Released Videos From The Pentagon's First Batch Of UFO Files

[Lance Payette]

I find it far more probable that the witnesses' judgement of flying objects doing things that are physically impossible is flawed.Again, it makes far more sense to question the judgement of the witnesses than to question our understanding of physical laws.
Either that or the eyewitness accounts are FUBAR. I know which one I am betting on.What makes these witnesses credible?

it's quite simple really. A nutter's creed, often times abused:
Witness testimony is the most unreliable. Therefore mistaken. whenever.

These quotes are right in my epistemological wheelhouse, so thank you.

Yes, eyewitness testimony is generally characterized as unreliable - but this paints with too broad of a brush. Eyewitness testimony immediately after an event is generally quite reliable insofar as the major details are concerned. In fact, there have been studies with hoax UFOs (lights suspended from balloons, drones, etc.) that showed the witnesses quite accurately reported what they saw; they simply (and not unreasonably) misinterpreted the phenomenon as something more mysterious than it actually was. An epistemologically savvy witness would not leap to any conclusion but would consider all the circumstances and possible mundane explanations and arrive at his best estimate of what he actually saw;if and when the mundane truth was revealed, he would accept it.

What is often characterized as the unreliability of eyewitness testimony is really talking more about the fallibility of memory. I often play memory games with myself that do indeed demonstrate the astonishing fallibility of my own excellent memory. I've hammered a couple of participants here who actually were in Dealey Plaza and purported to remember details no one could reasonably remember 60 years after the event. I apparently drove Toni Glover away, but her purported "memories" just aren't credible in my opinion. Had Toni documented her recollections at the time, and been telling a consistent story for 60 years, I'd be less skeptical.

We also have to factor in the nature of an event. The JFKA was sudden, wholly unexpected, hideously traumatic and utterly chaotic. Eyewitness testimony is obviously not going to be as reliable here as what happened in the third inning of a baseball game or even what happened when a big silver disk appeared in the sky and hovered for five minutes.

My recollection of my UFO experience has remained the same since it happened. I can remember virtually NOTHING of my wedding a year later, but the UFO event is burned into my mind, has never varied one bit, and is as fresh today as 50+ years ago. I am kind of astonished by this myself, but there it is.

Had I been alone, I would be far more skeptical of my own experience than I am. I had been fascinated by UFOs and heavily involved in the study of them since the age of ten. I would have LOVED to see a UFO. I thus would have been the least credible eyewitness imaginable. But my friend was the exact opposite, as hard-nosed and skeptical of everything as they come, yet he saw what I saw and was even more shaken. I have considered the alternative explanations and remain convinced this was something extraordinary. This conclusion is reinforced by what I have called the "psychic aftereffects," which are not uncommon in UFO experiences.

Because I am an intelligent, rational, analytical critical thinker, I do not insist on any particular explanation for this event. I am convinced that what the two of us saw was actually, objectively there. It defies any mundane explanation that occurs to me. It was simply - yep - an "unidentified flying object." My very vague recollection of the craft actually meshes fairly well with stealth technology. If information surfaced that the military was testing small stealth craft in 1971 and these super-secret craft occasionally paced old VW Beetles on Nevada highways during daylight hours at a distance of 75 yards just for the hell of it, I'd cheerfully say "Well, I'll be damned." I'd still have to account for what I have called the psychic aftereffects, but I'd probably throw in the towel if the military explanation were solid enough. (FWIW, Lockheed and Northrup were awarded contracts to build the first static models of stealth craft in 1975.)

Should anyone else attach any weight at all to my experience? Someone who knows me well might do so. I've had people I know very well describe to me experiences, UFO and otherwise, that were mind-blowing and jaw-dropping. One otherwise extremely dull civil engineer described a camping experience in which a large disk zoomed over a lake in full view of him and his son, hovered and sucked up a huge column of water and zoomed away. In fact, one of my little axioms, that has proved itself time and again, is that if you share one of your own extraordinary experiences in a group of five relatives, friends or colleagues (even lawyers!), at least two and more likely three will proceed to relate some incredible experience that makes your own sound like it was hardly worth telling.

The reason I mentioned the 1000 best cases is because volume is how anecdotal and testimonial evidence is best assessed. No matter what extraordinary phenomenon we're talking about, at some point the mountain of anecdotal and testimonial evidence reaches such an overwhelming volume that the only alternative explanation is something like "No matter how credible these folks may seem in the rest of their lives, and no matter how much we may rely on what they say and do, they are fundamentally crazy when it comes to this phenomenon and we can't trust anything they say." This is, indeed, a fair summary of John's post.

In those 1000 best cases, the witnesses will include experienced pilots, military personnel, law enforcement officers, high-level scientists and others who are trained in observation. Often a sighting will include multiple such witnesses. Often the eyewitness testimony will be reinforced by radar returns and/or physical effects and traces. Entire volumes have been written concerning the phenomenon's apparent interest in military and nuclear facilities, and these volumes are chockful of the testimoy of men on duty who saw what certainly appeared to be craft that had an ability to render the most technologically advanced security and weapons systems inoperative. It takes a rather closed and rigid mind - or a wholly uninformed one - to blithely conclude "Nothing to see here, move along."

John's posts reflect a mindset that I often encountered among a certain species of atheists on religion forums. The materialistic paradigm is rock-solid, Newtonian physics explains everything, go away and leave me alone. Well, no. There is no physicist who thinks Newtonian physics explains everything or that quantum physics is anything other than mysterious and baffling. The materialistic paradigm is hanging on by its fingernails. The notion that consciousness rather than matter is the fundamental stuff of the universe is taken very seriously. The possibility that our reality is a simulation is taken seriously. The possibility that we live in a designed, information-based reality is taken seriously. To dismissively attribute the 1000 best or 10,000 best or 100,000 best UFO cases to "eyewitness unreliability" is simply an uninformed, head-in-the-sand position.

Again, I make no claims. I simply say that the UFO phenomenon is genuinely mysterious, worthy of serious study and exceedingly difficult to explain in mundane terms. I know what I experienced, I know what others have reported in the best cases, I have my hierarchy of theories, and I factor them into my overall convictions as to What It's All About. That being said, my convictions could prove to be 100% incorrect.

[John Corbett]

I don't know what you saw but it is completely illogical to assume because you can't explain what it was that it must have been space aliens or some other supernatural phenomenon. There is zero credible evidence that extraterrestrials have visited the third rock from the sun or of the existence of supernatural events. I am a believer in the adage that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I've seen lots of examples of the former and none of the latter. I'm not sure of the origin of that adage but the late Dr. Carl Sagan expressed it in both video and print.

[Lance Payette]

If John didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him because he provides such a perfect foil. The sort of rigid, dogmatic thinking he exemplifies, here and in his responses to anyone who dares not to share his views about the JFKA, is encountered across the entire spectrum of what I lovingly call Weirdness, which includes the UFO phenomenon and even the JFKA. This "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up, I'm right and you're wrong" mindset is all too common.

Duncan may be regretting he ever started this thread, but I shall persist because this is way more interesting for me than whether Oswald was carrying curtain rods into the TSBD …

I don't know what you saw but ...

John doesn't know what I saw, but by God he knows what it wasn't!

it is completely illogical to assume because you can't explain what it was ...

Do my posts suggest I "assume" anything at all about my experience? Did I not make quite clear that I have no firm position as to what it was or wasn't? The nature of the experience leads me to a provisional belief that it was non-mundane, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief by compelling evidence to the contrary. My belief that it was non-mundane is bolstered by numerous anecdotal reports of similar experiences by other sane and credible persons. My provisional belief that it was not a nuts-and-bolts ET craft is based on 60+ years of study of the UFO phenomenon, but I would be prepared to be disabused of that belief as well by compelling evidence of ET craft.

that it must have been space aliens or some other supernatural phenomenon.

Does anything in my posts suggest I assume my experience involved "space aliens"? Quite the contrary. In my first post, I made clear that (1) I thought the UAP Disclosure movement was badly misguided for focusing on this angle, and (2) among experienced ufologists the ET hypothesis is regarded as among the most unlikely. I also made clear that I did not think my own experience involved an ET craft. (That being said, there are a vast number of UFO reports, including some of the best, for which an ET craft seems at first blush the most likely explanation; the problem is that there are just too many such cases unless Earth is the Disneyland of the universe and, moreover, there are aspects of the phenomenon that just don't mesh with the ET hypothesis.)

Does anything in my posts suggest I think my experience was a "supernatural" event or that the UFO phenomenon is a "supernatural" one? I used the term "non-mundane," meaning "not easily explainable in terms of our present understanding of reality." No, I don't think my experience involved angels or demons, which is about the only supernatural UFO hypothesis.

There is zero credible evidence that extraterrestrials have visited the third rock from the sun or of the existence of supernatural events.

John appears to know pretty close to nothing about the UFO phenomenon, but he somehow knows there is "zero credible evidence." Ditto for whatever he means by the supernatural - a term that I do not use unless talking about theology because "anomalous" and "non-mundane" are more precise. I have spent 60+ years deeply involved in these subjects, to some minor extent as an experiencer. Although I don't happen to buy into the ET hypothesis, I would strongly dispute the statement that there is zero credible evidence. There is a great deal of credible evidence for which ET visitation is at least a plausible hypothesis. For the supernatural - i.e., anomalous - I would say flatly that John doesn't know what he's talking about. There are mountains of evidence, including laboratory PSI studies, that cannot be explained by conventional science.

The problem with folks like John is that he thinks he gets to be the sole arbiter of what is credible. I wish it worked that way, too - but it doesn't. I get to be the arbiter of what I find credible and so do you, but that's as far as it goes. If 999 out of 1000 people disagree with me, then I probably do need to take a closer look and reconsider.

I have no problem with someone who has studied the UFO phenomenon or any area of the anomalous as diligently and for as long as I have and who reaches entirely different conclusions and convictions. I do have a problem with someone who seems to be speaking from a position of near-total ignorance telling me my own conclusions and convictions are "completely illogical" and supported by "zero credible evidence."

I am a believer in the adage that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I've seen lots of examples of the former and none of the latter. I'm not sure of the origin of that adage but the late Dr. Carl Sagan expressed it in both video and print.

One wonders if John knows that his hero Sagan wrote a scholarly article in 1963 in which he speculated that the earth had been visited by ETs numerous times in the past and possibly within the historical era: "Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight," Planetary and Space Science, Volume 11, Issue 5, May 1963, Pages 485-498. Using the Drake equation for the likelihood of ET life, he estimated the frequency of extraterrestrial visitation. Based on his estimates, he hypothesized that Earth had been visited many - perhaps hundreds - of times during geological time and possibly once during historical times. He went on to state, "It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions."

Once he became a highly paid spokesman for atheism and the materialistic paradigm, he did his best to suppress this paper and distance himself from it. The fact is, the tales of his intellectual dishonesty and manipulation are legendary. But I digress ...

No, the "extraordinary claims" shiboleth was popularized by Sagan but predates him by 300 years. It is akin to a logical fallacy. The obvious problems are: Who gets to decide when a claim is "extraordinary" and who gets to decide when the quantum of evidence is "extraordinary"? In reality, this is little more than a tool for intellectually dishonest skeptics and debunkers to keep saying, "Sorry, you're nowhere near the 'extraordinary' standard yet. In fact, your claim is so 'extraordinary' we don't see how you could ever get there." As Thomas Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it's also a tool to insulate a prevailing paradigm against challenge - anything that contravenes the prevailing paradigm is ipso facto "extraordinary."

As Garry P. Nolan, an immunologist and the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, has stated: "Science doesn’t care whether the claim is extraordinary or not. It simply arbitrates if the evidence is sufficient. The extraordinary claims/evidence meme is pretentious nonsense."

Many UFO hypotheses and other claims regarding the anomalous are "extraordinary" only in the sense that they are inexplicable given the prevailing materialistic paradigm, which itself is fast crumbling. If reality happens to be fundamentally different from what we now understand it to be, these hypotheses and claims may not seem extraordinary at all. Indeed, perhaps the evidence for UFOs and anomalous phenomena is a very large clue that our present understanding of reality is incorrect.

[Tom Graves]

Not that I care, but we have two responses that reflect an almost complete lack of familiarity with the history and scope of the UFO phenomenon. Anyone familiar with the, say, 1000 best UFO cases - multiple trained and credible witnesses, radar confirmation, physical effects and traces - could not possibly make the dismissive comments we see here.

I won't beat my own peewee encounter to death since I've previously described it, but:

1. I was in the company of a diehard skeptic who was a good friend but thought all varieties of woo-woo were nonsense - and he just about wet his knickers.
2. The encounter was during daylight hours.
3. The UFO was no more than 75 or so yards away and fully visible for 30-40 seconds.
4. Without a word to each other, we both instantly recognized that this was something weird and troubling.
5. There were commonly reported "psychic aftereffects" that confirmed for me that this was no mundane encounter.

I could easily jump on the "ET" bandwagon, but I don't believe this is what it was. The ET explanation doesn't mesh with all the facts of those 1000 best cases (and mine) any better than "optical illusion" or "sooper-dooper miltary technology." The 1000 best cases include UFOs doing unbelievable and even physically impossible things when sooper-dooper military technology still had propellers.

Dear Fancy Panzer Rants,

Maybe what you experienced was a glimpse into the next century -- through RFK Jr's wormhole -- when your boys Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, J.V. Trance, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin, et al. ad nauseum, have thawed themselves out and developed some super-duper new drone technologies with which to kill as many Ukrainians, non-white immigrants, and Snowflake Socialistic Communistic Libtards as possible!

-- Tom

[Richard Smith]

I don't have any skin in the UFO game but my instinct is that given the enormous distances in space that it is extremely unlikely that anyone is visiting Earth.  Even if they did, the time continuum makes it unlikely they have done so in our short human time span.  Also, they would be subject to certain laws of science.  No radio signals detected to the outermost regions of space.  Conclusion - no UFOs have come here in recent history. 

[Lance Payette]

I don't have any skin in the UFO game but my instinct is that given the enormous distances in space that it is extremely unlikely that anyone is visiting Earth.  Even if they did, the time continuum makes it unlikely they have done so in our short human time span.  Also, they would be subject to certain laws of science.  No radio signals detected to the outermost regions of space.  Conclusion - no UFOs have come here in recent history.

All well and good, but bear in mind that you - like most people - are limiting the definition of UFOs to nuts-and-bolts craft that are traversing the vast distances of space at speeds that we would regard as obtainable. UFO = alien spacecraft. I would agree that this is exceedingly unlikely, especially in the numbers that proponents of the ET hypothesis seem to think is happening (making Earth the Disneyland of the universe). Bear in mind, however, that in his 1963 paper Carl Sagan hypothesized that this had happened hundreds of times. The larger point is that the ET hypothesis is no longer favored by most serious ufologists (or even little old me), so the term UFO encompasses far more and much stranger hypotheses than just "alien spacecraft." The problem is, almost every explanation - including even mundane ones like secret military technology - fits some of the cases but does not come close to explaining the phenomenon as a whole. One of my very best friends - a true UFO luminary who has appeared on national TV programs for decades - thinks we live in a simulated reality, basically meaning a cosmic software program where anything is possible. The UFO phenomenon as a whole is so weird that it almost drives you to an explanation along these lines. (FWIW, this is no longer regarded as lunatic fringe stuff: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/.)

[Richard Smith]

All well and good, but bear in mind that you - like most people - are limiting the definition of UFOs to nuts-and-bolts craft that are traversing the vast distances of space at speeds that we would regard as obtainable. UFO = alien spacecraft. I would agree that this is exceedingly unlikely, especially in the numbers that proponents of the ET hypothesis seem to think is happening (making Earth the Disneyland of the universe). Bear in mind, however, that in his 1963 paper Carl Sagan hypothesized that this had happened hundreds of times. The larger point is that the ET hypothesis is no longer favored by most serious ufologists (or even little old me), so the term UFO encompasses far more and much stranger hypotheses than just "alien spacecraft." The problem is, almost every explanation - including even mundane ones like secret military technology - fits some of the cases but does not come close to explaining the phenomenon as a whole. One of my very best friends - a true UFO luminary who has appeared on national TV programs for decades - thinks we live in a simulated reality, basically meaning a cosmic software program where anything is possible. The UFO phenomenon as a whole is so weird that it almost drives you to an explanation along these lines. (FWIW, this is no longer regarded as lunatic fringe stuff: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/.)

I'm sure there are certain military craft that are responsible for some of these events.  Many are also fakes or bizarre weather events.  I heard someone say that the most likely source of proof of any alien existence will be the discovery of some type of abandoned alien vehicle/space junk that has been orbiting the universe for eons.  That sounds about right.  But they are not visiting Earth.  Even if they had some type of currently unimaginable technology that allowed them to transverse enormous distances, the odds of this coinciding in time with our own existence must be trillions to one.  Like the JFK conspiracy, many UFO types take the lack of evidence to reverse engineer a theory that still allows them to maintain some basis to believe.  Often not only baseless but insane.