THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
February 21, 2016
www.theparacast.com
Amazing Fireball Sightings Explored on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show, and for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast without the network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes and we give free ebooks for long-term subscriptions. We’ve just launched The Paracast+ Video Channel. Check out our new “Lifetime” membership! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, to join us for a UFO update. According to Davenport, “One of the issues I would like to discuss is the wild proliferation of sightings of clusters of red, orange, and yellow fireballs. It appears to be the most important facet to the current status of Ufology, and I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of those reports do not involve so-called ‘Chinese’ lanterns.” Davenport will also discuss his ongoing plans to develop a UFO detection system using “passive” radar. First proposed 22 years ago, Davenport suggests that recent advancements in personal computer technology make the plans more feasible than ever.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
National UFO Reporting Center: National UFO Reporting Center
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on February 21: Gene and Chris present a brief wrap-up of the International UFO Congress, where Chris was roaming the vendor booths and conference rooms and met Dr. Jacques Vallee for a brief chat. This leads Chris to discuss his early involvement in UFO research and his “Mysterious Valley Report” newsletter, which he had sent to Dr. Vallee and several hundred other readers. We also discuss the problems of integrating UFO sighting databases among research organizations. So we have sighings reports, but few are making the effort to coordinate all that data. The discussion moves into efforts to set up UFO detection systems and find other ways to put the facts together and make an effort to figure out what is really happening. The subject moves to evaluating evidence of cattle mutilations. We also preview the upcoming 10th anniversary episode of The Paracast.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
My Data is My Data
By Gene Steinberg
One thing that’s clear from decades of UFO research — nobody has any provable answers. I’ve covered the theories, from the most popular theory, spaceships, to various alternatives that include alternate realities, time travelers and the collective unconscious.
You combine then, separate them, and add in other possibilities, and you still have the same enigma that’s confronted people ever since the first UFO was observed. When may be is also a matter of debate, witness the ancient astronaut theories about the possible presence of extraterrestrials in Biblical times.
But what about the sighting data? Well, a number of organizations have collected sightings over the years. One of the most active in the early days, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), had everything stored in file cabinets. It happened mostly before personal computers and database applications took over. Alas, the data is still stored in those file cabinets, and the caretakers have shown no interest in doing anything but storing. A wealth of sightings and investigative reports remains unavailable to researchers.
Today’s UFO clearinghouses include MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Both place their sightings in databases of one sort or another, and you can usually find that information online. That’s a good thing.
What’s not so good is what is being done with that information, which continues to grow as more and more people report UFOs.
NUFORC is essentially a one-man project run by director Peter Davenport. You can call their hotline and report your sighting and follow up by submitting a report. That report is stored in a relatively barebones database with limited search capabilities. I suspect it was set up some years ago and hasn’t been updated with the latest technology.
While Davenport is to be commended for being at this game for 22 years, he’s not actually doing much in the way of investigation. He doesn’t have a staff to travel to the places where UFOs are seen and work with witnesses to unearth the facts.
As Davenport admits on this week’s episode of The Paracast, the database is highly imperfect because human testimony is imperfect. Such fine details as date, time, duration of the sighting and even the order of events may be imprecise. At least with multiple witness cases, you can attempt to reach a consensus of descriptions to get as accurate a picture as possible as to what actually occurred.
Now it may not be possible given the structure of the database, but little effort is made to actually evaluate the data beyond the act of collecting sightings. What does it all mean?
Davenport’s ultimate solution is to establish a network of UFO detectors using a technology that he refers to as “passive radar.” Although he’s made a few presentations on the proposal over the years, the idea has, forgive the pun, remained under the radar.
There is some hope, however. The Paracast has already featured representatives of another UFO detector project, UFODATA, and perhaps Davenport can contribute his ideas to that venture. But it’s not as if the multibillionaires who are only too happy to fund wacky political candidates are willing to contribute anything to solid efforts to get positive proof of UFO reality.
As to MUFON, yes the organization has state directors and field investigators who will go out and personally investigate sightings. That information is entered into their database, but what happens next? Well, MUFON has been around since 1969. But it does not appear that any progress has been made towards understanding the phenomenon. MUFON’s mission statement includes this goal: “Promote research on UFOs to discover the true nature of the phenomenon, with an eye towards scientific breakthroughs, and improving life on our planet.”
At least they are not officially pushing the extraterrestrial hypothesis, since “true nature of the phenomenon” doesn’t imply prejudging the solution.
So just how is that goal being met? After 47 years, what has their research shown anyway? It does appear that most of the people involved with MUFON favor ET as the solution. That’s fine, so long as their research isn’t restricted to that theory.
MUFON publishes a small monthly magazine that mostly contains sighting reports and some commentaries by guest writers. That’s pretty much as far as it goes, month in and month out. The annual symposiums, and periodic state meetings, will feature guest speakers of one sort or another. But it doesn’t seem as if those speakers are carefully vetted as to the quality of their research and whether they can offer theories with some level of authority. Without naming names, some of those speakers occupy the more extreme factions of the UFO field, but evidently they can fill seats.
So in large part, MUFON specializes in public information, hoping to attract larger membership rosters to fund the workings of the group. But they appear to almost always be under the eight ball. There is enough money to keep the organization running, but the investigators are unpaid volunteers. There never seems to be sufficient funding to actually research anything, not even basic analysis of the growing sightings database to seek trends and consistencies.
In one instance, where they actually had funding for specific research projects from eccentric millionaire Robert Bigelow, the whole deal soon fell apart, evidently due, in part, to turf wars.
I can understand the lapses of NUFORC. Again, it’s a one-man-band, and Peter Davenport appears to be doing the best he can under that severe limitation.
But what about an interim step, such as combining these two huge databases to at last get a fuller picture of sightings? Clearly there are duplicates, and perhaps alternate witnesses will be found for individual cases by putting this information together.
As far as MUFON is concerned, it doesn’t appear they are prepared to share their data beyond what you can get online. Davenport mentions the possible difficulties coordinating different databases. That, however, depends on whether these are off-the-shelf database applications, or home-built. Even in the latter case, databases will often handle data in fairly similar ways, using individual fields to store records of information.
So one field may contain a name (or a first name or last name), another the address, a third the date (this can be subdivided into day, month, year, time, etc.). The actual sighting report may also be divided into separate fields depending in which facts are included.
An off-the-shelf database application will usually include the ability to import data records from a different application. It’s done by mapping common fields, although there may have to be changes if those fields are presented differently. At the end of the day, unless something really funky is going on, most of the data from one type of database can probably be imported and/or merged with another.
But would NUFORC and MUFON be interested in pooling their resources in this fashion? It’s the eternal question about real cooperation in UFO research to attempt to find actual answers to the mystery. But at the end of the day, is the data even useful beyond sets of anecdotal reports that are seldom accompanied by supporting data?
In other words, can any of this information help us to find a possible solution to the UFO mystery? Or is it all about collections of data that demonstrate that people are seeing strange things in the skies but not a lot more?
Copyright 1999-2016 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
February 21, 2016
www.theparacast.com
Amazing Fireball Sightings Explored on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY A PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! We have another radio show, and for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to After The Paracast, plus a higher-quality version of The Paracast without the network ads, and chat rooms when you sign up for The Paracast+. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes and we give free ebooks for long-term subscriptions. We’ve just launched The Paracast+ Video Channel. Check out our new “Lifetime” membership! For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, to join us for a UFO update. According to Davenport, “One of the issues I would like to discuss is the wild proliferation of sightings of clusters of red, orange, and yellow fireballs. It appears to be the most important facet to the current status of Ufology, and I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of those reports do not involve so-called ‘Chinese’ lanterns.” Davenport will also discuss his ongoing plans to develop a UFO detection system using “passive” radar. First proposed 22 years ago, Davenport suggests that recent advancements in personal computer technology make the plans more feasible than ever.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
National UFO Reporting Center: National UFO Reporting Center
After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on February 21: Gene and Chris present a brief wrap-up of the International UFO Congress, where Chris was roaming the vendor booths and conference rooms and met Dr. Jacques Vallee for a brief chat. This leads Chris to discuss his early involvement in UFO research and his “Mysterious Valley Report” newsletter, which he had sent to Dr. Vallee and several hundred other readers. We also discuss the problems of integrating UFO sighting databases among research organizations. So we have sighings reports, but few are making the effort to coordinate all that data. The discussion moves into efforts to set up UFO detection systems and find other ways to put the facts together and make an effort to figure out what is really happening. The subject moves to evaluating evidence of cattle mutilations. We also preview the upcoming 10th anniversary episode of The Paracast.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
My Data is My Data
By Gene Steinberg
One thing that’s clear from decades of UFO research — nobody has any provable answers. I’ve covered the theories, from the most popular theory, spaceships, to various alternatives that include alternate realities, time travelers and the collective unconscious.
You combine then, separate them, and add in other possibilities, and you still have the same enigma that’s confronted people ever since the first UFO was observed. When may be is also a matter of debate, witness the ancient astronaut theories about the possible presence of extraterrestrials in Biblical times.
But what about the sighting data? Well, a number of organizations have collected sightings over the years. One of the most active in the early days, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), had everything stored in file cabinets. It happened mostly before personal computers and database applications took over. Alas, the data is still stored in those file cabinets, and the caretakers have shown no interest in doing anything but storing. A wealth of sightings and investigative reports remains unavailable to researchers.
Today’s UFO clearinghouses include MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Both place their sightings in databases of one sort or another, and you can usually find that information online. That’s a good thing.
What’s not so good is what is being done with that information, which continues to grow as more and more people report UFOs.
NUFORC is essentially a one-man project run by director Peter Davenport. You can call their hotline and report your sighting and follow up by submitting a report. That report is stored in a relatively barebones database with limited search capabilities. I suspect it was set up some years ago and hasn’t been updated with the latest technology.
While Davenport is to be commended for being at this game for 22 years, he’s not actually doing much in the way of investigation. He doesn’t have a staff to travel to the places where UFOs are seen and work with witnesses to unearth the facts.
As Davenport admits on this week’s episode of The Paracast, the database is highly imperfect because human testimony is imperfect. Such fine details as date, time, duration of the sighting and even the order of events may be imprecise. At least with multiple witness cases, you can attempt to reach a consensus of descriptions to get as accurate a picture as possible as to what actually occurred.
Now it may not be possible given the structure of the database, but little effort is made to actually evaluate the data beyond the act of collecting sightings. What does it all mean?
Davenport’s ultimate solution is to establish a network of UFO detectors using a technology that he refers to as “passive radar.” Although he’s made a few presentations on the proposal over the years, the idea has, forgive the pun, remained under the radar.
There is some hope, however. The Paracast has already featured representatives of another UFO detector project, UFODATA, and perhaps Davenport can contribute his ideas to that venture. But it’s not as if the multibillionaires who are only too happy to fund wacky political candidates are willing to contribute anything to solid efforts to get positive proof of UFO reality.
As to MUFON, yes the organization has state directors and field investigators who will go out and personally investigate sightings. That information is entered into their database, but what happens next? Well, MUFON has been around since 1969. But it does not appear that any progress has been made towards understanding the phenomenon. MUFON’s mission statement includes this goal: “Promote research on UFOs to discover the true nature of the phenomenon, with an eye towards scientific breakthroughs, and improving life on our planet.”
At least they are not officially pushing the extraterrestrial hypothesis, since “true nature of the phenomenon” doesn’t imply prejudging the solution.
So just how is that goal being met? After 47 years, what has their research shown anyway? It does appear that most of the people involved with MUFON favor ET as the solution. That’s fine, so long as their research isn’t restricted to that theory.
MUFON publishes a small monthly magazine that mostly contains sighting reports and some commentaries by guest writers. That’s pretty much as far as it goes, month in and month out. The annual symposiums, and periodic state meetings, will feature guest speakers of one sort or another. But it doesn’t seem as if those speakers are carefully vetted as to the quality of their research and whether they can offer theories with some level of authority. Without naming names, some of those speakers occupy the more extreme factions of the UFO field, but evidently they can fill seats.
So in large part, MUFON specializes in public information, hoping to attract larger membership rosters to fund the workings of the group. But they appear to almost always be under the eight ball. There is enough money to keep the organization running, but the investigators are unpaid volunteers. There never seems to be sufficient funding to actually research anything, not even basic analysis of the growing sightings database to seek trends and consistencies.
In one instance, where they actually had funding for specific research projects from eccentric millionaire Robert Bigelow, the whole deal soon fell apart, evidently due, in part, to turf wars.
I can understand the lapses of NUFORC. Again, it’s a one-man-band, and Peter Davenport appears to be doing the best he can under that severe limitation.
But what about an interim step, such as combining these two huge databases to at last get a fuller picture of sightings? Clearly there are duplicates, and perhaps alternate witnesses will be found for individual cases by putting this information together.
As far as MUFON is concerned, it doesn’t appear they are prepared to share their data beyond what you can get online. Davenport mentions the possible difficulties coordinating different databases. That, however, depends on whether these are off-the-shelf database applications, or home-built. Even in the latter case, databases will often handle data in fairly similar ways, using individual fields to store records of information.
So one field may contain a name (or a first name or last name), another the address, a third the date (this can be subdivided into day, month, year, time, etc.). The actual sighting report may also be divided into separate fields depending in which facts are included.
An off-the-shelf database application will usually include the ability to import data records from a different application. It’s done by mapping common fields, although there may have to be changes if those fields are presented differently. At the end of the day, unless something really funky is going on, most of the data from one type of database can probably be imported and/or merged with another.
But would NUFORC and MUFON be interested in pooling their resources in this fashion? It’s the eternal question about real cooperation in UFO research to attempt to find actual answers to the mystery. But at the end of the day, is the data even useful beyond sets of anecdotal reports that are seldom accompanied by supporting data?
In other words, can any of this information help us to find a possible solution to the UFO mystery? Or is it all about collections of data that demonstrate that people are seeing strange things in the skies but not a lot more?
Copyright 1999-2016 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!