SIGHTINGS: KNOWNS VS UNKNOWNS

SIGHTINGS: KNOWNS VS UNKNOWNS
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This writeup will be about that category of aerial sightings classified as “unknowns”. As you all know, it is the “unknown” category which contains the UFOs. It will end with a discussion of nighttime versus daytime “unknowns”.

Over the years different collections of strange aerial phenomena have been compiled and studied with the objective of understanding them all. What always results is a small residue of sightings that cannot be explained through our familiar explanations. This is the “unknown” category. It can also be called the “UAP” category, for Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. UFOs make up the largest part of the UAP, or unknown, category.

UFO debunkers and coverup personnel strive to make the unknown category be as small as possible. If it can be gotten down to a few percent, then most people will be satisfied to attribute that small portion to be an acceptable error margin that must be explainable by conventional means and then forget about it, no further investigation required. That is obviously the strategy behind the Project Blue Book Special Report #14 (hereafter referred to as “PBBSR14”) introduction where it states in its 3rd sentence that “of the 131 sightings reported during the first four months of 1955 only three per cent were listed as unknown.” Of course, that writer does not mention that after Edward Ruppelt left Bluebook in late ’53, the whole project changed to a debunking goal of 100% conventional explanations of those unknowns simply by force fitting the explanation to the sighting, often resulting in ludicrous and embarrassingly stupid explanations.

Stanton Friedman points out that the PBBSR14 data shows that the unknown category percentage is 21.5% and that number is published right within the body of the report. Such a large percentage cannot be ignored and explained away as an acceptable margin of error. Later on in this writeup, this percentage will be revisited and changed by the Ufonalyzer to 16% (still very large) and it will be explained why this was done. And please be reminded that now we know that the best reports were always routed away from Blue Book for secret investigation, and these reports would have raised the percentage even higher if they had not been excluded. Furthermore, those numerous cases which had been intentionally force fitted into the “known” category have never been retrieved from this category and placed back into the “unknown” category by any investigator, nor have they been quantified as far as this writer knows. This writer believes that other reports have published similar unknown percentages in the double digits as well. One exception is the COMETA report.

Early in 2010 when Leslie Kean released her book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record”, she had several TV interviews in which she stated the unknown percentage was 5%. This percentage certainly is radically smaller than PBBSR14’s percentage. After reading reviews of her book and hearing what she said about it, the Ufonalyzer, although glad she wrote it, decided that he was not going to read it because it appeared to be another of the many fine books which list UFO encounters, interviews with high ranking, sometimes retired people, and which mention many of the official documents suggesting the reality of UFOs which we, as UFO believers, all are familiar with. In other words, it is written for the general public and those people who are deciding whether to believe in UFOs or not. Since that decision, chunks of her book’s text are now on Google Books, and these pieces verify the Ufonalyzer’s initial opinion. It is a very pleasant surprise, indeed, to see the positive impact that her book has caused in the UFO world, so we should all be grateful to her. Her book’s text gives every indication that she is using the COMETA report’s published percentage for its unknowns, which is 4-5% unknowns. It is this writer’s opinion that she should have used the percentage from PBBSR14 and not COMETA’s percentage because the 5% figure is much too close to what most folks would agree is a small but acceptable measurement error. She would have been perfectly justified if she had done this because the PBBSR14 study is much more scientific than the COMETA study and covers a much bigger sample size. The only drawback would be that the PBBSR14 study is based on data ending in 1952, and the COMETA study uses much more contemporary data. But, given the success and impact of her book, this is a small point which need not be mentioned anymore.

The vast majority of sighting reports can be explained by many different phenomena. Most of these explanations are correct when honestly investigated and objectively applied to the sighting. Back in the day of Blue Book, the categories listed in the report are as follows:

Balloon
Astronomical
Aircraft
Light Phenomena (mirages, sun dogs, inversion layer images, distortions)
Birds
Clouds, dirt, etc
Psychological (fanatics, publicity seekers, imagination)
Insufficient Info
Unknown
Other (kites, contrails, fireworks, flares, rockets, small tornadoes)

Since Blue Book’s time, other additional and/or refined categories have come into existence. Do you recall TST, or Tectonic Strain Theory? This theory has two parts, both based on earth’s strata being under a pressure or bending force. Rock is crystalline in nature, so the force sets up piezoelectric voltages in the strained rock crystalline structure. The theory is that these voltages can ionize gases near the rocks and cause plasma balls to appear. The plasma balls look like UFOs. The second part is that the electric fields themselves can act directly on the brain and induce hallucinatory visions of things that aren’t there such as UFOs. Tectonic strain actually can cause lights that are seen prior to earthquakes, but no one has ever proven a plasma ball from tectonic strain. As an aside, famed debunker Philip Klass was a big plasma advocate. Another theory is mentioned elsewhere in this blog in which UFOs are the imaginary product of sexual maladjustment. Theories like these are little more than scientific masturbation which panders to the mainstream public and to the egos of the scientists who come up with such crap. Regarding plasmas, ball lightning is believed to exist and it IS a plasma ball. However, the average size of a landed UFO is usually 20 feet plus or minus, and the diameter of ball lightning is never more than a few feet, although one source says 8 feet. Ball lightning, if seen from a distance, could be mistaken for a UFO. There was a recent article on the internet whose title screamed “UFOs Explained.” The explanation was that it was one of the phenomena of sprites, jets and elves. Having seen videos of sprites and jets, this writer can tell you that this article was ridiculous. The Majestic Documents website contains the forward of a never-published book by Vernon Bowen. The CIA took it seriously and annotated it liberally. Bowen was a UFO debunker, and came up with simply impractical theories on the nature of UFOs (e.g. the Coanda effect.) Temperature inversion layers used to be used all the time to explain UFO sightings. Debunker and Majestic 12 agent Donald Menzel used to invoke this false explanation all the time. Although it is a real phenomenon, believer James MacDonald proved that Menzel’s frequent use of this explanation could not be possible in most of Menzel’s explanations. Menzel probably was aware that he was lying but hoped to dupe the public anyway. It is doubtful that he really believed in his own explanations. These are more examples of scientific masturbation.

As we inspect the categories used by the Blue Book investigators, we see “flares” in the “Other” category. This explanation has risen to be a major player in explanations these days. Some people believe that when a significant UFO event occurs, the military runs out and drops a bunch of flares to confuse the public into thinking that the UFO was flares all along (e.g. this possibly occurred during the Phoenix Lights incident.) A subset of the “flares” category in our modern times are Chinese lanterns.

We also see “fanatics” in the “Psychological” category. Fanatical religious explanations of UFOs have always been with us since the beginning, and it is kind of disappointing and sometimes frightening to see the large segment of UFO believers that this thinking still controls.

We now come the the second part of this writeup.

The Ufonalyzer has stated a couple of times in this blog that night sightings of UFOs are pretty useless because hardly any data can be extracted from them, and one is rarely sure that the night light isn’t something ordinary. Most UFO sightings occur at night. The following clever graphs from Vallee’s 1966 book, “The UFO Enigma” shows when most occur at night. (Type I and Type III sightings are Vallee’s own UFO classification system which never caught on like Hynek’s did. (This writer does not like either one because their categories are not mutually exclusive.)) This is followed by a histogram (Figure 41) from PBBSR14 which also clearly shows the same thing. The PBBSR14 data stops at 1952, and the Vallee graph was published in 1966.

Consider the following hypothetical daytime sighting. A large disc is seen flying by in broad daylight at a low speed. It stops to hover, witnessed by a few people, and then resumes its flight. What looks like windows can be seen around its periphery. This is a good sighting. This sighting would be hard to explain away by the categories listed earlier. Therefore, it probably would be listed as “unknown”. In other words, the better the data, the more likely it could not be force fit into conventional earthly categories, so it would wind up as “unknown” because it is so good. One can reason from this is that daytime sightings should have a higher percentage of “unknowns” than nighttime sightings because daytime sightings have the potential to yield far more data than nighttime. Let’s check out the Ufonalyzer’s opnion that daytime sightings yield a higher percentage of “unknowns” than nighttime by analyzing Figure 41 from the PBBSR14. This is the only set of data that this writer has seen which separates “known” and “unknown” by time of day.

The data from the histogram was analyzed by separating night from day along the horizontal axis. Daytime was selected as being from 6:30am to 6:30pm. There were 798 daytime sightings and 1348 nighttime sightings. Daytime “unknowns” were 128 and nighttime “unknowns” were 215. These numbers were counted off of the histograms. The percentage “unknowns” for daytime sightings therefore is 16.04%, and he percentage “unknowns” for nighttime sightings therefore is 15.95%. In other words, they’re equal. What??!! How can this be?? This shows that nighttime sightings are just as effective at yielding UFO sightings that hold up to analysis as the daytime does. This just does not make sense. It looks like from now on the Ufonalzyer will have to shut his piehole and stop criticizing all those nighttime UFO videos that are all over YouTube.

By the way, on page 10 of the PBBSR14 document, it states that the total of object sightings should be 2199 so this means that the count from the histogram should equal 2199. Instead, it equals 1348 + 798 = 2146 which is off by only 53 and is good counting accuracy from such a small graph.

Earlier it was mentioned that Stanton Friedman’s reporting on PBBSR14 came up with an “unknown” percentage of 21.5%. This is based on 3201 sightings (page ii of the PBBSR14.) Page 15 gives further data about these 3201 which filters the 3201 down to 2199 “unknowns”. This is because the 3201 contains double counting; e.g. if an “unknown” was sighted by, say, 2 witnesses, then that is counted as two “unknowns” in the 3201 sightings, but only counted as one “unknown” in the 2199 sightings. Similarly, if two UFOs were simultaneously spotted by one witness, then that sighting would count as two “unknowns” in the 3201 sightings.

In conclusion, although UFOs come in a variety of shapes and sizes, it is highly likely that we are observing only one phenomenon when they are seen. In this writer’s opinion it is the phenomenon of visiting extraterrestrial craft under intelligent control. Although a variety of explanations exist for curious phenomena which, after investigation, turn out to be the “knowns”, the residue (i.e. the “unknowns”) are very likely explained by only one phenomenon (i.e. the ETH.) If the totality of the UFO phenomenon is explained away with anything but the ETH, then that explanation requires many separate explanations all cobbled together. It is much simpler, cleaner, and more elegant, and therefore more believable to go with the ETH for the whole UFO explanation. With this you have one single explanation and not a collection of parts put forth by those who have obviously not studied the issue, and by some of whom who wish to display their erudition on their specialty, which is repugnant. However, even this writer admits that even the ETH is not adequate if one restricts the ETH to only one alien species visiting earth. It fails because of the huge variety of different craft that are seen. The variety of craft is far beyond what one would expect a single species to have designed for its mission on earth. The ETH fails until one hypothesizes several visiting species overlapping one another in their visitations. Fortunately, the additional data gleaned from Close Encounters of the Third Kind “proves” that there are many races visiting earth with crafts of many shapes and sizes.