That never seems to stop people reporting familiar objects as UFOs, unfortunately.

__________________
Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

But it doesn't mean that these claims should be so easily disclaimed without an investigation.

What's to investigate?

It's up to the claimant to conduct an investigation and come up with evidence to support his claim.

Anyway, there are several possibilities, including (but not limited to):
- a blimp commonly seen in the region and thought to be in the region at the time of the sighting.
- an alien artifact
- an undentified object of some kind

So far, it seems like it's an unidentified object of some kind. Knowing what we know about the blimp, and knowning what we know about people misidentifying blimps in the past, this seems like the most reasonable identification to make with the evidence available.

If somebody wants to identify it as an alien artifact, then they'll need to come up with additional evidence that both reasonably rules out the blimp hypothesis and supports the alien artifact hypothesis.

And it's easy for an armchair skeptic to disclaim it without looking closely at he situation.

Well, by that theory the geniuses in Phoenix should have recognized those flares (and yes, I saw them [last year's "flareup", not the one from 10 years or so ago]- took about a half second to recognize them, and 5 more seconds to make a sarcastic comment about UFO reports to be seen the next day).

Mike

If I got out of my armchair every time somebody told me they'd seen a UFO, I'd never finish my after-dinner cigar and brandy.

But the whole point of being a skeptic is that you don't get out of your armchair unless somebody gives you a very good reason.

So what's the good reason here? What makes this claim of seeing an alien artifact so much more interesting and worth investigating than all the other claims?

What is there to "disclaim"? All we have at this point is a number of people who apparently saw something they couldn't explain and among those people their descriptions vary significantly.

A better question might be what do you think they saw? An alien spaceship? If so, how did you come to that conclusion based on something (I assume) you did not see yourself?

__________________
Men go and come but Earth abides.

If memory serves me correctly, it was also the sighting of a large, triangular-shaped object that a number of people reported.

Wait. That was a blimp too, wasn't it?

As a Texan, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the UFO proponents and debunkers who will be postively affecting the Stephenville economy. Be sure to buy a tee-shirt. Or two.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

MUFON's efforts toward the Phoenix event was sorely lacking. Nobody did the elemental triangulation of the videos for years and when they did, it showed they were over the range where flares were dropped. MUFON and its officials repeatedly denied that they could be flares and accused quite a few people of lying or misconduct. When it comes to high profile cases reported by the media, MUFON is not very good at investigating.

As for the blimp, I saw a video reportedly taken that night. It definitely looked like a blimp. It was on Youtube but it has since disappeared.

True, which kind of gives a whole new meaning to their recent statement (made before their "investigation" is completed which is expected to take up to a year by their estimation mind you) that “We consider this the most significant mass sighting since the Phoenix Lights of 1997"... perhaps now would be a good opportunity to remind us all again what was so significant about it?

__________________
Men go and come but Earth abides.

I do agree that MUFON has dropped the ball a few times. Some of its investigators embraced the "Gulf Breeze" ufo hoax that Ed Walters pulled years ago. Kevin Randle debunked it I'd heard that some within the network changed their minds after seeing the evidence Randle had presented.

Yeah. Mistakes happen.

T-shirts. Over the last few years, when covering the big forest fires, people come around, selling T-shirts. That's our system. Free enterprise.

Randle just wrote a history of the case and never investigated it personally. Gulf Breeze was another example of how MUFON is not really interested in solving cases that become high profile in the media. The case was being exposed as a hoax and the MUFON leadership, in order to save face, discredited the investigators who were exposing the case as a hoax.
If they are going to make blunders such as these in high profile cases, what does it say about the ones that are not high profile and nobody bothers to check?
They learned nothing from their mistakes at Gulf Breeze and these same mistakes were repeated with the Phoenix 1997 event. To me it is a case of being unable to trust MUFON to do the job of investigating cases right simply because they haven't done so in the past.

The night that I saw the flares, there were indeed reports of a "large, triangular object." They happened at a different time (and location) than the flares, and I did not see them or even hear about them until the next day. About three days later, local news interviewed a local amateur astronomer (high school kid, as I recall) who reported viewing the object through a low power telescope and determining that it was a formation of aircraft with normal lighting.

Mike

That is about correct. The Mitch Stanley report did not show up in the media until several months later and it appeared only in a local paper. Mitch did report to MUFON his sighting early on through a contact in the astronomy club but when he appeared at a local MUFON town meeting with this report, he was labeled a "debunker" and they felt he was lying. Nobody bothered to follow-up on this report despite it being there as a potential explanation. Another example of MUFON's honesty and integrity in reporting/investigating UFO events.

I have a report on the 1997 phoenix event on my website.
http://members.aol.com/TPrinty/AZUFO.html
It is a bit dated because I wrote most of it in late 1997 (with some additions later as more data became available). I recall reading an article in the AZ republic about Mitch last year where he commented that nobody still mentions his observations as a potential source for the 8-8:30 triangle event.

That's the problem...there is very little to look closely at. I've seen one video, taken on a cell-phone camera, which was nothing more than a white light on a dark, reference-free background (and didn't match witness descriptions of an object with dancing/flashing lights).

And then you have witness reports. And you can check flight/radar records to see if anything happened to be in the area (the blimp apparently was).

And that's really all you have. You're right in that we can't just automatically say "Yeah, it was a blimp" or "Yeah, it was sunlight reflecting off of airplanes"...but just because we can't prove it was one of those two things doesn't make the theory it was a UFO any more credible. There's a thousand things it could have been, and a UFO (as in extra-terrestrial vehicle) is the least likely.

What was the analogy we used before? I just saw a car drive by, but I couldn't see the driver. Because I can't prove it was a man or woman, it doesn't automatically make it an alien. That's simply not how it works.

__________________
I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Theory of Zombie Relativity:
1) Everyone Else is a Zombie relative to You
2) Whether or not it matters is related to the inverse square of the distance between their teeth and your brain
(Quoted from Demigrog)

More related...
UFO convention: Witnesses and investigators discuss Texas sightings

The story is just a few more descriptions. But the attached video, clearly shows an infrared shot of...? A big circle.

The video of the previous sighting looks like a deflated balloon.

A lady who disagrees it was a saucer because it looked more like an aspirin. (doesn't the body crave what it needs?)

And the dogs with the tin foil cones? What's up with that?

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Well, if aliens really wanted to get in close and study us st00pid humans, they'd mind-control our dogs to do it. Gotta protect yourself, man! They're out there, man! Down with the Man, man! ...sorry

__________________