Phoenix Lights

[Scaramanga]

I find myself unperplexed. The "UFOs" in the second event, way over on the other side of a mountain range, were not planes, they were flares dropped from planes. If you looked at them with binoculars or a scope, you would not see planes, you'd see single bright lights.



Not a true Scotsman astronomer, anyway.



HE would.

He doesn't say '10 degrees above my house'.....he says '10 degrees over my house'. The first would clearly have the literal meaning of the UFO being 10 degrees above his house, because it is a comparative expression. The latter is just not the same....and one truly has to play some strange semantics to make it do so. To me it is clearly ' over my house, at 10 degrees'.

But frankly I find the state of reporting and analysis appalling anyway. Such vague and ambiguous wording does not come from a 'skilled observer'....true Scotsman or otherwise !

As for the Barry Goldwater event, the flares were dropped by planes. The same planes ( Warthogs ) as are claimed for the earlier event. Sure the later event was flares....I think just about everyone now agrees on that....but one can quite justifiably ask why nobody saw the planes that dropped the flares when its alleged people could see the earlier Warthog formation from 70 miles away !

 

[Eburacum]

one can quite justifiably ask why nobody saw the planes that dropped the flares when its alleged people could see the earlier Warthog formation from 70 miles away !

Tim Ley claimed to have seen the formation from 65 miles away; I'm not sure how he determined that distance, but it seems to confirm that the planes were a high and distant formation, rather than a large and low object that would be difficult to see at that distance.

The Snowbird A-10s flew overhead for some of the witnesses; curiously enough they seem to have been coming from the north west, so they must have followed a complex flightpath that went northeast from Tucson, then southeast, then southwest towards Barry Goldwater range. No wonder it took them three hours.

 

[Scaramanga]

Size estimates are not always accurate, though.

Sure...but there's a huge difference between something 5 degrees across and something large enough for a witness to say ' you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover it '. Numerous witnesses described the object as 'massive', 'enormous', ' big enough to fit all 40 of our B52s on the wing of ' ( from the James Fox documentary ), etc. Something 5 degrees across just isn't 'massive'....and no amount of stretching things makes it so.

Bear in mind also that the witnesses have to balance size vs speed in their mind. One cannot on the one hand say witnesses are useless at judging size and speed, and then on the other hand expect them to instinctively know what speed something a certain size 'ought' to have. Sure, in an extreme case...if something was 40 degrees across and moving at 1 degree a second....I'd imagine most people would rightly find that odd, but something just 5 degrees across is not odd enough. It's not hugely different from the planes that pass over at 9000 feet at my house and have 2 degree wingspan and and move about 2 degrees per second.

That doesn't mean the formation wasn't the planes. But I think the formation would then have been much larger than 5 degrees and personally I accept some of the witness reports of 20 degrees or more. Clearly people saw something actually huge in dimension ( i.e visually large in size ) in the sky, and its wrong to just assume they 'inferred' huge-ness from an estimate of height and angular size.

In the Lynn Kitei documentary witness Terri Mansfield states ' we could not see the whole object from front to back, from side to side...it was so big '. That does not sound like 5 degrees to me !

 

[Eburacum]

Something 5 degrees across just isn't 'massive'....and no amount of stretching things makes it so.

On the other hand, you are deliberately 'shrinking' the apparent size and playing down the strangeness of a flight of planes at that height and speed.

Overhead, the flight would have appeared 9 degrees across, and that is assuming that Stanley was correct, and that they did not spread apart further during their journey. I have never seen an aircraft that covers 9 degrees of the sky, except directly underneath the end of an airport runway just about to land; and those planes were travelling at a much greater speed than an apparent 15-25 miles an hour. In general, only helicopters, VTOL planes and dirigibles travel that slowly, and none of those are triangular. So we are in the realm of high strangeness.

I find it very unlikely that any gigantic alien spacecraft would come and glide slowly over Phoenix for any reason, no matter how alien their thinking; but those people saw something. One possible alternative to aliens is a secret US or commercial aircraft that resembles a gigantic black triangle - indeed, there have been many reports of such 'black triangles' in the past. To be honest, I find the idea that anyone has built a gigantic black hovering craft (without ever using it despite the many, many conflicts that have happened since 1997) and kept this completely secret, ridiculous. Perhaps they are keeping this giant black triangle secret because it would be totally useless in a conflict - something that only travels at 25 mph at 2000 feet would be a sitting duck in a war.

No good photograph of a secret black triangle or an alien black triangle exists - that is because they don't exist, and never have. All the reports of black triangles have more mundane explanations, although they are not all the same explanation. Some older reports were sparked by the NOSS triangles, a series of formation-flying satellites that are now gone, but were the Starlink of their day. Many, many reports have been caused by formations of paper fire lanterns, flying in threes and creating triangles by chance. Quite a few are the result of planes flying in formation, often during, before or after air shows; some are flares (including, of course, infra-red flares), others are planes not flying in formation but just near to each other (which I think is the case here - which might explain the fluctuating size). Others have other explanations.

I can state with reasonable confidence that none of the reports are caused by slow, secret giant aircraft or slow, giant alien spaceships; but it would be very interesting to be proved wrong.

 

[Scaramanga]

On the other hand, you are deliberately 'shrinking' the apparent size and playing down the strangeness of a flight of planes at that height and speed.

No....I'm going by what the supposed star witness ( Stanley ) said. I haven't 'shrunk' anything. I did not dispute, in fact I even agreed, than even an object 5 degrees across going at 1 degree a second would seem oddly slow. My contention is that it would not appear so out of the ordinary as to generate loads of reports to the police...and that only what many witnesses say they actually saw, a visually massive object, could explain the hype.

Overhead, the flight would have appeared 9 degrees across

Based on what ? There are more witnesses who say the object was visually enormous, covering most of the sky, than there is Stanley with his 5 degrees.

I find it very unlikely that any gigantic alien spacecraft would come and glide slowly over Phoenix for any reaso

Me too. But my original point was that everyone seems to hold up Stanley as a reliable witness whilst at the same time asserting the 'unreliable witness' clause for everyone else. We'll never know for certain if it was an alien craft....or a blimp...or just a flight of planes....but we can look back on the matter and spot a certain level of standards not being equally applied. That's the point I've been making, regardless of what the phenomenon actually was.

 

[JMartJr]

only what many witnesses say they actually saw, a visually massive object, could explain the hype.

The hysteria of the 2016 Evil Creepy Clown sightings, the Spring Heel Jack panic, mass hysteria outbreaks in schools and witnesses being wrong about UFOs and other phenomena would tend to dispute that claim. Hype needs little underlying truth to get rolling. It would seem particularly so in this case, where there was a later, more protracted event that would be seen by a lot of people that same night, and a community was abuzz about it the next day, allowing for cross pollination of of stories to blur and distort actual memories.

There are more witnesses who say the object was visually enormous, covering most of the sky, than there is Stanley with his 5 degrees.

And as pointed out above, witnesses tend to wildly inflate their estimates of the angular size of even common items seen in the sky, such as thinking the moon would be about the size of a tennis ball at arms length, instead of the more accurate aspirin tablet. I think you'd at least agree that an astronomer, even an amateur, might have more experience at judging angles of separation of points in a night sky than the average person. Most of us do not have ANY experience or knowledge of applying degrees separation to points in the sky.

Something 5 degrees across would be 10 times the diameter of the full moon across it's width, and many times the area if you assumes a solid body between the lights. That would seem "huge," it wold be visually huge compared to other things we are used to seeing in the night sky.

I feel like we're close to "going around in circles" here, so I'll try to bow out here unless there is some new point I think I can speak to. Of course please refute anything that you think I've gotten wrong (I've been wrong before!)

Edited to complete the thought in the paragraph beginning "Something 5 degrees," which got chopped when I went to answer the doorbell and didnlt complete the post before posting it when I got back...

 

[Eburacum]

Based on what ?

Based on Trigonometry. Unless Stanley made his observation at 90 degrees, i.e., directly overhead, the value of 5 degrees you keep quoting is too small.
If Stanley made his assessment of 5 degrees width at 60 degrees elevation, that formation would subtend 7.04 degrees overhead.

However, he may have made his assessment at a range of different angles, since he was apparently observing the formation from 20 degrees (possibly less) to 60 degrees elevation.
If Stanley made his assessment of 5 degrees width at 50 degrees elevation, that formation would subtend 9.2 degrees when seen directly overhead. This figure seems reasonably likely to me, but it may be even more.

If Stanley made his assessment of 5 degrees width at 40 degrees elevation, that formation would subtend 13.5 degrees when seen directly overhead.
If he made it at 20 degrees elevation, that 5 degrees width would become a massive 52.4 degrees wide when seen overhead.
So a little bit of inaccuracy or ambiguity in Stanley's account allows for a lot of leeway in the apparent width of the formation, particularly when seen from directly underneath.

I think that Stanley's assessment is within the right ballpark for a large, slow moving, overhead phenomenon.

 

[Scaramanga]

Based on Trigonometry. Unless Stanley made his observation at 90 degrees, i.e., directly overhead, the value of 5 degrees you keep quoting is too small.
If Stanley made his assessment of 5 degrees width at 60 degrees elevation, that formation would subtend 7.04 degrees overhead.

I keep quoting 5 degrees because that is what Stanley actually says. They are his words, not mine.

The Astronomy article states....

"Stanley watched them for about a minute, and then turned away. It was the last thing the amateur astronomer wanted to look at. "They were just planes, I didn't want to look at them," Stanley says when he's asked why he didn't stare at them longer."

That same article...which has already turned Stanley's 10 degrees starting elevation into 20 degrees....then goes on to say....

"Tim estimates 15 minutes for the entire event. Mitch Stanley estimates 3-5 minutes"

Now if these statements are both true then the 'for about a minute' has to be the final minute of the ' 3 -5 minutes', as he says he then lost interest. And that minute has to be the minute in which he viewed through the telescope....as by his own words he didn't watch the object after that minute. So Stanley has to have already been looking at the lights for 2 - 4 minutes before viewing through the telescope. There is no other way to interpret his statements. So the lights have to have been already quite high up when Stanley viewed through the telescope....when we know the first 3 lights were all within one degree or so.

I am not trying to minimise the size of what Stanley saw. His own account does so when you fully analyse it.

 

[Eburacum]

I keep quoting 5 degrees because that is what Stanley actually says. They are his words, not mine.

In which case you must accept that the formation would subtend 7 degrees when directly overhead, due to trigonometry. 14 times as wide as the Moon, moving at a much slower speed than any familiar aircraft. I think there is plenty of opportunity for this dimension to be larger, but perhaps that is not necessary.

In the Proctor clip, the outer two lights seem to wander away from the central three lights over time. Perhaps Stanley saw the formation when it was particularly close together, and when some of the other witnesses observed it, the outermost lights had moved further apart. Whatever the case, the fact that the lights move independently in the Proctor clip demonstrates that this was not a single aircraft.

 

[Eburacum]

Here's an interesting 1997 interview with Capt. Drew Sullins, apparently the commander of the Snowbirds on that night. He doesn't address the 8pm event, but he does say two interesting things; first, there were eight Snowbirds in the air that night, and secondly the planes flew over the flare-drop range individually, not in formation, making repeated runs.

This suggests several things; the planes over the flare-drop range would have been individual aircraft, so would have been difficult to spot at that range. Also the 10:00 pm event must have been quite a long one, which gave a number of witnesses a chance to get their camcorders out. But most importantly, if there were eight planes up there, maybe Stanley and Proctor, and a number of other witnesses, only noticed the central five; there may have been other planes, as many as three, flying around at the same time which would extend the apparent size of the perceived object.
https://www.theufochronicles.com/2014/03/project-snowbird-and-infamous-flare.html

On that particular night, the visibility and atmospheric conditions were such that the things could have been viewed from the southwestern suburbs of Phoenix. These flares can be seen from hundreds of miles if the weather conditions are right. Apparently, they're not the only unit out there that dropped flares. Who's to say, perhaps the weather conditions and every thing just kind of came together and these things could be seen from Phoenix.
YOUNG: You speculate that other units could have also been involved?
SULLINS: The only units we had flying that night were the eight aircraft from the 104th Fighter Squadron.
YOUNG: What about the arguments that the flares were visible longer than 1-hour, when the actual burn-time for parachute flares would be around 4 or 5 minutes?
SULLINS: They were dropping a lot of flares. They were over that range for over an hour. One aircraft would go in, drop a couple of flares, make its run and attack a target, then another aircraft would come in from behind and illuminate the range again, so they were continually dropping flares in that area.

 

[Mendel]

A bit of an aside, but, the term "trained observer" is bandied about a lot. But amateur astronomers fit the this description a lot better than most of the people to whom the term is applied. They actually do something on a regular basis to train their brain to perceive.

When it comes to the quality of visual perception being a "solid citizen" rather than a beatnik doesn't mean a thing. The Solid Citizen Fallacy should be dead, but this zombie keeps on shambling along in UFO folklore. The false dichotomy is between visual perception and the hallucinations of a kook. As if you have to be hallucinating to misperceive. The true issue is quality of visual perception. How well does a Solid Citizen perceive?

Then there is the related issue: What is a "trained observer"? Are cops and pilots really trained observers? (Or are they just high in social status? So high that you're a bad person if you question the reliability of their perceptions.)

Is a governor a reliable eye-witness? Of course! He's a solid citizen and a pilot! Checkmate!


Hendry, A. (1980). The Ufo handbook: A guide to investigating, evaluating and reporting Ufo sightings. Sphere.



In the UFO sighting reports Hendry took directly from eye-witnesses, the misperception failure rate for pilots was 75%; 94% for cops.

A cop is a trained observer because he takes reports. But how has a cop trained his brain to process the data the retina of the eye is presenting to it via the optic nerve? More than the average person? How?

How has a governor done the same?

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." —Mark Twain

The true misperception rate is 100% for all professions.

However, 94% of law enforcement observations could be identified by the scientists from the description alone, which implies that the descriptions were better than average.

It is unlikely that aircrew would be significantly worse at observing than other white-collar workers; but it is possible that the phenomena one can see from an airplane appear more unusual (or more ambiguous) than those one can see from the ground (e.g. squid boats or drilling rig flares), and that is why less of them could be identified.

Cops generally have to enter detailed descriptions of objects and people into their reports, so I'd expect them generally to be "trained" to notice more details than an average observer.

(If you want to compare how good a profession is at identifying UFOs, you have to do something like expose a set number of each to the same sort of event and see how many identify it; e.g. lead 100 pilots and 100 cops to a spot where they can see bright Venus, and record their observations. But the data shown above isn't anything like that.)

 

[Eburacum]

However, 94% of law enforcement observations could be identified by the scientists from the description alone, which implies that the descriptions were better than average.

I like that; an optimistic and positive take on misperception. Even though the police got their identifications wrong, they gave enough detail for someone else to correct them.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

There are many issues involved in these statistics but I'm not going into them in this post. The main issue: This is a misperception rate, not a misreporting rate.

There's nothing about being a cop that makes one better at perception than the general population. Even if one is a detective... how many times are you looking at lights in the sky in the course of your investigations? Or any moving object? Or astronomical bodies? Does a detective ever look at Venus?

There's also nothing about being a cop, in particular, that educates one in the science of perception. That's important because if you lack that kind of knowledge you are not wary of the limitations of your own perceptions.

What if you look at Venus (for the first time in your life), chase Venus at 90 mph and then write a solid report about your pursuit of an unidentified object that exactly paced your movements? You get a report about a mysterious craft that defies known physics and was under intelligent control. After all it has no wings or means of propulsion and it was reacting to the movements of a particular person.

From then on in UFO Folklore it's a story reported by a trained observer who reliably reported his perceptions. Completely ignoring the question of whether the object really was as big as a house a few thousand feet away, that exactly paced the movements of the witness.

Issues:
-Size and distance estimates of ambiguous objects in night sky.
-Parallax effects of very distance objects. (Sun, Moon and Venus "follow" your movements exactly.)
-Locus of control - It's reacting to me. It's interested in me.
-Anthropomorphization; Cognitive bias; attributing human characteristics to non-human objects or animals. It's under intelligent control.

May or may not be in play:
-Self-serving bias. Will I be a special person because of my encounter? May influence reporting or not reporting.


When Allan Hendry was the in-house investigator for CUFOS, the issues just listed were well known. As were many other critical issues. Proper techniques for taking UFO eyewitness reports were decades old.

Currently, because UFOs are so old they're new again, all that knowledge is "lost" and we're back to square one. Too many people accept unexamined anecdotal stories as fact, without the issues of perception, cognitive bias, etc. being properly taken into account.

We're getting a lot of uncritically accepted anecdotal stories about mysterious craft defying the laws of physics under intelligent control. Too many people accept the unexamined anecdotal stories as fact, without the issue of perception, and all the other issues, being taken into account. Those stories are gathered together and... now there's so much evidence of mysterious craft that the reality of mysterious craft is a fact. Only denied by a handful of rigidly (perhaps pathologically) orthodox people who laughably self-identify as skeptics.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

We've gone back to square one when it comes to the Solid Citizen Fallacy, the Trained Observer Fallacy, the Anecdotal Report Fallacy, The Witness Variability Fallacy and The Selection Effect.

Solid Citizen Fallacy - These aren't just kooks, drunks and Beatniks reporting in this case (or many cases). These reports come from Solid Citizens.
1. The false dichotomy between hallucinations and misperception. Solid citizens have the same biological limitations as anyone else. This aspect of The Solid Citizen Fallacy ignores the well known issues surrounding perception and misperception.
2. Solid Citizens don't misremember details. Heh
3. Solid Citizens don't just make up things, embellish stories or pull hoaxes. Heh.
4. Social status makes one immune to criticism. If you question the story of a cop, a pilot, a member of the military (or a special education teacher?) you're a bad person.

Trained Observer Fallacy - See post 133.

Anecdotal Report Fallacy.
Anecdotal reports taken as fact, gathered together and presented as over-whelming evidence for a mysterious narrative.
-It was as big as a house a few thousand feet away moving with no wings or visible means of propulsion. (Venus)
-Objects at the altitude of aircraft, moving in circular pattern. (Star Link flares)
-It was hovering and then accelerated at tremendous speed. (Airplane moving along witness' line of sight.)
-It was hovering and then accelerated at tremendous speed. (Venus covered by unseen moving cloud. Witness made cause and effect error. Mistook disappearance as huge acceleration.)
-It was hovering, rotating and followed me home. Here's my detailed sketch of it's structure. (Scintillating star.)
-A gigantic craft hovering in the sky above a military base. (Illuminating flares.)

But these stories are all woven into one big narrative.


The Witness Variability Fallacy.
If eyewitness reports describing the same object are wildly different, that's evidence for something very mysterious or fishy.

-It really was changing shape, speed, luminance, color. Maybe it's alien tech. Maybe it's an inter-dimensional being, or a time traveling human from a future Earth.
-Someone's lying. Probably the government or those darned skeptics spreading misinformation to muddy the waters.


No, man. Wide variability in reported details is a normal aspect of all eyewitness testimony; not specific to UFO sightings.

If we restrict this issue to UFO sightings, we have ample evidence of the Wide Variability Effect. Sometimes there are many UFO reports linked to a known object. But we get many different reported details.

See: https://satobs.org/seesat_ref/Oberg/680304-Eastern-US.pdf
An early example: The Zond IV reentry case - March 1968

A space junk reentry that looked something like this.


Witnesses reported:
-A fleet of objects flying in formation
-Two separate objects. (One was chasing the other.)
-One single object - Cigar shaped with rows of illuminated windows, saucer shaped, long and narrow with a light in front
and in back and a streaming tail...

Human perception, memory, cognitive quirks are an adequate explanation for differences in eyewitness reports. That's not opinion. That's science.

(At other times a false narrative is the problem.. Witnesses were looking at different things but the false narrative says they were looking at the same thing.)



The Selection Effect - Misperceptions generate mysterious UFO reports. More common accurate perceptions generate fewer reports. Thus a bias toward belief in a mysterious event.

People who recognize what they are seeing are not motivated to make reports or make short accurate reports. People who misperceive what they are seeing are motivated to make reports and tend to make detailed, wild reports. The wildest reports get the most attention. This causes a bias toward a mysterious narrative.

Example: Venus and Jupiter in conjunction. Just in one city: A million people don't look at all. Thousands of people see it as two stars (uninteresting), a few hundred eccentrics correctly identify Venus and Jupiter in conjunction. A handful of people stare at the mysterious UFO and report it. The UFO event hits the local news.

The Condon Report included this in connection to the same Zond IV case:

An effect important to the UFO problem is demonstrated by the
records: the excited observers who thought they had witnessed a
very strange phenomenon produced the most detailed, longest,
and most misconceived reports, but those who by virtue of
experience most nearly recognized the nature of the phenomenon
became the least excited and produced the briefest reports.
• The "excitedness effect" has an important bearing on the UFO
problem. It is a selection effect by which the least accurate reports
are made more prominent (since the observer becomes highly
motivated to make a report), while the most accurate reports may
not be recorded.
• In the case of Zond IV the two most lengthy unsolicited reports
described the apparition as a cigar-shaped craft with a row of
lighted windows and a fiery tail, while the correct identifications as
a re-entry were short, in some cases recovered only by later
solicitation of reports.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Sure...but there's a huge difference between something 5 degrees across and something large enough for a witness to say ' you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover it '. Numerous witnesses described the object as 'massive', 'enormous', ' big enough to fit all 40 of our B52s on the wing of ' ( from the James Fox documentary ), etc. Something 5 degrees across just isn't 'massive'....and no amount of stretching things makes it so.

Bear in mind also that the witnesses have to balance size vs speed in their mind. One cannot on the one hand say witnesses are useless at judging size and speed, and then on the other hand expect them to instinctively know what speed something a certain size 'ought' to have. Sure, in an extreme case...if something was 40 degrees across and moving at 1 degree a second....I'd imagine most people would rightly find that odd, but something just 5 degrees across is not odd enough. It's not hugely different from the planes that pass over at 9000 feet at my house and have 2 degree wingspan and and move about 2 degrees per second.

That doesn't mean the formation wasn't the planes. But I think the formation would then have been much larger than 5 degrees and personally I accept some of the witness reports of 20 degrees or more. Clearly people saw something actually huge in dimension ( i.e visually large in size ) in the sky, and its wrong to just assume they 'inferred' huge-ness from an estimate of height and angular size.

In the Lynn Kitei documentary witness Terri Mansfield states ' we could not see the whole object from front to back, from side to side...it was so big '. That does not sound like 5 degrees to me !

In my opinion this is an example of the Witness Variability Fallacy. See post 134


The Selection Effect is also important in this case. We're getting the wildest misperceptions but very few reports of the accurate perceptions.

These are related, of course.

As mentioned earlier in this thread, we should give more weight to the earliest reports and less weight to the long after the fact reports.

 

[Mauro]

We've gone back to square one when it comes to the Solid Citizen Fallacy, the Trained Observer Fallacy, the Anecdotal Report Fallacy, The Witness Variability Fallacy and The Selection Effect.

Solid Citizen Fallacy - These aren't just kooks, drunks and Beatniks reporting in this case (or many cases). These reports come from Solid Citizens.
1. Solid citizens have the same biological limitations as anyone else. This aspect of The Solid Citizen Fallacy ignores the well known issues surrounding perception and misperception.
2. Solid Citizens don't misremember details.
3. Solid Citizens don't just make up things, embellish stories or pull hoaxes. Heh.
4. Social status makes one immune to criticism. If you question the story of a cop, a pilot, a member of the military (or a special education teacher?) you're a bad person.

Trained Observer Fallacy - See post 133.

Anecdotal Report Fallacy.
Anecdotal reports taken as fact, gathered together and presented as over-whelming evidence.
-It was as big as a house a few thousand feet away moving with no wings or visible means of propulsion. (Venus)
-Objects at the altitude of aircraft, moving in circular pattern. (Star Link flares)
-It was hovering and then accelerated at tremendous speed. (Airplane moving along witness' line of sight)
-It was hovering and then accelerated at tremendous speed. (Venus covered by unseen moving cloud. Witness made cause and effect error. Mistook disappearance as huge acceleration.)
-It was hovering, rotating and followed me home. Here's my detailed sketch of it's structure. (Scintillating star.)
-A gigantic craft hovering in the sky above a military base. (Illuminating flares.)

But these stories are all woven into one big narrative.


The Witness Variability Fallacy.
If eyewitness reports describing the same object are wildly different, that's evidence for something very mysterious or fishy.

-It really was changing shape, speed, luminance, color. Maybe it's alien tech. Maybe it's an inter-dimensional being, or a time traveling human from a a future Earth.
-Someone's lying. probably the government or those darned skeptics spreading misinformation to muddy the waters.


No man. Wide variability in reported details is a normal aspect of all eyewitness testimony; not specific to UFO sightings.

If we restrict this issue to UFO sightings, we have ample evidence of the Wide Variability Effect. Sometimes there are many UFO reports linked to a known object. But we get a many different reported details.

See: https://satobs.org/seesat_ref/Oberg/680304-Eastern-US.pdf
An early example: The Zond IV reentry case - March 1968

Witnesses reported:
-A fleet of objects flying in formation
-Two separate objects. (One was chasing the other.)
-One single object with rows of illuminated windows - Cigar shaped, saucer shaped, long and narrow with a light in front
and in back and a streaming tail,


The Selection Effect - Misperceptions generate mysterious UFO reports. More common accurate perceptions generate fewer reports. Thus a bias toward a truly mysterious event.
People who recognize what they are seeing don't make reports or make short accurate reports. People who misperceive what they are seeing make reports and tend to make detailed, wild reports. The wildest reports get the most attention. This causes a bias toward a mysterious narrative.

Example: Venus and Jupiter in conjunction. Just in one city: A million people don't look at all. Thousands of people see it as two stars (uninteresting), a few hundred eccentrics correctly identify Venus and Jupiter in conjunction. A handful of people stare at the mysterious UFO and report it. The UFO event hits the local news.

The Condon Report included this in connection to the same Zond IV case:

This should be a Required Reading for any person before reporting an UFO. Thumbs up.

 

[Mendel]

There are many issues involved in these statistics but I'm not going into them in this post. The main issue: This is a misperception rate, not a misreporting rate.

No, it isn't. A misperception/misidentication would describe a base set of observation events and then determine how many of these were identified correctly by the witnesses.

Here we have a base set of unidentified/misindentified object reports, and rates on how many of the reports in that set were subsequently identified by the jury. The statistics are an identification rate. We cannot turn it into a misidentification rate because we lack the data to do so.

 

[Scaramanga]

The true misperception rate is 100% for all professions.

It takes a LOT of 'mis-perception' to see something that allegedly covers no more than 5 - 10 degrees and for numerous witnesses to make comments such as ' you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover this thing'....or that it was so large you could not see one end when looking at the other...and other similar comments mentioned earlier.

It just seems to me people settle on their chosen narrative and anyone who doesn't fit into that was 'mis-perceiving'. ( I hasten to add this works both ways and Mitch Stanley received a frosty reception with his ' 5 degrees' from those who'd seen something visually 'massive' ). Personally I have long since ceased to care if it was all aliens or not. The case fascinates me more from the level of bias from all sides than it does the alien aspect.

 

[Mendel]

It takes a LOT of 'mis-perception' to see something that allegedly covers no more than 5 - 10 degrees and for numerous witnesses to make comments such as ' you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover this thing'....or that it was so large you could not see one end when looking at the other...and other similar comments mentioned earlier.

Ok, so maybe we need to be more nuanced here than I have been.
• misidentification: describes Venus, but reports it as alien craft
• misperception: describes Venus as moving and maneouvering

In that case, we can still say that a report from wich the UFO could be identified would've been mostly perceived correctly, so that the rate given in the UFO Handbook is not a "misperception failure rate", but rather a minimum perception success rate.

The misidentification rate is likely still 100%, given that we still don't know more about alien visitors and flying saucers than when the book came out decades ago.

It just seems to me people settle on their chosen narrative and anyone who doesn't fit into that was 'mis-perceiving'. ( I hasten to add this works both ways and Mitch Stanley received a frosty reception with his ' 5 degrees' from those who'd seen something visually 'massive' ). Personally I have long since ceased to care if it was all aliens or not. The case fascinates me more from the level of bias from all sides than it does the alien aspect.

The side that deems unlikely that which has never been shown to be possible is not biased.

 

[taurusclover21]

We'll never know for certain if it was an alien craft....or a blimp...or just a flight of planes....but we can look back on the matter and spot a certain level of standards not being equally applied. That's the point I've been making, regardless of what the phenomenon actually was.

I'm just as certain it wasn't an alien craft as I am that it wasn't Santa's sled being pulled by flying reindeer.

 

[JMartJr]

I'm just as certain it wasn't an alien craft as I am that it wasn't Santa's sled being pulled by flying reindeer.

I wouldn't go quite that far.

1) I know airplanes, drones, balloons and stuff exist and fly around in the atmosphere here and generate UFO reports. I know that Venus an meteors and such exist and generate UFO reports.

2) I do not know if alien spaceships exist, nor if they DO, if they can get here, nor if the CAN, would they do so for decades and fly around being elusive rather than landing and stealing all our zenite or welcoming us to the federation. But "maybe" seems to me to remain in play.

3) I know that Santa Clause and flying reindeer do not exist, at least as described in The Lore.

So in evaluating UFO claims, I tend to start with "Might it be anything in category 1, things that are known to exist and to generate such reports?" If it can be proven to be one of those mundane things, fine, game over. If it can't be proven but remains plausible, that's good enough for ME (not to MB standards!) and the ball is in the court of those believing the answer is from category 2. They need to prove their case. So far, their record is 0-zillions. But that MIGHT change. Category 3 is not in play, to me.

(I guess there ought to be a 2.5, for something less scientifically plausible but that I can't disprove... angels or demons or inter-dimensional (whatever that means) whatsnames.)

My $0.02, your mileage may vary...

 

[Eburacum]

It takes a LOT of 'mis-perception' to see something that allegedly covers no more than 5 - 10 degrees and for numerous witnesses to make comments such as ' you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover this thing'....or that it was so large you could not see one end when looking at the other...and other similar comments mentioned earlier.

My goal is to find out if it is possible to allow for a small amount of misperception on both sides, that would allow both types of observation to be broadly correct. For instance, there were eight planes up there, not five - if Stanley failed to notice some of the planes, then other observers might have seen them and made a larger subjective assessment of total size for the formation.

Here's another account that describes the lights as close together; this may simply be the result of distance, or it may be that the planes sometimes flew closer together than at other times.

The National UFO Reporting Center received the following report from the Prescott area:
“ While doing astrophotography I observed five yellow-white lights in a “V” formation moving slowly from the northwest, across the sky to the northeast, then turn almost due south and continue until out of sight. The point of the “V” was in the direction of movement. The first three lights were in a fairly tight “V” while two of the lights were further back along the lines of the “V”‘s legs. During the NW-NE transit one of the trailing lights moved up and joined the three and then dropped back to the trailing position. I estimated the three light “V” to cover about 0.5 degrees of sky and the whole group of five lights to cover about 1 degree of sky.“

https://stampaday.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/the-phoenix-lights/

It seems very likely that many of the (bona fide) observers were fairly accurate in their observations - but these observations occurred at a wide range of angles and distances.

 

[Scaramanga]

My goal is to find out if it is possible to allow for a small amount of misperception on both sides, that would allow both types of observation to be broadly correct. For instance, there were eight planes up there, not five - if Stanley failed to notice some of the planes, then other observers might have seen them and made a larger subjective assessment of total size for the formation.

Indeed....to me the issue is that there is such a discrepancy in reports that it is really difficult to know what to make of it. It's not helped by the fact that there were two 'events' separated by just 90 minutes or so.

I generally think that witnesses do somewhat accurately report what they see...even if they mis-interpret what it is. I recall a case in Yukon where a UFO turned out to be the re-entry of a Russian satellite, and how even though the witnesses thought the scattered fragments were a 'solid' object they generally got the size, direction, colours, etc all correct. Not bad for 'unreliable witnesses'. Of course, that was one of Stanton Friedman's 'best ever' cases where two witnesses claimed 1000 foot wide craft hovered over the road....but that version is extremely discordant with what the other 20 or so witnesses saw, which is how you can spot embellishment.

The problem with the Phoenix UFO is its not just one or two people reporting wildly huge or low down stuff. And I really don't know how to reconcile the bewildering variety of reports. Five lights, three lights, seven lights, 5 degree across, 15 degrees across, covering the entire sky....odd rippling effects, the craft zooming off at high speed ( which even the Governor has claimed he saw ), and some do claim the object 'blotted out the stars', the orange colour is quite consistent, though some did report red. And the biggest mystery of all.....howcome something so widely observed has so few photos or videos and does not seem to have shown up on a single CCTV camera.

 

[Eburacum]

We can discount all estimates of height, except for those which include details which can support such estimates. Without such details, estimates of height or distance are impossible.

Stanley's observation is one of the few observations which could give a good estimate for height (if the planes could only be resolved by telescope, they must be very high). All the other observations have estimates of height which are purely subjective.

Perhaps if we could find two simultaneous observations to give a triangulation then we might derive a better estimate. That takes us back to the start of this tread; no reliable estimates of triangulation for the 8:00pm event have been found, yet.

 

[Scaramanga]

I'm just as certain it wasn't an alien craft as I am that it wasn't Santa's sled being pulled by flying reindeer.

I think that's the wrong road to judge the matter by....as you are then judging what witnesses claim to have seen via a pre-conceived ' it can't have been aliens....therefore the wilder reports cannot be true ' lens. All that really matters is, did the wilder claimed reports actually happen as claimed. We need to establish that way before we credit or discredit aliens. Making a pre-judgement about aliens is getting it round the wrong way.

 

[Scaramanga]

We can discount all estimates of height, except for those which include details which can support such estimates. Without such details, estimates of height or distance are impossible.

Well...that's where I have a bone to pick, as I think the assumption that witnesses saw something a certain angular size and speed and then did some mental gymnastics to work out ' hey....that's not quite right' is false. I think its a lot simpler...that witnesses saw something huge and concluded it was huge...no need for mentally working out how big a 1000 foot wide 'craft' at 20,000 feet 'ought' to be. In other words the witnesses who claim the sighting was huge were not 'working out' that it was huge....they were seeing that it was huge. You can clearly observe that from witnesses in the James Fox and Lynne Kitei documentaries. Of course....I don't doubt they selected the 'best' witnesses for those films, so there is selection bias there. But, I believe those witnesses.

There is a thread of witnesses who claim the 'craft' was low and large. Of course, the lower the phenomenon is, the less actually big it has to be. And to me that is where the best solution comes in. Possibly a low flying blimp. But, of course, we then have to explain Stanley and others !

 

[JMartJr]

Making a pre-judgement about aliens is getting it round the wrong way.

Fair point -- but to say "it was aliens," an extraordinary claim in that it has never been made with proof before, ever, is going to require getting real proof on the table. Which is going to be impossible in "my memory of what I thought I was seeing is like this..." cases.

 

[Scaramanga]

The side that deems unlikely that which has never been shown to be possible is not biased.

That's getting the cart before the horse. There's a story that does the rounds ( I don't know how true it is ) that the French Academy of Sciences deemed that witnesses 'cannot' have seen rocks fall from the sky because rocks falling from the sky was 'impossible'. Therefore the witnesses simply cant have seen what they saw. Well, dismissing witness reports 'because aliens cant be here' is of the same ilk. Whether aliens in fact even exist in the first place is a totally different matter to....did the witnesses actually see what they claimed to see. The two are completely different things.


EDIT ( Yes the French Academy Of Sciences story is true.....as this short passage from Harvard shows.... https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967IrAJ....8...69L )

 

[Scaramanga]

Fair point -- but to say "it was aliens," an extraordinary claim in that it has never been made with proof before, ever, is going to require getting real proof on the table. Which is going to be impossible in "my memory of what I thought I was seeing is like this..." cases.

Indeed, and to me its a bit nauseating the way the Lynne Kitei documentary on the incident starts ( and ends ) which a bunch of 'space brothers' hocus pocus. I mean...I assume these are the same aliens doing proctology on Arizonan loggers for 5 days, which doesn't seem all that friendly !

I prefer to just leave aliens out of it completely and ask....did the witnesses actually see what they claimed to see. Even if the answer is yes, there's still a bunch of avenues before we contemplate aliens.

 

[Eburacum]

In other words the witnesses who claim the sighting was huge were not 'working out' that it was huge....they were seeing that it was huge.

No, there is more to it than that. Since their estimates of height were unreliable, they had no way of discriminating between something which was a few hundred feet wide at 2000 feet, or a mile or so wide at 35,000 feet. It is literally impossible to make a reliable distinction between an unknown phenomenon at 2000 feet and an unknown phenomenon at 35,000 feet, without further information. Are you suggesting that these witnesses could make that distinction, using information that we are not aware of?

This is important, because the idea of a single slow-moving object a few hundred feet wide at 2000 feet, or a few kilometres wide at 35,000 feet is spectacularly absurd, whereas a formation of separate objects a mile wide moving at regular jet cruising speed is relatively mundane and commonplace.

 

[Mendel]

That's getting the cart before the horse. There's a story that does the rounds ( I don't know how true it is ) that the French Academy of Sciences deemed that witnesses 'cannot' have seen rocks fall from the sky because rocks falling from the sky was 'impossible'. Therefore the witnesses simply cant have seen what they saw. Well, dismissing witness reports 'because aliens cant be here' is of the same ilk. Whether aliens in fact even exist in the first place is a totally different matter to....did the witnesses actually see what they claimed to see. The two are completely different things.


EDIT ( Yes the French Academy Of Sciences story is true.....as this short passage from Harvard shows.... https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967IrAJ....8...69L )

We are getting to the point where we are no longer having a conversation.
I wrote (and you quoted me):

The side that deems unlikely that which has never been shown to be possible is not biased.

Note the word "unlikely". You reply as if I had written "impossible".

Then note that I wrote, "which has never been shown possible". Contrast this with your source, which you failed to quote:
It talks of "irrefutable evidence", presumably consisting of the actual rocks that fell from the sky. None of the UFO reports have that kind of irrefutable evidence going for them.

Therefore, your reply fails to address what I actually wrote: not a conversation.

 

[taurusclover21]

So in evaluating UFO claims

Not "UFO claims," "alien spacecraft" claims.

 

[JMartJr]

Not "UFO claims," "alien spacecraft" claims.

No, in evaluating UFO claims (reports might be a better word) "maybe aliens" comes after things that are known to exist and to generate UFO reports, for me.

Probably should add hoaxes to the list of stuff in category 1... come to think of it...

 

[Eburacum]

One option we haven't really explored is that the 8:00pm Phoenix event was a flight of fire lanterns. If the actual height of the phenomenon was only a few hundred feet, then fire lanterns would be a good candidate. I've seen quite a few formations of chinese lanterns, and they do look weird; I've even set a couple off myself, the first one being on the night of the Millennium (just a few years after the Phoenix event).

This chap admitted to causing a UFO report in 2008 by releasing lights attached to helium balloons; this may even be true.
https://web.archive.org/web/2008050...ews_042108_new-lights-sightings.895be60f.html

Some speculated they were UFOs but that does not appear to be the case. A Valley man told 3TV he was behind it all!
He says he took four large balloons full of helium, tied them to road flares and let them go!
Phoenix residents and the media were still abuzz over the mysterious four red lights that appeared in Monday night's sky in north Phoenix.
The man, who did not want to be identified, told 3TV that he used fishing line to attach road flares to helium-filled balloons, then lit the fares and launched them a minute apart from his back yard.

Since we don't really have an accurate estimate of height for the 1997 8:00pm event, we can't really rule out fire lanterns or illuminated balloons, but no-one has claimed responsibility.

 

[Scaramanga]

No, there is more to it than that. Since their estimates of height were unreliable, they had no way of discriminating between something which was a few hundred feet wide at 2000 feet, or a mile or so wide at 35,000 feet. It is literally impossible to make a reliable distinction between an unknown phenomenon at 2000 feet and an unknown phenomenon at 35,000 feet, without further information. Are you suggesting that these witnesses could make that distinction, using information that we are not aware of?

No....you are completely missing the point.

The entire basis of the Mitch Stanley alleged relevance is a claim ( even if it is not directly stated ) that witness have done your 'impossible' and worked out mentally that the lights are too slow at some given height. The entire argument centres around obtuse and in my view obfuscatory calculations. In my view all of that is an enormous ( pun intended ) red herring that just leads people squabbling over heights, angles, yada yada....and completely misses the main point....

...if you see something in the sky that is 40 degrees across, or that is ' so large you could hold a newspaper open and it would not cover it', you don't need to do any mental gymnastics. You know you are seeing something unusual whether it is at 20,000 feet or 200 feet.

 

[Scaramanga]

We are getting to the point where we are no longer having a conversation.

I replied as I did earlier precisely because we aren't. When you argue " The side that deems unlikely that which has never been shown to be possible is not biased. ".....I'd already said I didn't think the phenomenon was aliens. So which 'side' was arguing aliens ? My reference to the French Academy was to a sort of ' XYZ doesn't exist....therefore the witnesses cannot have seen what they saw ' stance.

 

[Scaramanga]

One option we haven't really explored is that the 8:00pm Phoenix event was a flight of fire lanterns.

Which is exactly how some of the witnesses describe the lights in James Fox documentary. Glowing orbs of orange. And....some saw 7 and some saw 5.....easily explained by two of the lanterns going out. Hmm...we'd need the wind direction that day.

One would have to suppose that Mitch Stanley saw something completely different...the real Snowbird flight. But witnesses seeing both Snowbird and a flight of lanterns would explain the huge discrepancy in visual size that I've had an issue with.

 

[Mendel]

I replied as I did earlier precisely because we aren't. When you argue " The side that deems unlikely that which has never been shown to be possible is not biased. ".....I'd already said I didn't think the phenomenon was aliens. So which 'side' was arguing aliens ?

I'm not referring to "the side that is arguing aliens". I was responding to your, "The case fascinates me more from the level of bias from all sides than it does the alien aspect." And the level of bias is markedly different depending on which side you look at.

That's one of the distinctions peddlers of misinformation want you to forget. They'll say, 'well, all politicians are lying", which papers over distinctions that are important and plays into their hands in an "it's ok because everybody is doing it" sort of way. You have to vest your trust in the people who try the most to be real, and the "everyone does it" crowd ain't it.

My reference to the French Academy was to a sort of ' XYZ doesn't exist....therefore the witnesses cannot have seen what they saw ' stance.

Yes. But it was based on ignoring a plausible theory and actual evidence, so the premise was false. It's not the same situation as with transdimensional or interstellar travel. But I already replied to that point, and you ignored my reply then. Repeating the exchange won't change anything, unless you re-read and have an actual convo.

 

[Eburacum]

And....some saw 7 and some saw 5.....easily explained by two of the lanterns going out.

Also easily explained by a flight of eight planes, not all flying closely together, seen at different angles and distances.

We don't need to postulate a cluster of fire lanterns, but on the other hand we can't necessarily rule them out yet (without finding out the wind direction).

 

[Ann K]

We don't need to postulate a cluster of fire lanterns, but on the other hand we can't necessarily rule them out yet (without finding out the wind direction).

If I recall correctly, the later flare drop did not show any significant wind drift. Of course, that was some miles away so may not be indicative of the conditions in Phoenix itself. Mountains can cause strange wind patterns.