wonder where Oberg got these scientific standards from. In short, there exists no observer on this planet which could ever expect to meet Oberg's criteria to be considered "evidence for extraordinariness".

What is "unrealistic" are Obergs' own expectations and his unwillingness to evaluate the better cases on record. Square peg, round hole, something which Oberg seems to have serious trouble with.

reply to post by jclmavg


And this is the problem with the subject. There are so many de-bunkers out there who just hate to leave something unexplained, so thats wen the stupid explanations and "bad witnesess" raise their ugly heads.

I mean, you look at the skeptics society. We have all these people come together to de-bunk everything. Even hold confernces to de-bunk everything. So, you have to ask yourself, why! To me, its like a cult. These people don't care about the truth, even though they say they do. They love de-bunking, and they love trying to be clever.

Ok, here is another example. Go to the bad Astronomy website. There is a thread about Michio Kaku and how he believes that a certain amount of ufo's are unexplained. Read the thread and see how he gets ripped and ridiculed for just saying that!

Yes, its good to be skeptical, but there is a de-bunking cult like problem that refuses to take the subjet seriously, even though the evidence is overwhelming that something odd is flying in our air-space,be it ET, secret militery craft, unexplained natural phenomenon etc

Originally posted by jclmavg

Originally posted by JimOberg
The existence of humanly-unexplainable stories alone is not evidence for extraordinariness unless you assume human omniscience and eidetic memory and total rationality -- with a touch of omnipotence thrown in. But thats unrealisitc. In every field of human activity there's gonna be a fraction of events we never can explain.

Translation: I'm not going to discuss the strongest multiple-witness/triangulated UFO visual cases on record. I'm just going to pretend they can be explained, we merely need to assume no more than that the observers were simply mistaken about the core aspects of the event. And if there is corroborating physical evidence such as radar corroboration or film or photographs or landing traces, these surely must have been faked, misinterpreted, or just simply be flawed uncorrelated incidents.

Obviously, Oberg has set the goal posts for "evidence" arbitrarily high, observers need to have photographic memory, be omniscient and be fully rational human beings. Since even no scientist alive wil match these criteria, I wonder where Oberg got these scientific standards from. In short, there exists no observer on this planet which could ever expect to meet Oberg's criteria to be considered "evidence for extraordinariness".

What is "unrealistic" are Obergs' own expectations and his unwillingness to evaluate the better cases on record. Square peg, round hole, something which Oberg seems to have serious trouble with.

Well, let's see how that's supposed to work.

Here's a pilot case with reported EM effects. It's on the main 'unsolvable cases' data bases.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I contend it was caused by a rocket launching, and the pilot reports of the object's range and motion were seriously garbled and mistaken, as were the claims of instrumental malfunctions.

Read it and tell me -- is this the kind of solution you would accept?

Example 2: The famous 'Minsk airliner' of 1984. Listed as 'unsolvable' in all the top UFO databases.

www.msnbc.msn.com...

I contend that it was a Soviet sub-launched missile test, badly misperceived by the witnesses who added in extraneous coincidental details.

Note that the strength of the solution -- do you accept it, by the way? -- is due to luck -- the presence of a group of geographically dispersed witnesses, and the co-pilot's extraordinary effort to draw the object's shifting shapes in his logbook -- drawings which could later be compared to the visual patterns of other known missile launchings.

Without that 'luck', I'd be the first to admit that the case would be unexplainable. But not without prosaic explanation -- just without any persuasive evidence to promote that explanation, that ordinary people could find.

Are you following me? You're essentially correct that I merely raise 'possibilities', not proof. But 'proof' is what the proponents of extraordinariness are responsible for -- proof there is NO possible earthly explanation. All I'm doing -- all I have to do -- is raise 'reasonable doubt' and the case remains unproven (but I agree, NOT 'disproven').

Originally posted by Jay-morris
reply to post by jclmavg

 

And this is the problem with the subject. There are so many de-bunkers out there who just hate to leave something unexplained, so thats wen the stupid explanations and "bad witnesess" raise their ugly heads.

I mean, you look at the skeptics society. We have all these people come together to de-bunk everything. Even hold confernces to de-bunk everything. So, you have to ask yourself, why! To me, its like a cult. These people don't care about the truth, even though they say they do. They love de-bunking, and they love trying to be clever.

Ok, here is another example. Go to the bad Astronomy website. There is a thread about Michio Kaku and how he believes that a certain amount of ufo's are unexplained. Read the thread and see how he gets ripped and ridiculed for just saying that!

Yes, its good to be skeptical, but there is a de-bunking cult like problem that refuses to take the subjet seriously, even though the evidence is overwhelming that something odd is flying in our air-space,be it ET, secret militery craft, unexplained natural phenomenon etc

I'm not going to argue with this criticism, because I don't disagree with it. It's why I'm sorta thought 'wobbly' by the main skeptical groups because I'm satisfied to live with uncertainty, and have no problem at all with granting that unsolvED cases exist -- that part-time amateurs can't solve EVERY report (which is the tacit assumption of the UFO believers if there were no 'true UFOs'.).

It's the implicatons of that 'unsolvability' that I think about, and in my view, the fact of an 'unsolved residue' is not proof of an unexplainable stimulus -- just a demonstration of limits of human knowledge which we live with in every other aspect of our lives.

Pilot cases that have been solved often involve space and missile activity [often deeply classified] that can be seen at very long ranges and in truly unearthly visual manifestations -- look at the Canary Islands UFOs of the 1970s and 1980s which turned out to be Trident SLBM tests over the western horizon. Once you realize just HOW bizarre this stuff can look and how HARD it may be to get documentation that it even occurred, the existence of some bizarre pilot stories doesn't seem anywhere near as weird.

reply to post by JimOberg


Its a vert frustrating subject to be in too. Me, i need evidence to believe that some of these ufo's are ET. While there is enough evidence that these things are real, that does not mean they are from another planet,dimension, future etc

What i can't get my head round is this. There have been many militery sightings of ufo's. Many of these cases involve multiple witnesess and backed up by radar. Surely this would make the governemts sit up and take notice. I just find it hard to believe that they just sweep it under the carpet and say there is nothing to it.

So, a part of me thinks that governments do take ufo's very seriously. They just don't want us to know how serious they take ufo's.

Its like the ufo over iran (1976) What a great case this is. Multiple witnesess, plane malfuction and radar hit. I mean, what else could it be other than a ufo, be it ET or man made.

Originally posted by Jay-morris
reply to post by JimOberg

 

Its a very frustrating subject to be in too. .

Perhaps if enough people agreed on a strategy of what to do, arguing over specific cases would be less central to the discussion. There remains such a wide array of potential hypotheses for some of the reports -- ranging from genuine ETI visits to military security drills testing how far and fast classified material spreads as gossip, to ad hoc cover stories for 'Broken Arrow' drills [as I witnessed while at Kirtland AFB in the early 1970s].

I still think our imaginations are only barely capable -- if even at all -- of conjuring up a relatively complete set of potential stimuli. These threads help.

I have looked into a number of cases that remain unexplained and unexplained they remain until other wise, that in its self opens up possibilities and one of these possibilities is an ET origin.To simply dismiss this is not to sleep with one eye OPEN on the nature of this UFO enigma; More often than not UFO cases that are backed up with solid reliable witnesses ect and are hard to debunk are usually the cases that debunker's avoid; We all do not know all there is to know and the ones who claim they do are the ones to avoid;J. Allen Hynek one of "blue books" principle investigators in his latter years summon it up for me;

In 1977, at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, Hynek presented his thoughts in his speech "What I really believe about UFOs." "I do believe," he said, "that the UFO phenomenon as a whole is real, but I do not mean necessarily that it's just one thing. We must ask whether the diversity of observed UFOs . . . all spring from the same basic source, as do weather phenomena, which all originate in the atmosphere", or whether they differ "as a rain shower differs from a meteor, which in turn differs from a cosmic-ray shower." We must not ask, Hynek said, what hypothesis can explain the most facts, but we must ask, which hypothesis can explain the most puzzling facts.[13] "There is sufficient evidence to defend both the ETI and the EDI hypothesis," Hynek continued. As evidence for the ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) he mentioned, as examples, the radar cases as good evidence of something solid, and the physical-trace cases.

Then he turned to defending the EDI (extradimensional intelligence) hypothesis. Besides the aspect of materialization and dematerialization he cited the "poltergeist" phenomenon experienced by some people after a close encounter; the photographs of UFOs, some times on only one frame, not seen by the witnesses; the changing form right before the witnesses' eyes; the puzzling question of telepathic communication; or that in close encounters of the third kind the creatures seem to be at home in earth's gravity and atmosphere; the sudden stillness in the presence of the craft; levitation of cars or persons; the development by some of psychic abilities after an encounter. "Do we have two aspects of one phenomenon or two different sets of phenomena?"

Hynek asked.[14] Finally he introduced a third hypothesis. "I hold it entirely possible," he said, "that a technology exists, which encompasses both the physical and the psychic, the material and the mental. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man's. We have gone from Kitty Hawk to the moon in some seventy years, but it's possible that a million-year-old civilization may know something that we don't ... I hypothesize an 'M&M' technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology."

link; en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by JimOberg
Let's start on common ground: do you agree with my prosaic explanations for such classic cases as Gordon Cooper's 1957 'Edwards AFB Landing"

No.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't you explanation the witnesses saw a weather balloon and Gordon Cooper is a liar ?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by JimOberg
look at the Canary Islands UFOs of the 1970s..

Hey Jim have you managed to uncover any more information on that case and if so, could you post it in the relevant thread?


Canary Island UFO Sphere Incident, 1976


Last time I looked you just knew missiles were being let off in the Atlantic ocean 'somewhere' and you ignored large swathes of Spanish Air force file testimony which didn't fit snugly with your 'theory'.

I'm not saying your missile explanation is untenable, it's just that without further information, parading it around as 'conclusive' seems a little disingenuous - look forward to hearing some further information.

Originally posted by jclmavg

Translation: I'm not going to discuss the strongest multiple-witness/triangulated UFO visual cases on record. I'm just going to pretend they can be explained, we merely need to assume no more than that the observers were simply mistaken about the core aspects of the event. And if there is corroborating physical evidence such as radar corroboration or film or photographs or landing traces, these surely must have been faked, misinterpreted, or just simply be flawed uncorrelated incidents.

Jclmavg, I think you've pretty much summed it up there mate - very succinctly put.

I can't see how 'the null hypothesis' works on cases like the Portage County incident and to my mind it takes 'denialism' to a whole new level.

Object:

"They said the craft they chased was about 50 feet across and 15 to 20 feet high with a large dome on its top and an antenna jutted out from the rear of the dome"

Thread

Cheers.

Originally posted by Schaden

Originally posted by JimOberg
Let's start on common ground: do you agree with my prosaic explanations for such classic cases as Gordon Cooper's 1957 'Edwards AFB Landing"

No.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't you explanation the witnesses saw a weather balloon and Gordon Cooper is a liar ?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I'm not interested right now in what the sighting actually was, although the AF did say it was a weather balloon and included deploy logs in the Blue Book file. I've seen those documents -- don't you think you should see them too before jumping to a conclusion, or is too much evidence just too confusing?

Gettys, Bittick, and through them McDonald, supplemented by Davis, report that the object drifted slowly past. Gettys and Davis, when asked directly, denied any knowledge of Cooper being involved anywhere in the event.

Cooper himself in his 1978 interview with OMNI makes NO claims of direct involvement, or of a landing, and says his information "is all second hand". Spiegel, who did the interview, says he still has the tape.

What is YOUR explanation for the chasm between Cooper's later versions and with all the other witnesses AND his own earlier version?

Mine is to speculate that confabulation, letting a narrative improve for dramatic effect, is the process that led to this apparent dichotomy. Nobody's lying, in my view.