What Shall We Do about Radar-Confirmed UFOs?

[Kilgore Trout]

You're afraid of the topic and the facts presented here; that's why you feel the need to troll. Smart people know why anonymous posters online troll. Your trolling is no different.

I trust the smart people know who to take seriously.

 

[Nous]

I trust the smart people know who to take seriously.

It won't be someone who is so agitated that he feels the need to troll with a hundred vacuous posts on a topic, never able to give an intelligent answer to a single question.

 

[Milton Platt]

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?

Does nobody know what the letters UFO stand for? UN-IDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT. So if you say it s a spaceship with little green men in it, you have IDENTIFIED it.

 

[Shad]

Show us the Belgian UFOs were a hoax.

A person came forward admitting to making the hoax. His claims were replicated. SOBEPS also has a record of making false claims. When reviewed by expert it was concluded to be radar angels spin by SOBEPS

Show us that the Campeche UFOs were a hoax.

I said "or ignorance". In this case it was oil well flares.

 

[BSM1]

I'm an agent of the Greys. I've been hired to misdirect and discredit those trying to bring the Truth to light.

So it's you? Dang, I had @Quetzal in the pool...

 

[Kilgore Trout]

It won't be someone who is so agitated that he feels the need to troll with a hundred vacuous posts on a topic, never able to give an intelligent answer to a single question.

I can agree with that.

 

[Nous]

Does nobody know what the letters UFO stand for? UN-IDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT. So if you say it s a spaceship with little green men in it, you have IDENTIFIED it.

I didn't see where anyone here did say any such thing, did you?

As with an unidentified criminal, the fact that an aircraft is unidentified does not mean that one cannot specify lots of facts about it, such as when and where it appeared, by what method it was observed, who observed it, what were its physical features and behavior. From such facts, one also might be able to deduce further facts about it. For example, the documented maneuvers performed by the Belgian UFO were unquestionably beyond what is achievable with human technology. From this fact, one can reason:

P1: All UFOs that exhibit characteristics that cannot be accounted for as either human-made objects or natural phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin.
P2: The UFO detected on multiple radars and pursued by F-16s on March 30-31 1990 in Belgium exhibited characteristics that cannot be accounted for as either human-made objects or natural phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin
C: Therefore, the UFO detected on multiple radars and pursued by F-16s on March 30-31 1990 in Belgium was of extraterrestrial origin.

 

[Nous]

A person came forward admitting to making the hoax. His claims were replicated.

"His claims were replicated"? What does that mean?

How did this hoaxer cause the same signals on multiple radars? And how did this hoaxer cause multiple police officers to see objects in the sky in the same area as the radar signals?

When reviewed by expert it was concluded to be radar angels spin by SOBEPS

Prove it.

I said "or ignorance". In this case it was oil well flares.

Prove it.

 

[Nous]

I can agree with that.

It's too bad you don't have something better to do than post thousands of one-liners on topics that make you nervous.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

It's too bad you don't have something better to do than post thousands of one-liners on topics that make you nervous.

Keep watching the skies.

 

[Shad]

"His claims were replicated"? What does that mean?

The man coming forward claim it was a hoax told people how he did it by constructing a triangle with foam, placing lights on it then using gases to float the object into the air. That was replicated.

How did this hoaxer cause the same signals on multiple radars?

And how did this hoaxer cause multiple police officers to see objects in the sky in the same area as the radar signals? [/quote]

It is called Bragg scattering. No radar contact actually was pinpointed to the object and the Belgian military sources openly stated these were false contacts

Prove it.

Go look up Wilfried De Brouwer statements

Prove it.

Oil wells flares are in the area. Look up the Cantarell Field

 

[Shad]

P1: All UFOs that exhibit characteristics that cannot be accounted for as either human-made objects or natural phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin.

These are claims made by layman, nothing more

P2: The UFO detected on multiple radars and pursued by F-16s on March 30-31 1990 in Belgium exhibited characteristics that cannot be accounted for as either human-made objects or natural phenomena are of extraterrestrial origin

Which contradicts the statements made by the pilots as they had no visual contacts, only radar. Which was concluded as Bragg scattering by the Belgium military. It is amusing how someone on the ground could get a great picture of this "object" yet the pilots saw nothing at all.

C: Therefore, the UFO detected on multiple radars and pursued by F-16s on March 30-31 1990 in Belgium was of extraterrestrial origin.

Therefore your claims are moot as the very sources you rely on deny your conclusions. You merely blindly accepted a conclusion from an unreliable source and didn't check anything as it confirmed your bias.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Therefore your claims are moot as the very sources you rely on deny your conclusions.

Moot would be an improvement by several orders of magnitude.

 

[Nous]

The man coming forward claim it was a hoax told people how he did it by constructing a triangle with foam, placing lights on it then using gases to float the object into the air. That was replicated.

And how did this hoaxer cause multiple police officers to see objects in the sky in the same area as the radar signals?

It is called Bragg scattering. No radar contact actually was pinpointed to the object and the Belgian military sources openly stated these were false contacts



Go look up Wilfried De Brouwer statements



Oil wells flares are in the area. Look up the Cantarell Field

So you can't substantiate any of your claims here?

"Prove it" doesn't mean to make an assertion.

 

[Shad]

So you can't substantiate any of your claims here?

La Vague OVNI Belge ou le triomphe de la désinformation

"Prove it" doesn't mean to make an assertion.

Hilarious. You have done the same thing based on nothing as per your statement "extraterrestrial origin."

You accept assertions as true, nothing more.

 

[Nous]

La Vague OVNI Belge ou le triomphe de la désinformation

So you can't show us that any of your claims are true?

 

[Shad]

You can also watch the officer in charge denying your conclusion. Start at 5:50

 

[Shad]

So you can't show us that any of your claims are true?

Already have. You just didn't bother to look at the source I provided. Your unwillingness to look at source does not make it vanish. I provided information which hinders your conclusion and leads to a more rational one than "Aliens!!!"

 

[Nous]

Already have. You just didn't bother to look at the source I provided.

What source? You've linked to a YouTube video.

 

[Shad]

What source? You've linked to a YouTube video.

You didn't bother to watch it as I said to. Your problem is not an argument.