Wyoming UFO

deirdre said:
just looked at google maps. theres one of those giant train stations there. when i lived near the train tracks, a light used to stay on a long time at night which i always found odd, as although there was a small "loading company?" nearby, i always wondered why the light stayed on so long. trains in connecticut arent that long. but i know when i went cross country once we got stuck waiting for a train to pass and it sure felt like half an hour..we couldnt believe it! it was a long, long, long, long ass train!

the light i saw was orangish (im having a hard time remembering if it "flashed" back and forth like the train crossing lights do and it was not red like crossing lights, as it was so long ago..but i'm thinking it might have as i'm not sure a steady light would have irritated me so much in the middle of the night. (not 100% what was causing the light as i was too far and too many trees)

anyway could the nearby train tracks have something to do with it.
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It's a freight yard. There are subtle differences between a rail yard and freight yard.

A freight yard is used to assemble or build up trains, which involves either switchers or mainline locomotives moving forward and backing up multiple times.

That was the first thing I looked into. Maybe it was lights on a locomotive that was moving back and forth? But that didn't make sense.
-The freight yard is in the lowest part of the valley - but the light was up high.
-It may have made some kind of sense when I believed the video was sped up - but when I was convinced it's natural speed, that made no sense. The movement is too fast to be a train. If there were more of the video, the object would move too many times to be a train.
-A freight yard is full of lights. Where are the other lights? (I have the same objections about it being something on the Interstate. Too low and where are the other lights?)

Green River WY is well known to Train Fans as a part of the history of the UP Big Boy (giant steam locomotive of the '40s and '50s). I'll take the opportunity to include this video because it may answer the question of the orange lights you saw in the rail yard/freight yard, and to point to something we've been neglecting - sodium-vapor lights. The orange lights we see here are sodium-vapor lights. The headlight on the Big Boy has a yellow lens.


The mercury-vapor lights appear greenish in this video. The colors seem a bit off. Too little blue makes for too much red and green. The second locomotive is a UP FEF-3 - #844. This is a modern video of these relics on an excursion run. Someone has his car headlights shining on the train.

Could our object be an isolated group of sodium-vapor lights on a hill? Part of a mine? Doubtful, but something that should be included. The report is so vague that the fading in and out bit may be just part of the confusion. Maybe something was moving in front of the sodium-vapor lights? Maybe low clouds? All doubtful.
 
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Duke said:
Not interesting enough for me to join MUFON to get beyond their pay wall, however.
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@Z.W. Wolf mentioned the paywall too. I was sure one used to be able to search their database with a free account. Tink @tinkertailor said she used to do it when she had time, just for fun.

What's really irritating, is their private database got a public US taxpayer tune up for ~$350K via BAASS and AAWSAP back in the mid '00s.
 
Yes. At first I thought this was a sped up video. I was wrong. You (and other factors) convinced me that I was wrong and this was an excerpt from a real time video. Once I was convinced of that I realized that my ideas about trains or bulldozers wouldn't work. No bulldozer could move that fast!

I went on to look for a different reason for the movement - a camera glitch. It didn't take too long to find that this family of Sony cameras has a well known problem with sensor wobbling.

The problem is related to:
-Using "non-native" (non-Sony) lenses
-Failing to reset the camera's stabilization feature when a long focal length lens is attached
-Use of a tripod

Beckwith's camera had all three of these factors going. Non-Sony lens, long focal length lens attached, mounted on a tripod.

There's a way to fix this problem, as listed here: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/wyoming-ufo.13386/#post-312608

This thread illustrates the "Metabunk Method." We go through a process where everyone thinks out loud. We run ideas up the flagpole. Then we refine our thoughts by throwing away things that don't make sense. We move on to alternate things that make more sense. It's a fluid, reasonable process. Ideally, no one clings to a pet theory or gets their feelings hurt. That's an ideal that's not always realized, but I think it worked pretty well in this thread.
 
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Z.W. Wolf said:
Then we refine our thoughts by throwing away things that don't make sense. We move on to alternate things that make more sense. It's a fluid, reasonable process.
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is it too small and close a light to be doing any refraction? i'm saying that as in how the sun is lower than we see it as. ie. Mick's refraction calculator from the flat earth threads.

or would the light be "fuzzier" if this was the case?

(we dont really know what "in the sky" means as we have no idea what angle his camera was at. so probably silly to even speculate more)
 
From reading the articles in OP and comment #58 I thought the guy who filmed it was just a local yokel researcher but I guess Richard Beckwith is actually pretty involved in MUFON.

Article:
Richard has been with MUFON for nearly 15 years and presently serves as the State Director for Wyoming. [...] Richard has been involved in UFO research since the late ’70s. He met renowned abduction researcher, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, in 1980 when, as a young broadcast journalist, he wrote and produced a week-long investigative news special on UFOs. He would eventually become involved in the formation of the Institute for Human-Cosmic Interaction with Dr. Sprinkle, and others, including some who had been involved in parapsychological studies conducted at the Stanford Research Institute which led to the inception of the CIA’s remote viewing program. He served as legal counsel to Dr. Steven Greer’s Orion Project and was directly involved in the Orion Project’s efforts to obtain the Stan Meyer technology, all as detailed in Dr. Greer’s documentary film “Sirius”. Richard has also provided legal counsel to the MUFON Board of Directors.

He writes here:
Article:
I am proud to say that some of the data from MUFON’s investigative files was used to justify further study of the phenomenon to Congress. There is currently a program on the History Channel called “Unidentified,” starring a friend of mine named Luis Elizondo, the former head of the “Advanced Aerospace Threat identification Program” (AATIP) for the Department of Defense, which exposes AATIP and its conclusions. [...]

Those of us who study this phenomenon felt truly vindicated last year when Luis addressed the crowd at the MUFON Symposium and stated unequivocally that, “You were right.” When the head of the government program that studies UFOs says you were right, it means something.

His upcoming talk in a few months at the MUFON Symposium also updates his bio, that's he's now been with MUFON over 20 years and is a member of the Board.
Article:
Richard is a member of the MUFON Board of Directors and has been with MUFON for more than 20 years.


This doesn't help identify what's in the video but I surprised that someone so involved had never seen a UFO personally before, and did not provide more information that would be needed to try to identify it.
 
Could this be a commentary on the present state of UFOlogy?

There are many unknowns in this case. Beckwith states that he was going to put energy into gathering more witness testimony. One goal of this is to triangulate. He seems to take it for granted that the witnesses were looking at the same thing. We don't know how much energy he put into this.

In relation to the camera and the motion visible on the video: What we don't know is what Beckwith did. What we do know is what he did and didn't report.

-Declared with certainty the movement was not due to camera motion.
-Failed to publicly pursue an alternate explanation for the movement.
-Failed to report whether he saw this "oscillation" naked eye.
-Did not report whether he tested the camera to see if this movement was visible on videos in other situations.
-Did not report whether he did an Internet search - or a search of his camera's user manual - in pursuit of an alternate explanation for the motion.

He left it up to other people to do the work. I think we've established beyond reasonable doubt that this motion is due to a well known problem with this family of Sony cameras.

What we're trying to figure out is what type of incompetence is involved here.

Natural incompetence - The investigator is not very good at analytical thought.
Negligent incompetence - The investigator is not trying.
Aggressive incompetence - The investigator is deliberately doing a poor job.

Negligent incompetence may point to bias. Aggressive incompetence points to bias.


Did Beckwith fail to pursue this issue properly because it never entered his head to take the proper steps? - Natural incompetence.

Did he not bother to pursue this issue properly? - Negligent incompetence

Did he do the research and fail to report his findings? - Aggressive incompetence


To be clear, we have to question whether Beckwith is simply not very good at analytical thought, or whether he has a bias. At a deeper level, we should think about the roles of these two factors taken together. A synergistic thing. This has to remain an open - but nevertheless important - question. It has to remain open because we have inadequate data. But there's good evidence that at least one of these factors is in play.


Another issue: Did Beckwith make a proper report on his own sighting? We don't know. We haven't seen one. What we do know is that he gave a local media outlet a vague anecdotal report. In 1974, no serious minded UFO investigator would do that. But in 2024 the old knowledge is unknown or aggressively ignored. When I get time, I'll scan some more pages of Allan Hendry's UFO Handbook.


Okay, Beckwith is a bigwig in MUFON. And he states, "I am proud to say that some of the data from MUFON’s investigative files was used to justify further study of the phenomenon to Congress."

Do Beckwith's credentials within the field of UFOlogy prove that he's a competent UFO investigator? Does it further lend weight to the idea that the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing on UFOs was a very serious thing based on what the real experts know?

Or do his failings in the current Green River, WY sighting open questions as to the real competence and sincerity of self-appointed UFO experts in the year 2024?

Do these failings open questions about the nature of the Congressional hearing?
 
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The soft hoax, capture something odd, handily 'rule out' what is often the actual solution, and even though you seem to believe you captured the most important footage on Earth sort of seem to lose interest in it and don't publish any more information about the case i.e. raw device video, precise location date/time, comparison footage from the same device, daylight view of the same scene etc etc.
 
jarlrmai said:
The soft hoax, capture something odd, handily 'rule out' what is often the actual solution, and even though you seem to believe you captured the most important footage on Earth sort of seem to lose interest in it and don't publish any more information about the case i.e. raw device video, precise location date/time, comparison footage from the same device, daylight view of the same scene etc etc.
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Perhaps it is just fear of debunking oneself, when it's much more satisfactory to have a good story to tell at the next MUFON meeting.
 
jarlrmai said:
and even though you seem to believe you captured the most important footage on Earth
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He actually said the opposite.

Article:
“It’s ‘unidentified,’” he told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s all a UFO is. It’s something that’s ‘unidentified.’ It doesn’t mean it’s an alien (spaceship). You can’t say that it’s aliens. All you know is it’s some kind of object in the sky that you can’t explain.”

...
While he knows he saw a UFO, because it’s unidentified, Beckwith isn’t willing to say he saw a spaceship or a reconnaissance vessel for an otherworldly invasion.

“Unless it lands on your lawn and people come out and say, ‘Hey, I want to introduce myself,’ we just can’t say what it is,” he said.
 
deirdre said:
He actually said the opposite.


Article: “It’s ‘unidentified,’” he told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s all a UFO is. It’s something that’s ‘unidentified.’ It doesn’t mean it’s an alien (spaceship). You can’t say that it’s aliens. All you know is it’s some kind of object in the sky that you can’t explain.”
Content from External Source
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Except I'm not yet convinced he KNOWS it was in the sky. So far the chances seem pretty good that it was on elevated ground, though that is also unproven so far.
 
JMartJr said:
Except I'm not yet convinced he KNOWS it was in the sky. So far the chances seem pretty good that it was on elevated ground, though that is also unproven so far.
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i'm also still wondering about a possibility of refraction/ "loom" effect. But the
Z.W. Wolf said:
Negligent incompetence
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of this group is leaving me 'wondering', as i cant find pictures that deal with light sources and refraction has always confused me.

Article:
Light rays from an object, such as a ship on the water, traveling upward through the cool air into the warmer air are refracted downward toward an observer's line of sight. The rays then appear to originate from above the object and it appears to "loom" above its actual position. It is common for ships at sea near the horizon to appear to float above the water.
 
deirdre said:
refraction has always confused me.
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If you're not in a place where you're looking over a large body of water (which is the kind of place often used to illustrate the effects of refraction), then just watch the sun set. You will usually see it go from round to a flattened oval as it gets closer to the horizon, and at times the distortion is very large. It depends upon the atmospheric conditions.
 
deirdre said:
the sun is too far away, to relate to this particular ufo. our light is only a mile or two away, i'm not sure if its even possible for a lamp/light source to refract loom at that distance.
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You're probably right that in most cases atmospheric refraction isn't obvious if you're close to the object. But the enormous distance to the sun isn't important, as it's only the length of the light path through the atmosphere that matters. To a person of average height on level ground, the horizon is only about three miles away. Looking through just a few miles of atmosphere can cause a distortion.

If you look straight up, you're looking through less atmosphere than you would see if looking at ground level, yet it's still enough to make the stars appear to twinkle.
 
Ann K said:
Looking through just a few miles of atmosphere can cause a distortion.
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Thanks. :) , but im not talking about distortion. i'm talking about if a campfire (1 or 2 miles away) can appear higher than it actually is due to refraction.

like the ufo guy says it's "in the sky" but can the light be a campfire that appears to be in the sky due to refraction? Mick has a refraction calculator and it doesnt appear the light can lift up...but i'm not at all sure i'm using this calculator correctly. and since my pic isnt part below the horizon its really hard to tell if it is moving.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/simulating-atmospheric-refraction.7881/
https://www.metabunk.org/refraction/ <refraction calculator
 
deirdre said:
I'm talking about if a campfire (1 or 2 miles away) can appear higher than it actually is due to refraction.
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Probably not. The light path from a source 1 or 2 miles away is not really long enough for significant refraction or 'looming'. Most superior mirages and refraction effects occur over a distance of many miles.


-----------------
Inferior mirages are more local, commonplace and familiar; we've all seen the 'shimmering effect' you get on a hot road. This is caused by light from the sky bending upwards towards your eye. This can occur within a couple of hundred yards, and is the opposite of looming.


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Many photographs on the 'net that purport to show a mirage effect are in fact something else; this is called a 'false horizon' and occurs when the observer can clearly see an object, but can't clearly see the sea or ground which the object is standing upon.

This ship appears to be flying, and is often given as an example of refraction or of a superior mirage, or of looming; in fact it is none of those things.

The true horizon can just be faintly seem behind the ship- it is an effect caused by deceptive lighting, not caused by refraction at all.

----------------
How does this apply to the Wyoming UAP? Well, at night, it is entirely possible that the witness (Beckwith) was not able to see the terrain clearly, and perceived that the light was in the air whereas it was actually on a hill or other raised terrain. There is plenty of raised terrain in the region to choose from. In this case it resembles the 'false horizon' effect - a simple case of misperception of surroundings, no need for any refraction or looming.

Alternately there may have been some kind of raised platform or tower connecting the light to the ground, thereby ensuring it remained fixed in place. We only saw 30 seconds or so of this clip, but there was no significant movement (apart from the stabilisation wobble); maybe if we could see the full clip, and also obtain precise details of the direction and location of the camera, we might be able to understand it better.
 
Ann K said:
I thought that as well, but it seems likely that someone would have found the remnants of a burned-out car, wouldn't they?
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There are also time issues. Beckwith's friend called him to come see what he was seeing "late Saturday night" (post #43 above), but when he got there there was nothing to see. He went home, then came back when called again, claiming he shot the video at 0340 (Sunday morning) local time. (See post #19 above.)

Unless someone torched a car, doused it, then reignited it, the time/event line described doesn't jibe with a burning car. To further complicate the matter, there was also another witness who claimed to have seen (and recorded) whatever it was at around 8:30 pm on Saturday evening. (See post #19 above.)
 
Duke said:
there was also another witness who claimed to have seen (and recorded) whatever it was at around 8:30 pm on Saturday evening. (See post #19 above.)
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i think you need to dismiss that one as we have no real description and a wildly off time frame. she could have been seeing anything.

dont forget human eyeballs cant zoom in 400x
1711124804264.png
 
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deirdre said:
i think you need to dismiss that one as we have no real description and a wildly off time frame. she could have been seeing anything.
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Don't disagree, at least until her claimed video is seen. Along those lines, I also think we could dismiss the friend's initial sighting, if any, on late Saturday night. To my knowledge, we have no description of what he saw.

I'm beginning to wonder if the friend could have been part of an elaborate hoax/joke played on Beckwith. Remember, Beckwith was a UFO devotee who had never seen a UFO and undoubtedly was keen to do so. Note (see post #43 above) when Beckwith arrived the first time, he did not have his photo equipment. Could hoaxsters have made up the Saturday evening sighting to get him there, expecting to then spring their UFO on him when he arrived. If they had a "one shot" UFO, something like an incendiary device/burning car that would eventually burn itself out, it would have been wasted if Beckwith could not record it. Send him home with some comment about not having his camera(s) so he'd bring it when they called later to actually then spring the one shot hoax?
 
Duke said:
I'm beginning to wonder if the friend could have been part of an elaborate hoax/joke played on Beckwith. Remember, Beckwith was a UFO devotee who had never seen a UFO and undoubtedly was keen to do so. Note (see post #43 above) when Beckwith arrived the first time, he did not have his photo equipment. Could hoaxsters have made up the Saturday evening sighting to get him there, expecting to then spring their UFO on him when he arrived. If they had a "one shot" UFO, something like an incendiary device/burning car that would eventually burn itself out, it would have been wasted if Beckwith could not record it. Send him home with some comment about not having his camera(s) so he'd bring it when they called later to actually then spring the one shot hoax?
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i dont think i'd stay up to 3:30/4:30 in the morning to hoax my friend. and i certainly wouldnt set a car on fire...the police and fire departments tend to frown on that.
 
deirdre said:
i dont think i'd stay up to 3:30/4:30 in the morning to hoax my friend. and i certainly wouldnt set a car on fire...the police and fire departments tend to frown on that.
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The car fire was brought up/discussed by @Scaramanga and @Ann K. I used it as an example of a one shot hoax only to stay within the confines of today's recent discussion.
 
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Do we know why the object is bouncing side to side ? I mean, even the white smaller object 'emitted' from it bounces side to side in unison.....which makes me think it is the camera moving and not the object(s).
 
Ann K said:
I thought that as well, but it seems likely that someone would have found the remnants of a burned-out car, wouldn't they?
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That's assuming the correct location was given in the UFO report. It could all have happened somewhere else. Incidentally....slow the Youtube video down to 0.25 of normal speed and you can pretty much see the flames. That would be even more apparent if someone could stabilise the image and hold it in one place.
 
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