Leslie Kean asks: "Is the the case UFO skeptics have been dreading?"

[LongTomH]

Answer: It probably is! Ms. Kean has an article over at HuffPost: UFO Caught on Tape Over Santiago Air Base, and it's going viral!

Journalist Leslie Kean is the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. The book has received praise from people as diverse as Dr. Michio Kaku, Astronomer Derek Pitts of the Franklin Institute, and Rudy Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The case mentioned is a sighting from Chile in 2010, presented to the public in a March 13 press conference. In Ms. Kean's words:

It was a glorious, sunny morning on Nov. 5, 2010, when crowds gathered to celebrate the changing of the Air Force Command at El Bosque Air Base in Santiago. From different locations, spectators aimed video cameras and cell phones at groups of acrobatic and fighter jets performing an air show overhead. Nobody saw anything amiss.

But afterward, an engineer from the adjacent Pillán aircraft factory noticed something bizarre while viewing his footage in slow motion. He turned it over to the government's well known Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, or CEFAA, for analysis.

The stunning conclusion: The Chilean jets were being stalked by a UFO.

Please note: Chile's CEFAA is only one of a number of agencies established by governments that think UFOs are worthy of serious, scientific study. Those other countries are: Brazil, Peru, Equador, Uruguay, Argentina, Belgium, France and Britain. France's GEIPAN is part of their national space agency: CNES.

What makes this particular incident harder to dismiss?

CEFAA officials collected seven videos of the El Bosque UFO taken from different vantage points. Bermúdez commissioned scientists from many disciplines, aeronautical experts, and air force and army photogrametric technicians to subject the videos to intense scrutiny. They all came to the same conclusions.

As I said, this has gone viral: There are articles on Business Insider, and MSNBC.com.

'Debunkers' like Robert Shaeffer are already weighing in on the case:

"They're 'unexplained cases' only if you ignore the explanation. That's what's going to happen in this case."

Sheaffer has admitted that he hasn't examined any of the videos:

Sheaffer said there wasn't yet enough data available to judge what really happened at El Bosque. "It's going to be like the Phoenix Lights in 1997. We're going to have to go and sit down and look at it," he said. (Coincidentally, Kean and Blumenthal's story came out on the 15th anniversary of the Phoenix Lights incident in Arizona.)

Here's one of the videos:

Ms. Kean has a Facebook page, linked from her website

Edited to add - for those who think the Phoenix Lights case has been thoroughly debunked: The explanation usually given was that witnesses saw flares dropped by Air Force jets during a training exercise. That's disputed by Ms. Kean and by Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington III:

Symington says he saw a large triangular "craft of unknown origin" with lights. "It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical," he says. "It had a geometric outline, a constant shape."

Other witnesses also related the fact that the lights maintained a constant spacing throughout the sighting, unlike parachute flares which would drift with the wind. Also, the timing is off:

People sometimes confuse the sightings of the objects at around 8:30 that evening with the row of lights videotaped at 10 p.m. and shown repeatedly on television news. These later lights most likely were flares, according to video analysts. People who saw the earlier objects were outside watching the Hale-Bopp Comet, and saw something entirely different.

[William Seger]

1. I'm skeptical

I was looking at the Santiago video last night, and one thing that struck me was that the UFO does not show any motion blur, which I would expect at the speed it was supposedly flying and the shutter speed the camera was likely using (i.e. not especially fast when shooting blue sky).

[LongTomH]

2. There are 7 videos from varied angles

It's hard to dismiss all of them. Please feel free to remain skeptical; but, try to keep an open mind until CEFAA and others have made their analyses.

[William Seger]

4. If they're all like this, it will be easy to dismiss them all

Without even knowing the specifics -- frame rate, exposure time, actual distance to the object or its speed -- the motion blur should have been a very noticeable percentage of the distance traveled from one frame to the next, which is simply to say that the exposure time should have been a noticeable percentage of the frame capture cycle. That would be true even if it was a small object very close to the camera, not flying particularly fast (e.g. the "rod" phenomenon that some people find so baffling is caused by bugs flying close to the camera). Even if the camera was capable of the high shutter speed necessary to essentially "freeze" an object flying at 4000 to 6000 MPH (which is doubtful, anyway), standard CCD and CMOS sensors are not nearly sensitive enough to shoot that fast in ordinary daylight and get a useable image.

Apparently, there was no sonic boom, either.

Without saying what it is, we can safely say this was not an object flying 4000 to 6000 MPH. If the CEFAA hasn't even noticed the problem with the lack of motion blur, I'm not holding my breath waiting for their analysis.

[frogmarch]

3. The videos are from Nov 2010. What's taking so long

for Chile's CEFAA to analyze them?

Why aren't they sharing them with investigators outside of Chile?

Oh, and how can it be known that no one tampered with the videos?

Thanks for your interesting post. I like reading about supposed UFO sightings, even though I doubt Earth is being visited by ETs.

[frogmarch]

5. Purported close-ups of the whatever

from the first link:



further enhanced:



I'm skeptical.

[zappaman]

6. No. n/t

[Quantess]

8. I love UFO stories.

Especially before bedtime.

[frogmarch]

9. Kean's book reviewed at eSkeptic

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-03-28/



eSkeptic book review snip:

In an interesting essay included in the book titled “Militant Agnosticism and the UFO Taboo,” two political scientists, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, advance a theory as to why the U.S. government has supposedly been less than forthcoming on the UFO question. As they point out, skeptics cite a number of seemingly intractable obstacles to interstellar travel to argue against the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Nevertheless, Wendt and Duvall argue that the origins of the UFO taboo are political, not scientific

.

eSkeptic book review snip:

Kean endorses Wendt’s and Duvall’s call for a “militant agnosticism” in pursuit of UFO investigations. By agnostic, they mean not rushing to ascribe UFOs to extraterrestrial sources. If, however, the eyewitness accounts presented in Kean’s book are to be believed, then one would be hard pressed to conclude otherwise. Other explanations proffered in the past would be at least, or even more, mind-boggling, such as time travelers, Nazi flying saucers from underground bases in Antarctica, or visitors from other dimensions. What is most compelling about Kean’s study is the number of seemingly credible and authoritative first person sources who go on the record for her with their positions on UFOs. None of them claimed to have experienced any repercussions from the government or men-in-black visitations.

[FarLeftFist]

10. WOW. It says they were traveling between 4000-6000mph.

[Orsino]

11. UFO skeptics aren't "dreading" anything...

...but that loaded sentence shows Kean is pandering to the sort of paranoia one finds among the most diehard of believers.

And the phrase "as agreed by authorities around the world" makes her laughable.