Estimates vary but stereoscopic vision in humans is only accurate within about 200m.
I grew up in the mountains too, and witnessed the 1972 Great Daylight Fireball. It looked like it was much closer than it actually was.
That must’ve been an amazing experience. One night in late 1994 I went for a walk in Pasadena – the first walk I’d taken in years (because it’s true, nobody walks in L.A., haha) – and a meteor the size of a school bus lit up the night sky like broad daylight as it flamed out brilliantly and dramatically streaking across the sky, dripping chunks of fire as it burned and disintegrated. The power of it felt like an omen. And it turned out to be one for me, actually – but that’s a whole other story.
The craft I saw could’ve easily been 2X as far away or more, but they definitely weren’t any closer than my estimate. Like I said, I estimate the distance at the shortest possible range to arrive at a conservative estimate of their speed – you can tell when something’s in the local vicinity, and these clearly weren’t. I wish that I had seen them closer, to get a better sense of their scale and shape etc., but what my sighting lacked in clarity it more than made up for in astonishing maneuvering. To this day, I’m partial to reports that involve these kinds of instantaneous accelerations, because no known natural phenomenon or technology can move like that.
So maybe they were over the next town? Did you ask if anyone over there had seen them? Is the area a UFO hotspot?
One town over, at a minimum. I didn’t know anyone in that area at the time, so I wouldn’t have known who to ask (and the odds of looking up during that narrow, less than 1-minute window of time, would be astronomically minuscule anyway. And as far as I know SW Pennsylvania isn’t a hot spot, but some interesting cases have happened in that area (like most areas, I presume).
That's a rather long reach for a 7 year old. Mine is only about 30" and I'm fully grown and around 5'11.
I’m estimating the angular velocity of my recollection at my current size; I’m 6’2” now. If I’d estimated the numbers using my seven-year-old body at the time of the sighting, the results would’ve been roughly the same.
That's a small visual distance. Just using only one eye or the other can cause a visual shift of position of that much. I assume you were you standing perfectly still outdoor at the time and not in a vehicle?
That was only one typical segment length before they suddenly changed direction, nearly doubling back on their trajectory. Over the course of the whole incident they probably covered more than 1.5 radians. We were all standing still…riveted by the sight of these things. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them even when we were speaking – I was afraid to look away, frankly. It was sort of like trying to follow the flight of a gnat. It was astonishing to see something move like that in the sky. I’d always loved aircraft and technology, and even by the age of seven you’re used to seeing planes and rockets and helicopters and even shooting stars…it’s startling to see something in the sky that’s truly novel and unclassifiable.
Frankly I can’t think of any reason that a pair of craft would move in that fashion, other than to provide an aerial demonstration of their capabilities. So that’s how I’ve chosen to interpret it – as an aerial demonstration that basically says “look at this – this is possible, now figure out how to do it.” And this strikes me as a very elegant and efficient way to convey this knowledge, and the inspiration to pursue it.
Well, there's a couple of minor issues
Like what?
but no matter how you look at it, unless your estimate of the distance was off by miles and your estimate of the time by seconds, neither of which seem likely, the range of the velocity is still outside any normal sort of aircraft, as well as the maneuvers.
Yep. I’ve whittled the numbers down as far as possible, and the most conservative estimates are still totally inexplicable – but that zig-zagging motion is the clincher: I’ve never seen anything remotely like it, before or since. It makes our most sophisticated aircraft look like crude and lumbering dirigibles. And to see two objects perform those maneuvers in perfect formation, among a group of witnesses…well, let’s just say that I soon found myself digging through the ufo/paranormal books at the local library, and then my high school library, and finally the physics and engineering library at USC, looking for any hint of a physical explanation. But unfortunately, the first hint didn’t appear in the academic literature until Alcubierre’s paper in 1994. Before that, all of the physics books said that what I saw that day was impossible.
In fact, I didn’t find a rational explanation for what I’d seen until I stumbled across the books of Daniel Fry, the alleged contactee. His description of gravitational field propulsion, written back in the 1950s. 60s, and early 70s, perfectly matched my observations. Soon after, Alcubierre’s seminal warp field paper formally validated his descriptions and expressed them in the mathematics of general relativity. The correlation between them still spins my melon; it’s like the guy had a crystal ball into the future of theoretical physics.
I think that sightings by young people are all too often dismissed as vivid imaginations.
Yeah I figure that a lot of people write off my account because of my age at the time. But I was a smart kid with an early facility for the sciences. I knew that what I’d seen defied conventional explanations, and I was determined to figure it out. I still am – I won’t rest until I can understand how to explicitly replicate what I saw that day, at least in principle, on paper. It can be done, I know that. And I want to understand it before I die, because that capability would radically transform human civilization. Which is precisely what we need, now more than ever.
Do you think any of the kids you were with would still remember it?
I was never close with the other kids in the neighborhood, but about ten years later I did ask one of the kids who was there that day if he remembered it. He’d completely forgotten about it, which I found to be inconceivable and very disappointing.
A similar disappointment befell me recently, when I asked a friend if she remembered seeing a diffuse vertical column of luminous green light reaching from the pool that we were standing in one night in Burbank, up into the sky for hundreds of yards, gently twisting in place, about 22 years ago. We both saw it and talked about it that night as we observed it, and we were completely baffled by it (thanks to William Strathmann, I recently shared my account of this event with a brilliant geologist who offered a sensible explanation attributing it to a form of earthquake light). She’d completely forgotten about it.
Apparently there are two kinds of people: those of us who treasure life’s very rare anomalous experiences and obsess on figuring them out over years of constant contemplation, and those who aren’t particularly moved by the things that can’t be readily explained and exploited for some practical benefit – such people forget about the anomalous experiences they have because the memory of these events doesn’t keep circling back around through their consciousness for years on end.
Have you had any other odd experiences?
Nothing of that nature, sadly, but most definitely yes, and I treasure every one of them…even the dark ones. But they’re my little pearls, and all very deeply personal and precious to me, so I refrain from discussing them publicly. It’s a terrible thing when something precious to you is wielded as a weapon by small minds. I will say this though – I have a strong innate tendency to be a ruthlessly skeptical and cynical, reductionist type of thinker, and I’m certain that my sighting experience opened my mind to concepts and experiences that I may never have considered, otherwise. It changed me deeply and fundamentally. And for that I am profoundly and sincerely grateful.
One last comment. Lately Gene and Chris have been pushing the idea of focusing sightings investigations on the witnesses. This strikes me as a very worrisome idea. The moment that the witness feels like the investigation is about them, personally, they’re going to become very uncomfortable, suspicious, and resentful. Because I can’t imagine any way to interrogate a witness about their apparently unrelated personal lives before and after their incidents, that won’t make them feel like you’re trying to dismiss their experience as some kind of psychological dysfunction. And that’s when witnesses will stop reporting their experiences. Here’s a better idea: if you want to look for correlations beyond the sightings themselves, have the investigator keep track of *their* personal lives before, during, and after their investigations. Because if you find correlations there, then that’s really interesting. And it won’t alienate the witnesses in the process.
.
