junglist, when reality intrudes into a good fantasy the results are seldom pretty. A. C. Doyle bought into some really early "photoshopped" pictures of fairies. He was a very smart man with a blind spot. It still happens.

When you get several excited pilots flying around trying to intercept in the dark then anything that seems to confirm their expectations is seized. Look at various 'Friendly Fire' incidents over the years. Pilots involved were certain they were firting at the right target because it matched their expectations. In the heat of the moment you see what you think you should be seeing.

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So several professional people with reputations at stake, reporting about the same incident/same phenomena observed around the same time, are all fantasists?. I find that hard to believe. It could be the case, but I think its highly unlikely. I think that in both Belgium and Tehran, multiple witnesses, a few of whom were proven to be competent in their respective professions, saw something very real. The literal definition of UFO is not extra terrestrial craft but an unidentified flying object, when these unidentified objects display characterisitics and qualities that have not been displayed in currently available technology then surely they deserve to be taken seriously and merit proper investigation with all resources available?

Maybe they have been investigated and found to be ET in origin and the findings are secret, or they are prototype military vehicles that quite rightly, governments want to keep secret. It seems on here though that the merest suggestion of this means conspiracy.To the sceptics though, conspiracy theories just don't happen, when in fact the nations of this worlds national security laws are themselves, the very definition of a conspiracy theory.


eburacum45 gong back to the Tehran incident, from what I've read the 2nd F4 had a visual on the original object when the radar indicated it was 27nm, it got a radar lock at 25nm. The pilots then observed another ufo come from the first object and come towards them rapidly, I don't know if they also tracked that by radar as the report I have read doesn't seem to have that information ,I am also not as technically minded in these matters as others on the board seem to be, but my guess is, if they tried to fire on it, then they must have had it on radar.

Again, the argument settles on reliability of both human observation and the equipment on board the fighter jet, and I see this reliability argument time and time again on threads throughout this forum. What I have presented in the tehran case, are the facts of the incident. First hand accounts from the people involved and the details of radar data recieved. I think, given the amount of witnesses and the professional standing of quite a few of them, what they observed was a real, physical object. There is nothing else I can add.

What's to say the Radar lock was the 'light' that the pilot was seeing? How did he judge the distance of an unknown object? it could have been 25 miles away or 25 feet away.

If you want to persue this thread you need to start supporting your posts with some kind of evidence. So far you seem to put up a 'what do you trhink' then keep making assertions in the belief that as you didn't propose a Conspiracy you are free of the obligations of the CT forum rules.
Once you then start making assertions like in you last few posts you take on the obligation of supporting them as per the forum rules.

If you aren't familiar with them then here is a link Rules For Posting To This Board
Rule 13 is the one you need to study. Also the 'sticky' thread at the top of the Forum.

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No, but they could all be mistaken. I don't find that hard to believe.

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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?

Klass mentions the Teheran incident in one of his books. I don't have it readily available but he did bring up some important points about the F-4s. The Iranians were apparently not the best at maintaining their aircraft. Having a jet malfunction was not out of the ordinary in such aircraft. Do we know the history of the aircraft? Did it have a tendency to fail under certain circumstances? Without any documentation, it is hard to say but it seems possible the power failure may have been a fault or pilot mistake while under duress. Additionally, I am not sure how the pilot, who was flying in the opposite direction, could determine that the second UFO went back to the first. It was my understanding that this second "UFO" fell to the ground or disappeared.

You don't have to believe anything. You certainly don't have to believe they're chasing alien spaceships.

...multiple witnesses, a few of whom were proven to be competent in their respective professions, saw something very real.

Competence in one's profession does not equate to being excused from the natural limitations of human perception. Nor can someone be trained to accurately range objects with which he is no familiar, especially at night minus so many otherwise expected cues.

...when these unidentified objects display characterisitics and qualities that have not been displayed in currently available technology...

This leaps to two conclusions: first that the interpretation of the observation in terms of speed, size, and distance are to be taken literally as given by the witness, and second that some sort of technology is responsible for it.

Maybe they have been investigated and found to be ET in origin and the findings are secret, or they are prototype military vehicles that quite rightly, governments want to keep secret.

An extremely far-fetched set of hypotheses. Why not stick with ones that require shorter leaps of unfounded imagination?

UFO proponents always make the bifold proposal that people in the know are already sure these are extraterrestrial spacecraft, and are covering up that information for some nefarious purpose, or because the public are presumed to be panicky sheep. It's entirely circular reasoning.

...in fact the nations of this worlds national security laws are themselves, the very definition of a conspiracy theory.

Not a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy in fact, which is an entirely different thing. We know nations keep secrets and we know why. In fact, it is human nature to keep secrets from each other out of fear. But there is always evidence that the secret exists even if we don't know what it is. When the company board meets, you see them go into a room; there is evidence of their absence from other tasks; they emerge later. You may never know what they discussed, but you know something was discussed.

That differs markedly from conspiracy theories in which there is proposed some farfetched claim to explain what is entirely bereft of information.

my guess is, if they tried to fire on it, then they must have had it on radar.

Not necessarily. Engaging a target does not require it to have been seen on any radar.

Again, the argument settles on reliability of both human observation and the equipment on board the fighter jet, and I see this reliability argument time and time again on threads throughout this forum.

You see it because it is almost always the case in the real world. Things break down. People make mistakes. These sorts of occurrences account for the vast majority of anomalous events on Earth. To suddenly suppose that there must be a far-fetched explanation that has no a priori plausibility, simply because an event cannot be conclusively attributed to a prosaic cause, is quite irrational.

We focus on reliability factors in human perception because that's what real investigators do. In real investigations where people are liable for the strength of the results, witness reliability is always taken into account; whereas UFO investigations are almost entirely ignorant of this well-studied field. Go look at, for example, NTSB investigative methods and you'll find that worksheets and guides are provided to interviewers to help discern how reliable the witnesses' estimates are of things such as speed and distance.

"Reliability" in eyewitness testimony is not merely the witness's likely propensity to tell the truth, but more often his ability to discern the truth. Eyewitness observation (especially at night from a moving platform) is highly fraught with sources of natural, inescapable error. Real investigators take this into account and assess the witness statements on that basis. UFO "researchers" simply take every word that comes out of an eyewitness's mouth as gospel truth. And sadly, they think they're doing the right thing by that.

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Given the regional politics of the mid-70's the Tehran object might have been a lost Soviet plane or malfunctioning spy craft.

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Yonder is Dubhe seen on Earth tonight as it was in the days of Grover Cleveland's presidency whereas this way is Deneb seen as it was in the lifetime of Muhammed . If one somehow travelled to Deneb at very close to c then whenever you looked back you'd measure Earth as closer to you than the distance you would simultaneously measure between Earth and Dubhe.

Plus in some cases the characteristics are derived from different observations of seperate phenomena, but combined give the impression of "impossible" behavior of a single phenomenon.

Further, seeing "something" on radar does not necessarily mean there is a physical target.

What were they shooting with anyway? AIM-7? AIM-9? Guns? What does a "visual contact" even mean at 50km? I guess I should read up on the case, it's referenced so often.

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I recently saw a gentleman recounting the reports of a "near miss" by an airline pilot. The speaker noted that his balloon was 142 miles away at the time. However, if a trustworthy person like an airline pilot would certainly be more reliable than the guy who launched the balloon and tracked it.

Or, they could all be accurately factual.
I don't find that hard to believe either.

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We know that mistakes happen. We have conclusive evidence that mistakes happen. There is no conclusive evidence for the existance of alien spaceships, therefore it is unreasonable to "compare" the two (mistake vs alien spaceship) as if they were equally reasonable conclusions.

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So if we had conclusive evidence for alien spaceships it'd then be reasonable to "compare" (whatever that, in quotes, means) possible conclusions?

Uh, RAF, if there were conclusive evidence for ET craft in our skies there'd be no need to determine if these pilots were mistaken.

Therefore ...

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"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Why not?

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Meet the OOONG TOE.

You compared the mundane (mistake) on the same "level" as the extraordinary (alien spaceship). You did this when you posted that it wouldn't be hard for you to believe the latter as Swift had posted that he wouldn't find it hard to believe the former.

So you agree with me that it was an unreasonable comparison.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Well, yes. As it stands, we compare the likelihood that a sighting is an airplane, a helicopter, or a sky lantern. This is because we know what properties those have. However, we do not know what properties an alien spacecraft might have, so there's no logical reason to assume that anything has the properties of an alien spacecraft. It is Unknown, as per the definition.

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"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Even if there were alien spacecraft in our skies people would make mistakes and misidentifications; perhaps more of them, since people might be more likely to assume that a mysterious light was a spacecraft. I have myself mistaken the planet Mercury for an aircraft in the past.

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It is also possible for a pilot to report something that is "factual" (they report what they believe to be the facts) and also wrong (in the absolute sense).

The claim that these UFOs are ETs is an extraordinary claim. For me to believe such a claim, it would require extraordinary proof. This is not extraordinary proof in my opinion. Therefore, it is more likely they are mistaken.

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As probably the only person here with first hand professional experience of using Military Radar in the Royal Navy I have been saying this all along. People don't seem to take much notice though.

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Something is seen. We don't know what it is. So it's an alien spacecraft. I mean, what else COULD it be?

Alternatively: Well, it's just as likely to be an alien spacecraft as a case of mistaken identity. (This from the folks who play the lottery regularly.)

Coda: Prove it's not an alien spacecraft!

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Hahahahaha!!!! The burden of proof is on the debunkers, now. Nehner, nehner, nehner.

Funny how that works, huh? But hey, you're a mod, you've got to be a shill.

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You might find this interesting.

The Capabilities and Limitations of Shipborne Radar [Radar Bulletin No. 1(a) (RADONE)]

Good link. It's from 1945 but it all still holds true, well it was when I was in the RN in the early 80s. There are more processors on the system but it still needs a lot of interpretation by the operator. It's still more of an 'art' than anything else.

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I was more than a little confused by the fact that Macabee's account places Lt Jafari in the first plane, the one which did not manage to achieve some sort of radar lock with the apparent object, whereas the Wiki page puts him in the second plane.

Maccabee's account (here) is based on interviews with the tower operator, who watched the apparent object through binoculars; there was no reasonable possibility for that witness to estimate the distance of an object in the sky without some other clues, which were absent in this case.

Maccabee's account is also based on a report by the National Enquirer reporter Bob Pratt, who gives a separate account here, where the pilot and co-pilot of the second plane (who allegedly achieved radar lock) are named as First Lt Jalal Damirian and Second Lt Hossein Shokry.

This seems to suggest that in reality Lt Jafari was in fact in the first plane, the one which did not achieve radar lock, and that makes the bulk of that Wikipedia article as spurious as the radar lock Damirian seems to have somehow gained on the planet Jupiter.

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IIRC, one of the reasons for defence sensitivity, was that it could have given the Soviets an insight into potential weaknesses of our air defence radars.

The flaws in the early US radar are useful in considering the events around "the Battle of Los Angeles" as well.