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- ---------------
- NEWS & COMMENT:
- KLASS AT ASU
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-
- ParaNet Alpha 03/06 -- Philip J. Klass, billed as the world's
- foremost UFO debunker, lectured a small audience at Arizona State
- University's Neeb Hall last night.
- The event was promoted by the Phoenix Skeptics, whose members
- constituted the majority of the audience. Several members of ParaNet were
- also in attendance.
- Klass was introduced by Skeptic Ron Harvey as "The Sherlock Holmes
- of Ufology," and indeed, his investigative approach is methodical and
- detailed. He is responsible for succesfully debunking some of the more
- mysterious and baffling UFO reports over the past 22 years.
- To his credit, Klass began his lecture by debunking the myth that
- all UFO percipients are "kooks and nuts," saying that particular attention
- should be paid to reports made by credible witnesses such as pilots,
- astronomers, and other seasoned observers. He attempted to separate
- himself from those skeptics who would "dismiss all UFO reports out of
- hand."
- The first half of the lecture was devoted to two famous cases which,
- according to Klass, encapsulated many elements of standard UFO sighting
- reports, mainly nocturnal lights and daylight "disks" (something of a
- misnomer, since all daytime object sightings, regardless of shape, are
- lumped under this category). The cases were of a May, 1968 multiple
- witness report centering on Nashville, TN, and a 1969 report of fast-
- moving daytime objects sighted by three sets of jet crews centered around
- St. Louis. The first case turned out to be the re-entry of a Soviet Zond
- spacecraft, and the second, according to Klass, was a bright meteor-
- fireball, or bolide. Klass builds his case for the mundane nature of UFOs
- around these two sightings, because they exemplify many of his published
- "Ufological Principles," such as the fact that a majority of witnesses to
- an event CAN be mistaken in their descriptions; the fact that the human
- mind tends to fill in details that it doesn't see but expects, through
- societal archetypes, to find; and the fact that we tend to draw
- correlations between events where none may exist.
- Extrapolating from these two stereotypical cases, Klass then
- attempted to explain the famous Mansfield/Coyne Helicopter case, which won
- the National Enquirer award for the most baffling UFO case of 1973. A
- slide showing the four primary witnesses receiving their National Enquirer
- checks drew the expected chuckles from some members of the audience, who
- behaved like good little Skeptics and snickered appropriately throughout
- the presentation.
- The Mansfield case is one of the most oft-told in UFO literature,
- and details can be found in several sources, including two of Klass' four
- books, and a pamphlet available from the Fund for UFO Research, so I won't
- recount it in full here, but briefly, in October of 1973, four National
- Guardsmen flying North near Mansfield, OH in a Bell UH-1H helicopter had a
- nighttime encounter with an object which approached them from the east,
- threatened to collide with their chopper, hovered briefly, then flew off
- to the west where it disappeared. During the encounter, the pilot-in-
- command, Capt. (now Col.-ret.) Lawrence Coyne pitched the helicopter into
- an 800 ft. descent; when the encounter was over, he found he had actually
- CLIMBED from 1700 ft above sea level (MSL) to 3500 ft., and was still
- climbing at 1000 feet per minute. This unintentional climb has been
- attributed by many to some sort of "tractor beam" emanating from the UFO.
- Making use of his "Ufological principles," Klass proceeded to debunk
- the case as being another bright meteor-fireball. He contended that Coyne
- subconsciously noticed that his descent was bringing him close to the
- ground, and at approx. 400 ft above ground level (AGL), brought the
- collective up and initiated an ascent.
- All four men reported that the interior of the chopper was bathed in
- a green light while the object hovered above them. Klass points out that
- the windows on the top of the Huey are tinted green, and that the bright
- light of the fireball, caused by an envelope of ionized air, merely shone
- through the top windows, causing the "green" effect. The other anomalous
- elements of the report, the hovering, the structure, the temporary loss of
- radio contact with area airport towers, Klass dismissed with aplomb.
- It would be a momentous job of demystification, if it were not for a
- few basic flaws in Klass' main argument, the most challenging being the
- possibility of a bolide of such duration going unnoticed by the rest of
- humanity.
- Time is a crucial element in this case, for the duration of a bolide
- has an upper limit, as does the rate of climb of a Huey helicopter. While
- it has been demonstrated many times that percipients of sudden,
- extraordinary events have unreliable recall of the passage of time, some
- idea of the duration of the event can be gleaned from the fact that the
- Huey began descending from 2500 ft. MSL at the start of the event, reached
- 1700 MSL, then rose to 3500 MSL just after the event. The lowest amount of
- time acceptable to anyone is 45 seconds; most investigators agree,
- however, that the event lasted at least a minute. But let's take the 45
- second figure.
- In order for a bolide to even theoretically last this long, it would
- have to be travelling in the very upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere,
- where there is little friction to slow down the object or affect the arc
- of its trajectory. Recall that the object was first seen in the east, then
- disappeared on the western horizon. We can therefore say that, due to its
- great altitude and the amount of Earth's atmosphere it subtended, it would
- have to have been visible, not just over a large portion of Ohio, but over
- a large portion of the North American continent. As Klass points out, the
- event occured during the height of the Orionid meteor shower, at just
- after 11PM -- a late hour, but not too late for avid skywatchers, of which
- there would surely be a great number. Yet NOT A LIVING SOUL REPORTED
- SEEING A BRIGHT METEOR-FIREBALL on that night.
- When challenged on this point, Klass retorted by asking why no
- credible independent witnesses stepped forward to report a large UFO
- either. (A group of four witnesses DID attest to seeing the helicopter/UFO
- encounter some time later, however, their testimony is flawed in some
- respects, and hence cannot be considered reliable.) Ignoring for the
- moment the perceived unlikelyhood of alien spacecraft, it is much easier
- to believe that such a craft, operating at the low altitude of the
- helicopter over an area which Klass himself characterizes as sparsely
- populated, would go unnoticed, whereas a high-altitude bolide would be a
- spectacle most likely observed by thousands.
- Count forty-five seconds off to yourself, and imagine that, while
- you're counting, a fireball is traversing the night skies. Now imagine no
- one seeing it.
- Add to all this the fact that very few astronomers and meteor
- experts agree that a bolide event CAN last for that period of time. In
- answer, Klass characteristically trots out an event that occurred in 1972
- over the Western part of the U.S., which was captured on 26 seconds of
- film, arguing that it had to have lasted even longer in order for the
- photographer to notice it and ready her camera. The event (which occurred
- in broad daylight, over a more sparsely populated area of the country, and
- yet was reported by thousands) was characterized by Carl Sagan as
- something that happens "once in a century." Yet Klass has used the "bright
- meteor-fireball" device to explain SEVERAL cases throughout his three
- previous books. How many times can a once-in-a-century event occur since
- 1947?
- In his book "UFO's: The Public Deceived" (Prometheus 1981), Klass
- states that, since he believes the chopper crew saw SOMETHING strange and
- are not making the whole thing up, the event can only be one of two
- things, a bolide or a real, honest-to-goodness alien starship. He begins
- his argument against the latter on the basis of facts and evidence, but
- when challenged, falls back on theory, relying on Science's
- characterization of alien visits as "unlikely." I must ask how one
- measures such unlikelyhood, absent any reference data on such visits. We
- DO have some idea of the unlikelyhood of 45-second bolides, however, and I
- am here to tell you that they are SO unlikely as to put Klass in the
- position of virtually endorsing, by his own words, the ET Hypothesis.
- In the middle part of the lecture, Klass showed a slide of Dr. J.
- Allen Hynek, widely recognized as the father of scientific ufology. Klass
- strongly implied that Hynek's decision to switch from skeptic to proponent
- on the UFO issue was financially motivated. He related that Hynek drew
- $150 a day as a consultant to Project Blue Book; when the Air Force shut
- down that project, Klass said, Hynek changed into a believer and drew up
- to $2000 for lectures.
- Klass' implication is nothing short of contemptible. He ignores the
- fact that Hynek's path to advocacy of UFO research began long before the
- end of Blue Book; it can be traced to the aftermath of the 1966 Swamp Gas
- Incident in Dexter, MI. In addition, much of Hynek's lecture income was
- known to have gone back into UFO research.
- Skepticism is a necessity in the badly muddled world of ufology, and
- much of Klass' work has served to define the boundaries and goal lines for
- would-be saucer seekers. But the raison d'etre of skepticism is Science,
- and Klass, who accuses Ufology of having none, seems to have forsaken
- Science in favor of his own myopic axe-grinding.
-
- -- Jim Speiser