Thomas, do you have your own top ten compelling reports? I would very seriously like to review them.
I think that most people overlook the “tip of the iceberg” factor with this subject, because every time some big popular case takes a blow to its credibility, people start wondering if *all the cases* are just some sort of misunderstanding.
I don’t have a “top ten list” and frankly I lost interest in most of the individual case studies decades ago. Because after my own incredible multiple-witness sighting at seven years old, I fell into the habit of asking everyone I knew about their own strangest experiences, and it would probably stun the average Joe to find out just how many of the people in their lives have had a classic unexplained ufo sighting, and yet never bring it up unless they’re asked. A beloved neighbor near my family home who was basically a surrogate mother to me, described a silvery cigar-shaped ufo with colored lights that appeared to hover in broad daylight and then instantly dart away, while she was looking out the window of a car during a trip through the southwest. And a school teacher I knew cautiously broached this subject after hearing me talk about it, before she described a sighting that she had with a group of friends at college – they were on the roof of an apartment building one afternoon when they saw a metallic disc-shaped object with a series of lights around the outer perimeter descend straight down from the sky and come to a dead stop over the tree line a few hundred yards away. It hovered silently and motionless there for at least 20 minutes – enough time for them to call the police and show the responding officer the object when he arrived, before watching it suddenly depart along a rapid zig-zag trajectory weaving around nearby mountain ridges and over the horizon out of sight. That one made the paper the following day.
The point is: you never hear about most cases because people are reluctant to talk about them - and those can be the most compelling cases because you know the person telling you about it, and you can see the wonder in their eyes when they talk about it, which is usually told like a secret that they need to get off their chest. But of course frauds love to go around promoting their fake stories, and those often get national or even global exposure: so the tip of the iceberg that the public sees is weighted fairly heavily toward the dubious cases that tend to crumble under scrutiny. After a few decades of hearing fascinating personal accounts from friends and acquintances, most of my favorite cases have never been heard beyond the kitchen table, and that’s fine with me.
Because at some point I realized that this isn’t about proving that ufos or aliens are real. This is about a form of field propulsion unknown to conventional science, which would transform human civilization in a big and positive way virtually overnight if we could replicate it. So I’m happy to leave the case studies to the dedicated ufologists. To me, this is a physics problem to be solved.
[On another note, any news on the diffuse green column?]
No news, but I am going to send you an image so you can see what it looked like.
I've mentioned before that I was an F-4 radar tech in the '70s, so the Tehran case is particularly compelling to me, for some kind of radar-reflecting object that apparently was under intelligent control. But saying it was a structured craft conveying interstellar travelers is more than I would be willing to say. So too with the RB-47. One other case is the Coyne helo case, which is featured in Peter Sturrock's UFO book. Something is going on, but what?
Those are interesting cases - radar cases with visual confirmation are very compelling. I also like the Japan Airlines case, Gordon Cooper’s account of the ufo that his team caught on film at Edward’s Air Force Base, the Malmstrom AFB incident, and the Trumbull County case. There are also some really interesting cases from the White Sands Missile Proving Ground back in the 50s and 60s, at least one of which was caught on cinetheodolite as it circled a climbing test rocket – there are a number of cases involving military personnel capturing solid craft on films that were never released to the public. And that’s infuriating: we paid for that evidence and we have every right to see it.
We can’t say for certain what these objects are, but it strikes me that extraterrestrial technology is
the most prosaic explanation we have which conforms to the available facts. And that's good science - we
should formulate our hypotheses conservatively. Every other explanation, and certainly any paranormal/spiritual explanation, requires far more radical assumptions, such as “a paranormal/spiritual/consciousness phenomenon can appear as a solid metallic object that shows up on radar, performs aerobatic maneuvers, and emits bright colored light.” I find such paranormal explanations to be deeply implausible.
I don’t understand why anyone struggles with the ETH, honestly. It seems obvious at this point that the universe is teeming with life: Earth-like conditions are ubiquitous - we know that now for a fact. And it seems all but certain that countless other worlds have yielded intelligent technological species many thousands or even millions of years ago. So it would be bizarre if we
weren’t being visited by alien intelligences and their autonomous drones from all corners of the galaxy and beyond. Sure, some of these things may have come from “other universes” or some other inexplicably exotic origin, but why would anyone find that to be >more likely< than the far simpler possibility that they’ve dropped by from one of those nice inhabitable worlds just a few light-years over yonder?
