- I’ve seen flares used at night before, and these definitely are similar to those others I have seen.

- Objects seen isolated in the sky, without other nearby references, can be very deceiving. A number of years ago I was inbound to a major Midwestern airport after a “red-eye” flight from the west coast (early in the morning). At approximately 10,000 feet the other pilot and I saw an object trailing a contrail ahead of us. That altitude is far too low for a contrail, so the object really drew our attention. As we watched, it arced to the north and disappeared. We asked ATC if they were showing any traffic (we were the only ones on the frequency at 6:00 AM). They replied that we were the only aircraft within 25 miles. This object looked to be closer than that, so we were left puzzled.
After landing we found that there had been a military shuttle launch that morning. It made sense as we were looking to the SE and the object arced to the north as a military launch would do for a polar orbit. But, we were convinced that the object was 10 to 15 miles away. In reality it was closer to 1,000 miles from our position!

Unfortunately, “seeing is not always believing” as the eye can be easily deceived.

Do you think all of those 20 people who saw this unknown object were “mentally defective”? If so, does that say more about them, or about you?

And lumping those who believe there may be something to the UFO phenomenon in with birthers and 9-11 truthers, etc., only shows a narrow-mindedness and willingness to generalize. Those are not admirable qualities in a “skeptic.”

Also, I genuinely wonder how you explain away the many cases where radar corroborates the testimony of multiple, high-quality witnesses? (People with nothing to gain, and quite a bit to lose when coming forward.) I’m curious to hear how you’d explain away the RB-47 case, for example. (Multiple Witnesses to a strange and reactive object near the aircraft, confirmed by multiple radars, both active and passive.) More of your geese?

I’m a former skeptic. It’s only in the last 6 months that I’ve said “wait a minute here.” Kean’s book presents plenty of surprisingly good evidence that there is, indeed, something solid and unknown flying around in the skies. She does not claim to know what it is. Nor do I. And that is the proper scientific position to take: agnosticism. But it’s clear that there’s something there… something much more than unidentified lights in the sky… something solid, often huge, lacking obvious power plants or lifting surfaces, and maneuverable in ways that, it can safely be said, our military flying machines are incapable of. (Or we’d win any war in minutes.) What is it flying around up there? I’m shocked that more people do not feel they have the *right* to know, or a right to know that, perhaps, our officials don’t know.

I’m also a former fan and supporter of Dr. Shermer. (I loved his and Sam Harris’ videos with Chopra, and his writings on evolution vs. creationism are great.) But I find it difficult now to maintain respect for him. What he did to Leslie Kean in his recent SciAm piece was, to me, intellectually unforgivable. It shows the true rigidity of his thinking, and just how low he’ll go in order to “win” an argument. He took Belgian Air Force General DeBrouwer’s description of night one of the Belgian wave, and compared it to Kean’s own summary of the *entire* (months long) Belgian wave, trying to show Kean in the act of inflating the General’s conclusions. (She clearly did nothing of the sort. Her entire description was backed by the General’s conclusions. See the comments section on SciAm’s web page for details.)

To show you how alarming and dishonest what Shermer did truly is (it is *far* from trivial, and presents him with quite a credibility problem), here’s an analogy: Suppose that Scientist A does some experiments, resulting in Data Set A, and other scientists do further similar experiments, resulting in Data Set B. Expert writes a summary of Data Set A. Journalist then writes a summary of Data Set A + Data Set B. Skeptic then compares Journalist’s summary to Expert’s summary, to try to show that Journalist’s description does not match Expert’s and that, therefore, Journalist cannot be trusted. (Nevermind that they’re two summaries of *completely different sets of data*!) Geeze. Is this tactic really okay with any of you? I doubt it. What Shermer did should turn your stomach and make you wonder what other shortcuts he’s willing to take.

Why are scientists like Shermer, Tyson, Shostack, et al., NEVER willing to address the *best* UAP cases, cases involving sensors other than human eyes? I’ve noticed (only recently) that the scientists always try to characterize the whole phenomenon as if it were just unknown distant lights in the sky. Why? Isn’t that odd to anyone, given the facts (of what people actually have claimed to see)? Six months ago, I would’ve given the scientists a pass on that, based on my un-researched assumption that there could be nothing to the whole UFO thing… and scientists are seekers of truth, right, so surely they can be totally trusted. What I’ve come to see, however, is that it is more irrational to *deny* that there is something strange and solid (but unknown) flying around out there. There is surely a kind of scientific provincialism or territorialism at play here.

Those of you here on this board call yourself skeptics, and rationalists, and I’d agree with most of you in most every other thing – creationism, 9-11, Obama’s birthplace, climate change, God, etc…. However, just look closely and openly at the evidence for UAP — concern yourself with nothing more than the radar cases, for instance — and ask yourself how it is that you’ve never heard of those cases? (That was my biggest hurdle: “No… surely I would’ve heard of this by now?!?!” Nope.) I know that the UFO movement is full of cooks and frauds, absolutely. (Face it, UFO crowd, it’s true to an extent.) But no one is asking you to embrace their beliefs, unquestioned. You need not believe in Roswell, abductions, gov’t conspiracies, cattle mutilations. crop circles, etc. But it is silly and ignorant (by the very definition) to deny the core truth of the UAP matter just because of a fear of association.

Its amazing how viscerally angry so many “believers” are at Ortega here. Why? Could it be because he is bursting the “magical fantasy” bubble that so many have been living with after having seen the “lights”?? Seems to me people dont WANT to have a rational explanation here because it would burst that feeling of being “special” for having seen something that their imagination can call whatever they want.

Ive seen jets in person and numerous videos of jets dropping anti missile counter-measure flares and illumination flares during training. The 10 PM “Lights” are absolutely and obviously flares. The appear in the sequence and in the pattern that the jet is flying in. The brightness is affected by the different types of counter measures used, and the military is often trying out new types of countermeasures and different types of flares.

The 10 PM lights is absolutely a no brainer IMO. The Cognitec analysis of the flares where they superimposed the mountains from a camera placed in the same spot should absolutely settle this issue once and for all.

As for the “V”. Obviously that was a totally separate event altogether. Here again though, a little common sense and logic seem to escape people who just dont want to accept reality. People keep talking about Commercial aircraft not flying in formation. Why on Earth would anyone assume it was commercial aircraft? You have multiple military air bases and facilities all over Arizona and the whole SouthWest. Military aircraft routinely fly in close formation, from higher altitudes they would appear in exactly that formation. Could also have been experimental aircraft flying in formation. You actually HAVE a witness who looked at it with a high power telescope, and confirmed they were aircraft, and yet those who saw it with their naked eye, and couldnt determine what it was, refuse to accept that. Now why would that be? Except that those people dont WANT to accept a logical explanation.

Lets also not focus on one of the most obvious issues here. Why would an Extraterrestrial Spacecraft need to be flying over the state of Arizona, including near population centers, using “lights”? Aircraft have lights for only 2 reasons, for landing/takeoff, and so they can be identified in the air. Why would an Alien spacecraft, which presumably isnt interested in making “contact” with humans, need to have “lights” on flying over Phoenix? It is completely illogical.

This type of thing tends to happen, because the Military often remains quiet, even after something obviously has taken place, which just fuels suspicion and conspiracy buffs. What most people dont realize, is that TONS of things in the military are classified, even routine stupid things, and the military CANT confirm things often times, no matter how trivial or stupid they may seem. Whereas often times these situations can be rapidly cleared up with a simple explanation, the military creates the entire environment for these conspiracies to flourish, because they cant so much as even say “yes we shot some flares off”. So by playing dumb or just ignoring it, which they HAVE to do by law, they set off these grand conspiracies which find happy homes in the minds of people who WANT to believe in fantasy and exotic adventures.

Note the hate towards Ortega here. Why? Well, people dont like Skeptics. Skeptics are the party poopers. The guys who force you to have to look at reality and pull the veil back from the exciting fantasies we like to lose ourselves in.

As Howard said above, I want NOTHING MORE than to find real evidence of Alien spacecraft. I really do. But I have been an investigator, a REAL one, for over a decade and a half. I have to use rational deduction, logic, and evidence to uncover secrets and unravel mysteries. The problem with almost all of the UFO stories out there, are that they just dont stand up to REAL scrutiny when broken down logically, rationally, and based on evidence. Roswell, Kecksburg, Phoenix, Stephensville, they all break down after close scrutiny.

I can think of other mass hallucinations, like there being WMDs in Iraq. But of course that was explained fully from a single, credible source so it had to be true