The Namur UFO Photographs - Belgium, June, 1955.

Following on from the Nagora photographs from 1971, there are also some interesting images of an unidentified flying object below taken by a Belgian workman in Namor, Belgium on June 5th, 1955 (at around 07:30 pm).

There's also a good PDF document here from Aime Michel who provides further info about the case and discusses the examination of the images by an astronomer and meteorologist who conclude no photographic trickery was employed and show an actual object producing a vapour trail caused by 'authentic atmospheric condensation at an altitude of no less than 1500 meters'.

The Namur UFO Photographs - 1955:

Three photographs were taken on June 5, 1955 at about 07:30 P.M. near Namur. The witness indicated that he has visually seen a sharp gleam moving high in the sky without any noise and at high speed. He indicated that the gleam accompanied an object of discoïdal shape leaving a white trail behind him.

The second photograph taken on June 5, 1955 in Namur. The witness continued by indicating that the object lost altitude, made a turn and then went upwards to reach his own trail..

The third photograph taken on June 5, 1955 in Namur. The witness continues by explaining that when the object joined its trail, the trail was disspating, the UFO then accelerated and left, while luminous particles were ejected behind it.

UFOs At Close Sight

Does anyone have any opinions about the object or the photographs themselves?

The witness described the UFO as silver grey in colour and stated it arrived at great speed, slowed down, descended, caused a vapour trail.. then reascended and accelerated ejecting luminous particles.

reply to post by karl 12


#2, to me, appears to be dark-room manipulated for the effect of clouds partially obscuring the silhouetted subject. Granted, previous investigations claim no manipulation or trickery, but, to me, this one sticks out, and just looks manipulated.

#3, I have a problem with in regards to reports that UFOs do not create sonic booms.
If they do not create sonic booms, then, how do they create contrails?

#1, I have no thoughts on other than an absence of reference points for comparison. It could be anything.

reply to post by karl 12

Does anyone have any opinions about the object or the photographs themselves?

The witness described the UFO as silver grey in colour and stated it arrived at great speed, slowed down, descended, caused a vapour trail.. then reascended and made off at great speed

The first thing that struck me was the second photograph. It seems as if the "object" or more appropriately the artifact, seems to be translucent. Because I'm able to discern the shape of the cloud the "object" is supposed to cover. This does not correspond with the witness account. Which further makes me put serious doubt about the validity of the other photographs.

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This looks like a haunebu to me the upright structure with a dome apparent in photo #1 & #3... add in visual distortion produced by the field manipulation ..

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And you both have degrees and papers to show you are ualifies to judge such images??
I am sick of people who come on these threads and ust pick something and nitpick.....just to be obtuse....
The point with this stuff is that some of the best and brightest minds of the time were analyzing (photographs not video or digital trickery)
these are extremely hard to fake and there is a negative which adds further depth to the study....
a negative is like getting the exif data with a dig photo.....only better.....
The obect you see in all the photos is real,....get a grip on that fact.....
These fifties photographs of ufos,are by now overanalyzed and if somebody could call fake, they would have by now.....
Perhaps the last sure pictureswehaveare film camera shots.
The latest stuff is all suspect and worthless it seems.....
But the people who do see, they KNOW what they saw.....
There are fake photos out there, these are not someof them.....
Much the same thing goes for the fifties sightings, those people really did see what was described.....whole small towns turned out to watch these things back then.....
The saucers are real. please, any intelligent discussion can only follow that fact......
Its time to stop fooling yourself into thinking the subject is small enough for you or me to get our minds around its girth.
The fact is very few have the guts to start wiuth the basic premise.

reply to post by stirling


Please tell us how film photography is really hard to fake when a one-armed farmer in Switzerland named Billy Meier has been doing it for over 50 years?

Further there's a mountain of photos that are simply things tossed, thrown, or frisbee'd for purposeful capture on film, because, well, some people will actually pay ridiculous $$$ for photos of saucer craft.

Never underestimate the conniving of man where money can get got for very little effort at very little risk.

reply to post by Druscilla


Druscilla, thanks for the very quick response, did you even get time to read through the Michel Aimes article describing the conclusions of the meteorologist and expert photographer who examined the negatives?

As for sonic booms, the witness did not report any noise and the presence of contrails is probably a good question for an atmospherical physicist (Dr James E. Mcdonald would be a good candidate) but Intelgurl has made a good post in this thread about NASA aerodynamicist Paul R.Hill and his book ‘Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis’ is well worth a read if you're interested.

I may not agree with many of your opinions on the UFO subject (link) but I do appreciate the input though - thanks for the post.

Cheers.

reply to post by karl 12


Thank you.
Yes, I'll admit to having a predisposition for a bias toward more down-to-earth explanations for this phenomenon.
That isn't to say absolutely 100% of all cases are hoax, misidentification, delusion, or some other common explanation. That isn't to say that left over unexplained aren't the aforementioned either.

What we have, though, is a phenomenon where something does indeed seem to be occurring.

The issue is complex. Some sightings are people getting bug-eyed over Venus. Some sightings are people getting bug-eyed over Lenticular cloud formations. Some sightings are made up works of fiction by people that think saucer craft are 'cool' and by extension think that if they lay claim to seeing one themselves, they'll also be 'cool', at least in their own eyes. There's also a mess of poorly trained and even unscrupulous over zealous 'investigators' and 'researchers' that will ask leading questions that witnesses will pick up on thereby telling the wide eyed 'investigator', or 'researcher' what they think they want to hear just through the suggestion of the leading prompting questions.
Still some may be sightings of actual nuts and bolts foreign spacecraft, while others may be something entirely unknown similar in speculation to 'critters'.

Whatever the case, no one answer is going to fit every single report, and in some instances, reports may cover a variety of the above; part real, part fiction through leading questions, and part embroidery.

Fictional example:
person 1 claims to see UFO and describes it to person 2.
person 2 wants in on the action and says they saw it too, even though they didn't.
1 and 2 talk about what 'they' saw, drawing a picture of innocent collusion on one side and fraud on the other.
UFO researcher/investigator interviews both witnesses, together, instead of separately, and through leading questions, like 'Did you see any silhouettes of beings through windows?', the witnesses feel compelled to agree, and do so, when no such silhouettes were ever witnessed by the original person 1.

As has been said to death; fantastic claims require fantastic evidence. Yes, my bias errs more on the side of down to earth explanations, but, that's not to say that i don't really want there to be something truly unexplained and beyond explanation.

In regards to my initial response, It's just my opinion. As stated in the case of #2, yes, previous looks at this vouched for veracity. It still, however, just doesn't look proper.
I'd love to see the original negatives.

reply to post by stirling


People has faked, and continue to fake, UFO sightings every day. Considering the PDF file karl12 has been so kind to provide, it's made us privvy to what an expert were thinking in the early 1960s. We know alot more now, than what a single expert knew then. Druscilla has also mentioned the accounts of Billy Meier, and he did pretty well in the "fooling people with photographs" part, which was quite more modern that what the belgian workman would be able to conjure up in the 50s.

This account is interesting and refreshing, infinitely more so than what a plonker who posts youtube videos all the time can provide. But as modern accounts has flaws, this one has them also. And by the accumulated small and infinitesimal information I've gathered about the subject over the years, I'm not convinced this account is entirely true.

The last photo suggests a hybrid propulsion system, part antigravity, part jet propulsion.
Typical for Nazi Saucers during the early 50s. These have been filmed as well.
I have the footage somewhere on my external hard drive. Will look for it in the morning, it's almost 1:30 AM here and I'm off to bed.

As with any of these photos from the past, it would be nice to see some good, high resolution scans of the original photos and not these all cropped to crap. If I was going to say anything initially, it seems odd to me that the flying saucer is approximately the same size in every photo, despite the description of it flying up, up and away. That would indicate to me that it was a small model with a Roman candle sticking out of it, suspended in somebody's back yard.

And I also really have a problem with the description of the flight path with the thing dropping down to interact with its own vapor trail. That seems like an excuse made up to account for the look of that "middle" photo, which has the smoke from the Roman candle floating about in the way.

So, overall, without anything to convince me of the contrary, I'd say these photos were faked and the witness was a big fat liar. I could be wrong, of course. But it's the job of others to provide evidence that I'm not.

reply to post by Druscilla


Druscilla, I was just wondering if you have some kind of reference you could point us toward that indicates that UFO researchers behave in the manner you describe, leading witnesses and whatnot? Is this something you've looked into, or is this more of an assumption regarding how investigations take place? I've seen you mention it in two threads today, and I'm hoping there's something more to your opinion than just a feeling that there must be a lot of unscrupulous investigators out there.

reply to post by Orkojoker


I've seen it occur first hand, but not necessarily occurring as an intentional directive.

There aren't any university degree plans for UFO Investigator, and often enough field investigators are interested DIY parties who lack the proper training in disciplines key to carrying out proper interview procedure.

The following is a paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology regarding co-witness contamination you may be interested in reading. Combatting Co-witness contamination
(site registration required for full article beyond abstract)

As said, misleading results aren't always necessarily intentional by these investigators, but, more a product of over zealousness combined with little or no training in how to conduct proper eye witness interviews.
Investigators that think they know what they are doing that have no or very little training in information collections, can and will lead witnesses unknowingly where an interview becomes more an exercise in sympathetic collaboration in which the interviewer and subject under interview unwittingly collaborate to flesh out what the witness 'saw'.

Sympathetic compliance through the social susceptibility of witnesses to pick up on cues and subtleties expressed by poor interviewers is not only a problem with eye-witness testimony in the circle of UFO investigations, but, also police investigations where witnesses of crimes are queried, interrogations where someone under interrogation will tell what they think the interrogator wants to hear (it happens), as well as many other scenarios that can fall under the paradigm of learned helplessness and sympathetic collaboration.

More extreme cases can even involve False Memory Syndrome
This is a common pitfall associated with memory regression techniques used in investigating witnesses claiming abduction events.

It's thus vitally important that so called researchers and investigators be properly trained in information collection and interviewing processes to avoid these described.
There's very little to no supervision oversight or accountability in this field of investigation however and this is a grave concern where good solid accounts can be irrevocably trampled by a poor investigator.

reply to post by Druscilla


Hmm, some are really trying hard to explain things with something ordinarily. This is the harmful 'debunking' attempts I am against.

Ok let me follow this logic: A cinema room, it was on the wall. everything was a background, they added some smoke for effect and attached a small model of a UFO on strings.

Or: It was in the air, they just combined a picture of skies with a small model/real airplane

Or it even looks like a stealth fighter, it's the 50s not widely popular, again no reason to instantly call it fake.

See? I can have rich imagination too. Do you have anything to backup or prove these are fake or not? Because such way of thinking, just saying something is fake because it has to be explained with all explainable objects... is just silly and this is what makes people who try to explain things in ordinary way wannabes.

It's not like there is any further proof they are real but I don't see anything anyone coming to say they faked them or any proof of it.

reply to post by Imtor


Please refer to my very first post in this thread:

#2, to me, appears to be dark-room manipulated for the effect of clouds partially obscuring the silhouetted subject. Granted, previous investigations claim no manipulation or trickery, but, to me, this one sticks out, and just looks manipulated.

#3, I have a problem with in regards to reports that UFOs do not create sonic booms. If they do not create sonic booms, then, how do they create contrails?

#1, I have no thoughts on other than an absence of reference points for comparison. It could be anything.

Now, please point out to me where I've said any of these ARE fake?

I've stated what certain things appear to be from my perspective. I have not called any of these photos fakes.

You sound a little over defensive. Are you okay?

Edit: starting at a point of attempting to explain anything unusual from a standard of conventional explanation, working through conventional explanations and eliminating those as possibilities is a very sound and logical process.

If whatever is left over, regardless of how impossible it seems still explains and fits, then that could very well be the answer. 'Trying' to peg something as normal conventional phenomenon is just part of a logical path.
Starting at the other end, on the side of fantasy is ridiculous.

Originally posted by Blue Shift
But it's the job of others to provide evidence that I'm not.

And what does this 'job' pay?

I mean if I am going to spend all those hours digging up evidence in an effort to find something that will convince you... that in all likelihood you will dismiss anyway... surely I am entitled to remuneration for my time?

Originally posted by Druscilla

What we have, though, is a phenomenon where something does indeed seem to be occurring.

Druscilla, thanks for the reply and yes I agree that 'something does indeed seem to be occurring'. I'm sure many UFO sightings are caused by misidents as you say and I do think Occam's razor is a useful tool but Brian Zeller makes an interesting point below about how it seems to get lazily abused by debunkers and there are some good examples here of official UFO explanations having very little to do with the reported facts of the case.

"UFO debunkers do not understand Occam's Razor, and they abuse it regularly. They think they understand it, but they don't.
What it means is that when several hypotheses of varying complexity can explain a set of observations with equal ability, the first one to be tested should be the one that invokes the fewest number of uncorroborated assumptions. If this simplest hypothesis is proven incorrect, the next simplest is chosen, and so forth.

But the debunkers forget two parts: the part regarding the test of the simpler hypotheses, and the part regarding explaining all of the observations. What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses, which is the inverse of the proper approach".

Brian Zeiler

Perhaps the best course of action is to try to not generalize about the UFO subject too much and just take each case on its own merits - some of the more interesting cases like the Edwards AFB incident, the Tehran incident, the Portage County incident etc.. can also be found in Jkrog's chronological directory so hopefully you can post your opinions on the objects involved.

Originally posted by zorgon

And what does this 'job' pay?

Not much mate.

Thought the trail on the last pic did look a bit like this one taken over Mount Popocatepetl though.

link

Cheers.

Originally posted by Druscilla

Yes, I'll admit to having a predisposition for a bias toward more down-to-earth explanations for this phenomenon.
That isn't to say absolutely 100% of all cases are hoax, misidentification, delusion, or some other common explanation. That isn't to say that left over unexplained aren't the aforementioned either.

What we have, though, is a phenomenon where something does indeed seem to be occurring.

The issue is complex. Some sightings are people getting bug-eyed over Venus. Some sightings are people getting bug-eyed over Lenticular cloud formations. Some sightings are made up works of fiction by people that think saucer craft are 'cool' and by extension think that if they lay claim to seeing one themselves, they'll also be 'cool', at least in their own eyes. There's also a mess of poorly trained and even unscrupulous over zealous 'investigators' and 'researchers' that will ask leading questions that witnesses will pick up on thereby telling the wide eyed 'investigator', or 'researcher' what they think they want to hear just through the suggestion of the leading prompting questions.
Still some may be sightings of actual nuts and bolts foreign spacecraft, while others may be something entirely unknown similar in speculation to 'critters'.

Whatever the case, no one answer is going to fit every single report, and in some instances, reports may cover a variety of the above; part real, part fiction through leading questions, and part embroidery.
....

Hi Druscilla. Being as gentle as I can here, I must say that a number of your responses give the impression that you're not so aware of the actual decades-old history of the UFO phenomenon? Would you say that's a fair assessment? (Have you read, for example Condon, Bluebook, Hynek, McDonald, and Sturrock?)

Don't get me wrong, because no one is required to have a broad academic understanding of the subject before offering an opinion on it in a stinkin' online message board. And it is sincerely very big of you to admit your bias and pre-disposition against UFOs having exotic explanations. It's just that, as you've said elsewhere, "knowledge is power", and I know from experience that it's very, very difficult to understand much about UFOs without having proper knowledge of the relevant official history and sociological context.

I bring this up only because your attitude toward the topic, despite the hedging and qualifying language you usually insert, seems to have an edge to it... ridicule or scoffing almost, which is sometimes disguised, other times not as much. And I say this with the full and sincere knowledge that, being also skeptically-minded, had I not known what I now do know and read what I now have read -- official documents, whose legitimacy is not in doubt -- I would probably take a very similar attitude toward yours.

You seem like an intelligent and educated person, and if your number of posts here lately are any indication, you have an intense interest in the topic. Could I, in as non-offensive a way as possible ;-), suggest that you maybe take a broader and historical look at the topic, starting from the 40's?

Because there are a few things in UFO history that are not in serious doubt -- backed by official de-classified documentation. And once one accepts only two or three of these things as even just mostly true, then the nature of the whole UFO game changes. (And I do not mean that massive government conspiracies exist and any reasonable person should accept that. not at ALL. I don't believe that.) I do mean, however, that there is overwhelming and tremendous evidence -- the case is alarmingly easy to make -- that casts serious doubt on the purpose and motives of the Robertson panel, on the objectivity and competency within Project Bluebook, and on the fundamental validity of the Condon Report.

And because of these few items, it is my belief that skeptics who have not really gone through the process of studying the primary historical evidence may unknowingly be viewing the topic through a distorted and malformed lens. That's no crime, surely. But why not try to encourage the avoidance of that when possible?

These are just some random thoughts as I continue to read your well-written posts. Put simply, you are too smart to be at all under-informed as to the broad history of this topic and its treatment by official sources. (I say under-informed, since you are clearly not UNinformed....)

You and I agree that this UFO stuff is 95% ridiculous, almost embarrassing bunk. I focus on that 5%, since it does exist, and is qualitatively different than the 95%. You seem to think that remaining 5% is probably just more of the same, just with insufficient information to positively i.d. our prosaic cause. This idea, still alive, was actually disproven by the Air Force in 1953. See the data within Bluebook Special Report 14.

All the documents / authors I mention are free on the web.

Originally posted by Druscilla
'Trying' to peg something as normal conventional phenomenon is just part of a logical path.
Starting at the other end, on the side of fantasy is ridiculous.

Here is the problem, Druscilla. Again you seem unaware of UFO history. The "side of fantasy" you mention is actually the side that is basing its claims on observations. (Often multiple witnesses, with radar corroboration.) It is therefore on superior footing, scientifically, than the blanket denial of the unconventional possibilities that is so often seen around here.

The problem may be that some are unaware of the fact or don't want to admit that they really DO think the unconventional explanation basically impossible. And from that person's perspective, whether conscious of it or not, anyone starting with the assumption that "the unconventional MAY be possible" (which is the proper assumption, scientifically) might appear to be completely illogical, or even dabbling in "fantasy."

Check your assumptions!

No one is advocating that we START our analyses from "the other end", with the unconventional explanations; they just seem to be saying that what some myopic types perceive as "the other end" may actually only be the proper middle.