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From: Greg Sandow <gsandow@prodigy.net>
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 09:00:44 -0400
Fwd Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 19:13:25 -0400
Subject: Re: Occam's Razor and UFOs


> Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 00:22:38 +0100
> To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
> From: John Rimmer <johnr@magonia.demon.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: UFO UpDate: Re: Occam's Razor and UFOs

> >One more point. Your reasoning requires you, I think, to predict
> >that searches of government archives in formerly Communist
> >countries wouldn't reveal a large number of UFO reports we
> >haven't known about. That prediction would appear to be false.
> >George Knapp was acquired voluminous UFO reports from the former
> >Soviet military.

> Reports collated by the military obviously have a specific
> purpose. How many of these were "sightings" by military
> personnel, and how may were investigations of civilian reports?

All of them, I believe, were sightings by military personnel.
This was an internal Soviet military matter, entirely
unpublicized. Soviet military personnel had UFO sightings of
various kinds, and reports of them were filed with the military
authorities -- who were given a mission to collect them. There
are hundreds of these sighting reports, though of course in
Russian, so I couldn't skim through George's collection of Soviet
military documents to get an independent idea of what they're
like. From his description, the sightings sounded like the kind
we're all familiar with -- lights at night, disks in the daytime,
radar reports, and so forth.

I do think this is an interesting test cases for the theory that
UFO sightings and reports are generated by cultural factors. Here
we have an institution remote, one would think, from the western
media, sensational journalism, widely publicized UFO flaps,
widely publicized UFO books, and a general fascination with space
and the beyond. Yet its members reported the same kinds of UFO
sightings we're familiar with here..

Greg Sandow