471 replies to this topic

[mcrom901]

http://www.agu.org/p...028p06887.shtml

[WoIverine]

mcrom901, on 22 November 2012 - 03:23 PM, said:

'spectral analysis'? can u pls point it out?

It's in the OP. I trust McG's research, he's pretty thorough. I meant spectrum, not spectral. lol

Edited by WoIverine, 22 November 2012 - 06:12 PM.

[mcrom901]

WoIverine, on 22 November 2012 - 06:11 PM, said:

It's in the OP. I trust McG's research, he's pretty thorough. I meant spectrum, not spectral. lol

ok, i saw it... it's on this page...

http://keyholepublis...-1-31-FBI-2.JPG

but how did you get to....

WoIverine, on 22 November 2012 - 02:50 PM, said:

Ball lightning is also not composed of copper

?

[TheMacGuffin]

Life magazine ran an article in 1952 titled "Have We Visitors from Space?" which mentioned Lincoln LaPaz and the "green fireballs".  They did indeed give off some kind of copper residue, but they were not meteorites, ball lightning or anything else along those lines:


"The popular Southwest belief that a strange meteor shower was underway has been blasted by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, mathematician, astronomer and director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. He points out that normal fireballs do not appear green, they fall in the trajectory forced on them by gravity, are generally noisy as a freight train, and leave meteorites where they hit. The green New Mexican species does none of these things. Neither do the green fireballs appear to be electrostatic phenomena – they move too regularly and too fast

If the fireballs are the product of a U.S. weapons project, as some Southwesterners believe, it is a very secret one indeed: the Atomic Energy Commission and every other government agency connected with weapons development has denied to LIFE any responsibility for the fireballs.

Could they be self-destroying Russian reconnaissance devices? Not likely. While the U.S. believes the Russians have an intercontinental guided missile, there is no intelligence that indicates they have developed silent power plants or objects capable of moving nearly as fast as meteors (12 miles a second). Yet – for whatever it may be worth – the only reports of green fireballs prior to 1948 came from the Baltic area.

If the fireballs do not respond to gravity, they could only be explained as lighter-than-air craft or electrical phenomena – but they have characteristics which rule these out. Therefore they must be propelled. If propelled and not natural phenomena, they must be artificial. The extreme greenness of the fireballs has impressed most witnesses. When asked to indicate the approximate color on a spectrum chart, most of them have touched the band at 5,200 angstroms, close to the green of burning copper. Copper is almost never found in meteorites; the friction of the air oxidizes it shortly after the meteor enters the upper atmosphere. However, a curious fact has been recorded by aerologists. Concentrations of copper particles are now present in the air of Arizona and New Mexico, particularly in "fireball areas." These were not encountered in air samples made before 1948."

http://www.project19...femag52.html#10

[TheMacGuffin]

WHAT THEY ARE NOT – AND WHAT THEY MAY BE


What are the flying saucers, the luminous fuselages, the foo fighters and the green fireballs? The answer – if any answer at this time is possible – lies in the field of logic rather than of evidence. What the things are may be adduced partially by reviewing what they are not.

THEY ARE NOT PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA.   Although the Air Force cheerily wrote off its 34 unexplained incidents with this pat theory, the explanation does not hold up. There is no evidence, beyond textbook speculation, for such a supposition, and there is the direct evidence already cited against it. To doubt the observers in the foregoing cases is to doubt the ability of every human being to know a hawk from a handsaw.

THEY ARE NOT THE PRODUCT OF U.S. RESEARCH.   LIFE investigated this possibility to exhaustion. Not fully satisfied by the public denials of President Truman, Secretary Johnson and others, the investigators put the question directly to Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He said: "There's nothing in our shop that could account for these things, and there's nothing going on that I know of that could explain them." Still unconvinced, LIFE checked the whereabouts and present business of every scientist who might have anything to do with the development of superaircraft. All were accounted for in other ways. Careful feelers through the business and labor world encountered no submerged projects of the immensity necessary to build a fleet of flying disks. And there is still the conclusive fact: U.S. science has at its command no source of power that could put a flying machine through such paces as the saucers perform.

THEY ARE NOT A RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENT.   It is inconceivable that the Russians would risk the loss of such a precious military weapon by flying a saucer over enemy territory. No man-made machine is foolproof; sooner or later one would crash in the U.S. and the secret would be out. Nor is there any reason to believe that Russian science, even with German help, has moved beyond not only the practical but the THEORETICAL horizons of U.S. research.

THEY ARE NOT DISTORTIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE RESULTING FROM ATOMIC ACTIVITY.   To quote the answer David Lilienthal, former AEC commissioner, once made to that suggestion: "I can't prevent anyone from saying foolish things." Nor are they aberrations of the northern lights. Magnetic disturbances cannot account for them and neither can a notion (recently fathered by Dr. Urner Liddel, the Navy physicist) that they are "vertical mirages" – reflections from a vertical (instead of a horizontal) layer of heated air.

THEY ARE NOT SKYHOOK BALLOONS.   This was the original Liddel explanation, and in a few instances it may have been correct. But not many. They could scarcely be "fireflies in the cockpit," as one Air Force colonel suggested, since most of the observers were not in a cockpit when they saw their saucers. And it is hard to believe that saucers could be the reflections of automobile headlights on clouds, when they are seen in daylight under cloudless skies. These being the dead-end alleys of negative evidence, is there hope of an explanation on the open avenues of scientific theory? The answer is yes.

[TheMacGuffin]

LaPaz had also seen his own UFO in July 1947:

On July 10, 1947 at 4:47 p.m., one of the U.S.'s top astronomers was driving from Clovis to Clines Corners, N. Mex. [Subsequently revealed to be Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, investigator of Incident 10, the mysterious green fireballs.] His wife and his teen-aged daughters were also in the car. (For professional reasons he has asked LIFE to withhold identity.) It was a bright sunny day, but the whole western half of the sky was a "confused cloud sea." All at once, as the car headed toward these clouds, "all four of us almost simultaneously became aware of a curious bright object almost motionless" among the clouds. Instantly, from long habit in dealing with celestial phenomena, he began to make calculations. with what crude materials he had at hand. He held a pencil at arm's length, measured the size of the object against the windshield of the car, measured the distance between his eyes and the windshield, etc. His wife and two daughters did the same, each making independent calculations.

The object, says the scientist, "showed a sharp and firm regular outline, namely one of a smooth elliptical character much harder and sharper than the edges of the cloudlets... The hue of the luminous object was somewhat less white than the light of Jupiter in a dark sky, not aluminum or silver-colored.... The object clearly exhibited a sort of wobbling motion... This wobbling motion served to set off the object as a rigid, if not solid body." After 30 seconds in plain view, the ellipsoid moved slowly behind a cloud (273 degrees azimuth, elevation 1 degree) "and we thought we had lost it." But approximately five seconds later it reappeared (275 degrees azimuth, elevation 2 degrees). "This remarkably sudden ascent thoroughly convinced me that we were dealing with an absolutely novel airborne device." After reappearing, the object moved slowly from south to north across the clouds. "As seen projected against these dark clouds, the object gave the strongest impression of self-luminosity." About two and a half minutes after it first came into view, the thing disappeared finally behind a cloudbank.

Edited by TheMacGuffin, 23 November 2012 - 03:53 AM.

[TheMacGuffin]

This 1952 article was written with the cooperation of Edward Ruppelt and others in the military and intelligence fields, and personally I have always considered it to be a semi-official disclosure about UFOs, which is a rare and unusual event but does happen from time to time just the same, at least in a limited way.

[mcrom901]

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 03:49 AM, said:

but they were not meteorites, ball lightning or anything else along those lines:

how did you reach to such a conclusion?

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 03:49 AM, said:

"However, a curious fact has been recorded by aerologists. Concentrations of copper particles are now present in the air of Arizona and New Mexico, particularly in "fireball areas." These were not encountered in air samples made before 1948."

check the link on the top of the page

[TheMacGuffin]

mcrom901, on 23 November 2012 - 03:57 AM, said:

how did you reach to such a conclusion?

I didn't.  LaPaz and others reached it long ago.

[mcrom901]

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 03:49 AM, said:

"However, a curious fact has been recorded by aerologists. Concentrations of copper particles are now present in the air of Arizona and New Mexico, particularly in "fireball areas." These were not encountered in air samples made before 1948."

On July 24 a green fireball was observed falling close to Socorro, New Mexico. Dust samples were collected at the School of Mines there and were found to contain large particles of copper. LaPaz found this highly significant, since copper burns with the same yellow-green color characteristic of the green fireballs. He also noted that if the copper particles came from the green fireballs, then they could not be conventional meteorites, since copper was never found in dust of meteoric origin. LaPaz suggested that further air and ground samples be taken in areas where the fireballs were seen.

that therefore this...

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 04:11 AM, said:

I didn't.  LaPaz and others reached it long ago.

"long ago"?

http://en.wikipedia....st-hoc_analysis

[TheMacGuffin]

mcrom901, on 23 November 2012 - 04:14 AM, said:

On July 24 a green fireball was observed falling close to Socorro, New Mexico. Dust samples were collected at the School of Mines there and were found to contain large particles of copper. LaPaz found this highly significant, since copper burns with the same yellow-green color characteristic of the green fireballs. He also noted that if the copper particles came from the green fireballs, then they could not be conventional meteorites, since copper was never found in dust of meteoric origin. LaPaz suggested that further air and ground samples be taken in areas where the fireballs were seen.

that therefore this...

Yes, those were LaPaz's conclusions at the time, that the UFOs were missiles of some kind.  After all, he was there and actually saw them, and he knew they were not conventional objects or natural phenomena.

"LaPaz travels to Los Alamos to interview the witnesses of the 20 Dec incident. He plots the sightings (which he notes were not made under the best conditions), and calculates that the Green Fireball had appeared at an altitude of around 50,000 ft and descended at a 45 degree angle to only about 12,000 ft, leveled off, then flew horizontally for about 7.5 miles at a speed of about 3.75 - 7.5 miles per second (13,000 to 27,000 mph - speeds at or above those achieved by ICBM warheads, and more than twenty times faster than a V-1)."

http://www.project19...b/gfbchron.html

[TheMacGuffin]

There were all kinds of ideas floating around at the time to try to explain them, but LaPaz was the meteorite expert and he knew these weren't meteorites.

[TheMacGuffin]

Others speculated that the UFOs were nuclear-powered Soviet craft being launched from Siberia, but of course those did not actually exist at the tome either.

[mcrom901]

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 04:28 AM, said:

Yes, those were LaPaz's conclusions at the time, that the UFOs were missiles of some kind.

he couldn't have reached any such conclusion... it's a logical fallacy

TheMacGuffin, on 23 November 2012 - 04:28 AM, said:

After all, he was there and actually saw them, and he knew they were not conventional objects or natural phenomena.

he didn't know... his data wasn't sufficient...

[TheMacGuffin]

Then in January 1950, LaPaz became even more convinced that the UFOs had to be artificial or man-made objects of some kind:


25 Jan

Dr William Crozier attempts air sampling at NM School of Mines in Socorro, using his special impactment dust collector.  Crozier was a WWII Proximity Fuze project colleague of LaPaz and is currently conducting a Navy-funded research project related to reentry vehicle research.  Crozier has developed a sampling device called an "impactment dust collector" which draws air through filter paper discs.  He has previously used the device in an attempt to obtain microscopic particles of meteor debris which had drifted down from the upper atmosphere.  The military funds the research as part of its early attempt to understand the dynamics of hypersonic objects in the upper atmosphere.  LaPaz has contacted Crozier in hopes that the Green Fireballs had volatilized and produced particles that might be collected by Crozier's special sampler.  Upon examining the filter from the Jan 25 run, Crozier finds that the filters contain large amounts of unusual microscopic copper spherules.  Copper is one of the rarest elements in natural meteors.

26 Jan
Second air sampling attempt at Crozier's lab. More copper particles are obtained.  LaPaz is convinced that this is evidence of the artificiality of the fireballs but Crozier is more cautious.