PROSAIC EXPLANATIONS: THE FAILURE OF UFO SKEPTICISM

[CNI News thanks optical physicist and UFO researcher Dr. Bruce
Maccabee for
permission to publish the following excerpts from a longer paper of the
same
title that will be delivered at the annual Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
International Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri in July. An abridged
version
of the same paper has also been published in Infinite Energy Magazine.]

by Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D.
brumac@compuserve.com
copyright B. Maccabee, 2000

INTRODUCTION

Could some UFO sightings actually be manifestations of Other
Intelligences
(OIs) or Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) such as extraterrestrials
(ETs),
visiting the earth and interacting with human beings? Or are all
reports of
such sightings simply mistakes, hoaxes, or dreams of the hopeful
believers?
It all comes down to explanation. If there were no sightings which are
richly
detailed, credible and yet unexplainable, the UFO subject would be
based
totally on "will o' the wisp"-like, indistinct observations, or on
theoretical expectations, as is the so-called Search for
Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI, based on the theory that we could detect
electromagnetic
waves radiated toward us, intentionally or unintentionally, by
extraterrestrial civilizations).

If all the richly detailed sighting reports had reasonable
explanations, then
theoretical speculations about ET intelligences visiting the earth
might be
interesting but of little practical consequence. Ufology, if there were
such
a thing in the absence of unexplainable sightings, would consist of
studying
witnesses who, evidently, failed to identify explainable (identifiable)

phenomena or who simply made up "tall stories" about ET visitation.
"Ufological science," if it existed under these circumstances, would
consist
of psychology, psychiatry and perhaps sociology.

There are skeptics who believe that this is exactly what should
constitute
ufology.

Noted UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass has provided perhaps the most
straightforward statement of the skeptic's position on UFO sightings in
his
book "UFOs: the Public Deceived" (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1983,
pg.
297), wherein he writes that the "Occam's Razor" alternative to
unexplained
UFO sightings, is this: "...roughly 98% of sightings are simply
misidentifications of prosaic, if sometimes unfamiliar, objects by
honest
persons... (and) ... the balance, roughly 2%, are self-delusions or
hoaxes by
persons who like to spin tall tales and become instant celebrities."

In other words, UFO reports are the results of misidentifications,
delusions,
and hoaxes, period! More recently he has indicated that in his thirty
or so
years of investigation he has found not one case for which he could
find no
"prosaic explanation". As evidence of this, Mr. Klass has offered
prosaic
explanations for a number of famous sightings. Of course, Mr. Klass has
not
attempted to explain each of the hundreds of thousands of sighting
reports
which have been made over the last half century. However, he has
proposed
explanations for a representative sample of reports which are
classified as
"good" by most ufologists and, on this basis, he has generalized his
statement to apply to the bulk of the UFO sighting reports.

Klass would have the reader believe that he has correctly explained all
the
sightings he has investigated. If he were correct then his argument
about
misidentifications, hoaxes, and delusions making up 100% of UFO
sightings
would be unassailable, at least for the sightings which he has
investigated.
However, in some cases he has offered prosaic explanations which are
demonstrably wrong. In other cases he has proposed explanations which
may not
be provably wrong but which are are, at the very least, weak and
unconvincing.

To say that at least some of Klass' prosaic explanations are wrong is a

strong statement. However, an even stronger statement can be made:
Klass'
analysis has demonstrated that at least some of the cases he has
investigated
have no prosaic explanations. Why is this? Because Klass, having
analyzed
these cases carefully, has proposed the only potential explanations
that
remain after all other explanations have been rejected. That is, there
are no
other potential prosaic explanations that make any sense. Hence, when
his
proposed explanations are proven wrong, there are no remaining
candidate
explanations and the sighting becomes that of a TRue UFO (TRUFO), which
might
be evidence of OI/NHI/ET.

THE CASE OF THE DAMAGED POLICE CAR

[An] example of a case for which Klass' proposed prosaic explanation is

wrong, or, at best, unconvincing, is the rather traumatic experience of

police officer Val Johnson of Warren, Minnesota. (See "UFOs: the Public

Deceived", page 223).

Shortly after 1:30 a.m., August 27, 1980, as he was cruising the
countryside
in his police car in an area of low population, Johnson noticed a
bright
light that he could see through the trees of a small wooded area.
Thinking it
might be a landed airplane carrying illegal drugs from Canada, he
accelerated
along a road toward the area of the light. Suddenly this light moved
rapidly
toward his car. He heard a noise of breaking glass and lost
consciousness.
When he regained consciousness, he was leaning forward with his head
against
the top of the steering wheel. There was a red mark on his forehead
which
suggests that he might have bumped his head on the wheel hard enough to

render him unconscious (he said he was not wearing his seatbelt at the
time).
After regaining consciousness, he called the police station. It was
2:19
a.m.; he had been unconscious for about 40 minutes. He reported that
something had "attacked" his car.

When another officer arrived on the scene a few minutes after Johnson's

report, he found Johnson's car nearly 90 degrees to the road (blocking
the
road) and skid marks nearly 100 ft long. Johnson was found in a
distraught
condition, in a state of shock. He said he recalled seeing the bright
light
rushing toward his police car and he recalled hearing breaking glass.
The
next thing he recalled was realizing he was sitting with his head on
the
steering wheel. He did not recall skidding to a stop. He complained
about
pain in his eyes and was taken to a doctor who could find no eye
damage. He
did not complain of a headache.

Of particular importance is damage to the police car. One of the two
glass
headlight covers on the driver's side had been broken; there was a
large
crack in the windshield on the driver's side; a plastic cover on the
light
bar on top of the car had a hole in it; there was a dent in the top of
the
hood, and two of the three spring-mounted antennas were bent 60 or more

degrees. Also, the electric clock in the car and Johnson's mechanical
wristwatch both read fourteen minutes slow, although Johnson was
certain he
had set both before he had begun his nightly patrol.

The damage to the car was physical evidence that something strange had
taken
place. Careful studies of the damage were made by the police department
and
by scientists working with the Center for UFO Studies. They could find
no
evidence or reason to believe that Johnson had damaged his own car.
They
could find no prosaic explanation for the sighting.

Klass also investigated the sighting. He spoke to several people who
knew
Johnson and asked about his interest in UFOs. According to his friends,
he
seemed no more interested in UFOs than in numerous other subjects. They
could
provide no reason to believe he would intentionally damage his car to
create
a UFO incident. He might "hide your coffee cup," one gentleman told
Klass,
but "as far as we know, he's never told any untruths."

Klass concluded his discussion of the Officer Johnson UFO sighting by
offering two alternatives. He wrote:

"The hard physical evidence leaves only two possible explanations for
this
case. One is that Johnson's car was attacked by malicious UFOnauts, who

reached out and hit one headlight with a hammerlike device, then hit
the hood
and windshield, then very gently bent the two radio antennas, being
careful
not to break them, then reached inside the patrol car to set back the
hands
of the watch on Johnson's arm and the clock on the car's dashboard.
These
UFOnauts would then have taken off Johnsons' glasses, aimed an intense
ultraviolet light into his eyes, and replaced his glasses, while being
careful not to shine ultraviolet on his face.

"Or the incident is a hoax. There are simply no other possible
explanations."

Klass' amusing version of the "UFO/ET hypothesis" should not detract
from the
importance of his statement that, "There are simply no other possible
explanations." In other words, if it was not a hoax, then there is no
prosaic
explanation for this sighting. Perhaps Klass realized that the hoax
hypothesis was unconvincing at best and intentionally tried to make the
UFO
alternative seem silly.

The police department did not accuse officer Johnson of damaging the
police
car. Yet, Klass' book, published about 3 years after the incident,
clearly
implies that this event had to be a hoax. Several years after the
publication
of the book, I challenged Klass to send a letter to the police chief of

Warren, Minnesota, along with a copy of his book chapter, so that the
police
chief would realize that he should charge Johnson with damaging the
car. So
far as I know, Johnson has never been charged with damaging the police
car.

UFO IN THE SNAKE RIVER CANYON

Klass is not the first to offer prosaic explanations. Dr. J. Allen
Hynek, who
in his later years became a strong proponent of UFO investigation,
began his
"UFO career" in 1948 as a strong skeptic/debunker. His explanations of
a
number of UFO sightings helped to set the tone of governmental UFO
investigation in the early years.

One of his most unconvincing explanations was that offered for the
sighting
by Mr. A. C. Urie and his two sons on August 13, 1947. They lived in
the
Snake River Canyon at Twin Falls, Idaho. According to the FBI
investigative
report of this case, at about 1:00 p.m. Mr. Urie "sent his boys to the
(Salmon) river to get some rope from his boat. When he thought they
were
overdue he went outside to his tool shed to look for them. He noticed
them
about 300 feet away looking in the sky and he glanced up to see what he

called the flying disc."

This strange object was flying at high speed along the canyon, which is
about
400 feet deep and 1,200 feet across at that point. It was about
seventy-five
feet above the floor of the canyon (and so more than 300 feet below the
edge
of the canyon) and moving up and down as it flew. It seemed to be
following
the contours of the hilly ground beneath it. Urie, who said he was at
about
the same level as the UFO, so that he had a side view, estimated it was
about
twenty feet long, ten feet wide and ten feet high, with what appeared
to be
exhaust ports on the sides. It was almost hat shaped with a flat bottom
and a
dome on top. Its pale blue color made Urie think that it would be very
difficult to see against the sky, although he had no trouble seeing it
silhouetted against the opposite wall of the canyon. On each side there
was a
tubular shaped fiery glow, like some sort of exhaust. He said that when
it
went over trees, they didn't sway back and forth, but rather the
treetops
twisted around, which suggests that the air under the object was being
swirled into a vortex. He and his sons had an excellent view of the
object
for a few seconds before it disappeared over the trees about a mile
away. He
thought it was going 1,000 miles an hour.

Hynek offered the following "prosaic explanation," which became part of
the
official Air Force record on the sighting: an atmospheric eddy. Why
this
explanation? The object appeared pale bluish in color, like the sky,
and the
trees were moving around as if a swirling wind went over them. Hynek
explained the blue color as a "reflection" of the blue sky in the
hypothetical atmospheric eddy. He offered no explanation of how this
eddy
could appear to have the strange "hat" shape, be traveling at about
1,000
miles per hour, how there could be a fiery glow at one location on the
side
of the "eddy" or why the eddy would appear as a solid rather than
transparent
object.

An eddy is a density inhomogeneity in the atmosphere which, in
principle,
might bend light by a very small fraction of a degree. However, for
Hynek's
explanation to work, the light would have to be bent five degrees or
more,
far beyond anything the atmosphere could do. Even Hynek realized this
and
repudiated his explanation years later (see The Hynek UFO Report, Dell
Pub.
co, NY, 1977).

KENNETH ARNOLD'S SIGHTING

The June 24, 1947 sighting by private pilot Kenneth Arnold attracted
worldwide interest. It also attracted many more than its share of
explanations. One of the scientists with an excessive urge to explain
was Dr.
Howard Menzel. In his first book, "Flying Saucers" (Harvard University
Press,
Cambridge, Mass, 1953), Menzel offered a blanket explanation for
sightings
that occurred within the first five years of modern UFO sightings
(1947-1952): misidentified atmospheric phenomena including the effects
of the
atmosphere on sunlight, unusual clouds caused by particular wind
patterns,
and mirage effects (light ray bending in the atmosphere). He suggested
several different atmospheric and cloud effects to account for Kenneth
Arnold's sighting. In later books ("The World of Flying Saucers",
Menzel and
Boyd, Doubleday and Co., 1963; "The UFO Enigma, The Definitive
Explanation of
the UFO Phenomenon", Menzel and Taves, Doubleday and Co., 1977) he
offered
other explanations.

Mr. Arnold, a businessman and private pilot with over 4,000 hours of
flying
experience, reported seeing nine semicircular, thin (compared to the
length),
shiny objects in a line flying southward past the western flank of Mt.
Rainier [and that] "swerved in and out" of a chain of mountain peaks
south of
Rainier. The objects were therefore about 20 miles east of him (he was
about
20 miles west and 10 miles south of Mt. Rainier and flying almost due
east at
the time). He timed their flight from Rainier southward to Mt. Adams, a

distance of about 50 miles. They crossed this distance in 102 seconds.
Hence,
the direct interpretation of Arnold's sighting is that these objects
were
traveling at about 1,700 mph. (This was about four months before Yaeger

exceeded the speed of sound in a test aircraft in October, 1947). In
reporting the speed calculation, Arnold arbitrarily reduced the speed
considerably to account for possible errors in his measurements. He
publicly
stated that the objects were traveling at about 1,200 mph. Arnold
reported
that he first noticed the objects as they repeatedly flashed or
reflected the
bright afternoon sunlight like a mirror when they were north of Mt.
Rainier
and last saw them (by their flashes) as they passed Mt. Adams. The
total
sighting duration was two and a half to three minutes.

Dr. Hynek was the first scientist to try to explain Arnold's sighting.
Hynek
used some details of the observation and an assumption about Arnold's
visual
acuity to calculate an approximate size of the objects. He obtained a
large
size (two thousand feet long, one hundred feet thick). He could not
accept
this size as reasonable, so he decided to ignore Arnold's claim that
the
objects went in and out of the mountain peaks south of Mt. Rainier. By
ignoring this statement (essentially implying Arnold had made a mistake
in
the observation) Hynek was able to assume that the objects were much
closer.
Hynek decided that Arnold saw large airplanes and he then estimated
that the
distance was only about six miles. This shorter distance reduced the
calculated speed to about 400 mph. Since this speed was within the
capability
of military aircraft, Hynek identified the objects as "aircraft,"
thereby
also ignoring Arnold's description of the objects.

Recent analysis of the Arnold sighting shows that Hynek made an
incorrect
assumption about Arnold's visual acuity. Had he made the correct
assumption,
he would have obtained a much smaller size (under 100 feet long and 10
or so
feet thick) and then, perhaps, would not have rejected Arnold's
distance
estimate, in which case he would have had to accept the speed estimate.
Had
he accepted the speed estimate, the history of the UFO subject might
have
been different.

Hynek's work was done secretly for the Air Force in 1948 under "Project

Sign"(1948). About four years later, Dr. Menzel tackled Arnold's
sighting. In
his first book "Flying Saucers" Menzel summarized the sighting, then
criticized the Air Force for accepting Hynek's explanation and went on
to
propose a much more "obvious" solution. Menzel wrote, "(Arnold) clocked
the
speed at about 1,200 miles an hour, although this figure seems
inconsistent
with the length of time that he estimated them to be in view. From his
previous statement, they could scarcely have traveled more than 25
miles
during the three minutes that he watched. This gives about 500 miles an
hour,
which is still a figure large enough to be startling." Note that Menzel
did
not tell the reader that Arnold had timed the flight of the objects
between
two points. Instead, Menzel invented a travel distance of twenty-five
miles,
and implied that this distance was covered in three minutes (180
seconds).
Hence he was able to assign a much lower, although "startling," speed
of 500
mph.

Menzel went on to "solve" the mystery of Arnold's sighting: "Although
what
Arnold saw has remained a mystery until this day (1953), I simply
cannot
understand why the simplest and most obvious explanation of all has
been
overlooked... the association of the saucers with the hogback (of the
mountain range south of Mt. Rainier)... serves to fix their distance
and
approximate size and roughly confirms Arnold's estimate of the speed."
(Note
that Menzel, unlike Hynek, accepted Arnold's distance estimate). Menzel
then
went on to suggest that Arnold saw "billowing blasts of snow,
ballooning up
from the tops of the ridges" caused by highly turbulent air along the
mountain range. According to Menzel, "These rapidly shifting, tilting
clouds
of snow would reflect the sun like a mirror... and the rocking surfaces
would
make the chain sweep along something like a wave, with only a momentary

reflection from crest to crest."

This first explanation by a scientist with the reputation of Dr. Menzel
may
seem slightly convincing, but only until one realizes that (a) blowing
clouds
of snow cannot reflect light rays from the sun (60 deg elevation angle)
into
a horizontal direction toward Arnold's airplane and thereby create the
very
bright flashes that Arnold reported; (b) there are no 1,200 mph or even
500
mph winds on the surface of the earth to transport clouds of snow --
fortunately!; (c) there are no winds that would carry clouds of snow
all the
way from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Adams (Arnold saw the objects pass Mt.
Adams
before they were lost to his view); (d) about 10 minutes before the
sighting,
Arnold flew rather close to the south flank of Mt. Rainer while heading

westward in order to search for a downed marine transport plane. Then,
only a
few minutes after the sighting, he flew eastward along a path that took
him a
dozen miles south of Mt. Rainier; during each of these flights (west,
then
east) his plane would have been strongly buffeted by such high winds,
but he
reported, instead, very calm conditions.

In case the first explanation wasn't sufficiently convincing, Menzel
offered
"another possibility": he suggested that perhaps there was a thin layer
of
fog, haze or dust just above or just below Arnold's altitude which was
caused
to move violently by air circulation and which reflected the sunlight.
Menzel
claimed that such layers can "reflect the sun in almost mirror fashion"
[but]
offered no substantiation for this claim.

Ten years after his first book, Dr. Menzel offered his third, fourth
and
fifth explanations in his second book, "The World of Flying Saucers":
mountain top mirages, "orographic clouds" and "wave clouds in motion."
In his
third and last UFO book, "The UFO Enigma, The Definitive Explanation of
the
UFO Phenomenon", written in the early 1970's just before Menzel died,
he
again discussed Arnold's sighting and offered his sixth (and last)
explanation: Arnold saw water drops on the window of his aircraft.

The "bottom line" is that neither Hynek nor Menzel proposed reasonable
explanations for Arnold's sighting.

CONCLUSION

The problem faced by the skeptics is that there are sightings for which
the
generally accepted (by skeptics!) prosaic explanations are wrong or at
least
unconvincing. If UFOs were "ordinary science," the proposed
explanations
would have been rigorously analyzed, and probably rejected, rather than

simply accepted. Scientific ufology needs skeptics, but skeptics who
are
capable of recognizing when a sighting simply cannot be explained by
any 
prosaic explanation.
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