You are aware that aircraft fly nonstop from New York to Los Angeles each night, and that they use strobe lights on the wings and tail to keep the local traffic from hitting them, aren’t you? Same idea.
What truly amazing is the way those who don’t accept the reality of the UFO phenomenon think making ‘points’ like that is worthwhile. . .
<font size=5>Geez Danny, thanks so very much for the insightful commments</font>
I think that it would be interesting to have David Bloomberg interview the officers and report back to us here in SDMBland…
Krispy Original – voted SDMB’s 19th most popular poster (1999)
George Papoon wrote:
Aircraft flying from New York to Los Angeles aren’t exactly “in hiding”. When an F-117 Stealth Fighter flies over enemy territory, it most certainly does not turn its lights on.
And if alien spacecraft zipping through our atmosphere are so numerous that they have to light themselves up just to keep from hitting each other, we should have had so many verified sightings of them by now that “hiding” would be out of the question.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Tell ya what, KO – you pay for my day off and my trip, and I’ll do the interview.
Amusingly, this story didn’t make it into the Illinois papers I read (or, at least, I didn’t see them and neither did anybody else I know), but they did make them into papers elsewhere in the country (for example, a friend in Seattle sent me an article).
The story made in into the St. Louis paper, which is the cite referenced in the link in the OP. It happened in the Eastern suburbs of St. Louis on the Illinois side, so it did make into local newspapers there. It is strange, though, if papers from other parts of Illinois didn’t cover the story. They probably dismissED it as a hoax or a country hick seeing things. Maybe the Seattle paper covered it because there are more UFO believers there. Isn’t there a UFO reporting organization in Washington state?
I suspect this sort of thing is much easier to believe if you smoke a lot of weed and listen to Art Bell.
Wouldn’t you agree, Contestant #3?
For what it’s worth, I remember seeing this story on CNN Headline News the day after it happened. (I would’ve mentioned it in my earlier post, but I forgot. :o)
Wasn’t a very large, slow-moving, triangular-shaped craft seen late one night flying over Phoenix back in 1998? Are there any Air Force bases near Phoenix?
Could there be a second reason the Air Force is sending these blimps out? Besides testing the phased-radar array, could they also be testing its camouflage? Send it over a sparsely-populated area and see if anyone on the ground can see it: “Memo to Lockheed Martin: More work needed.”
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
…uhhh…I must have missed the part where the multiple police officers and the golfcourse owner admitted that they smoked “a lot of weed and listen to Art Bell”…
Krispy Original – voted SDMB’s 19th most popular poster (1999)
Sorry, I can’t afford such an expense right now. I’m kinda down on my luck financially.
I was thinking that maybe the REALL organization, being as how they are a hotshot bunch of skeptics would at least investigate an prominent UFO sighting that happened in their own backyard…especially one with witnesses the caliber of police officers who are trained and skilled observers… …but hey, maybe the fight against magnets and herbs are eating up all the time and expense of the REALL organization right now for all I know…
Krispy Original – voted SDMB’s 19th most popular poster (1999)
No problem, Contestant #3, my pleasure. I continue to represent the struggle of reminding people that a UFO-fixated conspiracy theorist without a massive intake of marijuana and suspect data is like a day without a sunrise.
All right, Krispy, lay it on the line, call it like you see it and no beating around the bush: Do you think:
A) This craft was a UFO from another planet either piloted by extra-terrestrials or a robot controlled by them, like Voyager or Galileo?
OR
B) Do you think it was an Air Force craft (most likely a blimp) out on a test flight?
And if your answer is B), was this flight:
C) A perfectly innocent attempt to test new technology designed to strengthen the security of the USA?
OR
D) A test by an evil Federal Government trying to develop new technologies designed to spy on us all, depriving us of our privacy and liberty?
Put up or shut up. I haven’t accused you of smoking anything, so you have no reason to ignore or flame me. And my answers are B) and C).
FOR THE REST OF YOU: I think it’s likely there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, given its vast size, but I do NOT think any of them has ever visited this planet, at least not in recorded history. The Earth is 4.3 billion years old and it’s slightly possible that someone (or an unmanned probe) has visited in that great span of time. There is no hard evidence for this; I simply state that it’s possible, if not likely or probable that it’s happened.
>< DARWIN >
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I should have said, “BUT not likely or probable.”
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
:rolleyes: SIGH . . . You really didn’t get that, didya, pooter? See if you can follow this: small commuter aircraft are to transcontinental aircraft as terrestrial aircraft are to -? They (if they are extraterrestrial (which is the least likely of several possibilties in this particular case) may be running with lights on to keep our aircraft from hitting theirs. In this case, it’s doubtlessly because the craft has been ‘stealthified’ to not show on control tower or onboard radars.
If you knew what I know, everything would make sense; and if it didn’t, you’d know enough to know not to worry about it – The God of Somebody Else
Just keep telling yourself that, George.
Oh, but I should have clarified:
By “verified sighting”, I do not mean John Smith says, “Hey, look, there’s a light in the sky!” and Mary Jones says “Yeah, I see it too!”. I mean that it wasn’t a misidentified aircraft/weather balloon/reflection of moonlight/error in the camera’s optics/anything else we already know about, or a hallucination/waking dream, or a hoax, and that two or more independent sources describe it in details that don’t conflict. There are hardly a “huge” number of sightings that match such criteria.
Neither do I, peanut.
As do I, little drooplet.
The ‘truth’ of that statement comes down more or less to how you define ‘huge’. I say several thousand over a period of 50 years is sufficiently ‘huge’. Besides, how many bona fide such incidents would or should it take to elicit your interest? One? A dozen? A hundred?
If you knew what I know, everything would make sense; and if it didn’t, you’d know enough to know not to worry about it – The God of Somebody Else
Popular Mechanics once did an article called “Six Unexplainable Encounters”. But IIRC, they got several letters from people who cast doubt on all six encounters. But try finding those letters online!
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
jab1 asked:
My answer is E, I don’t know. I didn’t witness the object. The object could have been A, B, C, or D. What makes me doubt that these objects that look to witnesses as some kind of craft are secret government technology is the fact that many different shapes and sizes of these UFOs have been spotted.
I can fathom that at any one time, our government might have 1 or 2 super-expensive secret flying crafts up their sleeve, but 6 or 7 different kinds? Also since these types of craft are spotted virtually worldwide, the fact that the US government would be flying them low to the ground over foreign soil kinda might spoil the “secret” part now wouldn’t it?
There is no way that I can prove to myself or any of you on this board that some percentage of UFOs are acually extra-terrestrial crafts, however, the fact that:
these things continue to be witnessed
in many cases the witnesses are pilots, astronauts, military or law enforcement officials
tends to lead me to take seriously the possibility that the objects are ET.
Some people are predisposed to close their minds and their curiosity to the possibility of ETs. Most of the familiar tactics are in evidence in this very thread.
portray people that witness UFOs as “nuts”
rationalize that ETs would have good reason to land on the White House lawn if they truly existed
use our current human understanding of science and technical limitations as “proof” to argue that they couldn’t get here
point to a factually debunked UFO sighting (like a weather ballon) and hang their hat on the supposition that all the others must be the same
…and they close the book on the subject.
Hey, you know what? That’s fine with me if that brings them comfort and a feeling of intellectual superiority. Some others though (like me), realize that new sightings are happening almost every day all over the world. Some people aren’t as smug and all-knowing as to be comfortable with turning their back and closing the book.
Krispy Original – The original SDMB bad boy
Hear! Hear!
George wrote, re. verified sightings:
Several thousand? The only way you could arrive at that high a number is to take every single Project Bluebook sighting that was categorized as “unexplained” and automatically assume that they were all verified sightings. Which most of them aren’t. They’re unexplained. And most of them were reported by a single individual, which violates the two-or-more non-conflicting independent sources requirement.
(And by the way, if one witness said “It was a big silver sphere that hovered in place for a few seconds and then disappeared”, and a second witness said “It was a silver sphere that hovered in place for several minutes and then cruised away at a moderate clip” those would be conflicting reports. But the UFO magazines rarely report such conflicts.)
Depends on what you mean by “bona fide”.