The Events of July, 1952

Great Debates
21

OK. I went back and looked at DIF’s post in the S.E.T.H. thread to find the source, went to MUFON’s home page, where I didn’t find a direct link (understandable, since he was quoting a letter), and wandered over to one of the sites that addresses Project Blue Book. (www.evansville.net/~slk/) It did not look particularly flaky, so I checked it out. One of its pages lists 700 (+/-) unresolved sightings from Blue Book and its predecessors. Looking up 1952, I found July, then worked back to the point where each month had only a few sightings.

There was a small cluster at the end of March and beginning of April. There was another small cluster at the end of April and beginning of May. Another cluster began at the end of May, then ran through early June, ramping up toward the end of the month and spilling into July, with another mid-month lull (never going to zero) and ramping up at the end of July to spill slightly into August before tapering off again. June had 40 sightings and July had 45 (according to a Mr. Hall’s evaluation of unresolved sightings).

This hardly establishes my original observation, but it does nothing disprove it. There are a few sightings followed by many sightings. It dies down and repeats. At no point (in this list) are there multiple sightings that are not potentially triggered by earlier reports.

I used Mr. Hall’s information for the period because I had no MUFON data earlier than July. I understand that my “methodology” is not rigorous, but it was late and I wasn’t looking to prove any great truths. I simply
wondered whether my speculations could be easily disproved.

I was interested to see that while there are a few overlapping sightings between the two lists, there are many sightings that are not shared (sometimes for the same day). Mr. Hall is a UFO investigation proponent. I cannot think of a reason that he would have excluded the MUFON sightings if they had not been resolved (especially since the MUFON sightings are much more heavily weighted toward military and pilot observers).

Note, that according the the history at this site, the summer of 1952 was a period when those in charge of collecting the data were proponents of discovery, not denial, so it would seem unlikely that they would be recklessly throwing out good pilot observations: so where did MUFON get their list? (The team in place in 1952 was understaffed and underfunded, but they had not begun any activities that could be characterized as cover-ups at that time.)

My personal views toward UFOs are that I think the Air Force should have kept Blue Book open (it costs less than any base’s officer’s golf course) and simply used it to record events without trying to explain everything. Explanations lead to either pro- or anti- activists and don’t produce much in the way of information.

The bulk of the Summer, 1952 sightings don’t look very promising to me: silver objects, lights, guys flying at 200 m.p.h. accurately identifying object speeds in excess of 1,000 m.p.h. visually. I dunno, it hardly makes a strong impression. (Yes, I saw the radar “sightings” on MUFON, but they did not make it onto Mr. Hall’s list of unresolved sightings.)

OTOH, there are enough sightings of “something”, overall, that I have no problem with the idea of tracking the sightings in case something turns up.
:::shrug:::

Tom~

22

Tomndebb, you said

Well – since it was clearly not established, why should anyone bother to ‘disprove’ your point? You then go on to say

[quote]
There are a few sightings followed by many sightings. It dies down and repeats. At no point (in this list) are there multiple sightings that are not potentially triggered by earlier reports.*

Can you really expect such sophistry to be taken seriously? “A few sightings followed by many sightings” happens to be the definition of a UFO ‘flap’. You try to make it sound as though that’s a deficiency.

May I suggest that to say

essentially says nothing? By comparison, someone could say,“On Monday, someone in Valley A saw a rain cloud. From Tuesday through Friday, people (hundreds of picnickers is some cases) in Valley B, C, and D also saw cumulus clouds in the sky. It follows that all sightings of clouds after Monday must have been mass delusion.”

Now, clouds are fleeting, evanescent phenomena of the sky. Shall we disbelieve in clouds, by the rationale you seem to espouse?

23

Say, DIF, maybe you oughta read up on the Massachusetts witch trials, and all the eyewitness reports by reliable persons. Why, they were the very definition of a witch flap!

24

C#3 had posted your list from the S.E.T.H. thread which I had not seen. (I stopped reading that after day two when it turned into a typical pissing contest.) The list, as presented, is typical of a truncated graph: “look at all these sightings, right here.” Based on your/C#3’s information I tried to examine the evidence to see whether my speculative response was without merit. Instead, I found continuing evidence of the phenomenon that I had used in my initial analogy: a surprising/unusual event is reported, shortly after the report, a number of similar events are reported. (Fewer than 150 people out of 147 million reported them in the U.S. That qualifies as unusual.)

I have specifically not claimed that this disproves the existence of UFOs. I have indicated that I wish that Project Blue Book had remained active.

On the other hand, I would be willing to bet that in the summer of 1952, I could have found around 147 million people in the U.S. who saw clouds every single day. (The inhabitants of the Mojave Desert would not have reduced the overall population very much.) Seeing clouds does not qualify as a rare, unusual, or surprising event.

My point has never been to “disprove” UFOs. You asked (Cecil)

[quote]
what do you think explains the nationwide UFO ‘flap’ of July, 1952?*
I provided one speculative answer in the form of an analogy. When you told me to go away because I didn’t know what I was talking about, I went back and reviewed the information. My speculative response currently has as much validity as any other proposal. There was not simply a single, continuous series of sightings throughout the month of July. There were a series of reported sightings, coming in clumps, in which a single reported sighting was followed by multiple reported sightings and these events began in late March and proceded through August.

It might have been news-generated hysteria. It might have been Air Force testing. It might have been extra-terrestial visitors. I dunno. You presented a question. I provided a possible answer. If you find the answer is unsatisfactory, dismiss it and move on.

Tom~

25

Don’t bother, Phil. I already posted information about other “flaps” and he just said they weren’t about the July 1952 UFO flap and therefore didn’t have anything to do with the topic. So we’re apparently not allowed to try to explain these things unless we explain them as alien spacecraft.

26

I see UFOs quite often. I’m not very knowledgeable about airplanes, weather balloons, meteors or any of that stuff, so they are, to me, UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects.

But I don’t know how to make the leap from UFOs to Interstellar Space Vehicles. Never saw one of those. Probably wouldn’t know it if I did.

But it’s okay, because they got pictures of these space vehicles.

My son once threw a hubcap in the air and took a picture. Damned if it didn’t look like a spaceship!

At least it looked more like a spaceship than the blinking little lights I see from time to time. And not nearly as grainy and out of focus as I’ve seen in the media.

But what do I know?

You are unique - Just like everyone else.

27

A couple of years ago, while riding my motorcycle home on a long, narrow stretch of freeway between cities, I saw a bright yellow-white streak of light, very narrow but tall (almost as tall as the moon appears to the unaided eye), slowly rising into the sky. After about a minute, the rising yellow-white streak vanished, and a small, bright point of blue-white light continued to rise up from the spot where the streak had just been for another couple of minutes, until it either went out or got lost in the sky.

Had I witnessed an alien spaceship? NO. I had witnessed a human spaceship.

This was the launch of an unmanned satellite. Since I live in Northern California and was facing south when I saw it, it was probably a polar-orbiting satellite launched from Edwards Air Force Base. The column of yellow-white light was the very bright orangish exhaust of solid-fuel rocket boosters, like the ones they use on the Space Shuttle. The little point of light rising up after the boosters shut off was the upper stage burning liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen.

It is the only launch I have ever seen, and it looked spectacular even from my vantage point hundreds of miles to the north. But I could easily imagine someone – maybe someone who felt a little too ordinary, and wanted to convince himself that he was seeing something extra special – think that he was seeing an alien spaceship. (Heaven knows, when I was feeling really disempowered in my high school years, I saw a bright light in the daytime sky and really, really, desperately wanted it to be something spectacular, like a supernova. It was a mylar kite.)

I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.

28

Where to begin, where to begin. Well, first, of course, by ignoring pldimwit, who as usual contributes nothing but personal vituperation as mascot for DavidB . . .

Tom: Okay, then let’s agree to disagree. You provided three possible explanations for the phenomena in your last paragraph. My position is just this: whatever explanation you come up with explain the phenomenon, it should make sense, and more sense than the proposition that these things, whatever they are, wherever they ‘come from’ (if anywhere), and whoever ‘makes’ them (assuming they are manufactured) – that whatever they are, they are not explainable by conventional science, DavidB’s blithe dismissals notwithstanding.
There are simply far too many instances where all conventional explanations can be eliminated from consideration, and the ‘flap’ of 1952 is one of them.

I read the link about the ‘Mattoon Gasser’. If you go there and read it yourself, and take the time to ‘read between the lines’, all it amounts to is a story about how a group of psychologists (and need I point how ‘soft’ a science psychology is?) descended on the place well after the fact, with the obvious intent to study the affair as an example of ‘mass delusion’, only to reach the conclusion (surprise) that it was ‘mass delusion’ – and a ‘classic’ case to boot, which no doubt meant accolades for all involved. But this thread isn’t about ‘mad gassings’ or anything like it, DaveB’s contentions to the contrary.

As he went on to say,

You’re allowed to explain them as anything rational, but in most of the instances cited, the ‘rational’ explanations you put forward ultimately are ludicrous. In case after case, literally hundreds of times, sightings (hehheh, Tom) of these things have been made under conditions that preclude any and all conventional explanation, including so-called ‘psychological’ ones.

29

Well, what basically happened is this:

In 1947, a courier ship got lost and ended up smashing into the New Mexico desert. Their buddies came looking for them and discovered this planet that appeared to have a semi-advanced technology (or at least enough to blow themselves to smithereens) and radioed back to the Home Planet for direction.

The Home Planet ordered instense investigation and observation, and over the next 25 years or so, the little buggers were everywhere, being seen hovering over ships at night, darting around airplanes, descending out of clouds, and snapping Kodaks of military bases from coast to coast.

All of this information they collected about us was sent back to the Home Planet, and the leaders there analyzed it carefully and said to each other, "Holy Zarkon! We’re not going to get tangled up with that species! They’re so screwed up that it would take us 900,000 light-years to re-educate them enough to bring them up to speed with the rest of the Quadrant. O’Callahan, recall those ships immediately!!!"

At this point, they decided what they’d do with us is use us for an amusement attraction; so every so often, they send a saucerful of tourists by so they can look at our antics and laugh their tentacles off at our primitive, aggressive tendencies (sort of the same way we laugh at the geek in the circus freak show). This is why we’re not seeing mass sightings anymore, but we do see a ship or two every now and then.

Their ultimate plan is to wait until either: A) the Third World countries develop nuclear weapons powerful enough to annihilate us all and eventually end up vaporizing the world, or B) we overpopulate ourselves right out of existance after we use up every resource on the planet and starve to death. Then, they’ll move in and use the world as a depot for raw materials, which they will salvage off the wreckage of our civilization, and send back to the Home Planet—all except for Detroit, Calcutta, and east Philadelphia, which they will use as toxic-waste dumps for the spent fuel rods out of their warp-drive ships. In the meantime, they see no harm in having their fun with us.

Hell, I thought everybody knew this. Where have you guys been???

30

As opposed to the rigorous science of UFO investigation?

Isn’t this post about UFO sightings in 1952 “well after the fact”?

Maybe I’m not reading between the lines properly- why do you think that all these people saw objects they could not identify in July of 1952?

31

Huh. Attempting to illuminate or comment on one of Tom’s posts makes me “David B.'s mascot.” I wonder what commenting on David’s posts gets me?

Keep in mind, folks, DIF has already made up his mind that these were alien spacecraft, and no potential explanation, mundane or complex, is going to disabuse him of that nation.

32

Nowhere. As usual.

.

Also keep in mind, folks, that nowhere on this thread have I said definitely in any way what I think these things are and where they may be from, except within the context of ‘possibility’, and to state that the ‘conventional explanations’ in many instances fall far short of really explaining what was seen; and also that pld’s mind is closed to considering the possibility of anything that might threaten the parameters of his carefully circumscribed world.

33

Yeah, OK, DIF. That’s why I’m running seti@home on my home PC. Because I don’t believe there might be intelligent life elsewhere. Do you ever get tired of being wrong, or is it just so common it’s like an old friend for you?

34

Having espoused another Cause held by True Believers ;), I think I may have some worthwhile comments:

A fair amount of Unidentified Flying Objects are explainable (by Occam’s Razor) as natural phenomena. As a wise man once commented, “I saw a bright light where there had not been one previously in the west just after sunset. This led me to the obvious conclusion that a giant alien spaceship was occulting the planet Venus.”

This is accompanied by the “me-too” phenomenon that Tom noted, that one sighting is often followed by a rash of sightings, many of which turn out to be somebody doing it for the publicity/notoriety.

When all is said and done, however, there remains a substantial residue of observations that were not marsh gas, weather balloons, satellites of terrestrial origin, hoaxes, etc. Because hoaxers can fool the credulous, and some people have a need to believe in (ET) UFOs, does not mean that there cannot be actual events. As numerous posters have responded to Contestant #3 on other threads, it would be nice to have some concrete examples that cannot be explained away. However, having spent interminable time debating the putative historicity of the Resurrection, it occurs to me that there is nothing that cannot be explained away by someone with a desire to do so, and the most meager of evidence will convince someone with a need to believe.

Where one mines truth from this complexus is a very difficult question. It might be well worth exploring, however. What evidence might be convincing?

35

Pickman’s Model wrote:

A personal nitpick:

A light-year is a unit of distance, not a unit of time.

I’m not flying fast, just orbiting low.

36

:::leaping to Pickman’s defense:::

You would quarrel with an allusion to Han Solo, sir?? :wink:

37

Sure it is. But saying like I did sounds cool, don’t you think? :slight_smile: Anyways, my post was science fiction, and very few of us famous science fiction writers actually use hard science—that’s why it’s fiction. Oh, Isaac Asimov did, but he was in the minority. Look at H.P.L., though: he actually brought people back to life by dumping chemical compounds into a pile of grave dust and reciting the magickal formula. Pretty nifty, I think.

Polycarp: I thank you profoundly, Sir, for your defense of me! You are indeed a Gentleman and a Scholar, among other things. We should join forces, you and me…with our combined power, we could rule the galaxy.

38

Like I said, PLD – “your carefully circumscribed world”. Sure, you’re hooked up with SETI – *'Cuz Stone-Cold Carl Sagan sez so! * It’s not too much of a threat to your purblind worldview to accept the possibility that ETIs could exist way, way away from your little microcosmic backyard; but the thought that someone might actually possess technology that would seem like magic (ala Clarke) to us bursts that constricted sphincter you use in place of a real mind and leaves you gibbering.

No, I never tire of being wrong, for it is only in finding one’s errors that one can experience the enlightenment of truth. I have never learned as much from being right as I have learned from being wrong; nor have I ever met as interesting a succession of people as those who truly have something to offer in correcting me. An old friend? Nay, more like a beloved nemesis. Grow tired? Never!

You, on the other hand, li’l whelpling, have never been anything but tiresome; in post after post on thread after thread, you’ve had nothing to offer but vitriol and poppycock, poured forth from a head that not even a warm mug of Budweiser would want, nestled smugly in the lap of your kennelmaster, confident that he’ll be there to pick up the paper and tell you what a good little boy you are while you track dung all over the place with a happy smile, confident that he will be there to close the gate behind you when the big dogs get too close.

Or, perhaps I overdraw my analogy – perhaps you are more like a little parrot. Yes, that’s it – a parrot, gamely echoing a benighted viewpoint with virtually the same voice as your master, there to quickly shut the cage door behind you before the cats get to you. There you sit, day after day on his shoulder, leaving your droppings to dry and turn to dust, spreading the germs of your ignorance all about, waiting – always waiting for the change to play the vulture, you little verbozoraptor, you!

39

I’m out there looking for new evidence and accounts, keeping an open mind.

Others, who shall go nameless, have long ago made their decision and closed their minds. These people would not be found making an effort to read or research the subject. They don’t want to examine new claims or recent happenings.

I’ve yet to find a SDMB “skeptic” that keeps up on UFO events and that actively and precisely debunks…the folks we have out here just wave their mighty hands and declare everything non-important.

How intellectually dishonest.

Contestant #3

40

No, what’s intellectually dishonest is to constantly use the words “UFO” and “extraterrestrial spacecraft” interchangeably.