Quote:
Originally Posted by junglist
What especially gets me thinking is why the chief of air staff in Belgium at the time of the sightings would come out so publicly about the incident, risking ridicule. As a few of you have mentioned people make mistakes and radar returns can be totally explainable by different atmospheric conditions. Don't you think the chief of a countries Air defence staff would know that as well? I assume that to be in such a position within the military you would have to show a great degree of competence and expertise in your chosen field. The same applies to a lesser degree for the members of the Gendamrie who also reported the sightings, and the army colonel and his wife who's testimony is examined in the PDF file I posted a link to earlier. Can all these competent, professional people be wrong about what they saw either visually from the ground, or within radar data?
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You overstate the case. In the Belgian F-16 chase, the pilots never saw the UFO but were chasing spurious contacts. It appeared they were pursuing something. The people on the ground saw the F-16s keep flying by their UFO's indicating they probably were just stars scintillating, which is what the UFOlogist Meesen determined (of course you won't read any of this on a UFO website so pay attention). Now the F-16s thought they pursued something. However, they were initially directed towards a semi-stationary (edit: poor choice of words - very slow moving) target. When they kept flying past it, they noticed there was a strobe light on top of a smoke stack from a factory/power plant. Meesen suggested the radar was triggering on rising soot from the stack. Anyway, there was an analysis of the radar data made a year or so later from the F-16 chase. When it was all said and done, the analysts (Salmon and Gilmard I believe) determined that the contacts were sometimes reflections off of the ground, spurious signals, and, in one case, the other F-16! The data was just not very good. Everyone got excited about the event and it made headlines. However, the data suggests it was a mundane source confused by the pilots. Before you start with your highly trained observer/pilot nonsense, remember that pilots/policemen are human and can make errors in judgement. Why do you think many airplane accidents can be attributed to pilot error?