An Over-the-Top Blog About UFOs, the Paranormal, and the Collective Psyche
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Why UFOs Don’t Exist (In An Objective Sense)
by Dennis Stamey
Part I.
They Act Out Our Technological Fantasies
We’re not what exactly when this happened, maybe it was March 14, 2021, or even the 21st. We do know that it was about 9:15 p.m. and we were sitting in a Walgreens parking lot in Katy, Texas, waiting for our oldest son to get off work. Suddenly to the northeast, we saw a meteor. Fantastic. Then we saw another, and then another all taking the same flight path. Not possible. After that, a cluster of white and red lights appeared in the same spot where we noticed the meteors. We also noticed during this time a red light traveling a straight line across the north and then turning white and shooting away.
Finally, one of the red lights drew closer until a solid object came into view with flashing lights, we can’t remember what colors, on either side. It looked like a drone, a very big one at that, almost half the size of a sedan. But I didn’t notice any propellors, which are used to generate lift and to hover. The drone was almost directly to my left about 30 feet away hovering over a busy street intersection, busy even for a Sunday night. It started gradually descending and we thought, “Hell, it’s gonna land in the street!” But after it dipped a few feet, it rose slowly and then flew off at high speed. Not long after that, all the lights vanished.
So, what is this? Probably a drone light show. However, drone light shows involve hundreds or thousands of drones designed to communicate and execute choreographed patterns. We saw only about 30 of these lights floating around in no discernible pattern. Drones in almost all the shows are constructed to be as light as possible, allowing them to stay in flight for a long time and agile enough to perform the numerous maneuvers required. For instance, the Intel drones, which are commonly used in these displays, weigh less than a pound and are built of plastic and foam. These drones also carry large LED lights, GPS, a few sensors, and batteries. The shows (we’ve never seen any except on YouTube) usually include various multi-colored geometric shapes. How is it done? Well, software like Drone Show assigns a flight path to each drone as part of the pattern. One flight operator alone can actually operate the show.
With that said, why use monster-sized drones for a light show? They would be too unwieldy. How were those shooting stars recreated? And lastly, why did this one particular drone break away from the pack (or was guided away since it had to have been under human control) and fly close to me? A random event? We searched the local media for any mention of a drone display but uncovered nothing. Maybe somebody was playing around with a bunch of drones. But these big ones can cost up to $100,000 each. If all these lights we observed were from humongous drones, then somebody was toying with over three million in equipment. Doesn’t make much sense.
This event has always got us thinking (and here we become silly and mystical and more than likely we were witnessing some weird manmade activity), what if something, something outside the realm of the ordinary, was creating this display? What if they were creating an image that we might be familiar with, something within our context of understanding? Other people had to have seen these lights. Instead of a spaceship buzzing around, why not a drone? Our collective consciousness is shifting and we’re becoming more focused on experimental aircraft. In fact, a lot of UFO enthusiasts are abandoning the notion of extraterrestrial visitators for the secret government aircraft thesis. Let’s explore why.
We came across an issue of Popular Mechanics dated December 1991 with the article “America’s New Secret Aircraft” By Gregory T. Pope which discusses the Defense Department’s “black” programs, highly classified, top-secret military projects that are not publicly acknowledged by the government, military personnel, or contractors. A lot of the testing is done in the Antelope Valley in Southern California, the location for Edwards Air Force Base, Air Force Plant #42, and various contractor facilities. The article describes how people watched the skies at night in that area and occasionally saw lights zooming overhead at impossible speeds or triangular objects that silently hover around. Observers reported three different types of craft: triangular planes with 60 to 160 foot wingspans, a high-speed yellow or orange light, and a black, silent boomerang vehicle roughly 600 to 800 feet across. Of course, that was over 30 years ago and we’re not sure if these objects are still being spotted.
But were people really seeing ultra-classified aircraft or were their imaginations working over time? We remember watching an A&E documentary years ago on Area 51 which included footage of a large fiery object whizzing over the compound at night. It was traveling on a straight flat trajectory and likely couldn’t have been a meteor. The witnesses, who were congregated just outside the installation, exclaimed with amazement at the spectacle. Was this another experimental aircraft? Very doubtful. What sort of hypersonic plane would resemble a fireball?
Area 51 has, since the 1950s, been a base where the most important spying aircraft in American history was assembled, tested, and sent out on missions including the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird. It has always been shrouded in secrecy since being secretive, especially during the Cold War, was of the utmost importance.
In 1989, Las Vegas news station KLAS interviewed a supposed former employee named Bob Lazar who alleged that the strange technology being tested was from aliens and that Area 51 was designed to reverse-engineer and study alien aircraft and even aliens themselves. Lazar’s wild story has stuck and conspiracy theories have grown increasingly elaborate even influencing the film Independence Day and the TV show X-Files. It has also spawned other whistleblowers with yarns that are even more outrageous than Lazar’s.
As we mentioned in a prior article, Lazar and like-minded whistleblowers may have thought they saw unusual activity, much like the old-school contactees, and embellished some details to buttress their claims. We also alluded to the UFO conspiracists paying scant attention to the fact that Lazar lied about his education, such as taking courses at MIT and Cal Tech. Lazar also claimed to have worked for the Los Alamos particle laboratory but records listed him as a photo and film processor. There is also no evidence of him being employed at Area 51.
But what was that flaming object videoed over the site and what were those strange objects seen flying above Antelope Valley? We’re not sure about the first incident but as for the sightings in above northern Los Angeles County, it’s more than likely these were indeed super-secret craft.
Now, here’s where the mystery thickens. At the beginning of the new millennium, the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), were cataloging numerous sightings of triangular objects. NIDS, by the way, is a privately funded science institute based in Las Vegas with research focusing on aerial phenomena (we’re referencing an article by Leonard David entitled “‘Flying Triangle’ Sightings on the Rise” published in the online edition of NBC News for September 2, 2004).
Their 2004 study announced: “The United States is currently experiencing a wave of Flying Triangle sightings that may have intensified in the 1990s, especially towards the latter part of the 1990s. The wave continues. The Flying Triangles are being openly deployed over and near population centers, including in the vicinity of major interstate highways.”
The years 1990-2004, their study says, had experienced an intense wave “of Flying Triangle aircraft.” After analyzing hundreds of eyewitnesses, reports, the NIDS concluded that the behavior of the vehicles “does not appear consistent with the covert deployment of an advanced DoD [U.S. Department of the Defense] aircraft.”
Basically what the NIDS was saying is that these triangles weren’t behaving like experimental aircraft. For example, before the government revealed the existence of the F-117 and B-2 aircraft, there were only rare nighttime sightings occurring in the sparsely populated sections of Nevada, California, and a few other states. Flying at low altitudes over populated areas was rarely reported. The unidentified aircraft above Antelope Valley were also flying at night and within a constricted area.
“In contrast, the Flying Triangle deployment, especially during the 1990s, appears more consistent with the open and public operation of these aircraft,” the study explains. If these were super-secret planes, there was certainly no attempt to hide them from the public or from potential adversaries.
The NIDS study of these Flying Triangle shows that 1.) sightings took place near cities and on Interstate highways, 2.) they are seen at low altitude in plain sight of eyewitnesses, 3.) they fly at extremely low speed or hover in plain sight of eyewitnesses, and 4.) the vehicles sometime fly with noticeable bright lights, either blinding white lights, or “bright disco lights” that usually flash combinations of red, green or blue.
In 2000, Britain’s Ministry of Defense undertook an investigation into UFOs being sighted in that country, including sightings of black triangles. Code named Project Condign, the probe concluded in a declassified document that “the majority, if not all, of the hitherto unexplained reports, may well be due to atmospheric gaseous electrically charged buoyant plasmas” that are “capable of being transported at enormous speeds under the influence and balance of electrical charges in the atmosphere.” As far as the black triangles, they posited that these might be meteors. Skeptics of the report say that these findings are pseudo-scientific. The hyperbole seems to definitely suggest that.
For over two years, black triangles were prowling the skies over Belgium The first sighting occurred on November 29, 1989, when two gendarmes in Eupen, Belgium beheld a large silent triangular object flying at a low altitude with three bright lights on each corner. Reportedly, 30 separate groups of witnesses saw it, plus three separate groups of gendarmes, a total of 143. Four months later on the night of March 30, 1990, and onto the early hours of March 31 Belgian F-16 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept a number of these craft They obtained radar lock on nine occasions, a fact confirmed by ground radar, but the objects were too fast for the F-16s. The episode was seen by some 13,500 people on the ground and 2,600 of them provided written statements. In April, a photo of one of the objects was widely circulated showing a monstrous black triangle with bright lights at each corner. Could have been a fake though.
Sightings continued through 1991. What’s surprising is that there were many UFOs seen near the Bierset AFB in the province of Liege, which caused skeptics to theorize that they could have been Chinook helicopters. Unfortunately, once investigators started digging into the problem, trying to correlate helicopter flights with triangle sightings, they learned that the Bierset military airfield did not preserve files concerning flights older than five years. So, we’ll never know.
All these reports across the United States and Europe make us wonder if something isn’t trying to mimic the ultra-classified “black” aircraft. To further bolster this notion, consider that the NID began its investigation into these black triangles on January 5, 2000, when a police officer called their hotline to report “a huge, silent, brightly lit object in western Illinois.” Five other police officers from different precincts, as well as more than a dozen other witnesses, corroborated the story.
According to their testimonies, the triangular object was sighted flying in the direction of Scott Air Force Base (SAFB) in St. Clair County, Illinois. SAFB is the home of the U.S. Air Force air mobility command where large formations of U.S. Air Force cargo aircraft sometimes participate in Joint Forcible Entry Exercises often resulting in numerous UFO reports.
NIDS also discovered, interestingly enough, a “tentative correlation” between locations of Air Mobility Command installations and sightings of these Black Triangles. However, Air Force officials informed NIDS investigators that no such exercises took place that night nor were they aware of any flights that might account for the reported sightings. How curious. The triangles seem to have an affinity for military bases.
All this nicely correlates with the fervid interest in aviation shortly before the 1896-7 airship scare across America, an interest that was especially expressed in literature (imagination is notorious for altering culture you know). There are the short stories of Luis Senarens involving the protagonist Frank Reade which started a long run beginning in 1882 and often involved airships. Jules Verne’s 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror, published in America the following year, concerns an enigmatic inventor who constructs a powerful flying vessel.]There are also the airship stories of Robert Duncan Milne which were serialized in San Francisco newspapers during the 1890s.
But experiments in aviation were also transpiring in real life. We have Salomon August Andree who made headlines when he unsuccessfully attempted an Arctic balloon trip in the summer of 1896, a few months before phantom airships appeared over California. Andree died in his second attempt the following year. On May 6, 1896, Samuel Pierpont Langley, described as” the first major aeronautical figure in the United States,” made headlines after successfully testing a large aeroplane model. Then on September 26, 1896, a front-page story in the New York Times described how navigator William Paul crashed his flying machine into a clump of trees, narrowly escaping serious injury.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget the work of French-American pioneer Octave Alexandré Chanute who was inspired during the 1870s by the extensive efforts of other Europeans to develop mechanical flight. In 1896, Chanute designed five gliders that were constructed in the shop of fellow aviator William Avery’s in Chicago. One glider, christened the Katydid had multiple wings and was flown on the shores of Lake Michigan at Miller Beach, Indiana. In total, the craft made almost two hundred glides.
On November 1, 1896, an article in the Detroit Free Press reported that a New York inventor was going to build and fly an “aerial torpedo boat.” Sixteen days later on November 17, the Sacramento Bee reprinted a telegram from another New York man who claimed that he and two friends were intending to board an airship he had constructed and fly to California within a couple of days. Were these examples of “yellow journalism” so rife during that era? Whether these were hoaxes perpetrated by the papers or by individuals (the papers likely), that same night, hundreds of Sacramento residents reported seeing an airship passing overhead. Life imitates rumor.
November 17 was a rainy, dismal evening in Sacramento but through the dark clouds appeared a brilliant light. The apparition moved slowly west and appeared to be about a thousand feet above the rooftops. Among the legion of observers was George Scott, an assistant to the Secretary of State of California. Scott along with several friends climbed to the observation deck above the capitol dome where they were able to discern three lights instead of one. The lights were attached to a dark, oblong configuration.
R.L. Lowery, a former street railway employee, alleged that he heard a voice from the airship yelling, “Throw her up higher; she’ll hit the steeple.” When he peered up he saw two men seated on a bicycle-like frame, peddling, and above them was a “cigar-shaped body of some length.” Lowery said that the thing also had “wheels at the side like the side wheels on Fulton’s old steamboat.”
Five nights later, the airship paid another visit to Sacramento. It was Sunday night and weather conditions were overcast like before. A radiant light came into view in the northwest and then flew directly over the town, running against the wind. A witness named Jacob Zemansky inspected it through a small telescope and could discern that the object was “an electric arc light of intense power.” He also noticed that the light didn’t move in a straight line, but seemed to bob up and down in the wind. Another witness, Edward Carragher, used field glasses and could see that the light was attached to a dark body.
The airship took 30 minutes to cross over the city, disappearing into the southwest. Thousands were able to watch it this time including the city’s deputy sheriff and a district attorney. That very night, another airship appeared above San Francisco some 90 miles away. There it was observed by hundreds, including the mayor. It cruised over to the edge of the Pacific Ocean shining a dazzling searchlight.
Within the next several days, airships were being seen not only in California but from as far off as Washington State and Canada (we’ll give only a very quick synopsis of these events). After that, the airships remained inactive until February 2, 1897, when an aerial vessel materialized over Hastings, Nebraska. On February 5 a similar object appeared 40 miles further south near the hamlet of Invale. Soon the state was flooded with sightings. On the night of February 16, one soared over Omaha traveling at a low altitude. The airship carried bright lights, said the South Omaha Bee, making it difficult to discern its shape. 11 residents saw it go by including Thomas Hazel “who holds a responsible position with the Hammond Packing Company and is considered trustworthy in every respect.”
A Nebraska farmer even claimed he had stumbled upon an airship on the ground while the crew was repairing it. “It is cigar-shaped, about 200 feet long and 50 feet across at the widest point, gradually narrowing to a point at both ends,” the farmer attested.
The airship was apparently enjoying its stint over Nebraska, sticking around for two months, and the descriptions were fairly uniform, bright and side lights, no noise, and hovering and darting with great speed. The ship was seen moving in all directions, traveling upwind as fast as it did downwind. However, by April, a few residents did report seeing flames and fireballs coming from the vessel as well as the sound of muffled engines. Many also attested that it was shaped like a canoe and had four wings. Considering that at the time the population of Nebraska was just over a million in 1897 and that several thousand people had seen the mysterious ship, that represents a substantial proportion.
Soon the airships would invade the airspace over over parts of of the Midwest including Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri. April became a very busy month. There were also more stories about encounters with crewmen on the ground. The Dallas Times Herald for April 10 reported that a Fort Worth man named L.E. James had seen a person seven-feet-tall climb out of an airship near the Fort Worth park, secure some of the vessel’s lashings, get back in, and take off.
Perhaps the strangest meeting with an airship pilot occurred in Rockland, Texas on April 21, 1897. Around 11 p.m., a farmer named John M. Barclay said that he saw “an oblong machine with wings and brilliant lights” in the heavens. He went back to sleep but was soon awoken by the barking of his dog. Peeking outside again, he saw that the aerial visitor had landed in his pasture. Barclay grabbed his rifle and ventured out to investigate. As he approached the ship, an “ordinary mortal” emerged and told him to put down his gun. Barclay asked who the stranger was and he answered, “Never mind about my name; call it Smith. I want some lubricating oil and a couple of cold chisels if you can get them, and some bluestone. I suppose the sawmill hard by has the two former articles, and the telegraph operator has the bluestone. Here’s a ten-dollar bill; take it and get us those articles and keep the change for your trouble.” Back then, 10 dollars was equivalent to 250 today. Barclay wanted to go inside the ship, but “Smith” would not let him, but did promise to come back and take him on a trip in the near future.
The farmer procured oil and the chisels, but he didn’t have the bluestone. He returned and tried to give the man back the ten-dollar bill since he didn’t have everything he needed, but “Smith” refused. Barclay asked the pilot where he was from and where he was going. “From anywhere,” he replied. “But we will be in Greece the day after tomorrow.” They shook hands and the pilot clambered back into his craft and took off.
That same month the excitement reached its crescendo when an airship flew over Chicago early in the morning and later in the evening. It was here that Walter McCann took two photographs of the strange object as it was “coming from the south” at about 5:30 a.m. while standing on Market Street. The pictures were published in the Chicago Times-Herald on April 12. One of the photos was reproduced by one of the paper’s pen and ink artists and depicts a dirigible-type vessel with a large undercarriage. Several men are pointing to it.
There has been a lot of debate as to whether these photographs are a hoax. We also have our doubts (if they are genuine they are, of course, the first pictures taken of a UFO) but we do know that, according to the Times-Herald, an indefinite number of people saw the airship on that Sunday, and great crowds saw its light in the sky that night. Perhaps other Chicago dailies talked about the the incident
Sightings went on for a few more days and everyone expected these objects would move on to the East Coast. But they didn’t, which is interesting if all this was mass hysteria as some aver, and by the end of April, the wave ceased altogether.
Researchers into the “Great Airship Scare” such as T. E. Bullard have discovered that were approximately 1,000 separate airship related newspaper stories during this time and that there might have been some 100,000 sightings, a number they surprisingly deem conservative.
The airships would return in 1909 but this time to England and New Zealand. Off and on, a strange heavenly visitor would chug across the skies of America but it was usually a singular event. In 1915, mystery zeppelins would invade the skies of England and in 1918, mystery airplanes would alarm people in Australia. These planes were also buzzing about in the 1920s and 30s.
Of course, you could argue that the flying saucers, which have beclouded the skies since the end of World War II, are far superior to anything we could put into the air back then or even now. Therefore, they must be of extraterrestrial origin. But keep in mind that the airships of 1896-7 were also way advanced for that era. Gliders rather than huge illuminated dirigibles capable of fast speed were all inventors could produce. Whatever unexplained aerial phenomena might appear, they will always be a step or two ahead of our capabilities.
Trickster 
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