Is Brad Sparks right?

Brad Sparks has done a lot of great research over the years involving radar and electromagnetic UFO cases and government documentation, he also was the principal consultant for this film which has some good info about the Tehran and Shag Harbour UFO cases - considering there are quite a number of extremely perplexing unexplained UFO incidents out there (and an equal number of completely ridiculous official UFO explanations) does anyone think he has a point in the video below where he calls for 'the need for continuous, full scale scientific attack on the UFO subject'?

Google Video Link

Brad Sparks is a ufological researcher of high standing. He is a leading expert on the CIA Robertson Panel and the history of the CIA investigation of UFOs. He was the first researcher to discover that the Director of the CIA had been briefed on UFOs, the first to obtain the release of the CIA Director's UFO briefing memos, and the first to obtain the release of the complete, uncensored and declassified CIA Robertson Panel report and Minutes, as well as many other important CIA documents, some of which have never been released again to the public.

link

NICAP's Richard Hall also makes some relevant comments here about the subject but does anyone really think that the scientific method couldn't help in the objective analysis of UFO incidents and UFO data?

Good question, Karl and great thread, as usual

'the need for continuous, full scale scientific attack on the UFO subject'

...And to answer your question, yes, and that's what I try to do in my everyday job in the UFO field.
Let's not also forget the need of an educational side linked to this scientific approach.

reply to post by karl 12


Hi Karl , interesting question and my answer would have to be yes , but I see a problem .
I would imagine that a full scale scientific study would need to take place over a decent period of time and to really do the subject justice would need significant funding , and therein lies the problem , it couldn't be Government funded for obvious reasons so it would need someone with a bucket load of cash willing to bank roll the study on a rolling basis and also stay detached from it , and also be willing to accept that there would be no real gain for themselves .

Maybe a Bill Gates or Richard Branson could afford it but they would probably be vilified by the media for "wasting" hundreds of millions on a wacky idea that could be better spent in the third word , kind of like the fuss made over the cost of the LHC .....Or is that just my cynical view of the media showing

does anyone really think that the scientific method couldn't help in the objective analysis of UFO incidents and UFO data?

Given that the only scientific studies I'm aware of ( Grudge and the others) were fixed from the outset I think a proper unbiased study could deliver the goods , after all some of the members of the aforementioned panels , J. Allen Hynek and Edward Ruppelt come to mind became believers in the phenomenon after their time studying it .

If UFO's are real physical object then they will leave real physical traces , evidence , we have far greater technology than was available in the 50s so surely if somethings Alien is in our atmosphere and landing on our soil we should be able to get hard physical, visual and data evidence of it .

Hahah he sounds as dumb as he looks...

One concern scientists might have is that those mysterious flying thingies may be ours. That's pretty much what skeptics say about the case where UFOs were chased by F-16s and monitored on five radar screens, or the one in which 1,800 men stood in formation and watched a fighter scrambled and trying to keep up with an unidentified object, or the various cases of clear, close sightings by airline flight crew plus cabin crew plus passengers.

But usually, they probably don’t pay enough attention to the topic to get that far along in the thought process.

About the issue of expense, I’ve previously described a method that requires only effort, not cash.

reply to post by karl 12


Thanks Karl, Great thread as usual. Very interesting question. I have to agree with Gortex here. Too many conflicting interests and problems to fund it, and keeping it as uncorrupted as possible. Quite a challenge.

StringTh

Perhaps make use of all these retiring iPhones and Androids

Create an app that takes a raw video feed from the camera and, following a motion sensor event, streams the video over the home wi-fi and up to a website

Stick the phone to an upstairs window and leave it plugged-in, running the app and facing the sky

If enough people participate then maybe the same event could be watched in real-time from multiple perspectives

His comparison to astrophysics and marine biology is not valid. Physics predicted the existence of black holes. There are firm, repeatable and unambiguous observations which show their existence. Grey whales follow well known migratory routes. Individual whales can be identified and tracked.

The problem is that it is very difficult to apply scientific method to an intermittent, short lived, and highly variable phenomena in any systematic manner. Similarly, after the fact analysis of witness reports (and images) can at best eliminate some explanations, they cannot provide any information other than "unknown". At least, none so far.

Actually science could get somewhere (but not very far) with the proper instruments. The proper instruments are extremely expensive and in the possession of the military because they have substantial military and classified usage.

In particular: high-quality space tracking radar capable of picking up objects without transponder, in combination with immediately reorientable optical/IR telescopes with expensive multspectral sensors.

This technology, of course, is exactly what could potentially pick up your own and your rivals' unacknowledged military and intelligence (CIA/NRO are officially not military in the USA) capabilities and is why the technology was deployed. (the first, radar obviously exists, don't know about the second but it would be the logical followup).

Sources and methods will be deemed to be highly restricted for obvious reasons.

In sum, I bet a small number of people in Space Command know whether there do, or do not, exist any number of structured physical objects which arrive with non-gravitational (i.e. accelerating) trajectories from outside the gravity well of the Earth and which subsequently depart.

I also bet that if there are any, they are regarded as "not significant to defense" at this time, as there is no communication, motivation or known effect or known measures to be taken. They would be "false positives" and attention would turn back to trying to track stealth Russian and Chinese satellites.

reply to post by karl 12

When I try and imagine *how* such a study could be carried out, it’s hard to avoid the realisation that, in some ways, they’re probably under continuous study already. Why? Well any way we look at it, flying objects would be scrutinised as national security threats by any nation worth its taxes. The flight characteristics of some UFOs are perfectly suitable for breaching the defences of foreign airspace as well as our own. This alone should be interesting to some people – either as a template for pioneer design or as a way to identify future threats.

At the same time most nations on Earth will have some technology monitoring their airspace whether it be their own, Russian, Chinese or American. Satellites are up there programmed to respond to anything travelling at the speed of ICBMs. Lots of technology in many hands and nobody is releasing data to show that UFOs are anything more than temporary, localised and untraceable. The silence doesn't encourage the widely-held assumption that UFOs are zipping around like wasps in summer...

Unfortunately, whatever instigated the UFO waves of the past has largely withdrawn from the stage. Lights in the sky are reported every week and what can anyone do with that sort of data? ‘You saw a light huh? Travelling fast you say? Fill in the form and we’ll put it with the others…yawn.’ I saw something with friends a few years ago and it lasted about 4 seconds. It’s left me with a certainty that there are UFOs, but nothing else can be gained from the sighting. The same might apply to any new and public study; transient, unpredictable lights are hard to study!

So I guess the radar/ satellite data isn’t up for grabs under the aegis of national security considerations – ‘redacted’ so to speak. It’s possibly a very small pool of data anyway. The anecdotal, witness reports likewise can only lead to a conclusion that UFOs exist (in many forms) and that’s already been acknowledged in the body of studies by Sturrock, , Blue Book and even the Robertson Panel..

reply to post by karl 12


Of course as you know there is a precedent for a high level study of the phenonoma independent from Goverment , the COMETA report was the work of a private, non-profit, ufological study group , maybe a full scientific study could follow that kind of model .

a French weekly news and leisure magazine called VSD referred to it as an "official report", though technically this wasn't the case since COMETA was the work of a private, non-profit, ufological study group.

The group was responsible for the 'COMETA Report' (1999) on UFOs and their possible implications for defence in France. The report concluded that about 5% of the UFO cases they studied were utterly inexplicable and the best hypothesis to explain them was the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).
The authors also accused the United States government of engaging in a massive cover-up of the evidence.
en.wikipedia.org...

The cometa report english part1 pdf
The cometa report english part2 pdf

Originally posted by Kandinsky
Unfortunately, whatever instigated the UFO waves of the past has largely withdrawn from the stage. Lights in the sky are reported every week and what can anyone do with that sort of data? ‘You saw a light huh? Travelling fast you say? Fill in the form and we’ll put it with the others…yawn.’ I saw something with friends a few years ago and it lasted about 4 seconds. It’s left me with a certainty that there are UFOs, but nothing else can be gained from the sighting. The same might apply to any new and public study; transient, unpredictable lights are hard to study!

Yes, but let's not forget the scientific study of UFOs photos and videos that still increase our knowledge and help us to dismiss some cases (and in a better way than yesterday) that, otherwise, would have been stayed in the "no-no" grey land of UFOs...
That's include the educational side of our work that is, of course, central.

The French understood that a long time ago; each time they were solicited (officially or not) to be part of an important study, they added the photo/video analysis as a main component of the research.
It was already the case at the Pocantico meeting headed by P. A. Sturrock in 1997, and again in 1999 with the COMETA report (that Gortex talked about above) with F. Louange who is a French specialist in photo analysis.



F. Louange worked (and still do) also as a consultant for the CNES and is "the" photo/video specialist of the GEIPAN, each time its expertise is needed for the study of a UFO document.
He is mostly unknown from the English-speaking audience, but, amongst many other things, he wrote, back in 1983, the technical note about the diffraction slide system (in French) that was widely allocated to all the Gendarmerie squads in France in the 80's (but unfortunately was never really used!!)



Another thing that is widely unknown is the audit that was commissioned in 2002 to Louange by the CNES, after internal pressure to simply suppress the SEPRA (the GEIPAN "ancestor").
The report asked not only to continue the SEPRA activities, but also asked for more means, by the recommendations of a panel of about thirty personalities, questioned by Louange.



So, even if the results are still perfectible and if some mistakes have been made, at least, we still have, here in France, a dedicated official group that study in a scientific way, the photo/video documents related to UFOs.

Let's hope that this could be a model for any future scientific study of the phenomena for other countries as well...