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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