"Top Ten" UFO Case - Yukon, Canada, 1996 - BUSTED!?

Robert Sheaffer, on its blog "Bad UFOs: Skepticism, UFOs, and The Universe" expose today this classic case saying that it was only the re-entry of the rocket booster for Cosmos 2335.

On the evening of December 11, 1996, more than 30 people in several different locations in Canada's sparsely-populated Yukon Territories reported seeing a huge "UFO mothership" with rows of lights, flying by as a Close Encounter of the First Kind. (Note that he quotes for the source ATS and the excellent presentation made here back in August 2008 by member "jkrog08")


UFO "Mothership" sighted from the Klondike Highway, Yukon Territory, Dec. 11, 1996.

The documentary film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings lists this "multiple witness sighting in the Yukon" as number eight of the top ten UFO cases of all time. In that film the celebrated "Flying Saucer Physicist" Stanton Friedman says of this case:

"The Yukon case IS emblematic of what a good case should be. I mean, sure, we'd like to have a piece of the craft, we'd like to have the crewmember introduced for dinner. BUT multiple independent witnesses lasting a long time, describing something that's WAY outside the norm, -- there's no way you can make it into a 747, for example [chuckle]. And big, but this was much much bigger than a 747. "

read the whole paper here


Another illustration of the Yukon "UFO Mothership"

The original source for the investigation came from the Canadian satellite expert Ted Molczan

Molczan is probably the world's top civilian expert on observing earth satellites and calculating satellite orbits. Molczan looked into the matter carefully, and came up with an exact match: "the observed phenomena were due to the re-entry of the 2nd stage of the rocket that placed Cosmos 2335 into orbit earlier the same day." Should anyone doubt this, Molczan provides details of the mathematical calculations that support this conclusion.

See Molczan's calculations here Old Unknown Identified as a Re-entry
And of course many thanks to ATS member Jim Oberg that was the first to take a fresh look at this case, quoting Molczan:

Jim Oberg relayed to me a query from British journalist Ian Ridpath, about a UFO sighting in Yukon, on 1996 Dec 12 UTC (evening of Dec 11 PST), described in this 2000 Feb report by Martin Jasek: www.ufobc.ca... Jim wondered whether the reported phenomena could have been related to a satellite launch or decay, so I had a look.

See Jim Oberg's notes on ATS topic here: Yukon UFO "Mothership" Incident: December 11th, 1996, page 10

Another one bites the dust..

TBH Ive never trusted Stanton Friedman's judgment, he comes across as being very sincere and i think he has a genuine interest in the subject but i fully believe that he is prepared to call anything ambiguous a UFO / fly saucer just so he can sell books, documentaries and do lectures to fund his hobby.

The timing and location information is pretty hard to ignore. Unless the alien spacecraft was in the area specifically to monitor the re-entry.

1 MAJOR problem.
According to Jim Oberg.
"Reentries usually cross the sky within a few minutes, max about 3 -- if seen closer to the horizon, a lot shorter."

Now go back and read the witness statements..

Originally posted by UKWO1Phot
1 MAJOR problem.
According to Jim Oberg.
"Reentries usually cross the sky within a few minutes, max about 3 -- if seen closer to the horizon, a lot shorter."

Now go back and read the witness statements..

Quoting Ted Molczan:

Experienced sky watchers on SeeSat-L may find it difficult to believe that anyone could misidentify a re-entry as a spaceship, but human perception is notoriously fallible, and no one is immune. Much depends on the circumstances and personal experience.
Driving through the wilderness under a pitch black sky, and suddenly faced with a slowly moving formation of brilliant lights can be awe-inspiring and even terrifying. The human mind races to make sense of the unfamiliar, drawing on experience that may be inadequate. Depth perception can play tricks, such that something 200 km away, 100 km long, and moving at 7 km/s, seems to be just 200 m away, 100 m long, and moving 7 km/h - the angular velocity is roughly the same.

Taking these considerations into account, the eyewitnesses did a pretty good job, and need not be embarrassed for having perceived more than was there.

This whole Fox Lake incident starts at about 8 PM local time with the first witness “FOX1” driving on Klondike Highway along Fox Lake when he notices a light illuminating a long smooth surface.

Witnesses FOX2 and FOX3 were traveling along the highway(in two separate vehicles) about a half hour later (8:30 PM) and witnessed a huge UFO hovering over the frozen Fox Lake, obviously they immediately stopped their vehicles to further investigate the anomaly.

Around 8:30-9:00 PM, 2 hours drive north the town of Pelly Crossing were seeing this massive UFO as well. “PEL1”( Don Trudeau) was outside just northeast of Pelly when he saw a large row of lights come over the hill.

1 Hours is NOT 3 minutes however you you twist it.

This is a pathetic and laughable grasping-at-straws "explanation" of this sighting. A rocket booster falling to Earth in absolutely NO way matches what the witnesses are describing. Only the feebleminded will buy this.

Originally posted by UKWO1Phot
1 Hours is NOT 3 minutes however you you twist it

But look at how EACH of the witnesses described their own duration of experience -- a few minutes.

Nobody saw it hanging around for an hour. Unless you found another witness report?

You're counting on people remembering the exactly correct time of night they were scared out of their thermals.

Please read up on the 'scatter' of time estimates that is NORMAL for sudden amazing apparitions such as fireballs. You're lucky if they fall within a few hours of each other even when the stimulus is unquestionably simultaneous.

Tha'ts just the way things ARE, rather than how you imagine they OUGHT to be.

Absolutely brilliant!

I love how this underlines in bold face the fallibility of eye-witness testimony.

Further, it brings to question, regarding witnesses, were the witnesses cued, prompted? Were they subtly led during questioning to make claims above and beyond what they actually saw? Were witnesses cherry-picked for their susceptibility to subtle guidance during questioning to 'get' the answer the 'researchers' wanted to hear?

Similar things happen with hypnotic regression led by an unscrupulous, or poorly trained hypnotherapist causing false memory syndrome.

How often have ufo 'researchers' led witnesses into testimonials to claim what the 'researcher' wants to hear?

Timeline
• 7:00 PM - UFO witnessed by 3 Carmack witnesses. Moving initially NNW then changing to NNE.
• 7:45 to 8:15- UFO witnessed in Fox Lake.
• 8:23 PM- UFO in Fox Late witnessed by multiple witnesses moving NNW.
• 8:30 PM- Sighting by two witnesses stopped in the road at Fox Lake, object moving west to east.
• 8:30 PM- UFO seen in Pelly by many witnessed moving in various directions.
• 8:50 PM- UFO seen by witness in Pelly moving various directions.
• *Evening- UFO seen by family in Carmack going NNW.
• *Evening- “FOX6” also saw the UFO, the exact time is unknown.
*Exact time unknown -There are reports from other towns and other witnesses that still need to be substantiated if possible.

- Total time of sighting appears to be from 7:00-10:00 PM.

Still a stretch Jim.

Funny thread, to make it funnier, can someone please post a pic of what the debunker is saying the object actually is?

Edit: Oh the rows of windows

Firstly, surely the solar panels would be the first to break up and secondly, if it didn't burn up, then people would be in major law suits for this major failure.

The Yukon UFO sightings aren't very well-known to me so I haven't got a 'dog in the race' here.

If it was a Cosmos re-entry, I wonder how it was only visible to this location in the Yukon? There are such things as a 'privileged view' whereby perspective and terrain renders something observable only to those in certain locations. Could this be reasonably applicable in this incident?

I've looked at rocket re-entry footage and can appreciate how some might opt for UFO. Still, the footage is hard to equate with the descriptions by the witnesses...either by shape, speed or size. I concede that 'size' is too slippery to base a case on in these situations...



Here's another one slowed down...



I wonder if anyone can find sighting reports of this re-entry from other locations in Canada? It was a reasonable time for people to be out and about and should have received some attention in the press. As an idle afterthought, I wonder why subsequent Cosmos re-entries weren't also misperceived in such a grand way?

Originally posted by Kandinsky
As an idle afterthought, I wonder why subsequent Cosmos re-entries weren't also misperceived in such a grand way?

This situation already occurred in France back in November 1990...

IsaaKoi briefly talk about this well-known and still debated case (at least here in France) in this thread:

Date = 5 November 1990. Time = About 18:00 Zulu and UK time, 19.00 dutch local time.
You probably know better than me (or can easily find out), but I note that the documents refer to a re-entry of a Gorizon/Proton rocket body (or, according to another letter, the Russian Gorizont 21 communications satellite) in the atmosphere cross northern France and Germany around 6 to 6.30pm [GMT] on the evening of 5 November 1990, i.e. the same date and time.

The former explanation was reportedly confirmed by the French Service for the Investigation of Re-Entry Phenomena (reported in the Glasgow Herald, 7 November 1990).

NB : One of the witnesses has denied that the sighting was caused by the re-entry.

In its research, IsaacKoi quoted at the time Jim Oberg's article "Case Studies In Pilot Misperceptions Of "UFOs"...

How good are pilots' "UFO reports"? There is some dispute over whether the features they describe are imaginative interpretations of raw visual stimuli (based on their own aviation experience) or are sound renditions of raw perceptions.

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

Here are two "test cases" that are illustrative: the November 5, 1990 re-entry of the Gorizont/Proton rocket body across northern France and Germany, and the January 28, 1994 launch of Progress TM-21 from Kazakhstan. Both events were observed by airline crews. Arguably, in both cases, the pilots over-interpreted their perceptions and subconsciously introduced "deductions" and "conclusions" to shape their remembered perceptions.

The resulting perceptions look like many other 'classic UFO encounters" reported by pilots, encounters that superficially have a high credibility because of the technical expertise of the witnesses. But both of these man-made events provide a rare opportunity to calibrate pilots' perceptions to what we know was actually being observed, and to raise a caution flag about accepting similar perceptions as gospel.

I don't see any reasons why, if pilots can "over-interpret their perceptions and subconsciously introducted "deductions" and "conclusion" to shape their remembered perceptions", it should be different for the witnesses that saw the 'UFO' from the ground.

Open your eyes peeps, this is just a desperate attempt by a desperate debunker. Swamp gas, Venus, balloons and now this, laughable imo. There may be the odd case where somebody got something wrong in a sighting, but over 30 people saying they saw an object over a mile wide with flashing lights, this one isn't it

As on the earlier thread on this subject, I think a lot of people are rejecting the explanation based on a mistaken belief in what a satellite reentry SHOULD look like, not what past witnesses have described. And the key is the eyeball witnesses, not glary streaks on video which only poorly captures the aewsome moving pattern of fiery dots, crossing the sky horizontally in total silence.

reply to post by Druscilla


I will believe multiple witnesses who observed an object before I believe a mathematician who did not. I have personally seen craft traveling in a straight line at about a thousand feet off the ground horizon to horizon spraying green sparks out of the top and orange sparks out of the bottom and later found out meteorologists called it a meteor. An object under it's own power behaves much different than a falling meteor or space junk.

Report: "As he was walking his flashlight happened to point in the direction of the UFO. As if reacting to his flashlight, the UFO started speeding rapidly toward him."

Reality: the "UFO reacting" to him was entirely in his imagination. The rocket booster did not react to his flashlight.

Report: the UFO was hovering approximately 300 yards in front of the observer. "Hynek Classification: CE1" (Close Encounter of the First Kind).

Reality: the distance to the re-entering booster was approximately 233 km (145 miles), so this was not a "close encounter." At no time did it stop, or hover.

Report: "stars blocked out" by huge UFO.

Reality: the observers were viewing a long train of debris from the disintegrating rocket booster. It was not a solid object, and thus could not have "blocked out" stars. However, the light from the reentry may have made nearby stars difficult to see.

This guy has it nailed. First, you decide what the witnesses saw. Then you ignore any witness testimony that doesn't fit that explanation. I'm in the process of disembunking the O'Hare Airport sighting myself. Here's what I have so far:

Report: Witnesses saw a metallic, disk-shaped object hovering above the terminal.

Reality: Witnesses saw an airplane taking off. At no time did it hover.

Report: It was disk-shaped.

Reality: It was shaped like an airplane. The disk shape was in the observers' imaginations.

Report: The object took off straight up and left a circular hole in the overcast.

Reality: The airplane rose into the clouds at a leisurely pace. Planes don't leave holes in the clouds, so there wasn't a hole in the clouds. All in the observers' imaginations.

This technique works for just about any sighting of anything. It could even have been a car.

Report: The witnesses looked into the sky and saw the object.

Reality: The witnesses only thought they were looking into the sky, due to their overactive imaginations. They were actually looking into the parking lot, where they saw a car which they immediately assumed was an alien spacecraft.

I really haven't researched this case much, but I'm just going to say this.

The videos or rocket re-entries look NOTHING like what the witnesses described.

HOWEVER, the time and area of the rocket re-entry is convincing.

I don't know what to think right now.

reply to post by elevenaugust


This is ridiculous. Laughable, even. I've read up on this case extensively and there is absolutely no way EVERY witness saw a re-entry. Say what you will about eyewitness testimony, but if we are taking it for granted that witnesses are telling the truth about what they saw, then it's quite the stretch to go from a gigantic ship with search lights and windows (yes, witnesses reported the object seemed to be scanning the ground with lights) which was reportedly larger than a 747 and was seen to hover completely stationary over a lake, to the re-entry of a satellite.

I'd suggest this case is a long way from being "busted".

Originally posted by DeadSeraph
reply to post by elevenaugust

 

This is ridiculous. Laughable, even. I've read up on this case extensively and there is absolutely no way EVERY witness saw a re-entry. Say what you will about eyewitness testimony, but if we are taking it for granted that witnesses are telling the truth about what they saw, then it's quite the stretch to go from a gigantic ship with search lights and windows (yes, witnesses reported the object seemed to be scanning the ground with lights) which was reportedly larger than a 747 and was seen to hover completely stationary over a lake, to the re-entry of a satellite.

I'd suggest this case is a long way from being "busted".

The problem seems to be that you have no clue what a 'reentry of a satellite' really looks like -- or you wouldn't be making such absolutist assertions. There were a number of helpful links on the earlier avatar of this thread, now replaced by this new label.