Chris said he would try looking through some of his old hard drives for the originals but was very doubtful that he still had them.
Fingers crossed!
I don't believe the object in Robert's video was a helicopter for several reasons.
[…]
-Nothing on ADS-B.
Do you have the date and approximate times for Chris's pictures even if he lost the originals? It would be great to verify.
-the object doesn't display any navigation or strobing anti collision lights
The smaller strobe lights or navigation lights can be drowned out by the glare of a brighter light source onboard. This is especially true when seen at distance. However, if the UAP was indeed over the reservoir, as is being considered, then it would be likely to see those lights if it was a commercial craft. Curious indeed
-we would also have to completely negate the officers story about the object he saw and how close it was to him prior to appearing on the other side of the lake. So he's either a liar or crazy or stupid. I met and talked to him and several of the officers he worked with, including the chief of police who all vouch for him as not being someone to make things up or tell crazy stories or seek attention.
I think basically everyone here would start with the assumption that he is genuine, not lying, and presenting the information as well as he can recall. It's a big misunderstanding to assume scepticism about one's claims requires assumptions of dishonesty or even worse, insanity.
Visual illusions and perceptual errors are
normal and well researched by cognitive neuroscientists. Our brain is always engaging in a process of constructing our perception of the external world. To do so it uses many different shortcuts and assumptions influenced by the algorithm itself and from previous experiences. The image on our retina, for example, is just a 2-D picture that the brain has to translate into three dimensions adding speed, location, etc. In conditions of low information, especially with limited light sources at night, the likelihood of perceptual errors dramatically increases. We have all experienced these to varying degrees in our lives at some point.
As a brief example; it's neurologically impossible to determine the size or distance of an object in the sky on its own. The only way is if we know either size/distance to begin with. i made a post here yesterday going into more detail about perception:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/oregon-ufo-lights-seen-by-pilots-starlink.13825/page-2#post-331127
The main takeaway is I fully believe Officer Klein is genuinely honest in his retelling of events. That doesn't mean he couldn't have also experienced normal perceptual errors at night or other well documented issues with memory recall, especially under high arousal/shocking situations. I don't know what he actually saw, of course, just clarifying that we wouldn't need to tarnish his character while also remaining skeptical about his experience.
2. Many of the witnesses have claimed to see the orbs interacting just over the resevoir with the objects clearly in front of the trees on the shore.
Now this is the most important evidence that needs to be captured on video! It will provide relative distance/size. If the orbs also demonstrate high rates of speed in this situation without producing noise in the video, then we finally have something very interesting. I hope you're able to capture something like that on video with your upcoming sky camera.
3. The lights/orbs don't stay together in a tight pattern. They move around each other, split off, go in different directions, etc.
I would encourage you, again, to have a look at the comment I linked above. Some of the gestalt, cognitive organizing principles can explain how these perceptions happen. The lights might have been completely unrelated to begin with, but because our brain often group similar stimuli together we misperceive their behaviours. Two lights appearing right next to each other on our retina could in fact be many miles apart along the same vector from our point of perception.
I have no idea what it is but I do know there are many reported sightings in the same area spanning at least decades of the same or very similar characteristics and behavior.
I'm genuinely curious what you think about the current drone flap going on. Would you agree that plenty of normal, non-mentally ill people, are priming one another to misperceive mundane things like airplanes in the sky?
For me, it clearly demonstrates the power of
priming and
availability heuristics impacting perceptual errors/illusions. Now that everyone is expecting drones, they are perceiving drones, despite them being normal aircraft. It is definitely the case that even in small towns once a story spreads, other people will start to believe they are seeing the same thing. You should look into the clown panic in the southern US where everyone started seeing clowns that literally didn't exist. It's fascinating.
Thanks again for coming here to provide additional information, I wish you luck on your continued research and skycam setup. If you are able to get video footage demonstrating the orb behaviours witnesses have talked about that would be very cool! Please come share anything anomalous you discover, and be sure to include the original files with metadata