I am… skeptical. News Nation is also skeptical. They also put this up, so there’s that.
I’ve never heard of them, but News Nation doesn’t look like a fly-by-night. I mean, it’s not three guys with a green screen. On the balance, I still don’t buy the story — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Dan’s point here is valid — but this seems like a legitimate step up in the conspiracy theorizing.
…I wonder what’s actually going on.
This is good news even if you don’t believe in UFOs…
Continue reading Military creating formal procedures for UFO reports.A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue.
Via Hot Air.
But Hot Air has pointed out something from said story that I hadn’t caught:
Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.
My only excuse is that I was rolling my eyes at that ESP guy who was making a bad analogy using Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo would have had the back off of that hypothetical garage door opener within thirty seconds just to see what the heck was making the blinking red light, and he’d probably assume that the plastic was some kind of resin. Not that Da Vinci would be able to work out electromagnetic theory from a door opener, sure — but he’d concentrate on the important stuff first.
But I digress.
Continue reading I still want to apply Occam’s Razor to the NYT UFO story.
Straight-up, too. Two Navy FA-18 pilots doing routine training off of the coast of San Diego* back in 2004 got interrupted:
“Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” the radio operator said, according to Commander [David] Fravor. For two weeks, the operator said, the [USS] Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.
