I do think that the UFO community claims are a bit fishy but so are the governments. The fact that the first guy to see a UFO back in the 40’s was actually misquoted in the media and never did see a saucer shape object and from then on people reported seeing flying saucers does seem suspicious. But what the government claimed isn’t much better. They tried to use the swamp gas explanation with people that lived next to a swamp their whole lives. Unless people grow up in a big city, most of them are experts of there own surroundings. They should be able to discern natural or unnatural (usual or unusual) phenomena in there own environment.

I suspect that the government (which is made up of people with the same limitations as you and me) is just as confused as the public. I think that they stopped investigating and decided to give the UFO issue a conclusion back in the 60’s to avoid showing their own incompetence.

I think it’s very unlikely that what people are seeing up in the sky are extraterrestrials. And I agree with you that most people especially now a day are just misinterpreting natural and ordinary phenomena. But I also don’t think they should be dismissed without a proper investigation.

People have a near infinite capacity to misinterpret, exaggerate, imagine and even lie about things for any number of reasons that often seen completely ridiculous to everyone else. Some people simply want the attention, although my opinion is that most observers are not seeking attention or deliberately lying.

To an extent, *no one* is a completely reliable witness. I don’t think that the majority of people who report UFOs are lying, but I know from long experience that many completely sane and honest people frequently misinterpret what they see. It doesn’t matter if they are police officers, politicians or ministers. As such, scientists choose not to rely on eye-witness accounts only.

I’ve interviewed enough people to know that they generally get defensive, even belligerent if you tell them that you think what they saw was lights from an airplane, a weather balloon or whatever. Basically people don’t want the truth if it contradicts what they want to believe. So eye-witness testimony is just not good evidence. In a court of law, if all you have is eye-witness, a judge or jury might be forced to make a ruling. But in science — at least in good science — that just isn’t enough. You need evidence that is not easily explainable in any other way.

Let’s say that someone who is considered a reliable observer, or even a group of people, reported a strange light in the sky that suddenly appeared and then slowly began to sink toward the ground, finally to disappear. They saw no flashing lights and in the direction they were looking is wilderness with no airports for hundreds of miles. Being at night with no ground illumination to show it, it could not likely have been a weather balloon. The light did not move like a star or satellite, was too slow to be a meteor, and it was not in the place any planet or comet could be seen. What could you say? In this case I don’t think you could say anything about what it was, but rather what it appears not to be. If the observers are deemed reliable, then I think in this case the observation should remain classified as a UFO, since it remains unidentified and there is no reasonable known explanation. Now, please understand that this does not rule out natural phenomena or as yet undiscovered human activity in the direction of the light, and it certainly does not prove that the light was from an alien spacecraft from another world. But in this situation the sighting would remain unsolved.

Now, let’s say that the same report comes in, and it is not a planet, meteor, comet, satellite, “swamp gas” or a weather balloon. But, you happen to know that there is a major airport just a few miles away in the direction of the light, and it is such that you are lined up directly with the busiest runway. So you ask the observer if they are familiar with what planes landing at the airport look like and if they have ever seen a plane’s landing lights. They say of course they know what planes and landing lights are like and that this is certainly not an airplane.

This latter is a true example of a case I once investigated. I asked for them to call me if it ever appeared again, and within a week they called me and said it’s happening again. Being fairly close by, I rushed over the to observer’s location to find what seemed to be the entire neighborhood standing in the street — the one lined up with the runway — absolutely enraptured with airplanes coming to land on their regular schedules. There is no question that these people — no doubt all honest — we observing airplanes coming in to land at night, and they all thought they were UFOs. Now, would you waste time investigating this any further without good, physical evidence that what these people were seeing was anything other than landing airplanes? It would simply make no sense.

That of course is just one example, but if serious researchers spent time to investigate in detail every such report, nothing useful would ever get done.

So, eyewitness accounts cannot be considered good evidence. And if circumstances offer a good explanation and there is no physical evidence to the contrary, further study of such a sighting would be a waste of time, money and effort.

As to your last question, the government *DID* investigate UFOs extensively for years, and long ago concluded that there was no evidence worth pursuing any further. Conspiracy theorists likely will pop out of the woodwork right now and offer any number of ideas of why the government is “covering this up,” but I see no evidence of that. The government does cover things up, and the government does lie to us, and hides things from us, but there is simply no reason for them to cover this up, except to cover their own incompetence. You have right to doubt the government and not trust it, but there is no good reason whatsoever to believe that they have evidence of alien visitations to Earth, despite the claims of UFO devotees.

Larry S.

People want to believe in aliens. As I have said before, so do I. But I want my belief based on solid facts, not just desires.

LS

LS

First off, thank you and everyone else who makes civil comment. You may not agree with me on all points, but I greatly appreciate it when someone disagrees without profane language and without resorting to personal attacks on me. Unfortunately, others at times have not been not so civilized, and I hope they get the point that I will not post such comments.

Regarding the question of why a flashing light rules out extraterrestrial origins — well, I never said that it rules it out. But I did want to indicate that a flashing light could result from a far more likely and familiar explanation.

I may be misreading this, but it seems to me that you think that I am saying that all or most of the sightings in Stephenville were of the sundog. I did not say that and I certainly did not mean to imply it. This was something like 50 miles from Stephenville, and it is quite possible that the sundog was not even visible there. In fact I wrote that I did not know what most people saw. My whole point was not to say that people did not see anything (or anything other than the sundog). My argument was basically with the media in pushing this particular sighting out there without any apparent critical thinking, and as far as I can tell, no attempt to consider any mundane explanation. The other sightings at this point to me are UFOs or UAPs or whatever we choose to call them, because we (or at least I) don’t know what people saw. As such we cannot conclusively rule out anything.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you also seem to be saying that the identification of the object as a sundog is speculation (although you agree with me that it was a sundog). I may be misreading what you are saying here, but there really is no reasonable question about it. Sundogs are well-known atmospheric phenomena, at least to meteorologists. Members of the general public may never have noticed them before, and may not know what they are, but that doesn’t mean that they are alien or abnormal in any way. I have not examined the original photo, but if you look carefully at the photo from the Star Telegram, and perhaps adjust the contrast a bit to bring out the detail, you can see a small bit of the 22-degree circumsolar halo that usually accompanies parhelia (sometimes it isn’t see because it is so faint against the bright background of the sky).

Now I do not know why the truck driver described what he saw the way he did. In fact, when I go back to the original article on the Star Telegram, I frankly don’t understand exactly what he was trying to say in parts of it. But much of what he said does not apply to sundogs, yet it was applied to his photo, which as I said before is unquestionably a sundog. Anyone is welcome to disagree with that assessment, but my feeling is that if it walks like a duck…. well, you know the rest. In the absence of evidence other than a verbal description, I will stick with the simple and (to me at least) obvious explanation. The real question to me is why his story is so far from what a sundog is really like.

Certainly I will agree with you that many reporters are completely ignorant of basic science, and seem to care nothing about truth and accuracy — just in getting the “scoop” or whatever it is called today. [Boy that could get me into hot water with some of the media types I know, but they all know it is true!] There are some highly competent, thoughtful and knowledgeable reporters and other media people, but the truth is, most are more interested in sensationalism than sense.

No one — no matter how fanatical, or how big a “believer” — would be as thrilled as I to come across some genuine evidence for an extraterrestrial intelligence, and even more if UFO reports were shown to be true testament to that. I *want* to believe it, but I don’t want that belief based on wishful thinking.

Everyone operates from a belief system, which is why I think we all need a solid foundation in rational thinking. Sadly, this apparently is no longer taught in schools or anywhere else. I don’t know who first said it, although I heard it first from Robin Williams, and have quoted it many times:

“Be open minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

LS

I agree with you regarding the sundog in the photo, the witness describe mulitple lights on the object and that wouldn’t support a “sundog” as an explanation. Even more interesting is that for witnesses to see a sundog they would need to all be in relatively the same place looking in the same direction so if we had witnesses watching the object transit from West to East at a very low level again, sundogs would not be adequate to describe the phenomenon in question. I have seen sundogs and they are interesting but are always imbedded in a layer of clouds or water vapor and are seen at the altitude of the clouds themselves. This UAP for lack of a better description was described at ground level by a pilot, amongst others, who would be expected to know a sundog from a low altitude object…

While I think speculation is a start, I don’t think that doing it in public is a good idea because it simply fuels confusion.

I recall when the 2004 Mexico FLIR case was raging through the media we saw dozens of scientists who, with only a short clip and no supporting data, were heard to declare that the lights in question were falling space junk, meteors, plasmas, other aircraft… anything but aliens. And when the work to resolve the case was actually undertaken it was revealed that the source of the observations were oil well flares in the Gulf. To this day the case is pushed around as a legitimate UFO event when it was no such thing. The lesson there was that scientists are the same as UFO nuts, they operate from a belief rather than from an objective perspective.

The media carry much of the blame for this because it is a story and they HAVW to tell it. Reporters are notoriously ignorant. I deal with them all the time and they rarely have the qualifications to report to the world on most topics. A 1.5 minute soundbyte is not adequate for most stories and the media just really don’t care about truth or accuracy unless they are legally acountable. I have watched the media blow it over and over again, particularly with UFO cases…