As you know Paul, these were not ordinary witnesses, but the world's top experts in aviation, aerodynamics, and aircraft design, with Kelly Johnson being the world's foremost aircraft designer (who had just begun work on the U-2 on this sighting date). One was Lockheed's Cal Tech-trained Chief Aerodynamicist. They were also experts in visual observation of aircraft and objects at long distances, which they had to do in their daily work for Lockheed, most of them being pilots if not test pilots. One of them had trained in calibrating his visual estimates of distance of aircraft with radar tracking, which helped him match visual cues for distance with actual range (for example atmospheric haze can allow one to estimate distance, comparing an object's apparent haze to the observable haze of known objects at known distance, etc.). Very few people ever get such training (most people in a technical position like that can just use the radar to get the exact distances). One could not think of better UFO witnesses, expert trained witnesses, in all of UFO history.
I keep seeing the comment that there is no triangulation because there is only "one point" and people can't see objects from the ground at an altitude of 90 miles. That's absurd.
Let's take the second issue first: The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle are more than 170 miles in altitude above the ground and are seen all the time by naked-eye observers on the ground. Altitude alone has nothing to do with visibility per se. Angular size (size to distance ratio) and contrast with sky background are the determining factors in an object's visibility at long distances.
As for triangulation data points: There were 2 sets of Lockheed observers in 2 different locations separated by a baseline for triangulation of more than 30 miles. With people reading over the Lockheed witness statements, why has no one bothered noting that Kelly Johnson gave a specific sighting azimuth (direction) of 255 degs, based on his knowledge of his home's location with respect to his local geography (I personally visited the area myself)?
Johnson wrote: "I estimated the position of the object to be roughly over Point Mugu, which lies on a bearing about 255° from my ranch." The Lockheed WV-2 aircraft headed straight towards the hovering object and had their aircraft magnetic compass to give them an exact heading of due West Magnetic (270 degs or 285 True for that location in 1953). The 255 True bearing from Johnson's position and the 285 True bearing from the Lockheed aircraft's position intersect over the Santa Barbara Channel near Anacapa Island. That's called a triangulation. Lockheed chief test pilot and main pilot for this flight, Rudy Thoren, reported in excellent agreement with this triangulation that he "estimated that it [the object] was somewhere between Point Mugu and the Santa Barbara Islands" -- but the triangulation is more accurate than his estimate and should not be cited as if better than the triangulation, nor should other's estimates be used to trump the more accurate data.
That 255 direction from Kelly Johnson puts the object on a sighting line directly over Point Mugu, but the triangulated intersection point does not put the object itself directly over Point Mugu (about 20 miles away) but about ten miles farther away, at about 30 miles from Johnson. The direction to the object remains exactly the same, 255 degs, only the distance is greater, a parameter that is difficult to observe. Johnson said "roughly" the position was over Point Mugu, that means "very approximately."
There is a basic rule in science and engineering data analysis: Use the most accurate data! You don't mix in the less-accurate and vague data, and demand some kind of perverse "fairness" doctrine insisting that the most accurate data must always be allowed to be swamped by the vague or inaccurate data and then name-call anyone who selects accurate over the vague as "cherry-picking."
If astronomer-mathematician Lincoln LaPaz had followed this procedure in his decades of successful meteorite tracking he would never have found a single meteorite. But he found many meteorites using witness reports because he ignored or put little or no weight on vague imprecise witness statements and he quite scientifically "cherry-picked" the accurate data from among his data set. This is not just proper scientific procedure it is the required scientific procedure. It is the height of lunacy to use lousy data when you have better data. No scientist would take a witness statement of time of "oh, it was around 5 o'clock," and prefer it over the witness who precisely reports the time was 5:00 to 5:05.
It is a classic debunking tactic to deconstruct a UFO case by insisting tacitly, as an unspoken hidden premise, that all witnesses must be identical observing robots who report exactly the same details, and if any of them deviate in any way then the debunker gets to trump the accurate or more certain witnesses, who get dismissed in the process. So, with this tactic, if one witness makes a casual, inexact comment that something happened in "a minute or two," then that vague offhand remark gets to trump and destroy the witness who gives a precise numerical figure of "10 seconds." And if someone who analyzes the data uses the 10-second figure as the authoritative witness number, then the debunker screams "foul" and complains that the exact data is what is wrong and must be rejected or obfuscated with casual non-estimates and offhanded comments. Sorry, but that's not the way science is done. The 10-second figure for object disappearance is the controlling data point in any truly scientific analysis of this case.
It is another debunking tactic to insist that the witness must be his own PhD scientist investigator of his own sighting and do all sighting analysis himself, and do it correctly and completely as if he knows of all other witnesses' reports, and anything he says and any mistake he makes will be used against him, using hypercritical nitpicking techniques. The Lockheed crew and Johnson and his wife were not UFO investigators, and could hardly investigate their own sightings in their initial sighting reports in any case. They expected the AF to investigate, do triangulations, etc., and no doubt assumed that the AF did its job (which the AF did not, so far as we know).
What if Kelly Johnson had not been so careful and had not used the qualifying words "estimated" and "roughly" when he said he "estimated the position of the object to be roughly over Point Mugu" and had instead just said "it looked like it was over Point Mugu?" Would a debunker get to jump all over Johnson when the triangulation turns out to put the object about 10 miles farther away, but still on a line directly over Point Mugu? Would they get to say this disproves the entire sighting, or refutes Johnson's observational data? I think not. What if Johnson had been a little rushed that day in getting his secretary to type his report and had left out those qualifying words, thus making his report more vulnerable? Fortunately he didn't, but no doubt there are other parts of his report and other witnesses' reports that could be nitpicked to death with debunking tactics instead of common sense, scientific data procedures.
As the principal investigator of this case, I have spent years investigating and analyzing the sighting details, including interviewing the last surviving witness and indirectly communicating with the second-to-last (pilot Roy Wimmer, in a nursing home, via his daughter). I have carefully studied each parameter of the case, including aircraft location, altitude, time, heading, speed, turns, meteorological data, and the sighting parameters and physics for the UFO. I have constructed a sighting model with 3-D data that uses the best and most accurate data to reconstruct the sighting circumstances, physics and dynamics, including the Lockheed WV-2 flight time-altitude record data that was reported, in order to determine what actually happened, not what is most convenient to some ETH scenario (which I reject in general, and have all my life), or some debunker anti-ETH scenario. This flight record and reconstruction helps refine the fuzzier data on altitude and time. I am not ready to publish all of this work yet as it is book-length.
Facts are facts, however, even when they clash with my own personal beliefs and views (I do not "believe" in aliens). If the data in this multiple-witness, triangulated Lockheed sighting suggests an extraordinary flying object was observed by expert witnesses, then I report the data and do my best to reconstruct it in the most accurate manner, even if I do not agree with the direction the case points in, so to speak. It is admittedly a challenge to my anti-ETH position. But I will not force-fit the data into a debunking scenario by perversely choosing the most deviant and inaccurate details and ignore the most reliable and accurate data.
It is a fact that the human eye's Minimum Angle of Resolution (MAR) is about 1 arcminute -- one cannot "see" an object smaller than that with the unaided eye (with one exception not pertinent here). The angular size of a 200 foot object at about 60 miles distance is about 2 arcminutes or about twice (2x) the minimum to be visible. If the object had been smaller than 100 feet it could not have been seen at 60 miles. As the Lockheed aircraft approached to about 30 miles from the stationary object, the angular size would double to about 4 arcminutes or 4x minimum resolution or visibility (the Full Moon is about 32 arcmins in diameter for comparison, so the object would have been about 1/8 the angular diameter of the Full Moon and thus very easy to see and make out a rough shape, but not large enough for finer details). So what's the problem? Kelly Johnson was also at about that latter distance, but he also had 8-power binoculars which extended the range he could observe the object as it took off away from him in a climb.
That means they all could have observed the departing object out to a distance of about 120 miles with the unaided eye before disappearing due to distance. With the 8-power binoculars Johnson could see it to eight-times greater distance, or about 960 miles, where it would disappear (at an altitude of about 90 miles at a modest ascent angle of 5 degs) . Do the math. It is easy arithmetic. Therefore, during the object's 10-second departure as seen from the Lockheed WV-2 aircraft, it would have traveled about 90 miles (from about 30 to 120 miles) in 10 seconds. That's about 9 miles per second average velocity, or about 32,000 mph.
If Lockheed's test pilot Roy Wimmer saw the departure sequence for about 3 seconds longer than Lockheed Chief Aerodynamicist Philip Colman's 10-second high-speed departure interval (as Wimmer indicated when he said he "was able to see it for several seconds after the rest of the crew had lost sight of it") then I can be conservative and reduce this average velocity to about 7 miles per second or 25,000 mph at minimum (90 mi/13 secs = 7 mi/sec approx.). But that's an average velocity. It had to start from zero velocity, so the peak velocity could have been at least double that, or 50,000 mph. The acceleration required to reach 50,0000 mph in 13 seconds is about 175 g's. To be conservative, I can reduce this figure a bit more by assuming Wimmer's "several seconds" extra time than Colman might have been as much as say 5 secs longer, or 15 secs total for the escape sequence, but cannot reasonably stretch this much more than that. That results in an acceleration of about 130 g's.
Postulating outlandish object dimensions such as 1300 feet instead of the more reasonable 200 feet indicated by the Minimum Angle of Resolution and the 170-230-ft Flying WIng/C-124/B-36 comparisons made by the witnesses, only make these velocity and acceleration figures almost infinitely worse. Parameters cannot be arbitrarily changed like that without causing a massive ripple effect on all other dynamic physics parameters of this sighting. An object as large as 1300 ft in size would have to reach a distance of about 6.5x farther, or about 780 miles to disappear to the naked eye in about 10-15 secs, or about 6,240 miles distance to disappear in Kelly Johnson's binoculars in about 90 secs. The average speed is nearly 250,000 mph and peak velocity 500,000 mph reached at about 750 g's. I leave it to others to check this easy math for themselves.
Brad
