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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