Is "Improved Instrumental Techniques...", Nolan, Vallee, Jiang, Lemke 2022 a useful paper?

[F.Moon]

Just for the sake of completeness, here's an article from 2004 with some words by Randy James ("still alive and living in Council Bluffs"). Nothing new, I think.

 

[F.Moon]

And finally, a 1998 letter by Kenny Drake's uncle tryng to explain why "snow was falling in Big Lake Park, but nowhere else."

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Well...

 

[JMartJr]

As this thread has evolved more into an examination of the case than a discussion of the paper, should the title be amended to mention the case?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

A "multi-use crucible." It has legs. You can see how hot it is. Could you put this in a pickup truck as soon as the reaction was over?

Note: This is not in the U.S. I think it's in Gloucestershire, England

But maybe something of the kind was in use in Iowa in 1977?



If you choose to watch the whole thing, note that they drop something into the crucible to ignite the thermite. It's probably magnesium.


Note about the tiny foreign car with the 4 teenagers. More than once I've seen this bit of reasoning: Because it would be unlikely you could fit the necessary equipment in this vehicle, the conclusion is that this couldn't be a hoax.

Just because these guys were supposedly sighted by the Drake/James party, why would these guys necessarily have to be the hoaxers? That's aggressively sloppy thinking.

Hasty Generalization, Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, Guilt by Association, Motivated Reasoning... Take your pick.

I think we could just call it silly. Pushing a narrative.

 

[Eburacum]

Yes; I suggested a rail welding rig back in post #60.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/is...-2022-a-useful-paper.13286/page-2#post-349188

If you dropped one of those, it would make a considerable mess, and maybe a bright flash in the sky.

Does anyone know about the use of thermite rail welding in the US in the Seventies?

 

[MapperGuy]

A "multi-use crucible." It has legs. You can see how hot it is. Could you put this in a pickup truck as soon as the reaction was over?

Note: This is not in the U.S. I think it's in Gloucestershire, England

But maybe something of the kind was in use in Iowa in 1977?



If you choose to watch the whole thing, note that they drop something into the crucible to ignite the thermite. It's probably magnesium.


Note about the tiny foreign car with the 4 teenagers. More than once I've seen this bit of reasoning: Because it would be unlikely you could fit the necessary equipment in this vehicle, the conclusion is that this couldn't be a hoax.

Just because these guys were supposedly sighted by the Drake/James party, why would these guys necessarily have to be the hoaxers? That's aggressively sloppy thinking.

Hasty Generalization, Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, Guilt by Association, Motivated Reasoning... Take your pick.

I think we could just call it silly. Pushing a narrative.

I would lean away from the use of professional equipment, unless it was stolen and the user did not understand how it worked. In which case they would probably leave it behind.

From a pranksters point of view, if a little flash and flare is good, a bigger flash and bigger flare is better. So I would expect the quantities of materials ignited was as large a quantity of thermite/magnesium/gunpowder as they could find/steal. Yielding a big whoosh and lots of sparks. And the rest is people covering their behinds or trying to become part of the story.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

I think the most likely scenario is that it was home made thermite with chunks of magnesium to set it off placed in a shallow sand-lined pit. Maybe a lot of magnesium. No scrap metal was involved.

 

[F.Moon]

(#19)

I think this paper is designed to create a background of "peer reviewed" literature about UFOs regardless of what it actually says or doesn't say.

I suspect what's actually in the paper is irrelevant.

That's an interesting thesis. I think I agree- the title of the paper seems designed to crowbar its way into a "conventional" aerospace journal.
I toyed with the idea for a while that maybe one or more of the 2022 authors had a hidden agenda, i.e. to demonstrate that a flawed paper about UFOs could get published in a peer-reviewed technical journal- a bit like the Sokal affair.
(Alan Sokal, a physicist, submitted a hoax article to Social Text, to test what he saw as poor academic review standards in the humanities/ social sciences. It was published. Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
Depressingly, @NorCal Dave's observations make a lot of sense; Nolan, Vallee, Jiang and Lemke (or at least N. and V.) want to frame the narrative and get UFO subjects into mainstream journals, apparently without too much concern for scientific rigor or objective plausibility.

Vallee himself seemingly admits this purpose in these lines from Wired's article Jacques Vallée Still Doesn't Know What UFOs Are (Chantel Tattoli, Feb. 18, 2022):

The Progress in Aerospace Sciences paper, which was published in December 2021, was never meant to be "a breakthrough about what UFOs are," Vallée told me. It wasn't meant, L'Aigle-style, to pummel an entire town with rocks. It is "a template," he said, "for what serious UFO research could be in the future, if one plays by the rules." He and Nolan are now studying samples for potential follow-up papers. "You have to open the door first, before you can bring in the packages," he said.

Paraphrasing him, we could say that John J.'s massive post at the start of this thread is a "template" for what past and present "serious UFO research" really amounts to, "if one plays by the rules."

The Summary of the 2021 paper states:

The Council Bluffs case is one of many—the last several decades has [sic] recorded numerous cases wherein materials were claimed to be dropped from unknown aerial objects.

As already pointed out in this thread (#11), the evidence is mostly anecdotal, lacking basic information, or containing unreliable or plainly incorrect data. One example of the latter is the "1978 Jopala, Mexico" case which Vallee was still mentioning in 2017 (What do we know about the Material Composition of UFOs?, presentation at Contact in the Desert, Mojave, 2017). I assume he still does. The correct date of this case, well known to Mexican ufologists, is July 29, 1977. I don't know for sure whether the recovered sample had anything to do with the observed phenomenon, but it was long ago determined that the sightings concided with the re-entry of a Soviet rocket booster from Cosmos 929 (COSPAR ID: 1977-066B).

It doesn't matter. There's no need to rely on good old UFOs. "The day might come" when the brand-new UAPs will suffice, or so they hope. The Summary of the 2021 article goes on to say:

Recently, news reports have suggested the presence of other aerial craft of unknown provenance witnessed by Navy pilots concurrently detected with electronic sensors and visual identification [47–49]. While the data collected about this set of events does not include any material evidence, the day might come when materials from such events are available to be examined.

The new science of UAPs is coming...
The party goes on. The fun doesn't stop.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

What gets me is that these are classic cult infiltration tactics, and really reminds me of Scientology. The real coup isn't the data, it's getting the topic into a respected journal. That foothold creates a citation in a credible venue, to build a self-referential literature base.

Like Scientology's Narconon programs, the material is dressed in the language and structure of legitimate fields to "play by the rules" and pass editorial gatekeepers. The rebranding from "UFO" to the more official-sounding "UAP" parallels Scientology's habit of renaming and reframing its doctrines to shed baggage and borrow credibility.

The long game is normalization. You start with something seemingly benign, then gradually push more speculative or doctrinal claims under the same legitimized banner. It's a slow, strategic shift from fringe to accepted. Or at least sane-washed.