Astronaut recalls encounter with a UFO

[scowl]

NASA's Unexplained files # 3 I believe.

So is that a show on television or something?

[scowl]

That is your problem if you TOTALLY want to believe me ..... I said do your own research, answers aint gonna fall from the sky (or come as a result of believing any one)

I have done my own research and found nothing to support any of your claims.

If you have information I may have overlooked, by all means post it so we can evaluate it.

[JimOberg]

I am going to have to find more on it. I believe in UFO's but do not believe that everything unexplained is. But they only showed a brief clip of one but said there were 16 reported accounts. But like you, if they were capable of moving through and avoiding other objects, that for me says more than just mere space junk.

Please look over my "99 FAQs" about genuine spaceflight conditions and consequences, before you proclaim that you know enough about outer space conditions to accurately judge what is and is not possible there.

[JimOberg]

To everyone . do your own research . Research not only the sightings but also the people. Don't forget that NASA lied in our face....

It's worse than that -- NASA lied to itself about spaceflight safety, and in the 1990s enough key managers grew sloppy and self-delusional about the principles that CAN creat minimized-hazard [never 'safe'] spaceflight. That's when I went to Congress to testify about what I was seeing and fearing, and then walked out of my day job, helpless to halt the juggernaut toward another shuttle disaster. But as I wrote up the problems from the outside, I had the enormous honor of being officially denounced in a NASA press release for 'whacko' opinions -- just before they crashed another shuttle and killed seven more people.

How does that make me a NASA stooge and a servant of their prevarications? How many REAL whistle-blowers have you ever encountered?

[JimOberg]

..... there is an undercurrent of zealotry in his pursuit of anything to do with debunking.... I remember once I went to Obergs profile on facebook and his first interest was United Methodist Church of Brazoria ... it does point to a motive of someone who doesn't want UFOs to exist for what it might do to certain religious principles.

It might have more to do with the fact that my son was the minister at that church and he lived there in Brazoria with his wife and my only grandchildren.

Fortunately for the rhetorical levels of this board, I also take seriously and zealously the Christian principles of rage-control. I look forward to the time when you can feel profound shame for your comment, when you will be forgiven for it.

[JimOberg]

I saw that one of the scientists was complaining because NASA told him to down play his experiment when it showed life on Mars, because 2 prior experiments showed none. But then a decade later it came out that the 2 dead areas tested were high in some type of salt content which they now figure may have killed off any life in the soil samples.

The interpersonal politics of life-on-Mars scholarship can be vicious, perhaps expressing the awesomeness of the question and the fame of whomever gets the real evidence first. I've been friends with the meteorite fossil team for many years and watched their suggestions gradually gain acceptance as evidence and better analysis accumulated. It's MUCH more exciting to follow than mapping farcical faces and pyramids.

[bendigger0]

Jim O. Is there any UFO report or photographic evidence that you regard as credible or worthy of further investigation?

[JimOberg]

Oberg you read Paul Davies ? Philosophical implications? I bet you have a copy at home

As the notoriously laconic Calvin Coolidge once remarked to the lady sitting next to him at a state dinner who told him, "Mr. President, I made a bet that I can get more than three words out of you tonight."

"You lose."

[SolarPlexus]

I also take seriously and zealously the Christian principles of rage-control. I look forward to the time when you can feel profound shame for your comment, when you will be forgiven for it.

I like that. Youre a real Christian

[Forever Cursed]

I put my copy of the report on my website, I can't find it anywhere else. It's where Birnes learned of it, and began fantasizing freely.... [grin]

lol I just noticed the name. Yep it was your site I was on reading the report on "Moon pigeons" and you are correct, there really isn't much on it.

[SolarPlexus]

As the notoriously laconic Calvin Coolidge once remarked to the lady sitting next to him at a state dinner who told him, "Mr. President, I made a bet that I can get more than three words out of you tonight."

"You lose."

So is that a no? Do you like that book ?

[JimOberg]

Investors LOST money? That's NEWS?

The news is that the people who said, "We can automatically trust Gordon Cooper because he's a great hero," paid for their folly.

And learned a lesson a lot of folks around here don't seem to have, yet.

[Forever Cursed]

The interpersonal politics of life-on-Mars scholarship can be vicious, perhaps expressing the awesomeness of the question and the fame of whomever gets the real evidence first. I've been friends with the meteorite fossil team for many years and watched their suggestions gradually gain acceptance as evidence and better analysis accumulated. It's MUCH more exciting to follow than mapping farcical faces and pyramids.

I would have to agree with that statement !

[JimOberg]

Jim O. Is there any UFO report or photographic evidence that you regard as credible or worthy of further investigation?

Lots. I am intrigued by Salyut cosmonaut Kovalyonok's detailed description of a metamorphing cloud below him at sunrise as he flew over the South African missile test range in 1981 [and another rising glowing translucent sphere reported by Strekalov over canada]. The 100+ pictures that ISS crewman Luca Parmitano serendipitously caught last October 10 of the Topol missile staging in space over Kazakhstan show illumination and expansion and obscuration effects I'm still trying to understand. I've written up Andy Thomas's account of a 'moon illusion' that seems to have somehow atmospherically ducted the moon outline over the edge of the Earth and projected it as a rippling ring of fire on the ocean surface ahead of him.

Some of the views of small flashing particles -- very thin and very low-mass ice chips off thruster leaks, for the most part -- show a gently curving over a period of several minutes that I cannot relate to any outgassing or thrusting from the shuttle. Are they gentle jetting effects of water molecules heated by the sun and popcorning off in a preferred direction? Friends and I are working on the physics.

I know ice forms at the nozzles, by the way, because for the first two shuttle missions in 1981 I was at the 'OMS/RCS Propulsion" console in Mission Control. We detected propellant leaks not by pressure drops -- the tanks varied in temperature too wildly to accurately use Boyle's Law of PVT -- pressure/volume/temperature -- to accurately guage tiny leaks. No, we used nozzle thermometers to measure the chilling in vacuum of the evaporation of much of the leaking fluid leading to the freezing of the remainder [hydrazine freezes not far below H2O].

Nothing behaved as we expected from earthside experience -- even the heating from thruster firings looked 'upside-down', as the thruster fired the structural temperature dropped because of cool propellant flow from the external tanks, but when the thruster cut off, the very hot engine bell could leak its heat into the mounting structure that was no longer having cool new propellant flowing past, so measured temperatures went UP briefly and then gradually cooled. But only AFTER the engine had turned OFF.

We learned that assuming we were still in Kansas could bite us every time.

[JimOberg]

Jim O. Is there any UFO report or photographic evidence that you regard as credible or worthy of further investigation?

Fair question. While I am not stampeded by a residue of 'unsolvables' into requiring an extraordinary stimulus for some of them, I've seen enough weird stuff human-related and nature-related to suspect there's lots of useful clues to things we don't yet understand. That makes serious consideration of the data -- and serious collection and cataloguing of it -- worthwhile. And the ultimate 'holy grail' explanations -- you know who they are -- are not a priori impossible, and thus need always to remain on the list of possibilities.

But until we can get a better handle on the noise -- and modern ufology is part of the problem, not part of the solution -- we could well neither recognize nor properly diagnose those clues.

Yeah, I'm zealous about THAT. If it really WERE all nonsense, I suppose I would care a lot less. What kind of bizarre "crypto-believer" does THAT make me, I wonder.....

Edited March 11, 2014 by JimOberg

[Forever Cursed]

Fair question. While I am not stampeded by a residue of 'unsolvables' into requiring an extraordinary stimulus for some of them, I've seen enough weird stuff human-related and nature-related to suspect there's lots of useful clues to things we don't yet understand. That makes serious consideration of the data -- and serious collection and cataloguing of it -- worthwhile. And the ultimate 'holy grail' explanations -- you know who they are -- are not a priori impossible, and thus need always to remain on the list of possibilities.

But until we can get a better handle on the noise -- and modern ufology is part of the problem, not part of the solution -- we could well neither recognize nor properly diagnose those clues.

Yeah, I'm zealous about THAT. If it really WERE all nonsense, I suppose I would care a lot less. What kind of bizarre "crypto-believer" does THAT make me, I wonder.....

A belief in something more, or even the desire to believe ? It's the concept of most spirituality I think.

[bendigger0]

Jim O. thanks for your thoughtful response about UFO reports that interest you. What do you think about the 1952 DC 'flyover', the Travis Walton case, and the so-called Battle of LA. i appreciate your sincere response.

[JimOberg]

Jim O. thanks for your thoughtful response about UFO reports that interest you. What do you think about the 1952 DC 'flyover', the Travis Walton case, and the so-called Battle of LA. i appreciate your sincere response.

This really is far afield of the local theme...

The DC flyover was the theme of several TV spots my small production company did in the mid-1990s, I was able to interview the AF officer who debriefed the pilots as they returned, and we interviewed other figures still alive forty years later. I have the tapes and ought to put them on youtube sooner or later -- if I mailed somebody a VHS, could they convert it into postable form? The impression from the folks nearest the action was that the pilots were chasing phantoms and shadows -- there was nothing physical up in the air with them.

The Walton case is burdened by the powerful motivation for fraud from the very start -- money withheld from a logging contract that only was released after the UFO event freaked out the work team so they refused to return. The rest of it is storytelling. I've specified on my website the kind of INFORMATIONAL evidence I'd love to see from somebody who interacted with ETI. So far, no hits.

LA looks to me like panic compounded by outright retouching of the images used in the newspapers, to maintain public fear levels where the government wanted them to be.

I have no idea what the ladies saw afire in the sky among helicopters east of Houston in 1980 -- Schuessler worked down the hall from me and I kept up with the early investigations.

Life's like that. The 'potentially possible' really is wilder than the 'hard provable'.

[psyche101]

To everyone . do your own research . Research not only the sightings but also the people. Don't forget that NASA lied in our face.

Do yours.

(Edgar Mitchell) I, nor any crew I was on (I was on three Apollo crews), received any briefing before or after flights on UFO events, saw anything in space suggesting UFOs or structures on the moon, etc. We did it just like we said in official reports. My only claim to knowledge of these events is from the individuals, mostly of yesteryear, who were in government, intelligence, or military; were there, saw what they saw, and now believe it should be made public. But I claim no first hand knowledge, nor have any. Pass it on to the rest of the net, if you will.

--Edgar Mitchell

And Oberg is another pseudo skeptic, a DEBUNKER, probably a hard core Christian who doesn't want aliens to exist at any cost .. or just believes strongly in covering up what shouldn't be known to the public..... .and has a bit of an unhealthy fixation with debunking UFOs... there is an undercurrent of zealotry in his pursuit of anything to do with debunking.... I remember once I went to Obergs profile on facebook and his first interest was United Methodist Church of Brazoria ... it does point to a motive of someone who doesn't want UFOs to exist for what it might do to certain religious principles.

And you are a paid misinformant sent here by the legion of UFOlogists as part of the Disclosure project to do your level best to discredit Jim Oberg to the public so that UFOlogy might gain more blind followers. You know Jim does not refuse the idea of aliens at all, very much the opposite, and any quick read of his work will display that. What you wish to do is draw the less informed to superstition so that your legion might appear knowledgeable enough for the average person to buy a UFO book, or pay some insane price to listen to someone twaddle on with imagination and tell tall tales. Jim has never mentioned a religious inclination at any time, so I can only assume that you made that slander up on the spot to try and reach the rational crowd who question these ancient claims as strongly as they do the UFO question, what you fail to realise is rationality is not tempered, it is what it is and that is dictated by fact. As such, you do not look logical, nor have you presented a solid argument, your examples which have been shot down in flames and only represent an unwillingness to face the facts as they stand or learn, and prefer to confusticate them to validate your personal belief system. Only the slowest if minds could possibly see your weak argument as denting the reputation of this good man, you have however also illustrated that you are a hysterical person who is a sore loser in debate. The religious angle well exposed your agenda. If anything, you give people like Jim credibility amongst the more intelligent people who might stumble upon your baseless rant.

[seeder]

Do yours.

[psyche101]

Why would you think believing me is important ? I don't want you to believe me . ....

It's not that at all, you are a rude person with no thought for other users of this forum. Many actually like to hear what Jim has to say, and come here t hear what he has to say, as I said, I consider it an honor to speak with someone who has been so close to the action. Who are you? A rude Internet anonymous poster who bangs on with made up crap that you do not offer supporting information for - ever. You have nothing to offer but Jim does. However, should such a pathetic display ever make someone like Jim think, "Well, it's just not worth it" and lets face it, who could blame someone for that when having to face an insulting rant like yours, but it's all the people who want to hear what he has to say that will HATE you forever for your selfish personal wants and actions.

If you disagree, there is a mature and respectable way to go about it. You can offer real evidence to rebut any claim made, and I know for sure that Jim welcomes genuine inquiry, but all you did was a pathetic quick Google and cut and pasted the woo that is regurgitated around the Internet, and tried to pass that rubbish off as research, and then red faced ranted about nothing at all. Grow up some.

[SolarPlexus]

Bla bla... Im not forbidding James to speak (like many of you do to people who believe in UFOs btw) It might seem rude, but its my opinion (distrust) of NASA .. You on the other hand wont allow any other "truth" except yours to exist , at any cost

[DONTEATUS]

YEah ! NASA lies , THats going to Fly like Forum members Find Big-Foot and Eat him without testing for DNA, BUt the B.B.Q sauce went well with him !

[JesseCuster]

Bla bla... Im not forbidding James to speak (like many of you do to people who believe in UFOs btw) It might seem rude, but its my opinion (distrust) of NASA .. You on the other hand wont allow any other "truth" except yours to exist , at any cost

That's right. At any cost. I believe psyche101 has successfully forbidden many UFO believers from speaking on the subject and is willing to lay down his life and accept innocent bystanders as collateral damage in his quest to quash dissenting opinion on the subject of UFOs. Absolutely any cost is acceptable.

Seriously dude, you think any forum members here have the power to "forbid" people from speaking on the subject and will incur "any cost" in doing so? Someone was right earlier on, you need to lay off the melodrama.

[Merc14]

snap

Edited March 12, 2014 by Merc14