Hi to all of you! Whats your take on this? Its to debunk the Kenneth Arnolds UFO case. The Ovoids of Oxnard It was a bright, sunny day in 1993. Oxnard. California. I was riding my bicycle along a highway to the north and looked up and saw a formation of about twenty ovoid objects flying in formation. They were rotating along their axis of motion, like footballs, with one side black and one bright white, so they alternated in color while they spun. They were flying along the Ventura hills, off in the distance, north of my position. I estimated they were near the hills and thus about ten miles away, and they crossed roughly ten miles of hills in less than half a minute. This meant their velocity worked out to something over 1200 miles per hour. Yet I heard no sonic boom. The experience of seeing these strange objects, and then realizing their vast speed and mysterious silence, was quite surreal. I stopped (literally), along with my heart (figuratively), and tried to figure out what the hell I was seeing. Then I realized what it was. A flock of seagulls. About half a mile away. By matching them to the hills, I had grossly misperceived their distance, and consequently I was measuring their speed against the hills, which they were in fact nowhere near. My brain didnt recognize them as birds, so instead it did its best, and saw only ovoid spinning objects. I am quite certain thats exactly what I saw--which means my brain was misinterpreting the data and creating in my mind a completely inaccurate model of what the objects actually looked like. Once I realized they were birds, their proper shape and motion resolved in my minds eye and I could see them as seagulls plain as day. This change in my perception of the objects felt very much like what happens when you suddenly see one thing as something else, but cant see it as both at the same time (like the pic above...look at it...okay, book or cleavage?). These were Western Gulls, with black feathers on top of their wings and white on the bottom. The birds wings were flapping at a constant synchronized rate, thus alternating the white and black of their wings in my view, so rhythmically as to create the optical illusion that they were spinning round and round, like white-and-black footballs, and this led my brain to interpret the objects as ovoids, rather than as the more complex bird shapes they really were. Ken Arnold said his nine objects flying in formation appeared almost round, but followed flipping, erratic movements and two or three of them every few seconds would dip or change their course slightly, just enough for the sun to strike them at an angle that reflected on my plane. He said they appeared black on edge, but when they flipped over they flashed white in his direction, which is what he claimed had led him to notice them: when a bright flash reflected on my plane he says, he thought he might be too close to another aircraft, so he started searching the sky for one. Which would mean his mind was actually primed to see aircraft, not birds. However, in his earlier radio interview, Arnold never mentions this flash or any concern about nearby aircraft, and instead says he just happened to see them by accident, and even, at first, thought they were geese, because [they] flew like geese, but since they were going too fast, he said, he concluded they must be jets. But even then he repeats that they seemed to flip and flash in the sun, like my birds did. He also told the radio interviewer that they looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear, which sounds exactly like a bird to me. The whole flying saucer scare was started by a flock of birds! It took me about a minute to finally resolve my perception and correctly identify my own Unidentified Flying Objects. So they are UFOs no more. But this was only possible because I was so close to the birds that eventually their relatively close range and angle of perspective revealed their complex shapes, as well as their relationship to objects on the ground near them (and in the sky). In other words: because they were close. Kenneth Arnolds birds were probably at a greater distance and thus would have been harder to resolve correctly. He got to see them for a little over two minutes, yet his description sounds almost identical to mine. Many years before my experience I had read one of Arnolds accounts, in which he spoke of ovoids flying in formation and flipping or spinning as they went, one side white and the other black (I hadnt seen his drawings yet, which depict them more as crescents than ovoids). So when I saw my ovoids I started to get excited. I made the connection almost immediately. Holy crap! Thats just what Arnold saw! Then when I realized what I was actually seeing, I made the less excited mental note: Yep. Thats probably just what Arnold saw. Arnold had estimated that his objects were at his same elevation (about 9500 feet) traveling roughly across his path and were about fifty to a hundred miles away, and that they traveled between the crests of two mountains in less than two minutes. Based on cartographic data placing the distance between the mountain crests at greater than 40 miles, this gave a speed of over 1200 miles per hour, coincidentally exactly the same speed I had calculated for my ultrasonic seagulls. However, Arnold mistook the mountain tops to be at his own elevation, when in fact they stand 5500 feet, which means they were 4000 feet below him. Since he was actually looking down at the mountains, thinking he was looking on the level, his ovoids had to have been below him, too, and not at his same elevation. My seagulls were about half a mile from me, but I took them to be ten miles away, which is wrong by a factor of twenty. Given his miscalculation of the mountain heights, he was making hugely erroneous estimates of location and distance. If Arnold misestimated the range of his ovoids the same way I did, by matching them with a distant object (my hills, his mountains), then his distance calculation could have been off by as much as a factor of 40, which if corrected gives an actual velocity of 30 mph, closer to a realistic bird speed. The details line up too well not to be birds: all their flight behavior, their fluttering and flashing, their shape. For all these birdlike details to just happen to converge for alien craft (or jets or mirages or anything else) is much less probable than that Arnold simply miscalculated the distance of the objects. For thats the only element that supports any conclusion contrary to it was birds. Though Arnold also claimed in written reports that the objects briefly passed behind a mountain peak, thus establishing their great distance, this crucial memory did not occur to him in his earlier radio interview, so I suspect this is another example of how we can sometimes edit our memories according to what we think happened, rather than what actually did, a phenomenon well documented by psychologists. Bruce Maccabees argument about bird luminosity (relative to mountain snow) does not count against this conclusion, either, because he ignores the fact that flapping wings change their angle of reflection rhythmically (exactly as Arnold reported), as do birds that bank to change direction (as Arnold reported they did). Thus the flashes would correspond to moments of maximum solar reflectivity, something that mountains (by not moving) never achieve. Maccabee did not take this into account, and since my seagulls also flashed, in the same rhythmic way, it sure sounds like the same thing to me. Hence it seems far more likely than not that the original flying saucers were just birds. Thats the core of his argument. The details line up too well not to be birds: all their flight behavior, their fluttering and flashing, their shape. For all these birdlike details to just happen to converge for alien craft (or jets or mirages or anything else) is much less probable than that Arnold simply miscalculated the distance of the objects. Here is, however, something written by Macabee: They also ignored Arnolds claim that he turned his plane, rolled down his window (to view them without glass in the way) and flew parallel to the flight path of the objects for a short time. Because of the type of aircraft he was flying his speed would definitely have been above a stall speed of 80 mph (Arnold said he was traveling over 100 mph air speed). By drawing a map, using a reasonable assumption about Arnolds flight path and and a reasonable assumption about the path of hypothetical pelicans or geese, one can show that the birds would never appear to pass Mt. Rainier and then, 100 or so seconds later, appear to pass Mt. Adams, from Arnolds (moving) perspective. What are we to think about this all?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:03:16 +0000
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