Astronaunt Credibility: What do we believe?

Originally posted by SayonaraJupiter

Why was Al Worden fired? He was fired for the Postage Stamp Scandal .... but I also believe .... he was fired for making statements on TV that embarrassed Dave Scott and for making comments to newspapers "... it looked like a very large floodlight on a stage." All three of these could damage the reputation of NASA.

Thanks for the link -- I hadn't seem it. He does indeed say he was 'fired'. But as you may note, he really wasn't.

Re the floodlight on the stage during his EVA -- did anyone respond to my question as to WHY he might reasonably have made that analogy? What was the unique feature of his spacewalk that could have justified it?

ADD: DW responded correctly that Worden was the first man in history to make a spacewalk between worlds, in deep space -- where the only light source was the sun, not any backlighting bounced off ground or sky. Shadows were stark. Seems like a reasonable use of an analogy with a floodlight.

reply to post by SayonaraJupiter

Both his book and his interview are primary source materials. Deal with it. Al Worden says in the interview "I was fired."

And Richard Nixon said: "I am not a crook."



Please stop trying to hijack this thread.

I was not aware that any of the astronauts except for Cooper had actually seen a UFO. I think Aldrin and Mitchell have sometimes tried to stir-up publicity for an interview by mentioning UFOs without actually saying anything definite.

Anyway, that is my opinion. I'm a believer, but I don't believe anything Aldrin or Mitchell say on UFOs.

Originally posted by cloudyday
I was not aware that any of the astronauts except for Cooper had actually seen a UFO. .....

His accounts are the best known, but do not involve actual space missions.

My beef has been that nobody else, AFAIK, has ever actually investigated his stories -- they just accepted them at face value due to VIP privilege, I guess. My own extensive investigations, interviews, and document acquisitions, posted on line long ago, remain ignored by proponents. Pretending there's no possible prosaic explanation is not a good basis for earth-shaking paradigm shifts, IMHO.

reply to post by Cosmic911


Of course they're credible, they're about as credible as it can get! We won't take regular citizens accounts usually because we don't think they know anything, the astronauts are trained, experienced directly, I mean what more do we want out of them?

The only way would be if they were receiving something else as a payment or incentive, which I see is the opposite of happening. The In-Doc that was given to them after coming back to Earth appears to have worn off...

People tend to turn there noses up at all the "HIGHLY CREDIBLE" government & military officials telling them something, they'd rather wait for the government to tell them its true

These people also worship celebrity's and sit in front of the TV every night like brain dead idiots in a trance, stay in the heard sheeple don't wonder off sheeple, you will follow & listen to me sheeple, keep paying your taxes get up for work & give us all your money sheeple


wakey wakey

I tend to be open minded to anyone's account on seeing UFO`s and this includes the Higher trained jobs like Astronauts and such.
Does there position make them anymore believable for me? not at all under the fancy classification we name them they are still Humans with the ability to lie and tell the truth.
So what I am saying is they are no better then you or me in my book.

But then seeing the UFO`s for oneself helps one believe in the UFO`s and also helps one feel pity for those that claim to have that clearly just wasn`t sure what they seen like chinese lanterns for instance but jump right to the it was a UFO creating the curtain pulled over the true sightings needing separated from fakes..

Anyone can lie and anyone can just plain be wrong in what they think they witnessed. Proof won`t be good enough for discloser without evidence to back it up and that doesn`t matter who you are.

Originally posted by JimOberg
My beef has been that nobody else, AFAIK, has ever actually investigated his stories -- they just accepted them at face value due to VIP privilege, I guess. My own extensive investigations, interviews, and document acquisitions, posted on line long ago, remain ignored by proponents.

Yes but what you did looks like a heck of a lot of work. Trying to track down over a hundred pilots that worked with Cooper decades earlier was no small feat, and I think you admitted that you also needed some luck in addition to all your hard work, to put the pieces together. And you did that decades ago, so someone trying to do that today would probably just run up against dead ends due to the additional time that's passed.

So I suspect whether certain people personally like or dislike you, and trust or distrust you, that your research is probably the best we are likely to ever have on the Cooper UFO sightings. It's a shame more people haven't read your work, I think it's excellent.

And no I'm not a paid shill for NASA to say that, in fact I started out my UFO research from more or less a believer perspective. But rather than search for things that would provide confirmation bias and just agree with my beliefs, I actually looked for the truth, and in the process of doing so, I eventually became more of a skeptic.

So my advice to everyone from my personal experience is, don't look for things that support your beliefs, look for the truth, because your beliefs might be wrong. Mine were, and I admit it, and I might add that I'm not the only ATSer to experience this, there are quite a few others to seek the truth rather than just look for things that agree with them.

And I found Jim Oberg's article on Gordon Cooper's UFOs to be very insightful, so I think everyone with an interest in the topic should read it. You at least need to hear both sides of the story and it's so rare that you hear the other side of the Cooper story, you might be surprised. Once you're armed with both sides of the story, then you're better equipped to decide where the truth lies.

Originally posted by skylightsintheillions
Of course they're credible, they're about as credible as it can get! We won't take regular citizens accounts usually because we don't think they know anything, the astronauts are trained, experienced directly, I mean what more do we want out of them?

A lot other people felt exactly that way when Cooper endorsed a series of money-making aviation industrial projects in the 1980s. But they all turned out to be con jobs [Cooper was one of the victims], and people who believed then exactly as you do now, who believed Cooper's endorsements, lost millions and millions of dollars.

Too bad you didn't get a chance to invest your own life savings in such a project vouched for by Cooper. You might have come to a different conclusion, this time a reality-based one and not a NASA-propaganda-based one.

See www.jamesoberg.com...

It is interesting that Cooper's UFO sighting at Edwards AFB came second hand from his camera men. If he was as gullible as his business dealings indicate, then maybe someone was playing a joke on him.

Originally posted by JimOberg

Originally posted by SayonaraJupiter

Why was Al Worden fired? He was fired for the Postage Stamp Scandal .... but I also believe .... he was fired for making statements on TV that embarrassed Dave Scott and for making comments to newspapers "... it looked like a very large floodlight on a stage." All three of these could damage the reputation of NASA.

Thanks for the link -- I hadn't seem it. He does indeed say he was 'fired'. But as you may note, he really wasn't.

Re the floodlight on the stage during his EVA -- did anyone respond to my question as to WHY he might reasonably have made that analogy? What was the unique feature of his spacewalk that could have justified it?

ADD: DW responded correctly that Worden was the first man in history to make a spacewalk between worlds, in deep space -- where the only light source was the sun, not any backlighting bounced off ground or sky. Shadows were stark. Seems like a reasonable use of an analogy with a floodlight.

edit on 19-10-2011 by JimOberg because: ADD

Dr. Oberg i must ask? why are you so intrested in aliens and ufo's?

Originally posted by Human_Alien

Originally posted by Cosmic911
Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, and Buzz Adrin have publically stated their belief that we have been visited by extraterrestrial entities. These are highly decorated American heroes, M.I.T. Graduates, and experienced combat pilots. What are we to believe? I tend to believe them as credible witnesses. Did they really see E.T. UFOs? Or did they see secret advanced aircraft?

I pose this question to forum members...what are your thoughts on this subject.

Buzz Aldrin has publicly denied any dealing with alien life. In fact he does not believe in UFOs (that we see). He sorta says 'life has to exist outside our planet' but he adamantly denies we know about this.

There is something is amiss with that man. I think the brainwashing did some psychological damage. He became an alcoholic which I s'pose, doesn't mean much except, he lost his will-power.

It's been stated that many astronauts have returned from their mission, depressed. I wonder what causes that? (see: Brainwashing?)

Read Moonshot. Part of it is that once you've been to the Moon, what's left? That was the pinnacle of achievement, so anything that comes after is anti-climatic. Some people handle it well, others don't.

Originally posted by TechniXcality
Dr. Oberg i must ask? why are you so intrested in aliens and ufo's?

First, there's no reason why they can't be real. And even if they're not, that makes the
phenomenon only the most amazing cultural myth of the last half century.

Second, the evidence presented is so garbled, we'd never be able to work through it,
at the current level of research and discussion.

Third, many of the major themes, based on my own experience in spaceflight operations,
are wild goose chases that divert a lot of bright and sincere young people into wasted detours
while distracting serious attention from flight visual anomalies that DO deserve attention.

Fourth, figuring out the prosaic missile/space events behind SOME of the reports has been
a very challenging and rewarding effort in original research and then presentation and defense
of the conclusions. Clearing away 'noise' allows any real 'signal' to emerge more clearly.

Fifth, a lot of anger and viciousness in verbal exchanges, largely if not entirely unjustified,
can only be a toxic social trend that calls for healing and reconciliation by everyone involved.
There are plenty of things to get angry about in today's world, but chimera and fantasies
only divert energies away from truly repairable problems [and yes, it could be that there are
some people who like it that way]..

Originally posted by cloudyday
It is interesting that Cooper's UFO sighting at Edwards AFB came second hand from his camera men. If he was as gullible as his business dealings indicate, then maybe someone was playing a joke on him.

Cooper didn't have any camera men at Edwards AFB. I posted about that earlier in the thread.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by cloudyday
It is interesting that Cooper's UFO sighting at Edwards AFB came second hand from his camera men. If he was as gullible as his business dealings indicate, then maybe someone was playing a joke on him.

Cooper didn't have any camera men at Edwards AFB. I posted about that earlier in the thread.

hmmmmmm.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by cloudyday
It is interesting that Cooper's UFO sighting at Edwards AFB came second hand from his camera men. If he was as gullible as his business dealings indicate, then maybe someone was playing a joke on him.

Cooper didn't have any camera men at Edwards AFB. I posted about that earlier in the thread.

And, CloudyDay, -IF- you ever bothered to read my report on that story, you'd see that the cameramen's story was immediately filed as a Blue Book report, where it remains accessible in the national archives, and was latered researched more deeply and then was a key part of Dr. James MCDonald's pro-UFO testimony to the US Congress in 1968. Gordon Cooper's name doesn't appear in ANY of those contemporary documents.

Cooper used details from my OWN report, a draft of which I sent to him in 1986, to fill in some details about the camera crew in his 'Leap of Faith' autobiography.

Another data point of how the story evolved over the decades in order to make him more and more the central figure of a more and more extraordinary event is THIS item from my 1976 research log of how Cooper had described the encounter to Jack Acuff, head of NICAP, in the early 1970's:

March 5, 1976. Acuff tells me: "I talked to Cooper several years ago. He is into weird stuff, but he said he hadn't seen any UFOs on his space flights/" (Note: BEST EYESIGHT IN ASTRONAUT CORPS). "He did talk about a UFO in Germany that he chased and then decided was a weather balloon."

You know, I have commented for the last 3 years that disclosure would not happen soon, mainly because of so many other important issues on the presidents list, that if he did so, it could cost him an election....

Now I believe the opposite. I think disclosure is going to happen very soon, and not for the reasons we thought. I think it will be dropped to get the heat off so many other things that are going on. There is so much public unrest, with the OWS, the Iran issue, the Pakistan issues and banks and real estate... Dropping this now would publicly decimate those issues in trade for a revelation of another kind. I really think this is the way it is going to go.... Politicians are very good at these smoke screens, and this one will be a heavy fog. We will get what we want, in trade for so many other things that are important.... Don't even know if I like this or not.

reply to post by Cosmic911


NASA lies on a daily basis and Astronauts are simply employees. Sure they went into space and have seen what most people on earth never will but that does not make them heroes. They swallow and follow the party line, they are paid to. I would not trust what one told me anymore than I would trust their employer.

reply to post by MollyStewart

NASA lies on a daily basis ....

Wow. Daily, huh? If true, that is huge news. Notify Congress immediately, and provide your proof of that claim. They may be happy to know this, as they evaluate its funding plans in future.

Before you tell Congress, how about a peek at what you got, here in the thread? Pretty please.

Anyone can lie and anyone can just plain be wrong in what they think they witnessed. Proof won`t be good enough for discloser without evidence to back it up and that doesn`t matter who you are.

reply to post by Connman


This is an excellent quote/observation. It is perhaps the real reason for not having the "disclosure" everyone talks about all the time. There is simply no tangible evidence to support it?