Lovely photos. I am amazed to see that all those aircraft are still airworthy, or were some just doing ground runs?

Scotavia, actually a genuinely Fortean UFO is a rare thing and at least 95 percent of UFOs seen are mis-identificatons. I totally disagree that a UFO is ‘by definition’ anything that is unidentified. These days when we talk of UFOs we mean a sighting of an object in the sky that isn’t one of the many natural or human aerial objects. UFO researchers go to amazing lengths to dismiss these mis-sightings because the muddy the water. So when a significant ‘UFO’ is experienced we are not talking balloons, airships, Venus here. We are talking a very strange event that is not a dust mite or a meteor.

This is because the term UFO is no longer a description but a real name, for lack of a better one. One of the debunkers’ most disingenuous moves is to keep coming back to this idea that ‘unidentified’ mearly means ‘indentified as a normal phenomena if we had more data or better photos’.

Many many so-called UFOs that have been encountered in the last 60 years by commercial and military pilots are not and could never be considered a normal but mis-identified object. Only a blinkered person would hold this untenable viewpoint.

So a cylinder-like silvery metallic object goes head-to-head with an Alitalia A300 inbound to Biggen for Heathrow. It passed on a reciprocal direction a few hundred feet down the side of the airliner. It is either a out of control missile in which case where is it, where did it crash? Or it is a UFO meaning unidentified but not meaning Venus, a meteor or swamp gas. The military totally denied loss of any uav or missile and said there were no missile tests that day. The Alitalia crew complained to ATC and submitted and AirProx when the got to Heathrow.

In Iran in 1976 a huge sperical UFO hung in the night sky near Tehran. People reported it to the nearly Iranian Air Force base and the base commander was contacted and he sent up an F4 Phantom to check it out. As the F4 closed with the object it lost all electrical systems. The crew returned to the base while a second F4 was launched to take over. The second F4 saw the object from 30nm and their tracking radar locked on to it too. They saw a huge globe which was sending a tight beam of light down to the ground. When the F4 was within 10nm they tried to obtain missile lock and a small spherelike object came from the UFO at them. At that time they also lost their electrical systems (instruments and weapons I believe). The object, which the crew thought was a missile, flew 10nm at them, circled them and returned to the UFO. They returned to their base. This was originally reported in a CIA message from the USA’s Iranian embassy but after the Shah was deposed the base commander and the aircrew both ended up in LA or California and confirmed the event.

It is too easy to fool yourself into thinking you are being rational and open minded when you say a UFO is by definition ‘unidentified’ and think that must mean it would be identified as a common thing if more info was available. But many UFOs have been encountered by pilots and while these UFOs are ‘unidentified’ it is disingenuous to suggest they are common mis-identified aerial things. The crews that encounter them would probably say they encountered something truly mysterious and frightening.

If a mugger comes out of the dark and hits you he is also unidentified but you are in no doubt he was of the ‘mugger’ variety of object. But a debunker will say it was a dog or a cow because debunkers don’t believe UFOs are anything other than common events mis-seen by sky-uneducated people.

That’s my point. Making technical philosophical points about what ‘Theory’ is or what the acronym UFO stands for doesn’t impress me much. I did all that nonsense when I was younger but with age I have learned that getting to the truth of things is all that is important. We can talk philosophy and the meaning of words but apart from making us feel important it won’t get to the truth of things. And the UFO phenomena is probably more important than any of us know.

I believe our understanding of these Fortean phenomena might help us lift ourselves out of the materialistic scientific dogma that we are currently being blinkered by. And all of us who went through a western education have been taught this dogma. Science should be about investigating that which we don’t know about and that which is a mystery, not about maintaining the status quo of a set of beliefs. That’s why I mentioned Einstein. He recognised the dogma that existed in science in his day and put his scientific prowess to his NOT having suffered that sort of education.

That’s my view on it anyway. Apologies in advance for any offence caused. 😉

Hi Eh Team commander

I agree with what you write. We have to be more open to strangeness to see the cracks in the edifice of our current world view. They represent the ‘new’ science to come and should be welcomed.

It is too comfortable to place Fortean events into categories we already feel comfortable with. So UFOs can be mis-identified natural phenomena so some people (out of focus dust mites and pollen do look like glowing UFOs on digital cameras in bright light conditions) or we can see them as the nuts-and-bolts spaceship from a nearby planetary system. I personally don’t think they are either.

I DO suspect they are ‘visitors’ from elsewhere because the pilot-reported encounters show their actions are deliberate. Are they a sister race of evolved two-armed, two-legged, single headed beings? (EBEs as Mulder would say.) It is likely that would be their shape given random evolution? Probably not. So to me that suggests their actions and appearance are somehow tailored to our human nature to ‘fit in’ more, maybe? (They are not doing it well, if so.)

I have never seen a UFO while airborne but I have had experiences when ground-bound. The current UFO era has been going now for over 60 years without resolution, partly because science (and ‘intellegent people’) have been set up to consider it a laughing matter. This is the fault of the US Government which instituted the policy of debunking any UFO report sent to Blue Book, especially the significant ones. It also made the subject very secret so they could force military AND civil pilots to keep quiet about any airborne encounters (this is historic fact not my opinion). So the press and the scientific community took thie cue from this dismissive approach by the USAF. What they didn’t know was that the US military were feverishly investigating the many credible pilot-radar encounters of UFOs behind the scenes. Western governments followed suite.

We have been duped and misled about this important subject. As I said before, anyone who is open-minded should read pilot-encounters, especially from the early days after the war before the world wide cover-up began.

This UFO subject has been made a ‘belief’ type one by the disingenuous ‘debunkers’ who claim to be scientific but are in no way scientific in thier approach to on-the-edge-of-science subject. These debunkers (Phillip Klass for example) are true-believers themselves and like religious fanatics, they run campaigns to dirty the facts of the UFO phenomenon. So we end up with an emotive ‘belief’ sysem for those who eithe DO ‘believe’ or DON’T believe these objects are more than mis-identified natural or human objects.

Belief is what we have in most facts of science. I am a believer in scientific ideas because I have to take what scientists say as a matter of faith in the scientific peer-review system. But I don’t ‘know’ they are right.

Scientists (not all) say that Global Warming is a fact but I don’t think it is proven. They also say Darwinian Evolution is a fact but it has yet to be scientifically proven and is really still a theory (a impressive one though).

UFOs are real but it doesn’t follow that they are Alien Spaceships. That is an error of logic and a jump of faith. They surely act like intellegently controlled objects and I am sure that they are that. But does it follow that this means they are visiting spaceships? We are a long way from being able to prove that but it is a valid belief to hold.

Many debunkers say that because UFOs act in ways that seem to go against the laws of nature (right angled high-speed turns, popping in and out of view, etc) this ‘proves’ they are not real, but they are some sort of mental delusion. Well that is unscientific nonsense. What UFOs DO PROVE is that our understanding of natural laws are wrong or in need of updating. 😮

UFOs, like ESP and othe ‘paranormal’ phenomena, is ignored by science and is given NO funding to find scientific evidence or understanding. This is why there is so little scientific evidence out there. Science is blinkered and treats these subject as HERESY just like the Roman Catholic church treated people who held non-Christian views as heretics (and murdered them with the Inquisition).

Scientists don’t murder heretics but they do have an Inquisition: the self-appointed debunkers. These people try to publically murder the reputations of those (often scientists) who talk heresy.:diablo:

This is why these subjects still have so little scientific evidence to bring them out of the range of crank-beliefs. It is why the subject of UFOs is emotive to many (on both sides of the controversy).

UFOs are real and not dust-mites. What they are is still uncertain and we will never know until science unblinkers itself and looks honestly at the evidence. 😡

It is currently popular for those who don’t believe UFOs are anything other than mis-identifications and hoxes to smugly say this belief is a scientific and rational viewpoint. But it is nothing other than another belief based on the belief in the infalibility of science. If scientists are not interested then it cannot be a valid phenomena to investigate, right?

Einstein said that if he had gone through the ‘system’ of scientific education he would never have been able to see reality as clearly as he did when he postulated relativity theory. That says it all as far as a narrow viewpoint of science.

It seems that bad behaviour on aircraft is becoming more common. I think the senior steward should have access to a taser to zap these stupido passengers. Aggressive people on an airliner cannot be acceptable.

Brilliant 🙂
Was runway 23R used for take off’s only when runway 23L was used for landings?
When was runway 23R and also 33L (I think?) removed?

I think all the runways were used initially when the traffic was C-47 and Lancastrian types but I don’t think they used runways other than what they mark as runway 1, 2 and 5 (28R/10L, 23L/05R and 28L/10R) by the 1960s even though these maps show approach lighting on all runways. But i am sure there are others who will know for sure. 😉