[brilongstaff's UFO thread]

[brilongstaff]

some very interesting accounts from professional pilots from www.thewhyfiles.net which include the two radar/visual encounters of the late captain graham sheppard - definitely NOT venus.

http://www.thewhyfiles.net/pilotsightings2.htm

[HenrikOlsen]

So what?

No one's been claiming that every UFO sighting is Venus, just that "professional pilot" carries no more weight than "human being" does when it comes to eyewitness testimony of things they don't know about.

And no, lights in the sky is not covered by "things they know about".

[Garrison]

some very interesting accounts from professional pilots from www.thewhyfiles.net which include the two radar/visual encounters of the late captain graham sheppard - definitely NOT venus.

http://www.thewhyfiles.net/pilotsightings2.htm

So on some occasions when a pilot sees something strange in the sky something odd turned up on radar. Any evidence to correlate the radar with the visual sighting? And yes these stories don't seem to be Venus, they are simply unidentified flying objects with any number of explanations but a lack of evidence to come to any conclusion.

[brilongstaff]

So on some occasions when a pilot sees something strange in the sky something odd turned up on radar. Any evidence to correlate the radar with the visual sighting? And yes these stories don't seem to be Venus, they are simply unidentified flying objects with any number of explanations but a lack of evidence to come to any conclusion.

the metalic hub shaped object that sheppard observed probably had some sort of 'anti radar shield' around it - the radar return was for the invisible object that was traveling 100yards behind it.

[R.A.F.]

some very interesting accounts from professional pilots from www.thewhyfiles.net

The very first thing I read upon going to that link...

The Mexican C26A UFO Footage, Ufo, Area 51, Roswell, Chupacabra, Kecksburg, Rendlesham, RAF Bentwaters, Phoenix Lights, Majestic12, Abductions, Black Triangle, Nasa, Mutilations, Stealth, Varghina, Alien, Conspiracy, Mars, Moon...

Sounds like they never "met" an outlandish, unproven idea that they didn't "like". I consider the source, and don't see any reason to take that site seriously.

[Swift]

brilongstaff's posts from the Pilot Testimony thread and the responses to them, have been split off into this thread.

brilongstaff, you need to make very clear, with your next post, exactly what you are advocating here.

[Strange]

the metalic hub shaped object that sheppard observed probably had some sort of 'anti radar shield' around it

And what is the evidence for such an "anti-radar shield"? Other than it fits with what you want to believe.

[John Mendenhall]

the metalic hub shaped object that sheppard observed probably had some sort of 'anti radar shield' around it - the radar return was for the invisible object that was traveling 100yards behind it.

Aside from being irrational and unsupported, U.S. air defense radars as early as the mid-60's could pick up an SR-71 traveling at altitude and speed. There is no radar screening for big radars with good technology and good operators. Clue: think 1.5 gigawatt output for starters. And the technology is orders of magnitude better today.

Almost everyone has a cellphone with a camera now. Why do we still have only wretched fuzzy photos of chicken brooders for UFOs?

[R.A.F.]

Any evidence to correlate the radar with the visual sighting?

Brilongstaff....I, also, would like to see an answer to this question.

[Gillianren]

This thread shows what I think of as the Fallacy of the Conspiracist. (There's probably a technical term for it, but I don't know it.) It goes as follows.

Non-Conspiracist: Here is an example of phenomenon X being explained by rational explanation Y. This clearly shows that it is possible for phenomenon X to not be caused by conspiracy Z.

Conspiracist: Ah, but here are four examples that clearly show phenomenon X but cannot be rational explanation Y! This shows that conspiracy Z is the only reasonable explanation for phenomenon X in those other cases that aren't rational explanation Y!

You see how the non-conspiracists never once claim that rational explanation Y is the only explanation for phenomenon X. Just that it is an example which shows a non-conspiracy explanation. To the non-conspiracist, this suggests that perhaps other rational explanations exist to cover other examples of the phenomenon. Rational explanation Y is never intended to say "all X is Y," just "not all X is Z." And by "not all X is Z," they are saying, "you must show evidence that any X is Z other than a claim." But to the conspiracist, any explanation for X must explain all X, and Z is the only explanation that does and therefore must be correct. The idea that a phenomenon can have more than one cause is shocking to them.

[brilongstaff]

the link i provided was the only source i could find with graham shepherd's testimony. the site wouldn't let me copy and paste, hence i linked the site itself.

the reference to an anti-radar shield was a light-hearted retort to the question of correlation between radar and visual sighting - preston air traffic control alerted shepherd that there was unidentified opposite direction traffic approaching at very high speed. shepherd then saw a disc shaped craft flying towards his aircraft. now why wouldn't that craft be the thing that was causing the radar return? i can remember shepherd relating this story and he said that the most puzzling aspect of the encounter was that the craft did not cause a shock wave as it passed under his aircraft. indeed the whole affair was so unusual that neither the crew or the ground radar team filed a near miss report, which would have been the standard procedure had a conventional aircraft been involved.

[R.A.F.]

the link i provided was the only source i could find with graham shepherd's testimony. the site wouldn't let me copy and paste, hence i linked the site itself.

I see...

...the reference to an anti-radar shield was a light-hearted retort to the question of correlation between radar and visual sighting...

Which is the reason posters were asking for actual evidence of radar confirming visual sightings.

...preston air traffic control alerted shepherd that there was unidentified opposite direction traffic approaching at very high speed. shepherd then saw a disc shaped craft flying towards his aircraft. now why wouldn't that craft be the thing that was causing the radar return?

Garrison was asking for actual evidence that radar had confirmed visual sightings. Incredulousness is not evidence.

...i can remember shepherd relating this story and he said that the most puzzling aspect of the encounter was that the craft did not cause a shock wave as it passed under his aircraft.

So he made the assumption that it was some sort of "craft", therefore he expected a "shock wave".

...indeed the whole affair was so unusual that neither the crew or the ground radar team filed a near miss report, which would have been the standard procedure had a conventional aircraft been involved.

...or standard procedure if nothing worth "noting" actually happened.

[captain swoop]

If the pilot or ATC thought there was a 'near miss' then he would have reported it. If it was close enough for him to think it would hit him with a 'shock wave' then I would think a report would be filed.

As someone who has operated Air Warning Radar on Royal Navy SHips and stood Radar Watch ine exercise and in real Air Alert warnings in the South Atlantic I can tell you that all kinds of strange things come and go on radar screens but I don't think I ever saw anything I thought was some kind of alien spaceship.

[korjik]

If the pilot or ATC thought there was a 'near miss' then he would have reported it. If it was close enough for him to think it would hit him with a 'shock wave' then I would think a report would be filed.

As someone who has operated Air Warning Radar on Royal Navy SHips and stood Radar Watch ine exercise and in real Air Alert warnings in the South Atlantic I can tell you that all kinds of strange things come and go on radar screens but I don't think I ever saw anything I thought was some kind of alien spaceship.

Yeah, but you are a moderator. We know that you are part of the consipracy.

[R.A.F.]

Yeah, but you are a moderator. We know that you are part of the consipracy.

Consipracy??...sounds like a drinking game.

[Garrison]

the link i provided was the only source i could find with graham shepherd's testimony. the site wouldn't let me copy and paste, hence i linked the site itself.

the reference to an anti-radar shield was a light-hearted retort to the question of correlation between radar and visual sighting - preston air traffic control alerted shepherd that there was unidentified opposite direction traffic approaching at very high speed. shepherd then saw a disc shaped craft flying towards his aircraft. now why wouldn't that craft be the thing that was causing the radar return? i can remember shepherd relating this story and he said that the most puzzling aspect of the encounter was that the craft did not cause a shock wave as it passed under his aircraft. indeed the whole affair was so unusual that neither the crew or the ground radar team filed a near miss report, which would have been the standard procedure had a conventional aircraft been involved.

So no evidence that the radar return was anything other than a spurious return that happened to coincide with a UFO sighting? And isn't the more reasonable conclusion that there was no shock wave because there was physical object, or if there was one it was quite different from Shepherd's perception?

[brilongstaff]

garrison - i assume you meant to put the word 'no' between 'was' and 'physical' - irrespective, NO, the more reasonable conclusion is NOT that there was no physical object - the reasonable conclusion is that there WAS a physical object, and every honest, sensible person would agree with this. if this conflicts with your pre-supposed reality then, .... TOUGH ... get over it.

[pzkpfw]

Cut out the attitude, brilongstaff. Rudeness is not allowed here.

[R.A.F.]

...the reasonable conclusion is that there WAS a physical object...

Of course you are entitled to believe anything you desire, however your "conclusion" is not reasonable and is not supported by ANY evidence.


Doesn't that lack of evidence bother you at all??....sure bothers me.

[R.A.F.]

garrison - i assume you meant to put the word 'no' between 'was' and 'physical'...

I sure hope so.

[tnjrp]

But to the conspiracist, any explanation for X must explain all X, and Z is the only explanation that does and therefore must be correct. The idea that a phenomenon can have more than one cause is shocking to them.

Yes. As an addentum, there is the feature that all of the reported features of an observation must be explained by the single theory - there is never any room for error, misreporting, misconception or whatever as long as far as a mundane explanation is being proposed. There is some truth somewhat hidden inside that idea of course, because coincindence piled on coincidences do make an explanation weaker - despite the fact that coincidences do occasionally pile up.

[eburacum45]

I'm not overly impressed with the reporting on that site, since it perpetuates the myth that Gordon Cooper actually saw the object which was filmed at White Sands; unless 'witnessed' means something else in this case, since all he saw was the film.

In the case of Graham Sheppard's sightings (not Shepherd- another example of shoddy reporting) I would point out that sighting an object 'twice as bright as a planet' is not particularly outlandish; many bolides are at least that bright. His other sighting is intriguing, but there is very little to go on.

Continue to the next page, and we find a description of the November 1990 sighting which has been almost certainly identified as the re-entry of a Proton rocket, as the article briefly mentions. Given enough data I'm sure that most of these sightings could be explained, but even if they were, they would still probably appear on sites like that. Pilots make errors, as the first post in this thread and the November 1990 sighting both demonstrate.

[slang]

the link i provided was the only source i could find with graham shepherd's testimony. the site wouldn't let me copy and paste, hence i linked the site itself.

No problem, there's always someone who can.

ETA: btw, this isn't "graham shepherd's testimony", it's a description of his events, maybe based on his testimony...

Graham Shepherd below was a commercial pilot with B.A. (British Airways) for many years. Since his retirement he has decided to reveal his experiences with UFOs.

How convenient. Any possible physical evidence to support any of his claims is now long gone.

On the 22nd March 1967, Graham Shepherd was piloting an aircraft on a return flight from Gibraltar to London when the aircrew noticed a very bright star - twice as bright as any normal star or planet. The object became yet brighter and started to manoeuvre as though intelligently controlled; performing figures of eights and loops. Shepherd contacted Bordeaux Radar (France) and who confirmed the presence of an unidentified object 10 miles to the west, on their screens.

Details! Was this at night (perhaps it was, considering the following remarks)? Weather conditions? How could Shephard tell that his unidentified object was in fact 10 miles away, at night? Gosh, 45 years ago.. Does Bordeaux Radar still have the tapes?

In another instance, Graham Shepherd was flying from Scotland to London (Heathrow) in daylight. Just after crossing into England, he was alerted by Preston Radar Control that there was "unidentified opposite direction traffic" at 24,000 ft., approaching at very high speed. Shepherd was astonished to see a disk-shaped craft, similar to a shiny car hub cap, flying towards his aircraft. He estimated the object to be about 30ft. in diameter. The UFO passed within a quarter of a mile, about 2-300 feet below Shepherd's aircraft and yet caused no shockwave. The aircrew and the observers at Preston Radar Control were completely puzzled.

Once again the physical evidence is probably already conveniently gone.. Why is only "unidentified opposite direction traffic" a direct quote? What was the exact message from radar control? Is the "very high speed" another of the usual embellishments we so often see in UFO stories? What was the distance of that particular radar contact? How did Shephard determine the distance to his object? How could he tell its size without any reference, without knowing how far away it was? How could Shephard tell that the object was moving towards him, and not the other way around?

I'd like to see some research at what kinds of distance one may expect damage to hydraulics etc. due to aerodynamic shockwaves, but at a few hundred meters one would at least expect to notice some turbulance.

Neither Graham Shepherd or Preston Radar Control submitted a "near-miss report" as everyone in volved in the incident felt that something extremely strange had happened.

What!? That's just nuts. If it was extremely strange it could also be extremely hazardous. All the more reason to launch an investigation to find out what really happened. Or did Shephard have some other reasons not to submit to close scrutiny? Perhaps he had a couple of beers before or during the flight?

His decision to reveal his experiences have some anger as far as B.A. are concerned, writing to Graham Shepherd asking him not to relate details of his UFO encounters to anyone.

Evidence? What writing? "Have some anger as far as B.A. are concerned".. I can't make sense of this sentence, but then again, English isn't my native tongue. Can anyone help?


For quoting convenience, here's the entire piece again:

Graham Shepherd below was a commercial pilot with B.A. (British Airways) for many years. Since his retirement he has decided to reveal his experiences with UFOs.

On the 22nd March 1967, Graham Shepherd was piloting an aircraft on a return flight from Gibraltar to London when the aircrew noticed a very bright star - twice as bright as any normal star or planet. The object became yet brighter and started to manoeuvre as though intelligently controlled; performing figures of eights and loops. Shepherd contacted Bordeaux Radar (France) and who confirmed the presence of an unidentified object 10 miles to the west, on their screens.

In another instance, Graham Shepherd was flying from Scotland to London (Heathrow) in daylight. Just after crossing into England, he was alerted by Preston Radar Control that there was "unidentified opposite direction traffic" at 24,000 ft., approaching at very high speed. Shepherd was astonished to see a disk-shaped craft, similar to a shiny car hub cap, flying towards his aircraft. He estimated the object to be about 30ft. in diameter. The UFO passed within a quarter of a mile, about 2-300 feet below Shepherd's aircraft and yet caused no shockwave. The aircrew and the observers at Preston Radar Control were completely puzzled.

Neither Graham Shepherd or Preston Radar Control submitted a "near-miss report" as everyone in volved in the incident felt that something extremely strange had happened. His decision to reveal his experiences have some anger as far as B.A. are concerned, writing to Graham Shepherd asking him not to relate details of his UFO encounters to anyone.

[Strange]

"Have some anger as far as B.A. are concerned".. I can't make sense of this sentence, but then again, English isn't my native tongue. Can anyone help?

It is pretty incoherent. I can imagine good PR reasons for BA not wanting their pilots to say things like this: some people are frightened of flying; it doesn't help if they think pilots are seeing things.

I can't see why this is supposed to add credibility to the story though. Unless BA is secretly controlled by our Lizard Overlords. (Which might account for their poor customer service.)

[lok32]

Thanks Brilongstaff for the link to this report, it's tricky to find pieces of ufo lore I've never heard of before but I think this one fits the bill.

[JayUtah]

the reasonable conclusion is that there WAS a physical object, and every honest, sensible person would agree with this.

Let me know when you've surveyed every honest sensible person on that point. (i.e., You're begging the question.)

No, I disagree that the automatic interpretation of an otherwise unexplained radar target is that it must be a solid object. Radar is not some magic eye. As several radar operators here and elsewhere have testified, radar is subject to a number of phenomena that generate the appearance of a return by other means. Hence someone who claims that some particular return must necessarily correlate to some particular visual sighting has the burden of proof, the null hypothesis being that the return is spurious and unconnected to any particular other data.

What typically happens is that a visual sighting occurs first, then radar data is consulted to see whether there is any return that would be a candidate for correlation. That method is generally uncontrolled in the sense that there is no baseline for the degree of spurious returns generated by that particular installation, hence no basis for claiming that some particular unexplained return is worthy of further attention. That's simply confirmation bias at work. It has also happened a number of times that radar data are cherry-picked such that one return among several spurious ones are attributed to the same unknown phenomenon that generated a visual sighting in the same general area at the same general time. That falls into the fallacy of limited scope.

[Gillianren]

Thanks Brilongstaff for the link to this report, it's tricky to find pieces of ufo lore I've never heard of before but I think this one fits the bill.

If all that interests you is that you've never heard of it before, not that it meets any other criteria, sure! Such as, you know, being well researched. Or carefully documented.

[captain swoop]

It has also happened a number of times that radar data are cherry-picked such that one return among several spurious ones are attributed to the same unknown phenomenon that generated a visual sighting in the same general area at the same general time. That falls into the fallacy of limited scope.

This is easy to do if you are expecting to see something.. If you are looking for an incoming air attack any return from the direction you are expecting it is noticed. It is easy to link several random returns and start plotting yourself an incoming track when all you are seeing is wave tops, rain, seagulls and the circuits.
Radar returns are individual momentary contacts made when the target is 'painted' by the sweep of the rotating aerial and the radio signal is reflected by the target and returned. Depending on the speed of the rotation it is a few seconds before there is another return from the same direction. WHat gets plotted is lots of individual momentary contacts. It's the experience of the operator and the quality of the processing that counts.

[brilongstaff]

Let me know when you've surveyed every honest sensible person on that point. (i.e., You're begging the question.)

No, I disagree that the automatic interpretation of an otherwise unexplained radar target is that it must be a solid object. Radar is not some magic eye. As several radar operators here and elsewhere have testified, radar is subject to a number of phenomena that generate the appearance of a return by other means. Hence someone who claims that some particular return must necessarily correlate to some particular visual sighting has the burden of proof, the null hypothesis being that the return is spurious and unconnected to any particular other data.

What typically happens is that a visual sighting occurs first, then radar data is consulted to see whether there is any return that would be a candidate for correlation. That method is generally uncontrolled in the sense that there is no baseline for the degree of spurious returns generated by that particular installation, hence no basis for claiming that some particular unexplained return is worthy of further attention. That's simply confirmation bias at work. It has also happened a number of times that radar data are cherry-picked such that one return among several spurious ones are attributed to the same unknown phenomenon that generated a visual sighting in the same general area at the same general time. That falls into the fallacy of limited scope.

why did you mention what 'typically' happens? when in this case (which you obviously haven't bothered to read about) the radar sighting came first - it was then verified by the aircrew - sorry to burst your little bubble.

[brilongstaff]

If all that interests you is that you've never heard of it before, not that it meets any other criteria, sure! Such as, you know, being well researched. Or carefully documented.

well researched? the aircrew were warned about an object... they then saw said object... whole episode took seconds.... game over - no research necessary - open your mind gillian, even if it takes a crow bar.