The Awful Truth About UFOs (long) -- not for believers!

Originally posted by nullster
Esoteric Teacher - Quotes from important people can be cool. I like them because it shows that the UFO phenomenon captures the imaginations of people of all types. But in the end, most are simply opinions on the subject. Opinions do not fortify missing facts or offer up physical tangible evidence that can be evaluated.

I'm more than willing to concede that most quotes can be taken out of context, and not all quotes are representing the truth of the matter, on that you are surely justified nullster.

However, some, like that of President Truman most certainly are worth consideration when balancing truth and deception. But even deception has some truth in it, the intentions are decernable. Again, given that many presidents have talked openly about the UFO and alien connection, there must be a reason, a purpose for them stating things with the exact words they used, even if it were a "Freudian Slip" aka a peeking of the subliminal mind getting loose.

However nullster, your point of view is valid, but certainly does not discount all such quotes as non pertanent.

"Even skeptics have to admit that the attempt to label ALL UFO sighting as one thing (in this case, CIA blimps), is doomed to fail from the outset." == Gaz

Well said. While I do not believe that is where rand is going, his approach is interesting for no other reason than the reaction he is generating. If I am
wrong, then he is no different from believers who label ALL UFO sightings as ET (one thing, category anyway) which as you say is doomed to fail.

gee..i wonder when is the infamous.."Ignorance Denied" thing gonna step in?

The blimp thing works well for LARGE aircraft,

not so well for small stuff.

Take the 1930's Hindenburg:

Length = 803.8 feet, Diameter = 135.1 feet

Gas Capacity = 7,062,100 cubic feet

Main structure = aluminum

Filled with HYDROGEN = 242.2 tons gross lift

130.1 tons STRUCTURE = 53.7%

112.1 tons useful lift = 46.3% (payload)

Cruise speed = 84.4 mph

Four 16-cylinder diesel engines (1300 hp for 5 minutes at takeoff 850 at cruise)

7,062,100 cu.ft./ 484,400 lbs. = 14.58 cu.ft. per lb. (hydrogen)

------------------------------

It takes 15.6 cu. ft. of HELIUM to lift 1lb.

Take a 180 pound guy:

180 lbs.x15.6 cu.ft./lb. = 2,800 cu.ft. of helium

which gives the classic saucer shape of 24 ft. diameter 6 ft. high.

One naked guy, no gear, no radio, no instrumentation, no propulsion system,
and, oh yeah, no blimp.



travel.howstuffworks.com...

That was interesting, thanks Theox. Hadn't looked at it from that point of view. I'm always up for learnin new things.
BTW what happened to our vociferous host(rand)?

(Since you asked... )

There hasn't been very much progress in solving the UFO riddle since 1947, but if there's one thing researchers have learned in the past 60 years, it's that UFOs come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Every new report seems to bring a new shape, and overall, the shapes tend to evolve over time.

Many, many, many years ago I read a book which had an interesting idea: most UFO shapes can be explained as disks seen at different angles. A disk can look like a disk, of course, but the sillouette also matches the classic cigar-shape, but it can also be elliptical, egg-shaped, and circular, depending only on the viewing angle; you just have to tip it up on-edge. (If anyone knows the name of that book or its author, could you post it?).

About that time there were a number of round/spherical craft sighted, which meant there were lots of saucers standing on-edge that year, I suppose. I could never get my mind around the idea of extraterrestrials rolling around the Desert Southwest like so many hubcaps; luckily for me, the basic cigar shape can mimic all the outlines of the basic saucer.

It also occured to me that evolution had decreed that free-swiming sea creatures (your dolphin, sharks, tuna, cod, whales, and so forth) would be cigar-shaped, while the saucer shape would be used primarily by bottom-feeders and reef dwellers, who didn't need to be sleek and efficient. Nature has also applied the cigar shape to creatures of the air. Most flying insects are elliptical. The more efficient a bird needs to be, the closer their bodies are to the ideal, the albatross being a perfect example. Watch a starling or sparrow closely sometime: they beat their tiny wings like mad for a few seconds, then pull everything in and glide for a surpdrisingly long distance tucked into a tidy little cigar shape.
Some bird shapes.

Aircraft are also mostly cigar-shaped, as are artillery shells. Despite many attempts to create one, there have been no successful disk-shaped airplanes. The Chance Vought V-173 is probably the closest anyone's ever gotten, and it's a pretty ungainly looking thing. Aerodynamics, it seems, prefers the cigar to the saucer. The exception is the frisbee (and perhaps it's cousin, the clay skeet target), although that relies on some extreme rotaional dynamics to maintain course and altitude.

But can a cigar explain all the different shapes of UFOs? They have been described as disks, saucers, chevrons, arcs, cresents, bananas, globes, balls, lightbulbs, manta rays, cylinders, orbs, eggs, beer bottles, crosses, triangles, wyes, exes, rectangles, diamonds, eyes, doughnuts, inner tubes, jellyfish, cones, fans, half-moons, full-moons, funnels, and even blimp-shaped ("...but it was not a blimp, I'm sure of that..."), and coffee cup shaped (they go with the doughnuts, perhaps). And that's not counting variations: with fins, without fins; domes on top, domes on the bottom, no domes at all; windows, portholes, perfectly smooth; glowing and pitch black and everything in between; and so on and so on...

Cigars alone can't explain everything, but between saucers and cigars, we can narrow down the menagerie quite a bit.

All the shapes in the elliptical family, from rocket-shaped to fully circular, can be explained by either of the two "basic" shapes. I lean toward cigar-shaped, of course, but either would do. I really hope, in fact, that the USAF has been flying disk-shaped blimps.

I started playing around with Blender3D, and am amazed at the similarity of the shapes; either can easily look like the other, depending mostly on lighting direction.




It's not easy to tell them apart sometimes.

We can also explain the shapes in the arc and cresent family, although here, the cigar has the edge, so to speak. Disks tend to spread the reflection out more; I didn't save the similar simulation for saucers because I never could get it to look like anything but big white smudges. But if you see a flying fingerprint, you'll know what it is now.

Also notice that just turning on axis will make the arc shrink and grow dramatically; an observer could easily think the object was performing near-impossible maneuvers and accelerating like nothing on this earth.

We've still got more shapes to work through, though.

If we go ahead and throw blimps and other LTA airships into the mix, we get a lot more options: we can cover many of the geometric shapes (the ones that appear to glow, not necessarily the ones which have rows of lights). The big triangles will probably have to wait for the coming of the Giant Black Stealth Blimps (which are, we all know, cooler and sexier than their silver-haired forebears).


Genman wondered why I am obsessed the angle of the sun and moon and what they have to do with any UFO sighting. This is why: we now, all of us, have instantly available at our fingertips (quite literally!) every tool needed to completly analyze a close encounter, IF we have sufficient information. Let's take one example: the 1947 Maury Island event.

Gazrok pointed out that the incident is considered a hoax by most UFO researchers, and it may be too late now to ever know for sure. However, there are a few kibbly little details that I always wondered about. The witnesses claimed to see flying doughnuts, for instance. If Harold Dahl had been influenced by the Arnold sighting, and wanted fame and/or notoriety, why mention doughnuts? It's a pretty ridiculous detail.

Basically, we would need to believe that the blinp on the left can be made to look like the delicious airborn Krispy Kreme (tm) on the right.

So, we look up the solar azimuth and elevation for Maury Island (Seattle is close enough), and adjust our model accordingly. The Navy says thensun was at 232 degrees azimuth, 58 degrees elevation on maury Island at 2 PM on June 21, 1947. Dahl said he was looking almost straight up, so we'll adjust our virtual camera, plug in the figures, and see what we get.

Well, it's not perfect, but not bad for a first approximation; it seems that blimps we can indeed do doughnuts, under the right circumstances. First of all, we need a stumpy blimp; an L-Type trainer will work nicely. Then, we need an eliptical gondola that protrudes a bit. K class won't work, the gondola is too long; ZPGs have a huge antenna slung unerneath, and they didn't come around for a couple of decades, anyway. Luckily, the "little" L-Types come equipped with just the right sort of control cabin. Then we need the right lighting conditions. If we use an L class blimp, the sun needs to be approximately 50 degrees elevation, and need to be gererally from the side of the craft, rather than fore or aft. On my model, the inner-tube effect starts at an elevation of 15 degrees begins disappearing around 60 degrees, although it hangs in for a while longer on the high side.

Maury Island may be a hoax, but we know that the witnesses could have seen something resembling a doughnut that day, at that time, if there were L-Type blimps overhead. The power of any any theory, however, is its ability to make predictions. To this day, I still don't know which direction Dashl and friends were supposedly headed when the pastries arrived, but our model makes a fairly strong prediction: the observers would need to be generally south and east of the objects to have seen them as doughnuts. (Anybody know where the boat was coming from?)

Well, at least we know where all that hot slag came from



[edit on 4-1-2006 by rand]

[edit on 4-1-2006 by rand]

Now that's a damn good effort, there's research and even testing. That's all I wanted to see, some homework being done. Good on ya Rand.

I'll have to read this when I get home. Eyes are burning and I'm hungry. I can't seem to get passed - Blimp and Krispy Cream®.

Nice examples using Blender. Look forward to reading more.

Wow. Good post rand. But sorry its still not proof that all UFOs are blimps. My 3 sightings didn't resemble cigars or blimps or doughnuts or coffee cups. And they certainly didn't resemble any of your graphics.
But hey bravo just the same.

"The power of any any theory, however, is its ability to make predictions." == rand

He He. Great work. I knew this would not be dissappointing. Pay attention, folks. Thats
the scientific use of the term theory. Closest thing I have seen to science in here for some time.
Combine that with the demonstrable fact that most eye-witnesses are such bad observers that
they could not describe their own reflection if they saw it in the sky.

Rand really went out of his way, obviously, to introduce a lot of great information.

Can a Mod reward him, please?

I would vote for a WAT RAND, but I already used them all up this month, due to me deploying in about a week back to Iraq. I more than likely will be able to log on to my beloved ATS, but far less often.

I will remember you next month, and give you a WATS. Thanks again for that very well organized and formidably structured post Rand. It was a good read!

[edit on 5-1-2006 by Esoteric Teacher]

If I am
wrong, then he is no different from believers who label ALL UFO sightings as ET (one thing, category anyway) which as you say is doomed to fail.

True, but I can't think of many even amateur UFOlogists that believe this. Most in UFOlogy concede that even the MAJORITY of sightings are misidentifications of ordinary craft or phenomena...while only the MINORITY of sightings are truly worthy of further study.

An interesting example of this occurred while I was on my honeymoon a couple years back, in Disney World. During the evening show (it was still fairly light out, just before sunset) in EPCOT...a strange craft was high in the sky. Many in the crowd were looking and pointing, and even I couldn't quite make it out, and I can usually pick out craft pretty easily... It really did look strange. However, I had a mini spyglass to get a better view of the show, so I then used it to get a closer look of the craft. Through it, I could identify it as an F-18, just at a weird angle to us. I'm sure many in the crowd still believe they saw a UFO that night...even though it was just a plane. I still heard people talking about it as we left the show when it was over.

I believe many of the sightings of which people claim to be UFO's are indeed just blimps or aircraft seen at weird angles and viewpoints. However, to say that every UFO sighting is a blimp is just assinine. I am not saying your saying this, but I believe that what some people see in the sky cannot be explained by the blimp debunk.

Originally posted by UnBreakable
So what about "blimps" that exceed 1,000 mph? That's harder to fathom than the ufo phenomenon. Sorry, I don't buy the "blimp" explanation for all the reported ufo cases.


www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk...

You mean blimps that go from 0-1000 mph in 1 second dont you?
I have to admit that some debunkers are just as silly as the ones that believe like the Heavens Gate ppl did..its just on the other side of the spectrum

Originally posted by nightwing
"The power of any any theory, however, is its ability to make predictions." == rand

He He. Great work. I knew this would not be dissappointing. Pay attention, folks. Thats
the scientific use of the term theory. Closest thing I have seen to science in here for some time.

Could please contribute to the topic instead of brown-nosing rand.



Once again good work rand.

Nice theory and support, but theres still some things that cant quite be explained by blimps. They've been mentioned often enough, so i'll restrain from repeating them.

No one here is saying all UFO sightings are real.. Its pretty much agreed that 80-95% of the sightings are either wrong or hoaxes. However, your doing the same thing as those who say all sightings are real by saying all of them are blimps. Nice graphics, nice theory, nice answers.. But it just dosent work for everything.

Can a Mod reward him, please?

I actually originally (day it was posted) Applauded his original post, even if I disagree, it's an impressive amount of research, and well-reasoned...

very good stuff rand. Although I still for the most part don't agree with you.

That blender3d seems pretty powerful for an open source program. I think i might download it and give it a try.

Originally posted by Gazrok

Can a Mod reward him, please?

I actually originally (day it was posted) Applauded his original post, even if I disagree, it's an impressive amount of research, and well-reasoned...

Given my experiences here at ATS, my outlook is optimistic that the MODS are always doing an excellent job. This action further justifies my optimistic perspective of my ATS experiences. I thank you for recognizing a great effort put forth by a member who has repeatedly demonstrated a formidable level of integity.

Thanks Gazrok. Your attention to detail serves us well.

Edited to add:

I also don't buy into the concept that the majority of UFO sightings and reports are blimp related, however I have a better understanding and higher level of respect for those who can articulate their points of view in such a presentable format. Acknowledgement of their views and a effort to understand them only add to our collective knowledge. And, collecting knowledge is pertinent to and a prerequisite to denying ignorance.

Judge something as evil? Evil is relative to the observer.

See no, hear no, speak no Evil?

Monkeys do the same thing.

Peace,
John



One of my UFO sightings was near dusk when I was in 8th grade. Turned out to be a blimp

[edit on 6-1-2006 by Esoteric Teacher]

I left out a shape last time, deliberately, because I wanted to deal with it separately. It is the shape of the UFOs seen by Kenneth Arnold in 1947. The best I can determine is that there's never been a sighting of a vehicle with that plan since then.

In a handwritten notation to his typed letter to the Air Force, Arnold gave us a complete blueprint for the objects he saw that day.



Here's my first attempts at Blender3d versions of the craft.



His notes and interviews suggest that he didn't actually see the objects in plan view, but that he could make out the shape as "...they fluttered and sailed, tipping their wings alternately...". What I find particularly interesting is that the silhouette of the plan view resembles a blimp so closely.



Next time out we're going to take those shapes up to the track and see who's got horsepower and who's just blowin' smoke.

For those who haven't figured it out yet, I'm working to demonstrate that the objects sighted by Kenneth Arnold could have been blimps and probably were blimps. I'm starting with the case that gave us the term "flying saucer", then I'm going to work my way through the succeeding significant UFO cases, at least as many as possible. So here's your chance to prove me wrong at the outset; all you have to do is present a stronger case for alien technology OR prove that the objects could not possibly have been blimps. But I warn you, I've learned how to make motion GIFs

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century, Space Cadets!
:

[edit on 7-1-2006 by rand]

[edit on 3-5-2006 by rand]

[edit on 3-5-2006 by rand]