UFOs What Do We Really Know?

UFOs What Do We Really Know?

UFOs What Do We Really Know?

What Do We Really Know About UFO’s?

The Arizona Lights

Rendlesham Forest

Air Battle Over Peru

Air Chase Over Iran

Stalking the Mexican Air Force

Project Blue Book

1952 Washington D.C. Sightings

The Light on Mount Pudi

The Levelland, Texas Incident of 1957

Paul R. Hill

Dr. James E. McDonald

The Invasion of Colares

Gun Battle in Kentucky

Some Recent Tidbits

They Came Out of the Sky to Varginha

Does NASA See UFOs?

More Questions than Conclusions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

What Do We Really Know About UFO’s?

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Nothing else grabs our attention as much as the possibility that some type of spacecraft of unknown origin exhibiting capabilities exceeding anything humans have been able to attain are coming and going at will; that and the parallel idea that they are piloted by beings from some other world than our own.

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To give you a quick overview, I have taken some data on frequencies of sightings from around the world. Best UFO Resources, authored by Dimitris Hatzopoulos, reveals just how much attention this subject commands.

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According to Mr. Hatzopoulos’s information, which does seem to track with other sources I have found, people in the U.S. believe in the existence of UFOs at around the 50% level over the last twenty years. Since the 1950s, this has changed from lows in the 20% range up to levels around 57%. This, from a 1978 Gallup poll.

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Something like 8% of people believe they have seen a UFO. This percentage has been much the same over time from various surveys stretching over several decades, as well as from many countries.

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Something over 150,000 sightings of UFOs have been documented during the past 60 years and these are listed in several databases. However, the entire number of UFO sightings is estimated to be in the millions.

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So, even though there are thousands of new sightings every year, we find from surveys taken, that a small percentage of sightings are actually reported and therefore recorded.

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Of course you have to wonder if all of these sightings, both reported and unreported, are actually sightings of real UFOs. Here real means something strange and unable to be identified by experts in various scientific or technical fields.

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Many of these sightings have very little useful information along with the sighting, so it becomes impossible to judge just what these people saw. Certainly they saw something, but what that something was will never be identified. They will remain total unknowns with no real investigation possible.

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Then, there are many other sightings which can be identified from the information given along with the report of the actual sighting itself. Certainly these reports have varying degrees of information, so some of them can be identified conclusively to most people’s satisfaction. Along with these are some others that can be tentatively identified, but not conclusively.

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After taking into account all of those reported sightings, which leaves us with something between 5% and 25%, according to Mr. Hatzopoulos, and these are considered to be the real UFOs, in his words.

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Here Mr. Hatzopoulos is using the word real to define sightings that are of high quality and have sufficient strangeness. They cannot be linked to any human or natural causality one would normally expect to encounter.

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Even the Condon Report, using information gathered from Project Blue Book, reported that only a very small minority of sightings were hoaxes or fraudulent reports. Still, this kind of thing always caused credibility problems for anyone investigating UFOs.

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Today this is even more prevalent with the advent of computer generated animations. Some of these are so good they take experts to detect them and even then, some of them go undetected for years.

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Now these figures are not precise from year to year, but are averages over several years. These averages are in fact still valid today. Even so, you do see some reports of UFO activity being higher at certain times, but these figures are pretty accurate for our purposes.

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Let’s stop and examine some of this a bit more closely. If 8% of the general population throughout the world has had sightings involving a UFO, then considering the total population of the planet is something around 7 billion people, this means something on the order of 560 million people have sightings each year.

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Again, using the figures from the excerpt, this leaves between 28 million and 140 million sightings that are unexplained each year. If you add that up over several decades, even accounting for population increases, that still leaves a tremendous number of sightings that are potentially unexplainable.

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Other researchers have stated that they were able to explain all but about two percent of sightings that gave enough information to be worth investigating.

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Taking that lowest percentage, that now gives us something a bit more than two million unexplained sightings each year out of 560 million total sightings. That is still a lot of unexplained events.

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Taking into account that a great many sightings do not have enough information to be worth investigating, we could still come up with a conservative number of over a million sightings each year. Most people would think that over a million unexplained sightings is something world governments should be interested in knowing more about. In fact many governments are very interested in these sightings, but not the U.S. government.

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Before we go any further I must confess something. That is I have always been fascinated by the possibility of there being visitors from another planet coming and going since I was very young. In fact I even read a great many science fiction stories and I still do.

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However, the idea of otherworldly visitors actually being here was something else entirely. Sure you hear about various sightings on TV shows and read about them in the newspapers now and then, but to actually think they were here and we did not know it, is pretty mind blowing to me.

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I always thought about such things with a lot of skepticism and pretty much blew them off as something we did not yet understand about the natural world we live in. Certainly we are finding out more and more about this world we did not previously know, so I figured there were just many things yet to be

I guess I am saying that anything to do with UFOs I considered another form of science fiction. The movies are fun to watch, but seeing this as a possible reality is something else entirely.

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I started this book with the idea that I would find enough reasonable explanations to pretty much blow the whole UFO thing off or at least leave it with sufficient reasonable doubt. As I began my research I felt overwhelmed with the plethora of information out there available for free.

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Then add to that all of the books that have been written about this subject. This quickly made me realize that researching this book was going to be very difficult from the standpoint of having way too much data. However, there is data and then there is data.

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One of the major complaints from those interested in UFOs is when there is a reliable sighting of something that cannot be easily explained, the government offers some lame excuse that not even a child would believe. Upon beginning my initial cursory examination of this phenomenon, I discovered something else.

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That something else turned out to be alternate explanations for UFO sightings. When a UFO sighting is reported it initially brings about a lot of interest. As time goes on the media does not really keep up with the initial storyline and so it fades from memory.

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However, when something truly unexplainable does occur and is reported as such, then you see many explanations supposedly showing that this sighting was nothing more than a misidentified natural phenomenon or misidentified human activity of some kind.

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Now to be fair about this, many of the offered explanations are well thought out. In many instances these explanations do fit the situation and we have to then assume that whatever it was, that someone saw was misidentified due to inexperience on the part of the observer, either with technology or rare natural phenomena.

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Some of the other offered explanations do fit the general theme of the reported sighting, but fail to address pertinent details in the report. I believe these to be genuine attempts to find a suitable explanation for the sighting, but the person offering it is unable to come up with something that fits the other pertinent details.

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They are either discarded as imagination on the part of the original observer or are just not addressed hoping no one will notice.

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Then there are some explanations that appear to defy even simple logic. Explanations as: they were flares, or it was a military prototype, perhaps even Venus, or the famous swamp gas explanation. OK. Well, yes, these explanations do answer some of the sightings.

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Here I am referring to the same explanations that do not even fit the facts of the sighting that was reported. You will see these as we get into some of the sighting reports and I will address them and point out some details and you can make up your own mind about them as to whether or not they fit the situation.

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I also have been reading some of the opinions people have on this subject. I am seeing three basic themes in these.

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The first type of opinion is offered by the person who neither believes nor disbelieves that such things as UFOs exist or even can exist.

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They are on the fence about the whole thing. They themselves have never seen one and although they have heard of some instances of reliable witnesses talking about them, they wonder why no one has been able to show that they do indeed exist.

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The second type of opinion tries to convince us that all of the sightings reviewed and any of the opinions offered by the investigator or the people directly involved being wrong.

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All of the sightings can be explained in more mundane and ordinary natural ways, but no serious explanation of any value is offered. Since the extraordinary observations are obviously incorrect then that makes any opinion offered up incorrect as well. Still, we are left with the questions unanswered.

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The third type of opinion comes from those that are unwilling or unable to accept any extraterrestrial or other extraordinary explanation, just because of their own personal make-up. For these folks all I can say is there have been many things in human history that folks have not wanted to believe and yet, later it turned out that these very unbelievable explanations were the correct ones.

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So, with that in mind, you should be prepared for some great shock to your psyche if one of these extraordinary explanations does turn out to be the correct one.

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One of the great benefits of the internet is of course the ease with which we can find information of interest. However, it seems that every nut and screw out there has some kind of bogus information site giving us oodles of nonsense that not even a third grader would believe. What a mess.

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Being the persistent and bull-headed type of fellow I am, I kept at it and eventually began to uncover a lot of interesting and useful information. In fact the more of it I found, the more of it seemed to pop up on my screen. Thank goodness for SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Once I found something useful it would link me to another site and another and so on.

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Now the problem became one of figuring out what information to use, but that is a good problem for a writer. As the book began to come together many of my ideas and assumptions about UFOs began to change. They began to change greatly in fact. If you are a skeptic like me, then you are going to find this eye-opening. I know I certainly did.

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So where were we? Oh yes, we were left with something over a million sightings that are unexplainable each year all around the world. Keep in mind that this giant number of over a million is actually very conservative. So far so good, but what can we find out from all of this?

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Well, certainly some of these sightings are the same thing seen by more than one witness. There are those sightings that are incorrectly identified natural phenomena or perhaps some advanced technology of an earthly origin. Even so we still have a lot to explain.

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I am going to present some UFO sightings that are understandably quite famous for various reasons. The biggest common reason they all have for being so well known is because they are well documented and were seen by more than one observer. In fact some of them were seen by hundreds if not thousands of witnesses. Also, some of them have other indications of being real, as in radar images.

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Most folks that have had any interest in the UFO phenomenon have more than likely heard about some of these sightings. For those of you that haven’t, this should be very interesting for you. I personally have read about some of these sightings previously, but had not put them all together like this before. Doing so does show things from a different perspective.

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For those of you who have read about these sightings before, even though you believe at this point you will find it incredibly boring to go over them again, I am going to try and present them with a slightly different slant.

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I will attempt to put you in the position of one of the observers, as if you were seeing this and experiencing it yourself, trying to believe what your own eyes are seeing and what you are experiencing, and at the same time not think your mind is coming apart at the seams.

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Reading about these events from an outside perspective can lead one to see these as stories as entertainment for children, but I believe they can only be really appreciated when one puts themselves in the position of the ordinary citizen of some country in the world, going about their daily business and suddenly having something bizarre intruding upon their existence and having no mental tools to deal with such a situation.

The Arizona Lights

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On the evening of March 13th, 1997, an event took place over Phoenix, Arizona that became known as the Arizona Lights. That evening, around 10 PM, several hundred witnesses saw what appeared to be a string of lights flying in rigid formation overhead.

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They were traveling very slowly and in full view of the entire population of the city and surrounding areas. There were many video recordings made of this event as well, so it is one of the better documented cases of UFO events.

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Actually, this was not the only event that happened that night, but it was the one that captured the public’s imagination due to being recorded on video. There was an earlier event that occurred around 8:30 that evening that was not recorded, but still was seen by several witnesses.

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One witness said it was in full view over her house until it disappeared out of sight. The whole time it was moving slowly and steadily without making any sound.

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When asked initially about the activity over Phoenix on the night of March 13th, the Air Force said they had no activity in the area. Later they said that there was a group of visiting Air National Guard dropping flares over the mountains some distance away from the sighting. They were using A10’s. A10 aircraft are extremely loud aircraft, in case you did not know.

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Witnesses from the March 13th sighting mentioned being able to see some large mass between the lights overhead as well as seeing some kind of metallic material and a few even mentioned a shimmering effect as if it were reflecting light from its surface.

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Just from what the witnesses reported and some experiments using flares, as well as trying to duplicate that event using some of the same witnesses, it would seem that flares and loud aircraft do not make a match for whatever it was that flew over Arizona that night.

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A former councilwoman from Phoenix, Francis Emma Barwood, asked the Air Force for an investigation, citing public safety concerns. Afterwards she became known as the UFO candidate. However, she never mentioned the words UFO, ET, or the like.

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Still, she got a lot of negative responses from this. The odd thing is that none of this negativity was from her constituency, but from fellow lawmakers, as if they were trying to distance themselves from her for some reason.

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The governor at this time was Governor Symington. He was under a lot of pressure to find out what was going on in the night sky over Phoenix. He announced at a scheduled press conference that he would do his utmost to get to the bottom of what was happening.

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Later that same day he held an unscheduled press conference to announce the capture of the alien responsible. He paraded out one of his staff dressed as an alien and made a big charade of the whole affair.

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Ten years later Symington confessed that he too had seen the mysterious lights that night and it was definitely not a military vehicle. He was himself a pilot and retired Air Force officer. He even called it otherworldly and did not believe it came from earth. He also said he made that silly unscheduled press conference to calm the hysteria surrounding the sighting.