Not long ago I came across an article at listserve.com that briefly describes “
10 Mysterious UFO Incidents Confirmed By Radar”. I wasn't familiar with all of these cases, but I had read a little about a couple of them.
Ironically, as its only source for the March 30-31, 1990 sightings in Belgium (item #2), the article links to a
Wikipedia entry, the majority of which consists of two sections, the first pertaining to a single photo that the Wikipedia article claims was taken in 1990 and was a hoax, on the basis of a statement of an anonymous person claiming 20-years later to have been the hoaxer. However, as one can easily discover, the photo shown is not the one that appeared on the cover of
the 1991 publication of Société belge d'étude des phénomènes spatiaux (SOBEPS), and which was examined in the early 1990s by numerous scientists, including a former NASA scientist and 2 scientists at France's CNES, who authenticated that,
inter alia, the photo showed no indication of tampering, that “the middle light is very different from the three other lights,” and that the photographer was stationary while the object was moving (the person claiming to be the hoaxer apparently said he took a photo of a painted styrofoam triangle with flashlights embedded in it and hanging from a string). As Belgium Major General De Brouwer explains in a chapter he wrote in Leslie Kean's
UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record (Foreword by John Podesta)
, digital analysis of the original photo in 2002 by nuclear physics professor Andre Marion of University of Paris-Sud and CNES revealed that the object was surrounded by a “halo” in which photons were aligned in patterns, similar to the “lines of force” patterns of iron filings in a magnetic field, leading Marion to speculate that the craft may have employed some form of magnetoplasmadynamic propulsion. It was on the basis of these and other facts about the photo that Marion concluded that it was very unlikely to be a fake. (From DeBrouwer's footnote 4, quoting Marion's paper: “The existence of the 'lines of force' is a strong argument against the thesis of a hoax, which would be particularly sophisticated. Moreover, it is unclear why a forger would have bothered to imagine and realize a complex phenomenon, especially since it is not noticeable without sophisticated processing of the slide."). The Wikipedia article does not indicate that there has been any expert examination of the photo shown in the article, much less that it has been found to exhibit these same unique characteristics as the original photo.
In addition,
a Brussels shopkeeper has provided a video of a similar object (triangular formation of lights), which the Wikipedia article doesn't mention.
The next section of the Wikipedia article, “Skeptical Explanations,” quotes two people asserting that the thousands of reports of seeing such object(s) were merely due to a “mass delusion” or “psycho-social phenomenon”. This fails to account for the facts in more than one way. The initial sightings and descriptions of the UFO in November 1989 were made independently by 5 Belgian gendarmes within a short while of each other. A total of 13 gendarmes and more than 250 private citizens in this area gave similar reports that day. It is beyond implausible that the Eupen area of Belgium suddenly had a lot of hallucinating federal police officers all having the same hallucination. In March 1990, a group of people at a private dinner party reported unusual bright lights in the sky; the gendarme who responded witnessed these multi-colored (color-changing) lights, and at the same time the Glons NATO radar station detected an unknown object at the location of the reports. Three other radar stations reported the same signal. These facts are not accounted as a mass delusion or hallucination. The Belgian Air Force scrambled two F-16s, which, during a 75-minute chase, had brief radar contact and locked on the target 3 times, each time the lock quickly breaking as the object made freakish changes in altitude, direction and speed. See the
official report by the Belgian Air Force.
The Wikipedia article also quotes someone's comments made on a skeptoid.com podcast claiming that “upon analyzing the data, all three radar locks were on each other.” The Belgian Air Force report says no such thing, and its description of the behavior of the target and the breaking of the locks unequivocally contradicts such possibility. Neither the Wikipedia article nor the transcript of the podcast cite any analysis of the radar data. The podcaster's next sentence is: “The other contacts were all found to be the result of a well-known atmospheric interference called Bragg scattering.” But no source is cited for such a “finding,” and the facts noted in the Belgian Air Force report explicitly rule out the conditions for such false echoes (“during the radar observation, there was no meteorological inversion in progress”), in addition to the facts that (a) the behavior of the radar contacts rule out false echoes, (b) the signal was seen on 4 different radar systems, and (c) the contacts were “in the same area as visual observations.” It seems the only verifiable delusions or fabrications relating to this incident are those of the “skeptics”.
One of the more succinct and thorough video reports that I've found on this incident is this, apparently
a segment from the Unsolved Mysteries TV show. It includes interviews with,
inter alia, the officers who initially reported seeing the UFO, and video of the F-16 radar screen. In fact, the Wikipedia article mentions this episode in it's initial section, noting that “narrator Robert Stack added in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the sudden changes in acceleration and deceleration would have been fatal to one or more human pilots.” But this detail did not originate with Stack or the TV program; rather, it was noted in the
July 1990 Paris Match article whose source was the Belgium Defense Ministry: “But the object had speeded up from an initial velocity of 280 KPH to 1,800 KPH, while descending from 3,000 meters to 1,700 meters...in one second! This fantastic acceleration corresponds to 40 Gs. It would cause immediate death to a human on board. The limit of what a pilot can take is about 8 Gs.”
Item #9 on the Listserve article describes the 2004 sighting in Campeche, Mexico by the Mexican air force. The video of the infrared footage does not exist at the link provided, but you can find it
here.
There does not seem to be any explanation of these 11 crafts as being human-made, and certainly this was not some kind of natural atmospheric phenomenon.
Most aerial phenomena that are reported to authorities as unidentified by the observers are found to have entirely prosaic explanations. However, the 1999 report by the French COMETA--a committee of scientific and military experts and pilots commissioned by the Institut des hautes études de défense nationale (IHEDN) for the purpose of in-depth study of UFOs (UAPs)--found that in 62 countries between 1948 and 1999 there were 489 well-documented UAP cases classified as Category D, i.e., “phenomena that cannot be identified despite the abundance and quality of the data,” representing 4-5% of all UAP sightings that had been documented and studied. Of these 489 Category D cases, 101 (21%) were “radar/visual” incidents, in which there was a visual sighting that was associated with a radar detection. COMETA noted the same rate for the 363 cases of examined UFO incidents collected in the USAF Blue Book Project (1947-1969): 21% were “radar/visual” incidents.
COMETA Report Part 1 and
Part 2.
So these are my questions:
How do you account for these UFOs, such as the ones noted here? Are there rational reasons to conclude that the Belgian and Mexican incidents (for instance) are not of extraterrestrial origin?
Should governments withhold from the public the findings of their own investigations on such incidents? Doesn't secrecy by a government imply there is something more to these incidents than ordinary aerial phenomena (or hallucinations)?
Should military and aviation personnel be prosecuted for publicly speaking about their own sightings and experiences?
Do you support Congressional hearings where government and aviation employees can testify with immunity from prosecution?
