JFK Assassination Forum

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

TG--

For that matter, liddle-widdle LHO, self-defined "Marxist," and self-imagined great thinker, may have chosen to go to Russia all on his own liddle-widdle initiative, and Bruce Solie may have been an ordinary CIA'er, nothing more than a less-than-stellar desk jockey. 

If you think LHO could conceive and execute the JFKA on his own...surely LHO could venture to Russia on his own, a much less intrepid exercise.

My guess is LHO had sponsors or confederates for both actions.

Dear "BC," check out my most recent article on my Substack page, How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI.

It's titled "Maybe. Maybe not."

Here it is!


TG--

You wrote (paraphrased):

Just because James Angleton's confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior, probable KGB mole Bruce Solie, may have sent Oswald to Moscow in October 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA, it doesn't necessarily mean that Solie or the KGB encouraged and/or programmed self-described Marxist Oswald to kill JFK.

In other words, self-described Marxist Oswald may have decided to kill JFK all by his self-described Marxist self.


Here's my reply to you, TG (paraphrased by "TG"):

Lee Harvey Oswald, self-defined “Marxist” and self-imagined great thinker that he was, may have chosen to go to Russia on his own initiative, and your “probable KGB mole,” Bruce Solie, may not have sent him but been a less-than-stellar desk jockey CIA officer, instead.

If you think Oswald could conceive and execute the JFK assassination on his own, he surely could venture on his own to Russia — a much less intrepid exercise.

My guess is that Oswald had sponsors or confederates for both actions.


Dear “BC,”

Maybe you're right.

“Dour, plodding, risk-averse” Bruce Leonard Solie (look him up) might have been doing legitimate CIA business when he . . .

1) . . . ,not on official CIA business, flew to Beirut (home of Kim Philby) in February 1957, shortly after Nosenko’s boss, General Kovshuk (head of the KGB’s efforts against the American Embassy), had gone to Washington as an ostensible diplomat at the Soviet Embassy on a two-year gig but returned to his kept-open-for-him job at KGB headquarters after only ten months and was seen so often in the company of two KGB types near D.C. movie houses that the FBI began referring to them as “The Three Musketeers” -- right about the time that Popov's recently-fired-by-CIA dead drop setter-upper, Edward Ellis Smith, told an inquiring CIA colleague that he was "Spending a lot of time in movie hoses, waiting for a job to open up in California." (The Hoover Institution)

2) . . . flew to Paris twice within thirty days for very short visits -- the first time a couple of weeks before Nosenko “walked in” to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962, and the second time after he’d asked Nosenko some questions (see below) right before Nosenko flew back to Moscow

3) . . . showed up unannounced at CIA safehouse in Geneva on 15 June 1962 to ask Major I mean Lt. Col. I mean Captain Yuri Nosenko about a list of possible moles that Golitsyn had told Angleton about and which naive Angleton had told Solie about (Tennent H. Bagley, who was there, said Nosenko “drew a blank”)

4) . . . was the exclusive recipient of all of the incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald’s defection which, if someone in Solie’s office hadn’t arranged in advance with the Office of Mail Logistics and the Records Integration Division, would have been routed to the Soviet Russia Division

5) . . . pleaded with W. David Slawson in April 1964 for Nosenko to be allowed to testify to the Warren Commission, even though the Soviet Russia Division and CIA Counterintelligence had serious doubts about his bona fides

6) . . . “cleared” Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report

7) . . . hid Office of Security files on Oswald from the Church Committee and the HSCA

But then again, maybe not.

-- “TG”

PS What was so hard about former Marine sharpshooter Oswald’s sneaking a disassembled short-rifle, disguised as wrapped-up curtain rods, through a rear entrance of the Texas School Book Depository and up to the already serendipitously created Sniper’s Nest overlooking the motorcade route before work on 22 November 1963?

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.

Ruby did what he was told to do. He was stalking Oswald all weekend waiting for his chance to silence him.

Who told him and how do you know about it.

If Ruby was stalking Oswald, why wasn't he in the garage at the time Oswald was supposed to be transferred.

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.