When Darkness Falls:Nightime UFOs

"If the brains of the UFO world is the honest researcher, then the soul of the UFO world is the honest witness." UFOMM

One of the easiest UFO witnesses to dismiss and debunk is the nighttime UFO witness.
You can see this unfortunate tendency to devalue the nighttime witness on both general UFO reporting web sites and more conservative UFO researchers’ sites.

In the ufology community, we like to think devaluing nighttime witnesses demonstrates how objective we really are to the mainstream science community.

But it hasn’t worked yet.

I believe knee-jerk dismissal of this witness group has kept many genuine UFO witnesses from coming forward. I like to think nighttime witnesses are no more and no less honest than those reporting daylight phenomenon. But ultimately, UFO witnesses of every category have been treated like the enemy by debunker and researcher alike.

So what about our filtering out of folks across the board --deliberately or subconsciously-- just because they saw what they saw at night?

When a genuine UFO witness goes public and is treated as guilty until proven innocent, this bad behavior reverberates mightily because of the power of the web, and the permanent tracks left by bloggers, forums, and news coverage --not to mention advocacy websites. So when new witnesses, astonished by their experience, venture on the web for help, they’re often discouraged and delay reporting the incident. This happens at ATS, from what I hear. And what about the witnesses we never hear from, the ones who see the kind of treatment you often get out there, and are intimidated…forever?

The very nature of this experience deserves an understanding and compassionate tone from all of us --interviewers, reporters, commentators. Whatever our stance on the phenomenon, we all need to remember that it can be extremely difficult for some to come forward and make a detailed craft report or describe a light that was quite different from any light they’ve seen before.

So let’s look at some photos of aircraft lights and photos of UFOs --both typical and unusual examples-- showing lighted UFOs from nighttime witnesses.

Below are photos showing lighting on aircraft.

First Aircarft Navigational lights:
This quote from Abacus.com :
“Navigation lights
The navigation lights include a red light on the left (port) wingtip, a green light on the right (starboard) wingtip and a white light is on the tail.”
http://www.abacuspub.com/freepress/DontBeAfraidOfTheDark.pdf

Next, images from YouTube, a little provocative in nature:

They have to find something that hovers.

I live near an aircraft approach to Kennedy airport --one of the busiest in the country. I have witnessed aircraft lights which are rather stunning in brightness, due to the refraction of the atmosphere and therefore easily mistaken for something strange.

I have even witnessed aircraft on approach which looked like they were hovering. I have also witnessed many helicopters, from your normal police and media helicopter, to massive military copters used when presidents visit New York.

But never --after studying the more provocative looking aircraft-- never have I been fooled.

Since I’m neither a genius or an optics expert, and I can usually tell what kind of aircraft I’m observing at night because of what I’m used to seeing, I believe many witnesses dismissed by debunkers and certain UFO researchers are probably correct about what they say they saw --especially if what they observed differs from the more accepted explanation.

I understand the scientific approach and agree with it. But the problem is abuse of the scientific method –as applied even by some of the more overzealous UFO researchers who believe they need that stamp of validity from the decades-old scientific mainstream.

But serious UFO researchers inevitably come up against the brick wall of out-dated mainstream science, where at least on the matter of UFOs, easy, predictable answers that don’t challenge the official position of government and academia are the only acceptable answers.

So because mainstream science is already uniformly advocating that Brick Wall, everyone in our ufology community should be reminded that being open-minded, instead of brick-wall-minded, means not only cultivating an open mind, but going the extra distance for the witness, even though it takes time. And recording carefully what the witness says while the serious investigator is going the extra distance can make all the difference later on. Unique, unimpeachable details are often caught in the secondary analysis by the original investigator…or months or even years later, when other witnesses have added hard data to support what once seemed like unlikely details.

How do we strike that balance? Sometimes Venus is not what they saw, even though it was in the right part of the sky, and brilliant! That factoid is what I carry with me from the Portage, Ohio case, where even some inside the UFO community dismissed this case as nothing more than Venus. But in 2008, as police files were made public through MUFON, it was clear that what state and county officers reported was nothing like Venus.

To use the misquotation of Freud, when is a cigar-shaped object really a cigar-shaped object, and not Venus?

MUFON itself was guilty of the rubber-stamp, one-size-fits-all non-analysis in the early days of the Stephenville case, via Dr. Bruce Maccabee. Maccabee was quoted as coming to the conclusion after doing a short preliminary investigation that one of the witnesses had filmed nothing more than a star. But Maccabee never went to the site, himself, claiming he was too busy. True? Perhaps…but if a professional debunker like Oberg had done that….

So in the Stephenville case, we have MUFON returning a less than enthusiastic first assessment. The report even mentioned that neither of the sides would be thrilled with their official analysis.

But then everything changed with irrefutable witness evidence. Somehow this time, the witnesses were looked at with more respect after Federal Aviation Administration radar tapes fully corroborated their strikingly detailed UFO reports. And there is still other radar data available --if we could get it-- that may confirm the many other witnesses’ testimony of phenomena later that night and going into the next days and weeks that followed, accounting for approximately 300 sightings in all.

Video When Nightime Falls:



Now let’s take a look at some classic well-investigated UFO light pictures:







All Photos here:
http://www.ufocasebook.com/bestufopictures3.html

If these people hadn’t taken these photos, how many would have been explained away as aircraft, and the witnesses left to wonder if anyone really listened to any of the details they reported?

This is the dilemma witnesses face. Should we use the most rigid, conservative scientific investigation model --a model that can be truly bizarre in application of its own integral illogic and bias, based on exclusion?

We have to admit that today, same as it did five decades ago, the so-called scientific model of mainstream science departs from logic when it ignores all the ramifications of witness testimony and adds any old non-ufo explanation, often rubberstamping what amounts to the current trend, regardless of how that trendy rubber-stamp explanation challenges common sense and embarrasses the native intelligence of the witnesses.

The answer is still out there, but for me, the testimony of every serious UFO witness is like finding gold. Some of it may be fool’s gold, but if we’re careful enough, we should be able to tell the difference.


Joseph Capp
UFO Media Matters
Non-Commercial Blog