Found? Gordon Cooper's 1957 UFO film "sent...to...Washington...never to be seen again"

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Good point and I concede you are correct. Looks like tomorrow I'll be looking through those interviews I mentioned and listening to the finer details. If in any of them he had changed his story to make it as though he himself witnessed it I will once again concede that that would be glaringly suspicious.

However if he continuously states that the camera crew witnessed it rather than himself, could you not see that perhaps the crew may have had a "talking to" to gain their co operation and silence on the story. Threatening people's careers can do wonders when it comes to gaining their cooperation against their will, such as having them tell the story you (you...as in the military) want them to tell rather than the one Cooper is putting out there. It's one of the most effective tools of blackmail and is used constantly to this day. People's careers are literally their whole life. Throwing that away just to tell a story about what you saw that the vast majority of people on planet earth won't give two s**ts about, no matter how true it is, is something most rational people would never do.

What gives the crew more credibility than Cooper?

Just my two cents. Thanks for pointing out my misunderstanding on the issue though, you actually taught me something new today and I appreciate your insight on this story.

originally posted by: JimOberg

originally posted by: 727Sky....
Well one thing about it dead men cannot argue in their defense:

You do realize my results were published in 1986, and Cooper did his major TV interviews in the twenty years more that he lived?

So back off on the tut=tutting for supposedly picking on dead men who can't respond.

Just saying.

Thanks for the reply Jim ... No I did not know there was a 20 year difference.. Gordo was always someone I respected and liked but all I knew of him was the P.R. and Mercury days.. Not really a UFO buff myself so if I shot from the hip sorry.. I really did like his UFO interviews though even the one on "I Know What I saw"..

originally posted by: Scdfa
a reply to: Hongkongphooey

Scdfa:
Oh, my heavens! I find your accusations to be reckless and groundless, and an affront to my sensibilities, sir, and I politely request you refrain from further besmirching.
I'm afraid you simply must be speaking about a different Jim Oberg, sir!

Hongkongphooey:
No, I don't think so, I am speaking about the very same James Oberg who is a professional debunker! Why is he allowed to besmirch astronauts but we are not allowed to besmirch him???

Why, I do believe the fine art of sarcasm has proved difficult for me to convey in written form!
For that I do apologize, sir, and beg pardon.

I did think you were being sarcastic don't worry as I just wanted to underline my position Cheers

originally posted by: PlausibleDeniability
.....
There is a video of him stating exactly that only a few posts up from yours. I've seen several other videos of him stating the same exact thing to multiple independent interviewers over the past few years. I'm surprised that you would post something so blatantly false on here. It's almost laughable considering you have put this a mere 3 posts down from a link to one of the many freely available and easily found videos proving your statement to be completely untrue.
....

Do you honestly believe that Gordon Cooper never stated on camera that he witnessed this happen?

I could be wrong. Show me. Link, time hack.

EDIT: I see Arb chided you into a more focused view. Good for you.

Then you played the get-out-of-reality-FREE magic card. Tsk tsk.

originally posted by: coastlinekid

And of course, the file was complete and NOT sanitized for "Blue Book" consumption...


Riight...

An explain-everything hypothesis to avoid the consequences of ANY inconvenient testimony.

Sort of a get-out-if-reality-FREE card that is often played on these threads.

Since it's not a priori implausible, you have to go beyond the written records to talk with the original witnesses. Sparks, McDonald, and me -- we each contacted Gettys directly and got HIS raw input, and also I found Davis, who was on the desk when the men came in and was so impressed with the cameramen's excitement he remembered the encounter twenty years later when he first mentioned it to me. AND Cooper's real boss at Edwards at that time. And Cooper's ex-wife from that time.

What's your theory about why ALL of our results are identical and Cooper's is the out-of-step far-left-field out-lier?

And why if it had really 'landed' didn't Cooper run right over to the spot and look for ground traces? He never mentions thinking of doing that at all, does he? It just never occurred to him at the time?

And how does his late-in-life narrative style in a dozen well documented examples of exaggeration/dramatization well beyond the bounds of reality, jibe with his style in this case?

Doesn't the required cast of intimidated lifetime liars get excessively large at some point?

originally posted by: JimOberg

Did he not file a report of what he saw in 57 when it happened? I might not be getting it. So did he see all this and nothing was ever said until later or did he file a report of what he saw in 57 but not reveal what he reported until later?
.

These are good questions. Establishing a timeline and then looking at preconditions and consequences along that line helps narrow the range of plausible hypotheses.

There is no record that Cooper filed a separate report independent of the Blue Book report that Davis was directly central to initiating. Nobody recalls hearing him speak of the event until interviews in the mid-1970s and even then it was only as an indirect recollection of other people's stories.

The earliest verifiable take on Cooper's UFO tales was a conversation reported to me in 1976 by the head of NICAP, who related that Cooper only recently mentioned to him a sighting over Germany that he later attributed to weather balloons. I have my logbook entry of that exact conversation. He recalled no mention of any event at Edwards AFB, least of all a UFO landing story.

Here is my logbook:

A widely circulated internet story of a "Ferrando tape" interview from 1973 turns out to have been a complete hoax by a French paranormal magazine [I have the issue]. Columbia Pictures used quotations from an English translation of that French original, to promote CEIIIK in 1978 and put some excerpts on the package of a "bendable extraterrestrial figurine" it sold with the movie, and Cooper sued them to stop using a false quotation attributed to him. I can't find the outcome of the lawsuit, but as of last year, Columbia Pictures still had the hoax quotation in its promotional package for the DVD set.

Here's that bogus quote used in 1978 and still in circulation despite Cooper's lawsuit.

What year did Cooper file the blue book report?

originally posted by: 727Sky

originally posted by: JimOberg

originally posted by: 727Sky....

Well one thing about it dead men cannot argue in their defense:

You do realize my results were published in 1986, and Cooper did his major TV interviews in the twenty years more that he lived?



So back off on the tut=tutting for supposedly picking on dead men who can't respond.



Just saying.

Thanks for the reply Jim ... No I did not know there was a 20 year difference.. Gordo was always someone I respected and liked but all I knew of him was the P.R. and Mercury days.. Not really a UFO buff myself so if I shot from the hip sorry.. I really did like his UFO interviews though even the one on "I Know What I saw"..

They were good interviews, for sure -- which is why it's so scary in trying to use our day-to-day BS meters on these sorts of narratives.

Isn't that the documentary where the producer declares that Cooper's stories 'have never been explained' and uses them specifically to persuade his own skeptical father that the phenomenon is real? Or was that 'Out of the blue'?

originally posted by: Hongkongphooey
....

Even today, I would rather trust the words of Astronauts like Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell and even Story Musgrave (who did a complete 180 on his views of Aliens after he left NASA) than a paid disinfo debunker like Jim here

Cooper and Mitchell both makle it clear they never encountered any UFO events on their space flights and neither did any of their associates in the astronaut corps [Cooper wondered about what McDivitt saw, one possibility]. Musgrave is clear he never encountered ANY indications of ETI on his missions and neither did any other shuttle astronaut he knew of -- where do you get the idea he switched 180 degrees on that theme?

EDIT -- ADD

Musgrave on NO sign of ETI on space flights
www.jamesoberg.com...

Mitchell on no astronaut UFO encounters:
www.jamesoberg.com...

McDivitt explains his own sighting:
www.jamesoberg.com...

originally posted by: Reallyfolks
....
What year did Cooper file the blue book report?

Never. The original report was filed within a week of the incident in 1957, Cooper never seems to have mentioned this event and HIS claimed role in it until about 1974, maybe later -- it's a good question to determine precisely when.

I don't recall if he mentioned it or not in his late-1970s UN testimony, he did discuss the Germany event. Let's go back and see if he hinted at a second encounter then.

Good question, this will produce useful timeline data. Exactly WHEN did Cooper FIRST claim to have been involved with Edwards-1957?

originally posted by: JimOberg

originally posted by: Reallyfolks
....
What year did Cooper file the blue book report?

Never. The original report was filed within a week of the incident in 1957, Cooper never seems to have mentioned this event and HIS claimed role in it until about 1974, maybe later -- it's a good question to determine precisely when.

I don't recall if he mentioned it or not in his late-1970s UN testimony, he did discuss the Germany event. Let's go back and see if he hinted at a second encounter then.

Good question, this will produce useful timeline data. Exactly WHEN did Cooper FIRST claim to have been involved with Edwards-1957?

Cooper never filed a report on his weather balloon encounter in 57. Someone did though. Many years later he lied/embellished this 57 event that. Someone else just happened to file a blue book report about????? Is that what I am seeing you say?

originally posted by: Reallyfolks
Cooper never filed a report on his weather balloon encounter in 57. Someone did though. Many years later he lied/embellished this 57 event that. Someone else just happened to file a blue book report about????? Is that what I am seeing you say?

Did you read the story linked in the opening post? This is what Cooper said:

In 1978, in his second interview with Spiegel (this time for OMNI), he evaded any discussion of the Edwards case by saying, "I'd just as soon not get into the Edwards incident. I didn't get to see anything personally, it was all second hand evidence really."

He had no encounter. Even in the video he admits it's a second hand story, but in reality it's 3rd or 4th or nth hand as Sparks says, because the photographers didn't go into his office and explain what happened as Cooper claimed they did, but he probably heard about it through the grapevine.

originally posted by: Reallyfolks
...
Cooper never filed a report on his weather balloon encounter in 57. Someone did though. Many years later he lied/embellished this 57 event that. Someone else just happened to file a blue book report about????? Is that what I am seeing you say?

"His" encounter never occurred. Gettys and Bittick had an encounter [the explanation of which is in question] and reported it to Davis, who assisted the actual Blue Book duty officer to file a report that was always available for inspection. Cooper wasn't even there.

Years later when Cooper's story came out, investigators like Larry Bryant easily found the actual report and because it was so different from Cooper's story, concluded that the report itself was bogus and Cooper's version of the story was 100% true -- because 'astronaut testimony' had such magical authority to the general public, wheteher it was accurate or not.

And that's the way it worked out. Using Cooper's eagerness for media attention [even to the sad extent of regularly playing a mocked phone-in guest on Letterman], after he had been ostracized by the spaceflight community and his own colleagues for causing associates to lose millions of dollars on bogus investments, served the purposes of the UFO proponents.

Real research did not serve those interests, so was suppressed.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Since when does "not corroborated" equate to "Myth" and 'Unreal'?

It doesn't. The words an impartial person ought to have used are 'Unconfirmed' and 'unproven'.

If nothing else, your choice of words says much more about your personal bias and belief regarding Coopers' testimony and not much at all about it's accuracy or lack thereof.

What have we all learned kids?

People will try to colour your thinking using derogatory words and phrases, in order to bend your opinions towards their own.

No surprises there then..class dismissed.

a reply to: MysterX
The myth is that people think Cooper had an encounter with a UFO in 1957.

The reality is that he didn't, even by his own admission. Again Cooper said: "I'd just as soon not get into the Edwards incident. I didn't get to see anything personally, it was all second hand evidence really."

a reply to: Arbitrageur

So your issue is with Cooper not the incident?


Edit: meant to reply to Jim

Regarding the original form of the 1957 Edwards event, here are two press clippings from soon afterwards which describe it. No landing is mentioned.