Testimony of an Air Traffic Controller

Originally posted by cripmeister

Originally posted by Brighter

No, what you did was cite a chapter in the unscientific Condon Report, whose conclusions regarding the UFO subject were predetermined prior to the investigation even beginning. This is actually a testament to the strength of evidence for UFOs - that the USAF would have to literally pay off a university to conduct a bogus study to divert the public's attention away from it.

You seem reluctant to directly adress the facts and conclusions in Hartmanns chapter, why is that?

But your 'questioning' is ill-informed. For starters, you supported your position by quoting one of the most unscientific studies ever performed. It's not proper to support an argument with an excerpt from a pseudo-scientific study.

Again, where in the chapter is Hartmann being pseudo-scientific? Please provide citations instead of blanket statements.

It's not only possible, it's quite common. Any psychologist or psychiatrist with a basic level of competence can discern within minutes someone's general psychological dispositions.

So in this "residue of cases" were all witnesses evaluated by a psychologist/psychiatrist?

Regarding peoples' memories being contaminated, this is not an issue with cases of multiple, isolated witnesses. I'd even argue that it's hardly an issue with the vast majority of other cases. It's actually quite rare, and would probably qualify as some sort of rare mental disorder, for someone to be so impressionable as to allow their memories be effortlessly distorted to a degree that would fundamentally alter their original perception. Such extreme results are generally only achieved via prolonged suggestion conditioning that involves the administering of specific chemical compounds.

So certain, so confident and without citing any current scientific research. One word, opinions.

Even in one of the most vivid encounters, the Ariel School, Zimbabwe incident, you have an extraordinarily competent psychiatrist in John Mack (M.D. from Harvard, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard), who interviewed the children and found no reason to disbelieve what they were saying. And I'm fairly certain one of the first things he was trying to rule out was 'memory contamination'.

John Mack? Come on! I seem to have overestimated your critical thinking skills.

And once again the swords of both skeptic and believer come together with the almighty crash of steel

Regardless of personal opinions on the Condon Report, it still had a lot of unexplained unknowns in it, albeit the reader was neglected this fact in the summary report.

John Mack was very well respected and if anything, it's good that someone gave their time in studying this field, I would also have to say, he was not stupid and if he believed there was something to this phenomenon (whether aliens or not), then I would tend to agree with his views.

Being personally honest, based on everything I have read, watched, listened and experienced, I would say that the genuine, unexplained UFO reports are something that is truly different from anything we currently know. I say that, obviously not knowing for sure, but on all the evidence I have found, the things being reported are not from around here.

reply to post by Druscilla


1). Personally, I don't think you understand the subject matter; I think you're missing the point

2) ATC aren't saying they 'Aliens' they're saying "it's craft they don't know what it is because it doesn't co-inside what is currently in the military as they are flown today...

3) YOU are saying THEY are saying this.. but their not ..

4) how you say you can't say what it is and not even from a scientific view, of simply as questions of deductive reasoning ?? just to state that 'it's a unknown' .. EVERYONE is saying that, no one is denying that fact at all ~! .. what we're trying to find out through credible first hand account is .........WHAT is it~!

reply to post by Komodo


I suggest you work on your reading comprehension.
my rebuff on claims of 'Aliens' or "intelligently controlled artificially manufactured craft" is aimed at those who confuse the issue by making statements to the extent of using the words like "Aliens" and "craft".

The word "craft" implies an artificially manufactured vehicle.
The word "craft" implies intelligent control.
By extension intelligent control implies "aliens"

There are NO aliens, and NO craft until there's sufficient data available to reasonably posit such.
There IS a PHENOMENON.

I don't see you attempting to "figure out" what any of this is. I see you (majestic plural indicating you personally and similar like-minded people) agitating for an explanation for something there is as of yet no explanation for.

Just accept that we don't know what it is and there are currently no sufficiently sound explanations for what the phenomenon may be.
Agitating for speculative fantasy as well as using words like "alien", and "craft" is irresponsible, sloppy, and altogether outright fallacy where there's very little real indication for the justification of using such labels.

Your dance partner, for instance, last left us with a post screaming "I know what I saw!!!!!!"
What does that say?
It says to me that someone already has their mind made up and are completely closed off to any rational examination of the subject.
They want the answer to be "aliens" so badly, they refuse to accept any other answer, or even proper examination.

If someone wants to invest their faith in such fantasies, they're more than entitled to do so. Good luck. Running amok making completely unfounded claims without benefit of proper examination attempting to gain converts to whatever cause they're flying a flag for, or just making a scene in wiggling their claimed experience around in public like it's something special is just plain ridiculous.

If you don't want to read my opinion, don't ask it. Don't engage me. Don't read my posts. Simple.

I keep getting asked "what is it?" and I keep saying "I don't know". What part of "I don't know" is causing trouble in the understanding department?

Just a question to anyone. What's the South American, European, African, and Asian equivalent to NORAD, respectively?

Are there various governing bodies that handle a specific region/continent or is it more localized per country outside of North America?

reply to post by Druscilla

I keep getting asked "what is it?" and I keep saying "I don't know". What part of "I don't know" is causing trouble in the understanding department?

because you're stating that THIER eyes are NOT seeing what they SAY they are seeing..

ATC's are NOT saying they are Aliens.. you're stating that they/we ARE saying that .. they are NOT, they are merely stating what they are OBSERVING ..

you're are saying that intelligent controll craft are aliens........I've NEVER said that ..and they NEVER said that...all I've stated in the past is that it's super black budget military projects, so black that even the black budget guys think they're the only ones with the budget, or... it's from another parelle galaxie/extra terrestial...due to the fact of credible jet pilot eye witness accounts..

we can all down play it as much as we want .. but, untill we had a personal experience that defies logic and anything we know scientifcally, we'll always be a skepic ..

reply to post by Druscilla
While you are technically correct is saying there is NO alien until we have data to prove otherwise, you must admit we have quite a few cases where there is evidence of supposedly or perceptively intelligently controlled aerial vehicles. Now what they are is still undetermined.

There have also been multiple eyewitness reports of alien-like beings attacking them or in some cases, fleeing from them or alien-like beings in capture (Varginha and Corales flaps).

It is easy to get sucked into and caught up with the North American cases while overlooking the more exotic and unbelievable cases in South/Latin America and Asia, etc.

We need to put everything into perspective and say "while we, the general populace, don't have definitive evidence of ET, we at least have overwhelming visual evidence, credible eyewitness accounts and multiple testimonies to corroborate the alien/UFO link.

Even if 25% of the 5% unknowns are earth-bound non-human entities, I would still consider them "alien" in the sense they are alien to our normal world that we live in. It becomes complex, subjective and semantically driven as we try to define what is alien, terra-bound or unknown.

Originally posted by Jaellma
reply to post by Druscilla

 

While you are technically correct is saying there is NO alien until we have data to prove otherwise, you must admit we have quite a few cases where there is evidence of supposedly or perceptively intelligently controlled aerial vehicles. Now what they are is still undetermined.

There have also been multiple eyewitness reports of alien-like beings attacking them or in some cases, fleeing from them or alien-like beings in capture (Varginha and Corales flaps).

It is easy to get sucked into and caught up with the North American cases while overlooking the more exotic and unbelievable cases in South/Latin America and Asia, etc.

We need to put everything into perspective and say "while we, the general populace, don't have definitive evidence of ET, we at least have overwhelming visual evidence, credible eyewitness accounts and multiple testimonies to corroborate the alien/UFO link.

Even if 25% of the 5% unknowns are earth-bound non-human entities, I would still consider them "alien" in the sense they are alien to our normal world that we live in. It becomes complex, subjective and semantically driven as we try to define what is alien, terra-bound or unknown.

thx you

for this .. Star~!

reply to post by Komodo


.. and I'm NOT talking about ATCs necessarily, but ATS members, anyone, everyone in general.

ATC sees a dot on a screen.
The dot is unknown.
It acts in ways unaccountable by conventional aircraft.
All they can legitimately say is they had a hit, and it exhibited X "flight" characteristics.

Keep in mind clouds and other meteorological phenomenon show up on radar. It's not impossible that the dot on the screen acting strangely is just ongoing unexplained natural phenomenon, or something else.
Let's not forget meteors, bolides, satellite and other space junk reentry. Further, as you personally like to claim, there's off-the-books black project type flights, and there's also drones where some drones might not even require notification of flight paths and plans, yet, they show up as anomalous dots on the screen.

Anything beyond dot on screen exhibiting X characteristics is speculation on the part of ATC, or anyone else confirming the radar return and activity observed.

As far as naked eyeball observation of anomalous phenomenon by ATS members, I fully reserve the right to question anyone's fitness to accurately account for an unexpected unfamiliar untrained-for visual something.
Eye-witness accounting for any claimed phenomenon is the least important and least reliable element for any supposed claim.
If eyewitness accounting was of any greater importance than just barely above almost worthless, then the overwhelming glut of misidentification and other false positives that make up for some 90% or more reported cases wouldn't be what it is.

A nice video, I enjoyed watching it. His comments do make me wonder if the USA and "the phenomena" really do have some kind of deal in place that leads to all this secrecy (the one made by a former president perhaps ). But it also reminds me that with all this secrecy there is also absolutely no secrecy, because there is always a witness, someone willing to talk about it, but forced by nothing more than a system to not disclose. People themselves do not hold back. Gives (me) plenty to think about. And hopefully this kind of testimony will bring other credible witnesses forward too. So, a mysterious and interesting retrospective by the man, good of him to come forward. Thanks for sharing the vid!

reply to post by Druscilla

As far as naked eyeball observation of anomalous phenomenon by ATS members, I fully reserve the right to question anyone's fitness to accurately account for an unexpected unfamiliar untrained-for visual something. Eye-witness accounting for any claimed phenomenon is the least important and least reliable element for any supposed claim. If eyewitness accounting was of any greater importance than just barely above almost worthless, then the overwhelming glut of misidentification and other false positives that make up for some 90% or more reported cases wouldn't be what it is.

Valid assertion up until the phenomenon is witnessed simultaneously by a multitude of people, many extremely credible folks. If we need to question fitness or hold tight with skepticism of multiple sightings then we ought to do the same for every single thing, person, place or object we witness whenever we step foot outside our door every single morning.

At some point, common sense and logic must prevail over testing methodology.

reply to post by Jaellma


Just as exceptional or fantastic claims require equally exceptional and/or fantastic confirming evidence, the same extreme prejudice should be practiced as it applies to eye witness testimony relating to this phenomenon.

So called multiple witness group sightings are even more deceptive and less trustworthy than a single point source due such factors as:
Cross Contamination
Subconscious Social Sympathetic Collusion
and let's not forget the ever classic Asch Conformity paradigm:


In essence, put a bunch of people together, and regardless the event, even if widely distributed, somewhat confusing, and complicated sufficiently such that one would think no two witnesses would report the same thing, you find, more often than not, there's an uncanny resemblance between accounts with fewer dissimilarities than almost rehearsed sounding assertions of similarities.
This holds true for entirely false assertions where a false assertion is picked up and repeated, and the whole group will confirm they know exactly what they saw, but, what they saw was not what they report.

People are some of the absolute worst recording devices.
It's almost like we're engineered to have purposely misleading memories such we're incapable of relating accurate information on memory alone.

reply to post by Druscilla

So called multiple witness group sightings...

we're not talking about multiple witness group of people at the same time.. we're talking about....

single incidence(s) of observations witnessed by ATC;s and jet fighter and commerical pilots... highly trained to observe and report actrately what they SEE...because of national defense and self safety as well.

When the pilots state .. "i see a matalic object, moving at 5000mph manuvering at right angles 100 yards from my wing tip.." ATC's MUST trust the pilots what they are seeing is truth, it's exactly what they are seeing with the naked eye..

reply to post by Komodo


Okay?
So?
It doesn't make it any more or less an UNKNOWN Phenomenon.

About the only thing relatively consistent with the phenomenon is that in well over Half a Century of investigation and interest in this phenomenon from near every possible social strata worldwide, we continue to lack sufficient data to adequately describe the phenomenon in known terms.

Over 50 years and we have a whole mountain of data that is mostly worthless except as historical example and precedence of FAILURE to come to any unambiguous non-speculative conclusion.

I believe this air traffic controller saw something out of the ordinary. Aswell as most of the other people being interviewed by Greer. Because of the experience these witnesses have, the usual explanation doesn't hold, so these UFO's remain unidentified.
And I would like to know, but these guys deserve some explanation. Even if it is an official 'we don't know what it is, but we're trying to find out'.

(Sorry for my English, it's morning and haven't had my first coffee yet )

reply to post by cripmeister

Originally posted by cripmeister

So in this "residue of cases" were all witnesses evaluated by a psychologist/psychiatrist?

Well I’m glad you asked. Let’s even take it a step further, and take a look at the average psychological profiles of people who have not just seen UFOs, but have claimed to have had an abduction experience and in many cases also claimed to have actually been in a UFO. If anyone, they’d certainly display a high degree of psychological abnormalities, right?

Actually, they don’t. It turns out to be a mere unfounded prejudice that abductees and UFO witnesses are psychologically unstable. The majority of studies indicate that they don’t have a higher rate of mental illness or psychological abnormality than the rest of the population. They’re by all accounts normal people who’ve simply had unusual experiences.

Here’s an excerpt from a Harvard University Gazette article (July 24, 1992) that dealt with Dr. John Mack’s research:

A well-known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Mack reports that of the 60 cases he has worked on he has found, - to his surprise, that after a battery of psychological tests, "no psychiatric or psychosocial explanation for these reports is evident. These people are not mentally ill." He has spent countless therapeutic hours with these individuals only to find that what struck him was the "ordinariness" of the population, including a restaurant owner, several secretaries, a prison guard, college students, a university administrator, and several homemakers.

"The majority of abductees do not appear to be deluded, confabulating, lying, self-dramatizing, or suffering from a clear mental illness," he maintained. He has encountered only one person who showed psychotic features.

source

In another study, Parnell and Sprinkle examined over 200 individuals using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and found that no overt psychological abnormalities were indicated. (“Personality Characteristics of Persons Who Claim UFO Experiences”)

And here’s Stuart Appelle on another study:

Spanos et al. (1993) compared a group of control subjects to 49 individuals who had reported UFO-related experiences. … To assess psychological health, a battery of tests was administered (the schizophrenia subscale of the MMPI, Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale, the Magical Ideation Scale, the Perceptual Aberration Scale, Tellegen’s Differential Personality Questionnaire). The authors found that their encounter subjects scored no lower on any measure of psychological health than the controls, and had higher psychological health scores than the controls on many of the measurements. They conclude that “these findings provide no support whatsoever for the hypothesis that UFO reporters are psychologically disturbed” (p. 628), and “the onus is on those who favor the psychopathology hypothesis to provide support for it” (p. 629). ("The Abduction Experience")

And Appelle concludes from his survey of present studies that “[f]rom a clinical perspective, the data so far are unambiguous. Most abduction experiences cannot be accounted for in terms of known psychological disorder as measured on standardized psychometric tests.” (“The Abduction Experience”).

Some studies, on the other hand, do show that abductees demonstrate higher levels of mental disturbances, but these are dwarfed by the other studies that indicate otherwise. The implication is that these individuals are creating these fantasies, but you could just as easily argue that the very experience of an abduction would obviously have detrimental psychological effects on an individual, and that these are the effects that are being recorded.

In any case, the majority of scientific data suggests that these people on the whole are just as healthy as the general population.

reply to post by cripmeister

Originally posted by cripmeister

You seem reluctant to directly adress the facts and conclusions in Hartmanns chapter, why is that?

I was addressing the fact that the entirety of the Condon Report’s analysis is suspect due to the not so insignificant fact of their having decided on the conclusion prior to the study even taking place, which you yourself seemed a bit reluctant to address.

But the danger in deciding on a conclusion prior to a study is that you run the risk of forcing the investigators into spinning tall tales of circuitous, incomprehensible nonsense, which leads us to the passage you quoted earlier:

An effect important to the UFO problem is demonstrated by the records: the excited observers who thought they had witnessed a very strange phenomenon produced the most detailed, longest, and most misconceived reports, but those who by virtue of experience most nearly recognized the nature of the phenomenon became the least excited and produced the briefest reports. The "excitedness effect" has an important bearing on the UFO problem. It is a selection effect by which the least accurate reports are made more prominent (since the observer becomes highly motivated to make a report), while the most accurate reports may not be recorded.

source

Here’s what he’s saying:

P1: A set of people A who think they witness something strange create long reports.
P2: A set of people B who don’t think they witness something strange create short reports.
P3: Set A create these long reports because they’re excited.
P4: Because they’re excited, they’re more likely to send in a report.
P5: Because these reports are more inaccurate, there will be more inaccurate reports.

What he’s obviously trying hard to conclude is that it’s more likely that the reports they receive are misidentifications, because those people are excited and thus more motivated to send in a report.

This fails on both rational and empirical grounds. First of all, it’s bizarre that he fails to add that it’s also quite possible that people are excited and making accurate observations, and are therefore motivated to make a report that is both accurate and long. Second, he doesn’t even provide an adequate sample set to demonstrate that people creating detailed reports are more likely to misidentify things. (In fact, this itself is flatly contradicted by Blue Book’s findings, where there is a direct correlation between amount of detail and likelihood to be categorized as Unknown.) And finally, even if he could demonstrate that most people who create detailed reports misidentify things (and we’re still waiting on that…), that still doesn’t even come close to demonstrating that all such reports are misidentifications.

Basically he’s trying to say that we can just assume that most of these reports are misidentifications, because those people are more likely to be sending us reports. Aside from assuming what he’s trying to prove (kind of a problem), there are some pretty obvious holes in this argument, which I’ve already pointed out. But furthermore, to actually base the reliability of a report on the length of it seems to me no more reliable than some form of divination, and to be exploiting the most ridiculous, accidental association one could imagine. It’s entirely speculative, presumptive and unscientific. So I’d have to conclude that this “excitedness effect” certainly isn’t anything to get excited about.

So what are your thoughts on Hartmann's passage?

reply to post by Druscilla

Your dance partner, for instance, last left us with a post screaming "I know what I saw!!!!!!"
What does that say?

lol id rather be your dance partner and i do know what i saw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

reply to post by Brighter


Thx .. you ..

Thx you .. & .. thank you ~!! I can now take a sigh of relief ~!

reply to post by Brighter


WOW.. I guess I could have just posted your 2 threads already about Critical Thinking and the UFO Hypothesis I: Confusing the Issues
.. and would have benn done with this arguement .....

LOOOOOONG ago .. !~!

Kudos to ya ~!

Just to add a bit more on this thread and I appreciate, it may be boring to some but here's some audio from the Edwards AFB incident from the 60s, note the confusion from the trained military personnel:



Very much unknowns