02 - Historical UAP Cases

What kinds of features were being reported in high quality historical UAP cases? Were these features comparable to the features described in Caron and Faridi’s 2016 paper about atmospheric phenomena?

Astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek chaired Northwestern University’s astronomy department and acted as consultant for the United States Air Force’s Project Blue Book (History.com, 2018, para. 11). Project Blue Book is described on the website of The National Archives of the United States:

“Project BLUE BOOK, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOS… From 1947 to 1969, a total of 12,618 sightings were reported to Project BLUE BOOK. Of these 701 remain ‘Unidentified.’…

As a result of these investigations and studies and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project BLUE BOOK are: (1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; (2) there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and (3) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ are extraterrestrial vehicles.” (Archives.gov, 2020, paras. 7, 8, 10).

Dr. Hynek wrote the book The UFO Experience - A Scientific Inquiry, published in 1972. In his book he identifies a shared set of commonly reported features in UAP cases that he had investigated for the Air Force and failed to resolve:

“The Nocturnal Lights and Daylight Discs may not be mutually exclusive, but at night almost invariably only the brightness, color, and motion of a light are reported. Rarely is the object noted to which the light is presumably attached (this is purely an assumption; the UFO may be nothing more than the light)” (Hynek, 1972, p. 46).

“Frequently the object is described as having a general fluorescent glow with no specific lights” (Hynek, 1972, p. 77).

“...the object (often objects in pairs) is variously described as oval, disc-shaped, ‘a stunted dill pickle’, and ellipsoid. It generally is shiny or glowing (but almost never described as having distinct point source lights), yellowish, white, or metallic” (Hynek, 1972, p. 92).

“...the reporters are conscious primarily of a luminous object, sometimes very bright… and sometimes merely glowing, like a neon bulb or a luminous dial watch. The shape of the craft seems to be secondary to the luminescence in the perception of the observer, but when a shape is described, it is generally stated to be oval, ‘football shaped’, often with a dome atop it” (Hynek, 1972, p. 125).

“...there have been other cases in which the smallness of the reported object has been surprising” (Hynek, 1972, p.129).

“...the Nocturnal Light and the Daylight Disc. The trajectories and kinematics of the two categories are strikingly similar, perhaps suggesting that Nocturnal Lights are Daylight Discs seen at night and that, therefore, the distinction between the two groups is purely observational” (Hynek, 1972, p. 91).

Computer scientist, astronomer and ufologist author Dr. Jacques Vallee describes six UAP cases in the paper “Estimates of Optical Power Output in Six Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Defined Luminosity Characteristics” published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1998 (Vallee, 1998):

“Case no. 1: …a ‘bright light which was sharply defined and disc-shaped’ or ‘like a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal,’” (Vallee, 1998, p. 346).

“Case no. 2: …a large luminous object arrived slowly and silently… a large ball of light or a disk on edge… the color of a fluorescent tube… It left a whitish trace similar to the glow of a television screen. …hovered in the midst of a faint ‘halo.’ …the object vanished in the center of its glow ‘like a bulb turned off’” (Vallee, 1998, pp. 348, 349).

“Case no. 3: …a red-orange glow appearing through and above the trees… It appeared as a luminous hemisphere, pulsating regularly, ranging from dull red to bright orange, with a period of about two seconds. There was no smoke or flame that would have been characteristic of a fire. …it suddenly brightened to a blinding white… After about four seconds it returned to its red-orange appearance” (Vallee, 1998, pp. 350, 351).

“Case no. 4: …a bright light outside… an intense white source crossing the sky at high speed… the light appeared to be spinning. …a luminous disk moving in the sky… The object was white in the center and bluish-white at the periphery. It was surrounded by an intense green halo… a similar object… leaving a trail, and that a bright disk was seen… a slightly flattened sphere, whose light was similar to that of a very bright neon tube, with a fiery red-orange area underneath…” (Vallee, 1998, pp. 353, 354).

“Case no. 5: …oval, red, surrounded with white ‘flames,’... ‘a large orange ball, very bright’... orange flashes above the pine trees…” (Vallee, 1998, pp. 354, 355).

“Case no. 6: …’one of the best-documented sightings in Europe,’...observed formations of luminous spheres hovering in the sky… characterized by rapid accelerations and abrupt changes of direction” (Vallee, 1998, p. 356).

The reports of atmospheric phenomena found in modern peer-reviewed natural sciences journals appear to be similar to the reports found in historical UAP cases provided by Dr. Hynek and Dr. Vallee.

In an interview with Fate Magazine in 1978 Dr. Vallee describes a difficulty he often encounters when discussing UAP:

“most people see only two ways to look at the problem - either it's all nonsense or we're being visited from outer space” (Vallee, 1978, para. 11).

Dr. Vallee elaborates on his views in his paper “Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects,” published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1990:

“It is the view of the author that research on UFOs need not be restricted to these two alternatives. On the contrary, the accumulated data base exhibits several patterns tending to indicate that UFOs are real, represent a previously unrecognized phenomenon, and that the facts do not support the common concept of ‘space visitors’” (Vallee, 1990, p. 105).

In 2014 Dr. Vallee presented at the CNES-GEIPAN Workshop, and cited Hessdalen, Norway as a location “where the phenomenon manifests often” (Vallee, 2014, 763s).

In 1985 Dr. Hynek visited Hessdalen and stated, “I’m impressed with Hessdalen itself, because Hessdalen is really a UFO laboratory. It’s a place where things are happening and where things can be studied. Hessdalen has had the best equipment and the best periods of observation of the UFO phenomenon of any place in the world. Whatever it turns out to be, it is terribly important” (Hynek, 1985).

“A Long-Term Scientific Survey of the Hessdalen Phenomenon” was written by Dr. Massimo Teodorani and published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2004. Dr. Teodorani’s paper indicates that field study observations at Hessdalen suggest:

“an electrochemical model for the ball-lightning phenomenon” (Teodorani, 2004, p 217).

In 1972 Dr. Hynek wrote that "the UFO may be nothing more than the light” (Hynek, 1972, p. 46).

The article “The Secret Life of J. Allen Hynek”, was authored by John Franch and published in Skeptical Inquirer in 2013:

“in 1952... a wave of UFO sightings prompted Hynek to begin reconsidering his views on the subject. He openly speculated that UFOs might be a new kind of natural phenomenon he dubbed ‘nocturnal meandering lights’” (Franch, 2013, para. 13).

Dr. Hynek argued that lessons should be learned from the historical scientific verification of meteorites:

“As early as 1960, Hynek had begun to argue behind the scenes that UFOs deserved serious scientific scrutiny. ‘I need only remind you,’ he wrote to an Air Force official that year, ‘that less than two centuries ago the entire province of meteorites was kept out of legitimate astronomy because stories of ‘stones that fell from the sky’ were regarded as old wives tales. Had these accounts been given careful attention by the scientists of that day, the productive branch of astronomy which we now know as meteoritics would have been born well over a century earlier than it was’ (Hynek 1960). Hynek would often cite this incident from the history of astronomy to justify himself when he later became an outspoken UFO proponent” (Franch, 2013, para. 15).

What is the philosophy of the modern skeptic community, and what do they think of ball lightning and UAP?

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03 - Skepticism

Skepticism is an attitude of doubt or questioning towards a claim or belief. Britannica defines skepticism as:

“the attitude of doubting knowledge claims set forth in various areas. Skeptics have challenged the adequacy or reliability of these claims by asking what principles they are based upon or what they actually establish. They have questioned whether some such claims really are, as alleged, indubitable or necessarily true, and they have challenged the purported rational grounds of accepted assumptions” (Popkin, n.d., para. 1).

Skepticism involves the withholding of acceptance of claims until there is sufficient evidence to support them. A skeptic does not deny the validity of all claims, but rather seeks to evaluate claims based on evidence and reason.

Skeptical Inquirer magazine published the article “Your Unlearning Report” in 2017. Author Stuart Vyse writes:

“For a skeptic, there is nothing more satisfying than discovering that some previously cherished truth has been overturned by new evidence” (Vyse, 2017).

“The Burden of Skepticism” was written by astronomer Carl Sagan and published in Skeptical Inquirer in 1987:

“If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new… you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones… it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science” (Sagan, 1987, p. 6).

Astronomer Bernard Haisch defines skepticism on his website UFOskeptic.org:

“Skeptic – One who practices the method of suspended judgment, engages in rational and dispassionate reasoning as exemplified by the scientific method, shows willingness to consider alternative explanations without prejudice based on prior beliefs, and who seeks out evidence and carefully scrutinizes its validity” (Haisch, n.d., para. 1).

Brian Dunning is the creator of the podcast Skeptoid. Dunning describes skepticism in the article “What is Skepticism?,” published on Skeptoid.com:

“Skepticism is not simply about ‘debunking’ as is commonly charged. Skepticism is about redirecting attention, influence, and funding away from worthless superstitions and popular misinformation, and toward projects and ideas that are evidenced to be beneficial to humanity and to the world” (Dunning, n.d., para. 4).

In his article “The Flat Earth” in 2015 physics professor Dr. Donald E. Simanek from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania considers past misuse of the skeptic label:

“By 1800, Zetetic societies were flourishing in England. 'Zetetic' means 'seeker' or 'skeptic'. The flat-earthers took this name to symbolize their skepticism toward orthodox scientific views of the shape of the earth. However, their skepticism was limited to science” (Simanek, para. 20).

Skeptic magazine founder Dr. Michael Shermer discusses skepticism in his 2016 book Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye:

“Why some people are, by temperament, more skeptical than others is a subject for another essay, but suffice it to say that the reverse is also true - some folks are, by temperament, habitually inclined to believe rather than to doubt any assertion. Neither extreme is healthy and both lead to reasoning errors.

Perhaps the closest fit of the word ‘skeptic’ to what we equate with a skeptical or scientific attitude is a fourth meaning: ‘a seeker after truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite convictions.’ Skepticism is not ‘seek and ye shall find’ - a classic case of what is called the confirmation bias in cognitive psychology - but ‘seek and keep an open mind’” (Shermer, 2016, pp. 60, 61).

Naturalization

In the context of the sciences, naturalization refers to the process of explaining a phenomenon or a concept in scientific terms and reducing it to natural causes and explanations. This process involves removing supernatural, mystical, or magical explanations and replacing them with scientifically testable explanations.

Skeptics can help demystify and destigmatize certain phenomena that may have been attributed to supernatural or paranormal causes in the past. This promotes a more rational and evidence-based approach to understanding the world around us, and encourages people to be more skeptical of claims that lack empirical evidence or scientific support.

By naturalizing phenomena, skeptics seek to understand and explain the world in a way that is consistent with established scientific principles and does not rely on unverifiable claims. This approach can lead to a better understanding of the natural world and the phenomena within it.

In the 17th century The Royal Society adopted its motto:

“Our origins lie in a 1660 ‘invisible college’ of natural philosophers and physicians. Today we are the UK’s national science academy and a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists. The very first ‘learned society’ meeting on 28 November 1660… from 1663 it would be known as 'The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge'.

The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment” (RoyalSociety.org, n.d., paras. 1, 2, 3).

The founders of modern science adopted “take nobody’s word for it” as their motto: all statements must be verified by an appeal to facts as determined by experiment (RoyalSociety.org, n.d., paras. 1, 2, 3).

David Hume was an 18th century Scottish philosopher of science who wrote about the assessment of unverified claims:

“…no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish… 

I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates should really have happened… 

If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion” (Hume, 1748, as cited in Oxford, 1902, p. 114, 115, 116).

If independent eyewitness testimony was sufficient to scientifically prove the existence of a novel phenomenon then it would be necessary to classify many unverified phenomena as real. Even testimony from events with multiple eyewitnesses has been consistently shown to be unreliable, one example being historic reported sightings of the Virgin Mary:

“Apparitions of the Virgin Mary, inspiring wonder and devotion among millions, have been tracked for centuries[…] From a village in Rwanda to a rock cave in France, sightings of the Virgin Mary have been reported across the globe since A.D. 40. Since 1531, the Roman Catholic Church has investigated these reports and offered approval to multiple sites where bishops believe miracles occurred” (NationalGeographic.com, 2015, para. 1).

A Smithsonianmag.com article from 2017 titled “Scientists Didn’t Believe in Meteorites Until 1803” explains how the question of whether stones could fall from the sky was only resolved when a meteorite happened to break apart over a town in France in 1803:

“The l’Aigle meteorite fall involved more than 3,000 pieces of rock and numerous witnesses, and it changed everything… it was the presence of a townful of witnesses to more than 3,000 stones falling from the sky that finally helped scientists confirm that meteorites came from space” (Eschner, 2017).

NASA scientist James E. Oberg has written about recent mass misperception events related to rare and unusual natural phenomena:

“‘Classic’ satellite reentry fireball swarm mass misinterpretation[…] Majority of posters saw a structured hull with mounted lights, although a significant minority correctly reported separate lights [which some interpreted as a ‘fleet’ of UFO orbs]” (Oberg, 2021, p. 4).

“The unexplained fireball swarm chronicled by this team was, we NOW can demonstrate, caused by the atmospheric reentry of a Soviet satellite’s discarded rocket stage 

• Exactly such heavy vehicles break into many dense fragments that create a formation-flying pattern of bright lights

• About half the witness reports essentially accurately described the grouping of meteor-like individual objects 

• The other half of the reports describe a large flying vehicle with lights and jets arranged on its body

• The actual shape of that perceived body varied enormously, to a startlingly degree of “fill-in” structural details” (Oberg, n.d., p. 8).

People have filmed examples of these debris reentry events, and they’re entirely outside most peoples’ normal frames of reference. A fascinating video of a fireball swarm was posted on Reddit in the r/UFOs subreddit:

r/UFOs Debris?

Skeptic Robert Scheaffer comments on misperception events:

“Here we have… [an] example of extraordinary reports… arising from a… rare phenomenon. Therefore, the existence of extraordinary reports does not suggest the existence of extraordinary objects. It is perfectly possible to get extraordinary reports from ordinary objects” (Scheaffer, 2012).

Occam’s razor is frequently employed as a useful problem-solving maxim. Also known as the principle of parsimony (parsimony, from the Latin ‘parcere’ = to be sparing), the rule goes: the simplest explanation is usually right.

When parsimony serves as a founding proposition for a chain of reasoning, it can lead to the correct conclusion, but sometimes it doesn’t. Skeptics frequently appeal to parsimony in debates with believers, but the irony must be acknowledged: Occam’s razor is named after its alleged creator, a fourteenth century Franciscan friar who used it to justify his belief in miracles based on the high number of eyewitness reports.

This suggests that Occam’s razor’s validity primarily depends on the viewpoint of the person who is applying it.

The article “The Origin and Popular Use of Occam’s Razor” was published on The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) website in 2012:

“While Occam's razor is a useful tool, it has been known to obstruct scientific progress at times. It was used to accept simplistic (and initially incorrect) explanations for meteorites, ball lightning, continental drift, atomic theory, and DNA as the carrier of genetic information. Once more research was done and more evidence brought to light, however, new theories emerged based on the new information” (Borowski, 2012, para. 9).

Science writer Joshua A. Krisch wrote the 2022 LiveScience.com article “What is Occam's razor?”:

“Pedro Domingos [is] professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. When Domingos studied the applicability of Occam's razor to machine learning in the early 2000s, he found that a simpler model is superior to a complex one only if it is just as good at predicting new data. 

As modern machine learning has shown over and over again — in model ensembles, deep learning, et cetera — it's usually the most complex approach that's right, Domingos told Live Science in an email. ‘And that's not surprising; the phenomena we're modeling are almost always more complex than the models, and the closer to their true complexity we can get, the more accurate the models’” (Krisch, 2022, paras. 9, 10).

The value of Occam’s razor is conditional on the user’s grasp of the scientific method. An individual’s capacity to assess the available evidence is the relevant factor, not the maxim, and more complicated explanations may prove to be increasingly plausible as additional verifiable empirical evidence emerges over time.

Ball Lightning Skepticism

Ball lightning skepticism refers to the scientific inquiry and critical examination of claims related to the existence and nature of ball lightning. Skeptics approach ball lightning reports with a degree of caution due to the difficulties associated with collecting empirical evidence of rare and transient natural phenomena, in addition to the potential for misidentification.

In 2006 the article “The Ball Lightning Conundrum” by William D. Stansfield appeared in Dr. Michael Shermer’s Skeptic magazine:

“The existence of ball lightning has been questioned for hundreds of years. Today, the phenomenon is a reality accepted by most scientists… Open-minded skeptics might wish to delay judgment until more is known about it. Even though it is a rare phenomenon compared to common lightning (linear, forked, or streak), sightings of ball lightning have been independently reported for over a century by thousands of people” (Stansfield, 2006, p. 50).

Three years later Skeptic.com reversed course and published “The Case Against Ball Lightning.” In 2009 science writer Steuart Campbell argued:

“…the phenomenon exhibits no consistent characteristics and appears to be all things to all observers… contradictions might be explained if the observers are reporting many different phenomena, none of which are actually BL… anecdotal reports are unreliable…” (Campbell, 2009, paras. 9, 10).

“There is no photograph, film or video recording that can be accepted unreservedly as showing BL. Many forget the null hypothesis, which has explained many postulated phenomena, such as phlogiston and the ether, that turn out to be nonexistent. The null hypothesis may also explains BL, which could be a chimera, a pseudo-phenomenon” (Campbell, 2009, para. 2).

This was an interesting reversal. The reasons why skeptics were hesitant to support the claim that ball lightning is real should be taken seriously and considered in depth so that lessons can be drawn from the past.

By 2009 a significant body of field study and experimental data about ball lightning had been published in peer-reviewed natural science journals, but due to the transient nature of ball lightning it had never been successfully recorded in a natural setting with a sufficiently high resolution optical sensor allowing for precise spectral analysis to conclusively identify the otherwise ambiguous photographic evidence of an unresolved light source.

In 2010 Skeptoid Podcast’s “Episode 194: Ball Lightning” was released and host Brian Dunning pragmatically stated:

“it is fair to say that it's likely that one or more unknown phenomena exist that have triggered eyewitness accounts of hovering balls of light, but there's insufficient theory to support assigning these accounts a positive identification of ball lightning” (Dunning, 2010, para. 16).

In 2014 Skeptoid contributor Mike Weaver wrote a Skeptoid blog post and commented on the significance of the newly available peer-reviewed ball lightning data in the paper by Cen et al. that had been published in Physical Review Letters:

“While video evidence is compelling in many cases, the spectrographic evidence is very compelling in this case… this evidence strongly argues for the reality of the phenomenon” (Weaver, 2014, para. 8).

UAP Skepticism

In the natural sciences paranormal explanations have historically given way to naturalist explanations as researchers have sought to understand the underlying causes and mechanisms of observed phenomena. This shift towards naturalism has been driven by a commitment to empirical evidence, testable hypotheses and the scientific method, which prioritize explanations that can be objectively evaluated.

Scientists have been able to make significant progress in understanding nature by rejecting paranormal explanations and focusing on natural causes. This approach has led to a deeper appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of natural phenomena and underscores the importance of objective evidence-based inquiry as a means of advancing our understanding of the world around us.

The article “The Search for Negative Evidence” was published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine in 2016, and authors McGaha and Nickell argue that skeptics should support the scientific investigation of UAP:

“Nothing said so far means we should not continue to investigate unexplained phenomena, including UFOs. After all, onetime skepticism of fiery stones falling from the skies ultimately gave way to proof of meteorites. Science has nothing to fear from the examination of UFO reports, which, to date, have not been useless after all: We have learned much about… rare phenomena such as ball lightning… and much more. But investigation must go beyond just collecting negative evidence. It must represent a real attempt to solve—that is, to explain—a mystery” (McGaha & Nickell, 2016, para. 24).

Astronomer Bernard Haisch calls for open mindedness about the UAP subject on his website UFOskeptic.org:

“I propose that true skepticism is called for today: neither the gullible acceptance of true belief nor the closed-minded rejection of the scoffer masquerading as the skeptic. One should be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers...

To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another. That is not science” (Haisch, n.d., para. 14).

Lynn E. Catoe prepared “UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography for the Library of Congress.” It was completed in 1969:

”A major objective of this bibliography was to gather material from the physical sciences which related to the UFO phenomenon. The results of this intensive effort were a collection of articles which appeared in scientific and technical journals.

Some discussed UFOs in general terms in light of the limitations of present physical theories, and others explore peripheral areas, such as ball lightning and interstellar travel, which relate to certain theories regarding UFOs” (Catoe, 1969, p. iv).

References in Catoe’s 1969 bibliography include Arthur C. Clarke:

“Clarke, Arthur C. What's up there? Holiday, v. 25, Mar. 1959: 32, 34-37, 39-40. Author describes personal UFO sightings that proved to have conventional explanations. He suggests that many hard core unexplained UFOs may be ‘plasmoids’ -- ball lightning” (Catoe, 1969, p. 111).

“Clarke, Arthur C. Flying saucers. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, V. 12, May 1953: 97-100. In author's opinion, UFOs are not material bodies because: (l) they have been observed to travel at accelerations which no material body could stand, and (2) despite the enormous speeds reported, no sonic booms are ever heard. He considers it possible that UFOs may ‘turn out to be of intelligent extraterrestrial origin’ but ‘if they are artificial, and come from other planets, it is fairly certain they are not spaceships’, they will be something very much more sophisticated" (Catoe, 1969, p. 111).

“Hull, J. Men in Motion: Obituary of the Flying Saucers. The Air Line Pilot, v. 22, Sept. 1953: 13-1<1. Dr. Donald H. Menzel's book, Flying Saucers, is hailed as having solved the flying saucer riddle by proving that natural atmospheric phenomena account for UFO sightings. The author therefore postulates that 1953 should mark ‘the end’ of flying saucers” (Catoe, 1969, p. 133).

“Benedicks, Carl. Theory of the lightning-balls and its application to the atmosphere phenomenon called ‘flying saucers.’ Arkiv for Geofysik, v. 2, no. :i, 1954: 1-11. Author theorizes that reported UFO sightings are in reality ball lightning and gives data supporting his position” (Catoe, 1969, p. 313).

“Klass, Philip J. Many UFOs are identified as Plasmas. Aviation Week & Space Technology, v, 85, Oct, 3, 1966: 54-55, 57, 59, 6!, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73. Evidence is presented in support of theory that high-level UFOs could be created by electric discharge between clouds and between invisible layers of charged dust/ice particles. Occasional daylight sightings of what have been reported as well-structured or silhouetted objects are explainable as plasmas that give the illusion of metal structure, possible due to whirling charged dust or ice particles. Conclusions based on analyses of reports collected by National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena” (Catoe, 1969, p. 117).

“Klass, Philip J. Plasma Theory May Explain Many UFOs. Aviation Week & Science Technology, v. 85, Aug, 22, 1966: 48-50, 55-56, 60-61. Theory is advanced that many low-altitude UFOs are a form of ball lightning (plasma), also called kugelblitz, that is generated by lightning or by corona discharge along high-voltage power lines under appropriate conditions. Idea was prompted by numerous sightings on or near high-tension lines, especially at Exeter, N. H., during 1965, and the similarity of their characteristics to those reported for some kugelblitz sightings” (Catoe, 1969, p. 117).

“Klass, Philip J. UFOs - Identified. New York, Random House. 1968. 290 p. Theory is advanced that most UFOs seem to be ‘natural plasmas of ionized air, sometimes containing charged dust particles or tiny charged ice particles.’ These plasmas may be closely related to St. Elmo's fire and ball lightning. They appear to whirl and float, sometimes maneuvering as though they were controlled by an intelligent being; they can also give off light. Hypothesis is applied to explain reported UFO sightings near Exeter, New Hampshire, and to an alleged saucer landing in Socorro, New Mexico” (Catoe, 1969, p. 118).

“Gaddis, Vincent H. UFO Mystery: fire bolts from space. Saga, v. 34, May 1967: 25-27, 78-80; 82, 84, 86. It is suggested that fireballs and fire falls that seemingly drop from unknown heights as spheroids or masses of illuminated gas or condensed energy regardless of weather conditions might be generated in the Van Allen radiation belts and might account for some of the world's most disastrous fires” (Catoe, 1969, p. 314).

“Menzel, Donald H. and Lyle G, Boyd, The world of flying saucers. Garden City, N, Y. , Doubleday, 1963, 302 p. Authors describe the common types of UFO sighting and analyze some of the representative and most interesting cases in each category. It is concluded that specific UFOs can be accounted for in terms of normal physical phenomena” (Catoe, 1969, p. 122).

Journalist, author and UAP skeptic Jason Colavito appeared on KSL Radio in 2022, and he mentions the ball lightning hypothesis:

“...you even have things like space rocks, meteors for example, and you also have things that science has yet to fully understand. There’s an argument that at least some of the UFOs that people see are really balls of plasma, akin to ball lightning, which is something that’s often been hypothesized but science has yet to fully confirm… you have so many people seeing all sorts of different things, but they take all of those things and put them into one box labeled ‘unknown’... and you get this broad array of potential causes, and only one potential explanation: alien spaceship” (Colavito, 2022, 6m50s).

In 2021 Mick West, science writer and UAP skeptic, wrote:

“…I’m 100% sure that some UFOs are something anomalous. I’m 99.9999% sure that none of them are aliens. But they might be.” (West, 2021)

Mick West appeared on Out of the Blank podcast’s “Episode 1019: Mick West,” released in 2022:

“...could it be weather phenomena? Yeah, some things could be weather phenomena…

There could be types of lights that appear in the sky like lightning, possibly like ball lightning, some kind of plasma effect that occurs in the sky. 

These are all different things, but they can all contribute to what we think of as being the UAP phenomenon” (West, 2022, 44m20s).

James McGaha is a retired USAF pilot, astronomer and skeptic (Centerforinquiry.org, n.d.). In 2012 McGaha presented “Astronomy for Skeptics” at TAM 2012. During his speech McGaha relates a personal anecdote about ball lightning:

“If you fly you see all kinds of things. I'll never forget the first time St. Elmo’s fire engulfed my airplane. If you're religious it would change your attitude, but of course I wasn't but it's very interesting.

But ball lightning… the first time I ever saw ball lightning I was flying in pilot training at night and ball lightning attached itself to my wingman’s boom and then rolled down the boom into the cockpit with him where I thought he was going to die, and that may mean psychologically, not literally from the ball lightning.

It exited the aircraft and we were only flying 600 knots at the time so it can get your attention of course. In the atmosphere you have all kinds of things going on…” (McGaha, 2012, 5059s).

Dr. Avi Loeb, Harvard astronomy professor & Galileo Project founder discusses UAP during an appearance on The Singularity Lab in 2021:

“... if it turns out not to be of extraterrestrial origin, if it turns out to be some atmospheric phenomena that we’ve never anticipated, it will be quite interesting, we will discover something new, so I see it as a win-win proposition. 

I just don’t see how anyone can say anything against such a project. Collecting data, trying to figure it out and clear up the fog. You know, figure out what these unidentified aerial phenomena are all about” (Loeb, 2021a, 1448s).

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04 - Natural Science

Cambridge Dictionary defines natural science as “subjects such as biology, physics, and chemistry in which things that can be seen in nature are studied” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.). Harvard Catalyst describes the natural sciences as “the sciences dealing with processes observable in nature” (Harvard Catalyst, n.d.).

University of the People provides an expanded definition:

“Natural science is based completely around events and phenomena that occur naturally.

Humans have a curiosity as to why certain things occur in nature, and this is where natural science comes in. Researchers and scientists explore these natural events to better understand them and why they took place.

This research can then be used to predict future events or explain why and how things happen in nature so that we can protect or even mimic these processes” (University of the People, 2020, paras. 6, 7, 8).

Empirical Evidence

Empirical evidence refers to information that is obtained through direct observation, measurement, or experimentation. This type of evidence is based on real-world data and facts rather than on subjective opinions or beliefs. It must be obtained through a systematic and controlled process, and it must be open to independent verification and replication.

Verifiability is crucial for the scientific method because it enables independent confirmation of experimental findings. It allows researchers to build upon previous work and establish a shared body of knowledge. Without verifiability, scientific claims should not be considered credible.

Empirical evidence can take many forms, including quantitative data (such as numerical measurements) and qualitative data (such as observations or descriptions). In general this kind of evidence is considered to be more reliable and objective than other types of evidence, as it is based on direct observation and measurement.

Natural Science: Ball Lightning

In 2006 The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics announced that a Russian experiment capable of reliably producing ball lightning-like plasma phenomena had been successfully replicated, confirming that structured plasma phenomena can form under normal atmospheric conditions: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/presse/archiv/05_06_pi.

There are five publications spanning 2008-2020 available on The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics’ website: https://www.ipp.mpg.de/2977926/kugelblitze.

In 2007 Physical Review Letters published “Production of Ball-Lightning-Like Luminous Balls by Electrical Discharges in Silicon” by Dr. Paiva et al. (Paiva et al., 2007). Dr. Gerson S. Paiva is a post-doctoral researcher at the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (CBPF) with a PhD in inorganic and computational chemistry (Escavador.com, para. 1).

The paper by Dr. Paiva et al. describes the results of a ball lightning lab experiment:

“We performed electric arc discharges in pure Si to generate luminous balls with lifetime in the order of seconds and several properties usually reported for natural ball lightning. This simple experiment does not rely on energy sources and excitation mechanisms that are improbable in the natural phenomenon” (Paiva et al., 2007).

In 2010 “Green Fireballs and Ball Lightning” by Dr. Stephen Hughes from the University of Queensland, Australia was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Dr. Hughes proposes a mechanism that could explain some reports of ball lightning, even when there are no thunderstorms occurring:

“On the evening of the 16 May 2006 at least three fireballs were seen by many people in the skies of Queensland, Australia. One of the fireballs was seen passing over the Great Divide about 120 km west of Brisbane, and soon after, a luminous green ball about 30 cm in diameter was seen rolling down the slope of the Great Divide. A detailed description given by a witness indicates that the phenomenon was probably a highly luminous form of ball lightning. A hypothesis presented in this paper is that the passage of the Queensland fireball meteor created an electrically conductive path between the ionosphere and ground, providing energy for the ball lightning phenomenon” (Hughes, 2010, abstract).

"‘A transient electrical link between the ionosphere and ground, created by meteors or some other means, could help to solve the mystery of many UFO sightings,’ Hughes told LiveScience. ‘Since such balls would be very insubstantial they would be able to move and change direction very fast as has often been observed’" (Choi, 2010, para. 7).

“Attempts to Create Ball Lightning With Triggered Lightning” by J. D. Hill et al. was published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics in 2010. The paper describes an experiment that successfully used real lightning to produce a ball lightning-like phenomenon:

Hill, J. D., Uman, M., Stapleton, M., Jordan, D., Chebaro, A., Biagi, C. (2010). Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 72(13). https://sls-us.com/assets/docs/Hill_et_al_2010a.pdf.

In 1994 Dr. David Fryberger (National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University) proposed that “unusual atmospheric lights” (Caron & Faridi, 2016, para. 1) could be a type of ball lightning in “A Model for Ball Lightning,” presented at the International Workshop on the Unidentified Atmospheric Light Phenomena:

“A model for ball lightning (BL) is described… this model could also be a suitable explanation for other luminous phenomena, such as the unidentified atmospheric light phenomena seen at Hessdalen. It is predicted that BL and similar atmospheric luminous phenomena should manifest certain features unique to this model, which would be observable with suitable instrumentation” (Fryberger, 1994, p. 1).

In 2012 the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics published Paiva & Taft’s paper “Cluster Formation in Hessdalen Lights”. The paper’s abstract and highlights:

“In this paper we show a mechanism of light ball cluster formation in… dusty plasmas. Our theoretical model shows that the velocity of ejected light balls by HL cluster is… in a good agreement with the observed velocity of some ejected light balls…

We present a new mechanism involving the charge production during rock fractures. Electric charges from rocks produce dusty plasmas in the atmosphere. Dusty plasmas can interact with electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere” (Paiva & Taft, 2012, abstract).

The paper “Further Insight Into the Nature of Ball-Lightning-Like Atmospheric Pressure Plasmoids” by Friday et al. was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A in 2013. The paper describes the successful replication of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics’ experiment from 2006 and the subsequent study of resultant plasmoids through deography and spectroscopy:

Friday, D., Broughton, P., Lee, T., Schutz, G., Betz, J., Lindsay, C. (2013). Further Insight Into the Nature of Ball-Lightning-Like Atmospheric Pressure Plasmoids. The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Further-insight-into-the-nature-of-atmospheric-Friday-Broughton/18380994ba904863c99172308679e62e4d2d32c6

The researchers found that “The larger capacitance (energy) discharges produce better-formed, larger, and longer-lived plasmoids” (Friday et al., 2013).

In 2010 Dr. Paiva collaborated with Carlton Taft to write “A Hypothetical Dusty Plasma Mechanism of Hessdalen Lights,” published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. In their paper Paiva & Taft provide an explanation for observations of geometric structures in dusty plasmas:

“Hessdalen lights (HL) are unexplained light balls… it is suggested that HL are formed by a cluster of macroscopic Coulomb crystals in a plasma produced by the ionization of air and dust by alpha particles during radon decay in the dusty atmosphere. Several physical properties (oscillation, geometric structure, and light spectrum) observed in HL phenomenon can be explained through the dust plasma model” (Paiva & Taft, 2010, abstract).

In 2021 Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics published Dr. Paiva’s paper “Hessdalen Lights Produced by Electrically Active Inversion Layer” (Paiva, 2021). Dr. Paiva describes possible formation mechanisms:

“unusual, free-floating light balls presenting different shapes and light colors… these ghostly light balls are produced by an electrically active inversion layer above Hessdalen valley during geomagnetic storms…

‘Natural battery’, aerosols and global atmospheric electric circuit may play a crucial role for the electrification of the temperature inversion layers” (Paiva, 2021, abstract).

In 1991 Nature published “Plasma Fireballs Formed by Microwave Interference in Air” by Y. H. Ohtsuki & H. Ofuruton (Nature.com):

Ofuruton, H., Ohtsuki, Y. (1991). Plasma Fireballs Formed by Microwave Interference in Air. Nature. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Plasma-fireballs-formed-by-microwave-interference-Ohtsuki-Ofuruton/e5df7b27833dcdb9dfd7d8c721097a537ec14843

There are a variety of experimental designs that reliably produce ball lightning-like phenomena in labs. Methods include microwaves, electrical discharges in silicon and electrical discharges in water:

• Dikhtyar, V., Jerby, E. (2006). Fireball Ejection from a Molten Hot Spot to Air by Localized Microwaves. Physical Review Letters, 96(4). https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.045002

• Paiva, G. S., Carlos, A., Elder, P., De Vasconcelos, A., Mendes, O. (2007). Production of Ball-Lightning-Like Luminous Balls by Electrical Discharges in Silicon. Physical Review Letters, 98(4). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6448039_Production_of_Ball-Lightning-Like_Luminous_Balls_by_Electrical_Discharges_in_Silicon

• Zhuravlev, M. V., Tovmash, A. V. (2012). Secondary aerosol spherical structures formed by an electric discharge in water. Atmospheric and Oceanic Optics 25(3). https://ur.booksc.eu/book/15019484/7f2a49

Microwaves are frequently referenced:

Ashkenazi, D., Barkay, Z., Jerby, E., Meir, Y. (2013). Observations of Ball-Lightning-Like Plasmoids Ejected from Silicon by Localized Microwaves. Materials. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256484444_Observations_of_Ball-Lightning-Like_Plasmoids_Ejected_from_Silicon_by_Localized_Microwaves

Dikhtyar, V., Einat, M., Jerby, E. (2002). Flying Plasma Disks in Basalt Microwave Furnace. IEEE Conference Record — Abstracts (2002) IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1030655

Stephan, K. (2006). Microwave Generation of Stable Atmospheric-Pressure Fireballs in Air. Physical Review E. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17279961/

Jerby, E., Shoshani, Y. (2019). Localized microwave-heating (LMH) of basalt — Lava, dusty-plasma, and ball-lightning ejection by a “miniature volcano”. Scientific Reports. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6736850/

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05 - FOI: The United Kingdom

Historical records can be valuable resources for studying past events and gaining insight into the decision-making processes of governments and other organizations. By examining these documents, historians, researchers, and other scholars can gain a deeper understanding of the context and motivations behind certain actions, policies, and events. This can provide valuable insights into how and why certain historical events unfolded, and can help inform our understanding of contemporary issues and challenges.

Freedom of Information

Freedom of information laws, also known as access to information laws, provide individuals with the right to access government information. These laws allow citizens to request and obtain records from government agencies and public institutions. The aim of these laws is to promote transparency and accountability in government, enabling citizens to participate more fully in democratic processes.

Studying declassified documents can be beneficial in various ways. It provides an opportunity to learn from the past, especially in terms of government policies, decision-making processes, and historical events. It also allows for a better understanding of how certain policies and events unfolded, and what influenced the decision-making process. Additionally, it can help to shed light on certain historical events that were previously not well understood or were shrouded in secrecy.

The United Kingdom

In 2020 the article “British 'X-Files' of UFO sightings is going public” by science writer Mindy Weisberger was published by Space.com. Weisberger summarizes the United Kingdom’s (UK) interest in UAP:

“The U.K.'s fascination with UFOs spiked around 1950, prompting the MoD to form the Flying Saucer Working Party to address the phenomenon, according to the U.K. National Archives. UFOs in the early 1950s even captured the attention of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent a memo to his air minister in 1952 asking, ‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?’” (Weisberger, 2020, para. 4).

1951: The Unidentified Flying Objects Report

Gerald K. Haines “was an author and chief historian of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who undertook reviews of CIA operations for internal use and also wrote open source books” (IMDB.com). In The CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90, Haines wrote about the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) Unidentified Flying Objects report from 1951:

“…the British also were active in studying the UFO phenomena. An eminent British scientist, R. V. Jones, headed a standing committee created in June 1951 on flying saucers. Jones' and his committee's conclusions on UFOs were similar to those of Agency officials: the sightings were not enemy aircraft but misrepresentations of natural phenomena” (Haines, 1997, para. 16).

The UK MOD’s 1951 report:

“alleged sightings of luminous bodies traveling at high speeds” (UK MOD, 1951, p. 3).

“the descriptions given have included not only flying disc-like objects of the original ‘saucer’ type, but also wingless torpedo or cigar-shaped bodies, spherical or balloon-shaped objects, and luminous phenomena of various types” (UK MOD, 1951, p. 2).

“The reported observations have been almost exclusively visual… in no case has any tangible, material, or objective evidence been submitted” (UK MOD, 1951, p. 2).

“...all the observations reported were due to one or other of the following causes: 1) Astronomical or meteorological phenomena of known types. 2) Mistaken identification of conventional aircraft, balloons, birds, or other normal or natural objects. 3) Optical illusions and psychological delusions. 4) Deliberate hoaxes” (UK MOD, 1951, p. 5).

“The ‘Grudge’ report… The final conclusion reached by the Americans is that all reports of unidentified flying objects may be categorized as either: 1) misinterpretation of various conventional objects (e.g., aircraft, balloons, meteors or meteorites, stars, fireballs); 2) a form of mass hysteria; or 3) deliberate hoaxes” (UK MOD, 1951, p. 3).

2000: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region

Dr. David Clarke is interviewed in the article “The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: In the Debate Over UAP Origins, Scientists Wrestle With Possibilities... and Biases” by Micah Hanks for The Debrief in 2021 (Hanks, 2021):

"Dr. David Clarke is a professor of journalism and folklore who acted as a consultant and spokesman for Britain’s National Archives during the period when the Ministry of Defence (MOD) released its records on UFOs.

…he was particularly intrigued by the conclusions of Project Condign, a secret study of UFOs that the British Government’s Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) conducted between 1997 and 2000.

It resulted in a four-volume, 460-page report on the project’s findings, in which its author concluded, ‘that UAP exist is indisputable… [they] clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile – either manned or unmanned.’

‘When I actually read that, and I actually got hold of that report twenty years ago, it was quite a stunning conclusion,’ Clarke says. ‘So here was the guy, the UFO expert at the Ministry of Defence, he was actually saying ‘‘well, I’ve studied this for thirty years. My conclusion is these things exist.’’’

While Project Condign’s conclusions seemed to affirm the MOD’s views about the existence of UFOs, they did not link such aerial phenomena to theories about an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. ‘They’re not aliens,’ Clarke says of the report’s findings. ‘They’re not extraterrestrials, but they’re some kind of atmospheric plasma…’” (Hanks, 2021).

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region (UAP in the UK ADR) is a top secret MOD report (UK MOD, 2000) that was declassified in 2006 via updated freedom of information laws (BBC News, 2006).

“Codenamed Project Condign, the study was started in December 1996 and completed four years later in March 2000” (Wired, 2006).

The report was commissioned by the MOD to conclusively determine whether decades of UAP investigations had produced any information of value to UK defence leadership (The Guardian, 2006; Wired, 2006).

UAP in the UK ADR was never intended for public distribution. It was the product of a classified internal government study designed to secretly inform Ministry of Defence decision-making:

“Only 11 copies of the report were produced, and they were circulated to a restricted number of high-ranking Royal Air Force and defense ministry officials. It was so secret that not even the Ministry of Defence’s UFO department or the government ministers in charge of the defense ministry were made aware of it” (Wired, 2006).

The MOD went to “extraordinary lengths” to cover up its involvement in investigating UAP (The Guardian, 2006). After years of denial by Defence officials that the report even existed (Wired, 2006), a Freedom of Information Act request by Sheffield Hallam University academic Dr. David Clarke ultimately led to the report’s declassification in 2006 (BBC News, 2006).

A combination of still-classified material held in Defence Intelligence, Section 55 (DI55), the MOD’s intelligence branch whose existence was denied by the UK government until 2006 (The Guardian, 2006), along with “relevant scientific principles” (UK MOD, 2000, p. 5) and “probable underlying science” (UK MOD, 2000, p. 6) were used to arrive at the report’s conclusions about UAP.

Former MOD employee Nick Pope addresses the government’s historical reluctance to comment on the UAP subject in the article “My Time as a UFO Investigator for the Government” for BBC Future in 2016:

"The UK government – and other governments too, I suspect – were indeed hiding information on UFOs, but not about aliens…

Rather, we might be dealing with exotic atmospheric phenomena – and MOD scientific and technical intelligence personnel believed that, if harnessed, these might be able to be militarised.

As the Executive Summary of Project Condign’s final report says: ‘It is recommended that further investigation should be [made] into the applicability of various characteristics of plasmas in novel military applications.’

This is the ultimate dirty secret about UFOs, since a natural phenomenon that could be weaponised would be hugely attractive to the military of any nation" (Pope, 2016).

In the 2020 Space.com article “British 'X-Files' of UFO sightings is going public” Weisberger details the UK MOD’s continued interest in UAP:

“other MoD divisions continued the work of official UFO investigation in the U.K., ushering such efforts into the 21st century, The National Archives reported.

The last UFO report to be published online by the MoD dates to 2009, covering sightings that took place from January through the end of November of that year. These included "a silver disc-shaped light" (reported in January 2009), "up to 20 orange and red glowing lights" (reported in June), "a large bright silver/white ball/sphere" (reported in July) and "three blazing gold orbs in a diagonal line in the sky" (reported in September).

After MoD enacted a policy change on Dec. 1, 2009, the agency no longer recorded or investigated UFO sightings, according to the report” (Weisberger, 2020, paras. 5, 6, 7).

Dr. David Clarke comments on the nature of the UK MOD’s historical interest in UFOs in the article “Do I believe in UFOs?” on his personal blog:

“The file contents make it clear MoD's interest in UFOs was purely from a defence perspective. They simply checked to see if sightings reported to them have any ‘defence significance’ (i.e. are they hijacked aircraft, spy planes, enemy missiles?).

When those possibilities are ruled out, the reports were simply filed away and forgotten - as anyone can now see from the contents of the released files. Unfortunately, MoD are not funded to scrutinise their UFO reports for their scientific content. They say they remain open-minded about the possibility that ET life might exist, only they have never found any evidence to support the theory” (Clarke, n.d., paras. 27, 28).

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06 - FOI: The United States

1949: The FBI’s Protection of Vital Installations Memo

The FBI's Protection of Vital Installations Memo is a document that was issued in 1949 that classified sightings of UAP as a potential threat to national security and instructed FBI agents to report any sightings or incidents related to UAP.

“Night-time sightings have taken the form of lights usually described as brilliant green… Other reports have given the colors as red, white, blue-white, and yellowish green” (FBI, 1949, p. 2).

“Army intelligence has recently said that ‘the matter of ‘Unidentified Aircraft’ or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,’ otherwise known as ‘Flying Discs,’ ‘Flying Saucers,’ and ‘Balls of Fire,’ is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces.’” (FBI, 1949, p. 2).

“...G-2 and O.S.I. are actively engaged in investigating this matter...” (FBI, 1949, p. 4).

“...it was thought that the objects, the nature of which was unknown, might have originated in Russia” (FBI, 1949, p. 1).

This document suggests that by 1949 the FBI was looking into UAP that were described as flying lights of various colours.

1951: The USAF’s Project Twinkle

Project Twinkle was a scientific study conducted by the United States Air Force in 1951 that aimed to investigate reports of UFO sightings and determine their nature and origin.

“...reports on so-called ‘Flying saucers’ and unidentified aerial phenomena, many reports have been received through intelligence channels from persons who have observed what they considered to be unusual light phenomena…

Analysis by various specialists has indicated that many of the incidents involving light phenomena were undoubtedly observations of natural phenomena…

Dr. Kaplan has concluded that the ‘green fireballs’ are natural phenomena” (USAF: Project Twinkle, 1951, p. 21).

“...great interest of the Directorate of Intelligence in such phenomena and the related manifestations…” (USAF: Project Twinkle, 1951, p. 22).

“It is a well known fact that the Russians have been hard at work on several urgent projects to study ‘fireballs’” (USAF: Project Twinkle, 1951, p. 13).

“...suggested that this project not be declassified for a variety of reasons…” (USAF: Project Twinkle, 1951, p. 22).

1952: CIA Washington National Sightings Memos

The CIA's Washington national sightings memos are a series of CIA documents that reported on and analyzed several sightings of UAP over the Washington D.C. area during 1952.

The Computer UFO Network (CUFON) “has been… a pioneer in the electronic media UFO information field” since 1983 (CUFON). CUFON provides a searchable text collection of the declassified CIA memos from the 1952 period on their website:

“The huge 1952 flap, and particularly the "Washington National Sightings" [3] in July 1952, mark this year as notable in UFO history. The Washington National Sightings featured multiple simultaneous radar and coincident ground and airborne visual sightings of UFOs over the White House and the Washington DC restricted airspace” (CUFON, 1996).

The Freedom of Information Act was only first passed in 1966 by President Johnson (History.com, 2018, para. 1). These memos were written fourteen years before this date, at a time when there were no freedom of information access request laws.

The 1952 CIA memos provide an inside look at the CIA’s views about UAP reports at the time:

“The Central Intelligence Agency has reviewed the current situation concerning unidentified flying objects which have caused extensive speculation in the press and have been the subject of concern to Government organizations” (CIA, 1952, p. 47; CUFON Text).

“certain facts which are generally common to all reports. First, is the earnestness of those making reports. These people are certain that they have seen something…” (CIA: 15 August 1952 Memo, 1952, p. 28; CUFON Text).

“Grouped broadly as visual, radar, and combined visual and radar, ATIC has two major visual classes - first, spherical or elliptical objects, usually of bright metallic lustre. Some small (2 or 3 feet across) most estimated at 100 feet diameter and a few 1000 feet wide. There are variants in this group, such as torpedoes, triangulars, pencils, even mattress-shapes. These are all daylight reportings. The second visual group, all night reporting, consists of lights and various luminosities, such as green, flaming-red or blue-white fire balls, moving points of light, and luminous streamers” (CIA, 1952, p. 20; CUFON Text).

“no debris or material evidence has ever been recovered following an unexplained sighting” (CIA: 15 August 1952 Memo, 1952, p. 28; CUFON Text).

A 1952 CIA memo describes the CIA’s perception of the USAF’s internal views about UAP reports:

“The Air Force has primary responsibility for investigating 'flying saucers’… (A) The Air Force denies that ‘flying saucers’ are: (1) U.S. secret weapons (2) Soviet secret weapons (3) Extra-terrestrial visitors (B) It is believed that all sightings of ‘flying saucers’ are: (1) Well known objects… (2) Phenomena of the atmosphere which are at present poorly understood, e.g., refractions and reflections caused by temperature inversions, ionization phenomena, ball lightning, etc.” (CUFON Text).

“...into the public domain, there are four major theories in explanation of the Flying saucer… First, that it is a U.S. secret weapon development… The second theory is that these are a Russian development… The third theory is the man from Mars - space ships - interplanetary travelers… The fourth major theory is that, now held by the Air Force, that the sightings, given adequate data, can be explained on the basis either of: Misinterpretation of known objects, or of as yet little understood natural phenomena… on three of the main theories in explanation of these phenomena, - a US development, a Russian development, and space ships - the evidence either of fact or of logic is so strongly against them that they warrant at present no more than speculative consideration” (CIA, 1952, pp. 22, 23, 24, 25; CUFON Text).

The memos appear to describe the CIA’s preliminary conclusions about UAP at the time:

“cases might have been caused by little understood natural phenomena…

our consultants in Boston… are outstanding in the fields of geophysics, electronics and chemistry.  They emphasized to us that... In these areas occur phenomena which may account for optical or electronic aberrations as well as for things actually seen…  In the field of atmospherics would be the temperature inversions…

This phenomenon exists but the exact mechanics of its cause, its nature and manner of dissipation are not well understood. They listed three categories: atmospherics, ionization, and extra-terrestrial phenomena. They suggested also that products of nuclear fission might have some effect upon these…

Ball lightning, a luminous phenomenon which has been reported for centuries, appears in various colors but its nature is not known...” (CIA: 15 August 1952, 1952, pp. 36, 37, 38; CUFON Text).

“…atmospheric phenomena… our ignorance of the nature and controlling factors… is immense.  Effects of interaction between these natural phenomena and radioactive material in the air can only be conjectured.  The appearance of unusual optical or radar sightings caused by these phenomena is possible. Their occurrences cannot be predicted.

…many of the unexplained sightings of UFOs may be electromagnetic or electrostatic in character. Factors supporting this hypothesis are: Absence of sound, although apparently moving rapidly in the atmosphere. Phenomena are apparently affected by shock waves or electromagnetic radiation of aircraft. Reports of erratic operation of various kinds of instruments in the vicinity of sightings. Sightings of UFOs reported at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, at a time when the background radiation count had risen inexplicably” (CIA: 15 August 1952 Memo, 1952, pp. 38, 39, 40; CUFON Text).

The memos indicate that the CIA identified the Soviet Union as the primary threat given that the CIA appears to have concluded that “many of the unexplained sightings of UFOs” are “natural phenomena” (see previous quote). The CIA highlights areas of defense significance:

“We give Russia the capability of delivering an air attack against us, yet at any given moment now, there may be a dozen official unidentified sightings plus many unofficial. At the moment of attack, how will we, on an instant basis, distinguish hardware from phantom? The answer, of course, is that until far greater knowledge is achieved of the causes of the sightings - the little understood phenomena… we will run the increasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of tabbing the real as false. This is primarily an operational research problem but as long as it exists it will have intelligence implications because of its bearing on air vulnerability” (CIA, 1952, pp. 25, 26, 27; CUFON Text).

“The flying saucer situation contains two elements of danger… The question, therefore, arises as whether or not these sightings: (1) Could be controlled, (2) Could be predicted, and (3) Could be used from a psychological warfare point of view either offensively or defensively” (CIA, 1952, p. 5; CUFON Text).

The memos seem to suggest that the CIA recognized that the “little understood phenomena” posed a threat to national security due to the possibility that they could interfere with air defenses during a Russian attack:

“the problem which is to determine definitely the nature of the various phenomena which are causing these sightings, or to discover means by which these causes and their visual and electronic effects may be immediately identified.  Our consultant panel stated that these solutions would probably be found on the margins or just beyond the frontiers of our present phenomena, with the added possibility that our present dispersal of nuclear waste products might also be a factor.  They recommended that a study group be formed to… Determine the fields of fundamental science which must be investigated in order to reach an understanding of the phenomena involved” (CIA, 1952, p. 5; CUFON Text).

The memos indicate that in the interests of national security the CIA sought to minimize any public interest in the defense implications of UAP:

“It must be mentioned that the outside knowledge of Agency interest in Flying Saucers carries the risk of making the problem more serious in the public mind that it already is, which we and the Air Force agree must be avoided” (CIA, 1952, p. 16; CUFON Text).

“It is recommended that CIA surveillance of subject matter, in coordination with proper authorities of primary operational concern at ATIC, be continued.  It is strongly urged, however, that no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public, in view of their probable alarmist tendencies to accept such interest as ‘confirmatory’ of the soundness of ‘unpublished facts’ in the hands of the U. S.” (CIA, 1952, p. 16; CUFON Text).

The former chief historian of the CIA Gerald K. Haines wrote about the damage this desire for secrecy ultimately did to the CIA’s reputation in The CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90:

“CIA officials wanted knowledge of any Agency interest in the subject of flying saucers carefully restricted… This attitude would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility” (Haines, 1997, para. 21).

1953: The CIA’s Robertson Panel

Senior Astronomer and Director of SETI (TheGuardian.com) Seth Shostak wrote Britannica.com’s article about UFOs and describes the CIA’s 1953 Robertson Panel:

“the number of UFO reports had climbed to a record high. This led the Central Intelligence Agency to prompt the U.S. government to establish an expert panel of scientists to investigate the phenomena. The panel was headed by H.P. Robertson, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology...

The Robertson Panel met for three days in 1953 and interviewed military officers and the head of Project Blue Book. They also reviewed films and photographs of UFOs. Their conclusions were that… there was no obvious security threat, and (3) there was no evidence to support the ETH [extraterrestrial hypothesis]. Parts of the panel’s report were kept classified until 1979, and this long period of secrecy helped fuel suspicions of a government cover-up” (Shostak, para. 3).

CIA chief historian Gerald K. Haines wrote about the Robertson Panel in his book The CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90:

“In January 1953, Chadwell and H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist from the California Institute of Technology, put together a distinguished panel of nonmilitary scientists to study the UFO issue… The charge to the panel was to review the available evidence on UFOs and to consider the possible dangers of the phenomena to US national security…

the panel recommended that the National Security Council debunk UFO reports and institute a policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack of evidence behind UFOs. It suggested using the mass media, advertising, business clubs, schools, and even the Disney corporation to get the message across.

Reporting at the height of McCarthyism, the panel also recommended that such private UFO groups as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Wisconsin be monitored for subversive activities.

CIA officials wanted knowledge of any Agency interest in the subject of flying saucers carefully restricted, noting not only that the Robertson panel report was classified but also that any mention of CIA sponsorship of the panel was forbidden. This attitude would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility” (Haines, 1997, paras. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21).

The Robertson Panel report:

“Dr. Robertson enumerated the evidence available and requested consideration of specific reports and letters be taken by certain individuals present… For example, case histories involving radar or radar and visual sightings were selected for Dr. Alvarez while reports of Green Fireball phenomena, nocturnal lights, and suggested programs of investigation were routed to Dr. Page” (CIA Robertson Panel: Durant Report, 1953, p. 3).

“material evidence of the existence of 'hardware’ obtained from crashed vehicles… The absence of any ‘hardware’ resulting from unexplained U.F.O. sightings lends a ‘will of-the-wisp’ nature to the ATIC problem” (CIA: Robertson Panel, 1953, p. 13).

“Instances of Foo Fighters were cited. These were unexplained phenomena… the balls of light would fly near or with the aircraft and maneuver rapidly. They were believed to be electrostatic (similar to St. Elmo's fire) or electromagnetic phenomena… David T. Griggs (Professor of Geophysics at the University of California at Los Angeles) is believed to have been the most knowledgeable person on this subject... It was their feeling that these phenomena are not beyond the domain of present knowledge of physical science” (CIA: Robertson Panel, 1953, pp. 11, 12).

The Robertson Panel was concerned about public interest in the UAP subject:

“It was the Panel's opinion that some of the Air Force concern over U.F.O.s (notwithstanding Air Defense Command anxiety over fast radar tracks) was probably caused by public pressure… it was possibly dangerous in having a military service foster public concern in ‘nocturnal meandering lights.’ The implication being, since the interested agency was military, that these objects were or might be potential direct threats to national security. Accordingly, the need for deemphasization made itself apparent“ (CIA: Robertson Panel, 1953, p. 12).

“It was agreed by the Panel that no government-sponsored program of optical nation-wide sky patrol is worthwhile at the present time, and that the encouragement of amateur astronomers to undertake such a program might have the adverse effect of over-emphasizing flying saucer stories in the public mind” (CIA Robertson Panel, 1953, p. 21).

The Robertson Panel identifies the Soviets as the primary threat:

“If. U.F.O.s become discredited in reaction to the ‘flying saucer’ scare, or if reporting channels are saturated with false and poorly documented reports, our capability of detecting hostile activity will be reduced” (CIA: Robertson Panel, 1953, p. 18).

“The subject of UFO is not of direct intelligence interest. It is of indirect intelligence interest only insofar as knowledge about the innumerable unsolved mysteries of the universe are of intelligence interest…

The subject of ‘UFO’ is of operational interest for… interference with air defense by intentional enemy jamming or by lack of ability on the part of operating personnel to discriminate between radar anomalies and actual airborne weapons… interference with air defense by overloading communication lines from the air defense observation stations, (c) possibility of a psychological offensive by the enemy timed with respect to an actual attack…” (CIA: Robertson Panel, 1953, p. 1).

The Robertson Panel’s conclusions:

“As a result of its considerations, the Panel concludes: a. That the evidence presented on Unidentified Flying Objects shows no indication that these phenomena constitute a direct physical threat to national security. We firmly believe that there is no residuum of cases which indicates Phenomena which are attributable to foreign artifacts capable of hostile acts, and that there is no evidence that the phenomena indicates a need for the revision of current scientific concepts…

The Panel further concludes: a. That the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic. We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duty constituted authority” (CIA Robertson Panel: Durant Report, 1953, pp. 24, 25).

1968: The USAF’s Project Blue Book Final Report for Minot Air Force Base

The National Archives of the United States describes Project Blue Book on its website:

“On December 17, 1969, the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project BLUE BOOK, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOS.

From 1947 to 1969, a total of 12,618 sightings were reported to Project BLUE BOOK. Of these 701 remain ‘Unidentified.’ The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, whose personnel no longer receive, document or investigate UFO reports.

The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, ‘Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;’ a review of the University of Colorado's report by the National Academy of Sciences; past UFO studies and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the 40s, '50s, and '60s.

As a result of these investigations and studies and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project BLUE BOOK are:(1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat” (Archives.gov, 2020, paras. 7, 8, 9, 10).

Leslie Kean is an independent investigative journalist (PenguinRandomhouse, 2022) who was one of the three authors of the famous 2017 New York Times article about UAP (Cooper et al., 2017). In 2020 Kean was interviewed by John Horgan for Scientific American and references the USAF’s position on UAP from the 1950s when asked about whether she believes that some unidentified objects are alien craft:

“Piloted by aliens? I have an open mind, but no, I don’t believe that and have never said that. But I also will not rule it out. There are many possibilities on the table. I have made the point over and over that we do not know what these objects are, and that’s where things stand. My book concluded that a phenomenon exists, without question, named ‘unidentified flying objects’ by the US Air Force in the 1950s” (Kean, 2020).

Project Blue Book Final Report for Minot Air Force Base, 1968:

“The light… appeared as a self-luminous big ball of white light that seemed to change to a green light, then later to a dim amber color” (USAF Project Blue Book Final Report: Minot AFB, 1968, p. 4).

“The B-52 radar contact and the temporary loss of UHF transmission could be attributed to a plasma similar to ball lightning. The air visual from the B-52 could be… possibly a plasma” (USAF Project Blue Book Final Report: Minot AFB, 1968, p. 1).

“1. Plasmas can affect electrical equipment and can also be painted on radar. 2. Plasmas, such as ball lightning, can occur in clear weather as well as stormy weather. 3. Plasmas, such as ball lightning, can be seen visually and appear as a fiery ball. The most common colors are red, orange, yellow, blue and white” (USAF Project Blue Book Final Report: Minot AFB, 1968, p. 8).

Researcher Thomas Tulien compiled additional documentary evidence related to the Project Blue Book Final Report for Minot Air Force Base, 1968 on his website MinotB52UFO.com:

“a large glowing object… an unusual light…an ‘object which looked to him as the sun’... When the object reached the ground the light dimmed and extinguished. …a very large, brightly illuminated aerial object that would alternate colors from brilliant white to amber and green, with an ability to hover, accelerate rapidly and abruptly change direction” (Tulien, n.d., para. 6).

“...some type of ionized air plasma similar to ball lightning… most probably a plasma of the ball-lightning class. Plasmas of this type will paint on radar and also affect some electronic equipment at certain frequencies” (Tulien, n.d., paras. 2, 4).

1969: The University of Colorado & USAF’s Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, aka The Condon Report

Astronomer and science writer David Darling describes The Condon Report in his Encyclopedia of Science:

“The Condon Report was a final 1,465-page document… headed by Edward Condon [looking] into the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects based primarily on data collected by Project Blue Book. It was delivered to the US Air Force in November 1968 and released in January 1969” (Darling, para. 43).

Solar physicist Dr. Martin D. Altschuler wrote Chapter 7: Atmospheric Electricity and Plasma Interpretations of UFOs in the Condon Report:

“Not long ago, considerable scientific discussion ensued on the question of whether ball lightning is a real phenomenon… Today most researchers believe that Kugelblitz is a genuine electrical effect” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1166).

“In view of the numerous manifestations of atmospheric electricity, it is reasonable to try to determine whether or not some luminescent UFOs are indicative of yet another electrical phenomenon of nature. Much research has been done theoretically, in the laboratory, and in the field that bears on the problems of atmospheric electricity and the plasma state of matter. Here we emphasize the more unusual (and often speculative) aspects of these subjects and their possible correlation with descriptions of UFO behavior” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1152).

“Among the most mysterious manifestations of atmospheric electricity is the phenomenon of ball lightning or Kugelblitz. A glowing ball either appears after a cloud-to-ground lightning flash and remains near the ground, or is first seen in midair, descending from a cloud or arising from no obvious cause, thereafter remaining aloft until it vanishes” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1164).

“The median lifetime of ball lightning is roughly four seconds, with 10% reporting over 30 seconds. Determination of lifetime is difficult because subjective time during an exciting event is often in error, and few observers see a ball from the time it is created until the time it disappears” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1165).

“Physiological effects of large electric fields are frequently reported by mountaineers. Many of these effects are also occasionally reported in connection with UFOs” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1182).

“Another plasma physicist noted that a plasma explanation of certain UFO reports would require an energy density large enough to cause an explosive decay. Atmospheric physicists, however, remarked that several reports of ball lightning do indicate unusually high energy densities.” (Altschuler, 1969, p. 1194).

“Collisions with aircraft have caused verified damage, indicating that ball lightning is not restricted to ground level… One survey lists three complexions of ball lightning: a solid appearance with a dull or reflecting surface, or a solid core within a translucent envelope, a rotating structure, suggestive of internal motions, a structure with a burning appearance. The last type seems most common. About 1/3 of the witnesses detect internal motions or rotation of the ball itself, although this may depend on the distance of the observer” (Altschuler,  1969, p. 1165).

1969: The National Academy of Sciences’ Review of the University of Colorado Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by a Panel of the National Academy of Sciences on the Condon Committee

The National Academy of Sciences' Review of the University of Colorado Report on Unidentified Flying Objects was a critical evaluation conducted in 1969 by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences on the scientific methods and conclusions of the Condon Committee's study of UAP:

“…there are important areas of… atmospheric electricity in which present knowledge is quite incomplete. These topics came to our attention in connection with the interpretation of some UFO reports…

Research efforts are being carried out in these areas by the Department of Defense… [and] the National Aeronautics and Space Administration…” (NAS Review of the Condon Report, 1969, pp. 6, 7).

An Analysis of Ball Lightning-Aircraft Incidents by Keul et al. was presented at the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, and it states that ball lightning “is seen as an atmospheric electrical phenomenon” (Keul et al., 2009).

2003: The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Ball Lightning Study

Department of Defence contractor Professor Eric W. Davis (Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics & Engineering Research at Baylor University) completed Ball Lightning Study for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFMC) in 2003:

Davis, E. (2003). Ball Lightning Study. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFMC). https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/usaf/AFRL_2002-0039_Ball_Lightning_Study.pdf

Ball Lightning Study was acquired by archivist John Greenewald Jr. via FOIA request and published on his FOIA archive website The Black Vault in 2019 (TheBlackVault.com, 2019):

“Ball lightning is a very rare and very complex atmospheric phenomenon… Throughout history ball lightning has been believed by the thousands of eyewitnesses (or victims!) to be anything ranging from evil spirits, angelic manifestations, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)... or atmospheric (weather-related) electrical manifestations” (Davis, 2003, Preface).

“This author has spent nearly six years exploring anomalous atmospheric (and other) phenomena while collaborating with many fellow explorers from academia, U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and aerospace/defense industry” (Davis, 2003, Preface).

“Ball lightning (BL) is a rare but multifaceted atmospheric phenomenon. It has attracted the attention of people and scientists for generations. The phenomenon has generally been known for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in recorded human history. Historical explanations for what BL is vary. Such explanations generally run the gamut from evil spirits, angelic manifestations, unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or psychic-elementals to balls of exotic matter, meteors/fireballs, optical illusions, ignis fatuus (will-o’-the-wisp) or atmospheric (weather-related) electrical manifestations” (Davis, 2003, p. 1).

“Types of BL: Group A (BL events that follow a lightning flash to the ground) and Group B (BL events seen in midair and not connected to a lightning flash)” (Davis, 2003, p. 3).

“…there may be several independent (non-prosaic) mechanisms that are responsible for the generation of BL reports… …two models that are distinguished by how the BL model is powered: Chemical or gas burner models… [and] Electrical models... These models are then either (Uman, 1969, 1984, 1986): Self-powered… [or] Externally-powered…” (Davis, 2003, pp. 6, 7).

Also in 2003 but in a public setting Dr. Eric Davis similarly discussed the role that UAP have played in human history with co-author Dr. Jacques Vallee in the paper “Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: a 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena”:

“the similarity is striking between contemporary events reported as UFO close encounters and the more traditional observations of entities described as ‘angels,’ elves and fairies, or deities” (Vallee & Davis, 2003, pp. 223, 224).

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07 - Aerial Phenomena

Evidence for UAP has historically come primarily by way of eyewitness reports. Tens of thousands of UAP eyewitness reports have been compiled by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) (NUFORC.org, 2019).

The article “The Most Common Words Used to Describe UFOs From Reported Sightings” was written by Brit McGinnis and published by Stacker.com in 2019 (McGinnis, 2019).  In the article, McGinnis reviews NUFORC report data and identifies UAP eyewitness key word usage rates. The most frequently reported term used to describe a reported UAP is “Light,”, with 24,343 uses. In distant second place with 12,456 uses is “Circle” (McGinnis, 2019).

Eyewitness reports of unidentified aerial phenomena date back hundreds of years. More recently serious scientific investigations into ball lightning have occurred, with researchers attempting to better understand its origins and properties.

Eyewitness Reports

Eyewitness reports can be helpful in quantifying new natural phenomena to some extent, but they must be approached with caution. While eyewitness accounts can provide valuable information about the appearance, behavior, and context of a natural phenomenon, they are subject to a number of biases and limitations and cannot be counted on as a foundation for verifiability.

While eyewitness reports can be a useful starting point for investigating a new natural phenomenon, they should be considered alongside other types of data, such as quantitative measurements and scientific observations. It is important to use multiple sources of information to confirm and validate any findings or conclusions about a new natural phenomenon, and to employ rigorous scientific methods to minimize bias and ensure accuracy.

Dr. Alexander Keul, Associate Professor of Psychology at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (Plus.ac.at, 2022), co-wrote the paper “An Analysis of Ball Lightning-Aircraft Incidents”, presented at the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009. Dr. Keul reports that in aircraft incidents involving observations of ball lightning the object’s size is “sometimes over 1 m” (Keul et al., 2009), and that in 10% of events “there was no thunderstorm” (Keul et al., 2009).

Dr. Keul recently wrote an overview of historical observations of ball lightning-like atmospheric phenomena that was published in History of Geo- and Space Sciences in 2021:

Keul, A. (2021). A Brief History of Ball Lightning Observations by Scientists and Trained Professionals. History of Geo- and Space Sciences. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-brief-history-of-ball-lightning-observations-by-Keul/0bdd9cffda0a73434540ea37827501f16ecfc784

Keul’s paper describes eyewitness reports of atmospheric phenomena observed by professional scientists. These reports include an aeronautical meteorologist seeing a discus-shaped object that was 1 to 3 meters (3.3 to 9.8 feet) across (Keul, 2021, p. 47), and a spherical object seen by a space scientist estimated to be between 4 and 8 meters (13.1 to 26.2 feet) across (Keul, 2021, p. 47).

The chemical encyclopedia Chemeurope describes a historic report from 1638 of a 2.44 meter (8 feet) wide ball lightning-like object (Chemeurope.com, para. 6), cited to Devon Notes and Queries, “a quarterly journal devoted to the local history biographies and antiquities of the county of Devon” (Dymocks Books, 2010).

University of Washington Research Engineer William J. Beaty (Scholar.google.com, 2022) maintains an online database of hundreds of ball lightning reports (Amasci.com, 2012). Eyewitnesses describe a wide variety of characteristics:

• “...across the lake a bright white sphere about the size of a large grapefruit or softball… suddenly the bright white sphere descended in a 45 degree angle and went underwater about 10 ft. …the sphere lit up an area about 12 ft in diameter under the water. …it suddenly shot out of the water about 50 ft from the neighbor’s boat dock in a 45 degree angle and shot back the same direction from which it came…” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “A bright orange ball appeared in front of me like a small sun, looked the size of a basketball” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “a ball of oscillating light of the full color spectrum” (Amasci.com, 1999).

• “the orange ball was 1 meter long by a half a meter wide and the red one was 2 foot by 2 foot” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “a blue ball of fire about twice the size of a basketball with a small trailing tail of the same color” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “a large ball of very bright flame like orange / crimson colouring, with apparent very fine hairs/fingers of flame coming from the edges” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “about the size of a beach ball with red outer ring with a transparent blueish glow with smaller balls held within looking like atoms floating inside” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “It appeared to be spinning and did not appear to illuminate the surrounding area… I could see brighter orange/white filaments, or strings, travelling randomly throughout the edge… Although the sphere was orange it had a lot of black spots, more like ‘s’ curved shapes, which appeared to move in an extremely convoluted spiral pattern… the very central part of the circle had a black spot, also ‘s’ shaped” (VIC, 2008).

• “…pointed at both ends, snake like shapes going up the sides of the torus at a 45 degree angle, going over the top of the torus and going down the inside” (Knapstad, 2012).

• “inside the ball was like molten metal which moved. It seemed to contain air bubbles which separated and joined freely” (Downs, 2007).

• “about the size of a beach ball with red outer ring with a transparent blueish glow with smaller balls held within looking like atoms floating inside” (Richie, 2009).

Large phenomena are also reported on University of Washington Research Engineer William J. Beaty’s ball lightning report database:

• “a blue ball of light the size of a small car was following my truck” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “It was moving slowly, a ball, perhaps 6 m in diameter” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “this fire ball (about 15 foot wide) had no heat” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “It was flat on top and had crisp, scalloped edges. It was oscillating across the road and was about the width of the road” (Amasci.com, 1999).

• “a 5' x 5' sphere of orange blue light” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “The orb was as big as the car” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “the size of the 'ball' that passed over on my right could have been around 5 to 7 ft diameter” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “an approximately 4 or 5 foot blueish-whitish sphere slowly spinning” (Amasci.com, 2012).

• “The size was about the same as a small sedan or Volkswagen beetle.” (Amasci.com, 2012).

Many ball lightning reports appear to be indistinguishable from many UAP reports.

08 - Recent Discoveries

A review of the modern science related to atmospheric phenomena may provide valuable insights into the latest discoveries in the natural science community.

Maintaining an open mind to recent discoveries in the natural sciences is crucial for scientific progress and advancement. By being receptive to new ideas and evidence, scientists can identify new avenues of research. This can lead to breakthrough discoveries, technological innovations, and a deeper understanding of the natural world.

Atmospheric Science Review

A variety of rare and unusual atmospheric phenomena have been discovered over the past few decades (Albany.edu, 2013, para. 1).

Stanford University News Service issued a press release about red sprites in 1995:

“These strange and beautiful phenomena… have been discovered by scientists only in the last decade and are currently the subject of intense scientific investigation and speculation around the world, including Stanford.

‘The research is being driven by a scientific desire to understand these mysterious, spectacular occurrences that were just recently discovered. We thought we knew the basic physics of lightning and now we find we don't,’ said Umran S. Inan, professor of electrical engineering and an atmospheric physicist at Stanford's STARLAB” (Sangree, 1995, paras. 3, 4, 5).

The 2020 WorldAtlas.com article “Is Red Lightning Real?” by Antonia Cirjak describes some challenges related to the scientific verification of unusual phenomena:

“it is not easy to observe or film. There are special conditions that need to be present to film them, such as clear view and unlit sky. Johann Georg Estor, a German theorist of law is credited as the person who made the earliest report of the red lightning in the year 1730. The first photographic evidence was made much later in the year 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota. They captured the image by accident, using a video camera, and ever since then, the red lightning has been extensively researched” (Cirjak, 2020, para. 1).

Blue jets are described in the 2021 BBC Newsround feature “NASA: Blue Jet Space Lightning Spotted by Scientists From the ISS”:

“What we can see from the surface of our planet is only the beginning, the most powerful activity occurs high above the surface, in Earth's upper atmosphere. There are some pretty weird goings on up there and a Nasa mission that aims to learn more about them” (BBC.co.uk, 2021, paras. 3, 4).

“Blue jets are a burst of electrical lightning which travel upwards from the clouds into the Earth's atmosphere. And it's not the only phenomenon that experts are looking out for, known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), these unusual features were first spotted by accident in 1989.” (BBC.co.uk, 2021, paras. 10, 11).

A Forbes.com article provides additional information about blue jets:

“First reported way back in 1886, [blue jets] weren't photographed until 1989” (Siegel, 2021, para. 9).

“[Blue jets] aren't from up-going lightning, but cold plasma discharges occurring above terrestrial lightning strikes” (Siegel, 2021, para. 13).

In 2005 New Scientist reported on the discovery of a new kind of luminous atmospheric phenomenon referred to as a “TIGER” in the article “Columbia Crew Saw New Atmospheric Phenomenon”:

“A new atmospheric phenomenon was caught on video by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia just days before the shuttle broke apart... Astronauts relayed the video to NASA in real-time…

Yoav Yair of the Open University in Ra’anana, Israel, and colleagues spent more than a year analysing the video, which was originally taken to study atmospheric dust. But a single frame of the video – representing just 33 milliseconds – shows a mysterious reddish glow in the night sky on 20 January 2003. “I’m not sure what we saw,” says Yair. “I just know it wasn’t something we were used to seeing – it was something extraordinary.”

The glow… does not appear to be linked with thunderstorms. That contrasts sharply with other ephemeral events at similar altitudes, which glimmer into being when electrical current travels upward from lightning clouds…” (Mckee, 2005, paras. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (alternatively known as “dark lightning”) have only been known to exist for a few decades:

“As the highest-energy electromagnetic radiation in the Universe, γ-rays… are often created by surges of electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. But in the 1980s and 1990s, physicists discovered that clouds on Earth also emit invisible γ-rays: as short, intense millisecond bursts and as weaker, long-lingering glows. Somehow, certain storms accelerate billions of electrons to close to the speed of light to produce these γ-rays. ‘The mystery is how this can occur in Earth’s atmosphere,’ says Wada, a physicist with the Extreme Natural Phenomena RIKEN Hakubi Research Team in Saitama, Japan” (Nature.com, 2021, para. 2).

“Scientists have just begun to understand a strange phenomenon known simply as ‘dark lightning’… a release of high-energy gamma radiation—sources include supernovae and supermassive black holes—that is completely invisible to the human eye. Attempts to understand this mystery haven’t turned out so well, because, like normal lightning, the bolts are fleeting... only lasting a few thousandths of a second. On Earth, it’s believed that they occur naturally, and can be produced within the upper atmosphere” (Futurism.com, 2013, paras. 1, 2).

“There are two known kinds of gamma-ray phenomena associated with thunderclouds: gamma-ray glows, weak emissions which last about a minute, and short-lived terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs), which occur as lightning strikes and are much more intense than gamma-ray glows. Both occur in regions of thunderclouds sandwiched between layers of varying charge. The charged regions accelerate electrons to near the speed of light. At these speeds, referred to as relativistic, electrons that stray very close to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the air slow down a little and emit a telltale gamma ray. This is called bremsstrahlung radiation” (ScienceDaily.com, 2019, para. 4).

“…capturing these intense rays is not easy. Although satellites have spotted thousands of millisecond terrestrial γ-ray flashes (TGFs), those measurements can’t provide a close-enough view to reveal in detail the mechanism that produces them. Studying TGFs from Earth has previously proved difficult, and scientists have observed the longer-lasting glows at only a few locations” (Nature.com, 2021, para. 4).

The BBC Newsround feature “NASA Shares Photos of Steve the Amazing Space Phenomenon” was published in 2020. It discusses the discovery of novel atmospheric phenomena as recently as 2015:

“Since 2015 Nasa has been studying the purple light in the sky. It's proper name is Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement - or Steve for short - and it is sometimes seen during displays of the Aurora Borealis. Astronomers are trying to better understand the phenomenon” (BBC.co.uk, 2020, paras. 2, 3, 4).

“Steve is not a normal aurora. It may not be an aurora at all, according to some. Nasa said: ‘What's creating these long glowing streaks in the sky? No one is sure. These luminous light-purple sky ribbons may resemble regular auroras, but recent research reveals significant differences’” (BBC.co.uk, 2020, paras. 5, 6, 7).

As recently as 2021 novel atmospheric plasma phenomena continue to be discovered. Science writer Joshua Hawkins wrote “Stunning photos show space hurricanes swirling above the North Pole” for tech news website BGR.com in 2022:

Last year, scientists published a paper on the discovery of what they call “space hurricanes.” These hurricanes are nothing more than auroras like the Northern Lights; however, they often feature massive, outstretched arms similar to what you’d see in a normal hurricane’s design.

…these particular events have eluded us for so long, as they tend to happen in places where nobody is looking and when nobody is expecting anything to happen. So, if we want to capture more of these beautiful events on camera, we’ll need to pay better attention (Hawkins, 2022, paras. 1, 5).

The Role of Chance

Chance has played a significant role in the discovery of novel natural phenomena throughout history. A variety of natural phenomena that are accepted without question in the modern scientific world first went through a gradual shift from outright rejection to conclusive verification based on new empirical evidence becoming available over time.

The Royal Society established verification as the necessary standard of evidence in science. Oakton Community College provides a summation of the challenges encountered when applying the scientific method to earth sciences:

“The classic scientific method where a convenient laboratory experiment may be devised and observed often cannot be done in the earth sciences. This is because most of earth and geological phenomena are too big (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) or too slow (mountain building, climate change) to be observed easily or replicated; the earth itself is the ‘laboratory’” (Oakton, 2003, para. 4).

Sometimes scientists stumble upon unexpected observations or anomalous data that defy existing theories, leading to the discovery of novel phenomena. Technological advancements and improvements in observational tools have allowed scientists to detect and study previously unseen natural phenomena, further expanding our understanding of the natural world. Serendipitous discoveries can occur when scientists are investigating one phenomenon and unexpectedly find evidence of another, entirely different phenomenon that had been previously reported by eyewitnesses, sometimes for decades or even centuries:

• Meteorites: “In the 18th century, the French Academy of Science denied that stones could fall from the heavens, and rejected the mass of witnesses' testimony as superstitious nonsense” (Dolan, paras. 5, 6), until “The l’Aigle meteorite fall involved more than 3,000 pieces of rock and numerous witnesses, and it changed everything… it was the presence of a townful of witnesses to more than 3,000 stones falling from the sky that finally helped scientists confirm that meteorites came from space” (Eschner, 2017).

• Red sprites: “Johann Georg Estor, a German theorist of law is credited as the person who made the earliest report of the red lightning in the year 1730. The first photographic evidence was made much later in the year 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota. They captured the image by accident, using a video camera, and ever since then, the red lightning has been extensively researched” (Cirjak, 2020, para. 1).

• Rogue waves: “Rogue waves and sprites were ‘discovered’ by accident, detected by recording devices set up for other purposes” (Ruch, 2019).

• Blue jets: “First reported way back in 1886, [blue jets] weren't photographed until 1989” (Forbes, 2021, para. 9).

These kinds of natural phenomena share a set of commonalities:

1. The rare and elusive nature of many natural phenomena make them difficult to scientifically study;

2. Some natural phenomena are only conclusively proven to exist after chance events result in a one-off highly credible observation;

3. Eyewitness reports later shown to be largely accurate are disbelieved, often on reasonable grounds, for decades or even centuries.

This historical pattern in the natural sciences suggests that it’s possible that a similar effect may be occurring with respect to the modern UAP subject. Philosopher of science Thomas Goudge comments:

“...most physical scientists were initially reluctant to admit now accepted theories of meteorites, fossils, the circulation of the blood, bacteria, and in our times, ball lightning, into the area of respectable science…

the present establishment view… [is] that UFO phenomena are either not really scientific data at all (or at any rate not data for physics) or else are nothing but misperceptions of familiar objects, events, etc. To take this approach is surely to reject a necessary condition of scientific advance’” (Goudge, as cited in Hynek, 1972, p. 23).

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09 - Theory of Learning

Theory of learning is the study of how individuals acquire, retain, and apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws upon psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, education, and other related disciplines to develop models and explanations of how learning occurs, as well as the factors that facilitate or hinder effective learning. It has important implications for education, training, and human development more broadly.

Goddard Institute for Space Studies astronomer Richard Stothers wrote the paper “Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity,” published in The Classical Journal in 2007:

“A combined historical and scientific approach is applied to ancient reports of what might today be called unidentified flying objects (UFOs)… the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be due to, has not changed much over two millennia” (Stothers, 2007, Abstract).

University of California, Irvine anthropology professor William J. Dewan explains the value of adopting an interdisciplinary approach when academically studying the UFO subject in “‘A Saucerful of Secrets’: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of UFO Experiences,” published in The Journal of American Folklore in 2006:

“[A] supernatural experience widely reported in the United States-the sightings of anomalous lights, including so-called ‘ghost lights’, orbs, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and other labels attached to the observance of unexplained lights or aerial phenomena.

The use of folklore theory, an experience-centered approach, and cognitive anthropology provides an enriched perspective on how UFO experiences are perceived, interpreted, and incorporated into broader traditions… Taken together, these approaches suggest that so-called UFO encounters are often based on real, sometimes bizarre experiences” (Dewan, 2006, Abstract).

In astronomer and science writer David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Science he describes the effect that “outlandish tales” have had on the historical scientific investigation of UAP:

“George Adamski… was a worker at a hamburger stand… who claimed to have made contact with flying saucers and their occupants. In his best-selling books, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) and Inside the Spaceships (1955), he wrote about encounters in the desert nearby with telepathic Venusians. The aliens were here because they were concerned about radiation from atomic explosions, too much of which, they said, would destroy the Earth.

Such outlandish tales, though compelling to a lay-readership keen for what seemed like inside information about UFOs and sensitized to the issue of atomic weapons, helped further discourage scientists from becoming involved with the UFO controversy.

As the historian Steven Dick has pointed out: ‘Scientists seemed as unwilling to distinguish a potentially credible UFO phenomenon from Adamski's claims as the public was to separate scientific belief in extraterrestrials from UFOs.’ The increasing vacuum left by science was filled by a variety of individuals and largely amateur organizations who investigated UFOs from the standpoint of favoring the extraterrestrial hypothesis” (Darling, paras. 9, 10).

A 2020 History.com article by Greg Daugherty about George Adamski provides additional context:

“Since his death, Adamski’s critics have tended to portray him as a harmless crackpot, small-time con artist or perhaps a bit of both. Others, like J. Allen Hynek, took a somewhat dimmer view, accusing Adamski and others like him, of discrediting the entire field of UFO research. Author Arthur C. Clarke had made the same point years earlier, saying that Adamski and coauthor Leslie did “a real disservice by obscuring the truth and scaring away serious researchers from a field that may be of great importance” (Daugherty, 2020, paras. 30, 31, 32).

Smithsonian Magazine republished Rachel E. Gross’s article “How to Talk With Evangelicals About Evolution” from Undark Magazine on Smithsonianmag.com. Gross contemplates the implications of scientific theory threatening preexisting beliefs:

“If you aren’t caught on one side of the evolution debates, it can be hard to grasp what all the fuss is about. Here’s the short version: Charles Darwin’s crime wasn’t disproving God. Rather, the evolutionary theory he espoused in ‘On the Origin of Species’ rendered God unnecessary. Darwin provided an explanation for life’s origins — and, more problematically, the origins of humanity — that didn’t require a creator.

What would Darwin think if he could see the evolution wars rage today? If he knew that, year after year, national polls find one-third of Americans believe that humans have always existed in their current form? (In many religious groups, that number is far higher)” (Gross, 2018, para. 9).

Gross details evidence-based strategies to improve communication between conflicting groups:

“Those who research the topic call this paradigm the ‘conflict mode’ because it pits religion and science against each other, with little room for discussion. And researchers are starting to realize that it does little to illuminate the science of evolution for those who need it most.

‘Acceptance is my goal,’ says Jamie Jensen, an associate professor who teaches undergraduate biology at Brigham Young University. Nearly all Jensen’s students identify as Mormon. ‘By the end of Biology 101, they can answer all the questions really well, but they don’t believe a word I say,’ she says. ‘If they don’t accept it as being real, then they’re not willing to make important decisions based on evolution — like whether or not to vaccinate their child or give them antibiotics’” (Gross, 2018, para. 11).

“In 2017, biology education researchers at Arizona State University tested whether teaching strategies could lower this sense of conflict. For a study, they added two-week modules in biology classes to directly address students’ philosophical roadblocks and brought in contemporary scientists with religious backgrounds. By the end of the class, the authors noted in a paper, students who perceived a conflict were reduced by half, leading them to conclude that discussing the compatibility of religion and evolution ‘can have a positive impact on students that may extend beyond the classroom’” (Gross, 2018, para. 12).

On skeptic Mick West’s YouTube show Escaping the Rabbit Hole, skeptic Jason Colavito discusses Dr. Hynek and Dr. Vallee’s supernatural explanations for UFO eyewitness reports:

“What they saw in the connection was that… [UFOs] were also supernatural because they existed beyond the material realm. They weren’t physical objects that had mass and matter, and yet they were having a physical impact on the environment around them. 

So in the mind of poltergeist researchers, the poltergeists were both supernatural and had a material impact on this plane, and so what Hynek and Vallee were interested in is the question of whether the poltergeist phenomenon could be said to be parallel to or even part of UFO phenomena, so that UFOs were somehow or another these immaterial objects that were coming from either another plane or another dimension, popping into ours, having a physical interaction with ours while not themselves being physical, and then sort of dissolving back where they came from” (Colavito, 2022, 673s).

Dr. Hynek describes the apparent “impossibility” of UFO phenomena:

“At present the average physicist dismisses the entire [UFO] phenomenon as impossible. He is entirely correct to do so, in his frame of reference, for from the standpoint of our present knowledge of the way nature works, ‘such things just can’t happen.’. But ‘stones couldn’t fall from the sky’, either, and ‘ball lightning is sheer nonsense’” (Hynek, 1972, pp. 145, 146).

University of Bristol scientists David J. Turner submitted a new theory of ball lightning to the Royal Society in 1993 (Chown, 1993, para. 4). In “The Missing Science of Ball Lightning,” published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2003, Turner addresses the accepted logical limits placed on the study of ball lightning:

“One of the main problems in understanding ball lightning is that its properties, taken together, seem to be inconsistent with the laws of physics. This long-standing problem is completely eliminated once it is accepted that a plasma is both a phenomenon of physics and a mixture of chemicals… This may explain why ball lightning usually forms unexpectedly and unreproducibly… Phenomena result which are thermodynamically inevitable but, at first sight, totally unexpected. These can explain qualitatively all the seemingly impossible behaviour“ (Turner, 2003, Abstract).

The paper “Deep Weird: High Strangeness, Boggle Thresholds and Damned Data in Academic Research on Extraordinary Experience” by University of Wales Trinity Saint David anthropologist Dr. Jack Hunter was published in The Journal for the Study of Religious Experience in 2021:

“The historian of psychical research Renée Haynes (1906–1994), who coined the term ‘Boggle Threshold’ to refer to the point at which an extraordinary experience or phenomenon is deemed so outlandish and unlikely that it is entirely dismissed by the researcher. 

She explains that: Individual boggle thresholds will vary […] with individual temperament, history, training, and aptitude. They will also be influenced by […] the groups to which each individual is linked: family, friends, school, employment, university. 

In people brought up in the discipline of the physical sciences the levels of boggledom are likely to differ considerably from the levels found in those brought up in the humanities (Haynes, 1980, p. 94)” (Hunter, 2021, p. 8).

In 2019 American Economic Review published “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” by Azoulay et al. (Azoulay et al., 2019).  Dalmeet Chawla wrote about Azoulay et al.’s paper in Chemistry World:

“‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ This principle was famously laid out by German theoretical physicist Max Planck in 1950 and it turns out that he was right, according to a new study.

The work investigates how the premature death of a star scientist working in the life sciences affects the literature. It finds that collaborators of star researchers publish fewer papers in the field after their prominent colleague’s death, while the field sees a boost in studies by researchers that didn’t collaborate with the superstar” (Chawla, 2019, paras. 1, 2).

The article “Dispelling Demons: Detective Work at The Conjuring House” by science writer Dr. Joe Nickell was published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine in 2016. Dr. Nickell illustrates the subjectivity of paranormal experiences:

“much was made of a ‘solid blue tubular beam of light’ that shot down the chimney into a room, then retraced its route and disappeared… Hearing about it… Warren insisted that, writes Perron, it was supernatural… while the light was the ‘most amazing thing’ she ever saw in the old house—it was really ‘a tube of blue lightning’... consistent with the rare phenomenon of ball lightning that has been reported to enter houses, sometimes through chimneys” (Nickell, 2017, paras. 26, 27).

Martin Shough is a NARCAP Research Associate and science writer (MinotB52UFO.com, n.d.). In the 2007 “Report on Aerial Phenomena Observed near the Channel Islands, UK”, co-authored with Dr. David Clarke, Shough identifies the similarities between reports of rare atmospheric phenomena and UFOs:

“Occam’s Razor advises against invoking ‘new entities’ where existing entities suffice. Defining ‘new’ is fraught with ambiguity… a small core of cases surrounded by a less well-defined periphery of related accounts of ‘earthlights’ merging into folk tales… and, to a much greater extent of course, of ‘unidentified flying objects’.

The phenomenological differences between sub-groups of these categories may sometimes be small compared to their internal variation, suggesting that there are sociological origins for these ambiguous boundaries, which are overlaid on - and possibly act to obscure - physical ones” (Shough, 2007, p. 114).

Astronomer and science writer David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Science discusses “earthlights”:

“From every continent come reports of a similar nature. In west Africa, balls of light seen gliding over the surface of water are called ‘aku’ – the devil. In Malaysia, aerial lights known as ‘penangau’ are believed to be the phantom heads of women who died in childbirth. And in the northwest Australian outback, the so-called ‘min-min’ lights have a sacred significance to the Aborigines.

That earthlights exist is virtually beyond doubt. That they are linked in some way to tectonic activity and to sudden surges in ambient magnetic field strength is on the way to becoming firmly established” (Darling, para. 4).

Shough & Clarke discuss ball lightning-like atmospheric phenomena:

“Earthquake lights… today many geophysicists (although not all) accept that the association is real…

The largest study of modern EQL sightings dealt with more than 40 reported examples during the 1988-89 quakes in Saguenay, Quebec... According to Derr they fell into 6 types of luminous phenomenon: ‘(1) seismic lightning, (2) atmospheric luminous bands, (3) globular incandescent masses, (4) fire tongues, (5) seismic flames, and a newly-recognized category, (6) coronal or point discharges’” (Shough, 2007, p. 102).

In the 2016 Skeptical Inquirer article “The Brown Mountain Lights: Solved Again”, science writer Joe Nickell describes global folklore associated with light phenomena:

“Although legends mostly interpret the Brown Mountain Lights as ghosts, since about 1960 tales of UFOs, alien contact, and ‘interdimensional beings’ have proliferated there, as well as of ‘little people, fairies and such’” (Nickell, 2016, para. 16).

“There are also ghost lights at sea—for example the Bay Chaleur Fireship, seen off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, and attributed to the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire (Corliss 1995, 72–73)… a U.S. Weather Bureau report of 1919 explained the phenomenon as an electrical discharge compared to South America’s ‘Andes Light,’” (Nickell, 2016, para. 3).

“One researcher called attention to a few reports that could describe the rare phenomenon of ball lighting (Washburn 2012). Moreover, the lights are not limited to Brown Mountain but in fact have been reported throughout the entire area” (Nickell, 2016, para. 29).

“Proponents of the ‘mystery’ are quick to challenge the scientific explanations. But as Rosemary Ellen Guiley (2000, 156) acknowledges, ‘Ghost lights have a power to fascinate, and some individuals who see them do not want the mystique spoiled by an explanation.’ Neither do writers selling mystery. Whenever one explanation is offered, they describe other eyewitness reports (or alleged reports, since often no sources are given) that supposedly rule out that cause. They suggest, therefore, that no scientific explanation solves the ‘mystery’” (Nickell, 2016, para. 30).

In 1953 Sir Arthur C. Clarke hypothesized:

“UFOs are not material bodies because: (l) ..observed to travel at accelerations which no material body could stand.. (2) despite the enormous speeds reported, no sonic booms are ever heard” (Clarke, 1953, in Catoe, 1969, p. 129).

By 1959 Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote a paper explicitly proposing:

“many hard core unexplained UFOs may be ‘plasmoids’ – ball lightning” (Clarke, 1959, in Catoe, 1969, p. 129).

Dr. David Clarke provides Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s summary of his views about UFOs after a lifetime of consideration:

“...I would be failing in my duty if I did not say something on UFOs. So here, as briefly as possible, are the conclusions I’ve come to after more than fifty years of study: 

1. There may be strange and surprising meteorological, electrical, or astronomical phenomena still unknown to science, which may account for the very few UFOs that are both genuine and unexplained. 2. There is no hard evidence that Earth has ever been visited from space, 3. If that does happen, there are at least three independent global radar networks that will know within a matter of minutes…

Having written thousands of words on the subject (and read millions) I refuse to go into further details” (Clarke, A., 1986, as cited in Clarke, D., n.d., paras. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

As a guest on Witness Citizen podcast in 2021 Harvard astronomy professor and Galileo Project founder Dr. Avi Loeb speculates:

“…suppose the Galileo Project searches and figures out that these UAP are some natural phenomena.

So be it, then at least we’ll put to rest all these speculations that people have…

I wouldn’t feel hurt, I would just feel that we learned something new, and so we will be guided by evidence” (Loeb, 2021b, 3960s).

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