The mysterious Cold War case of unidentified aircraft descending on Loring AFB | Hacker News Reader

The mysterious Cold War case of unidentified aircraft descending on Loring AFB

thedrive.com

127 pointsbookofjoe48 comments

For the interested, no-nonsense types coming by this thread, I want to point to Harley D. Rutledge's[0] "Project Identification: The first Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena"[1][2].

He was a Ph.D. in solid state physics at the University of Missouri (at the same time as this Loring AFB story, it seems). Hearing about the nonsense of a UFO fad, he decided he'd go into the field and explain this phenomenon. He couldn't, but got a grant from a newspaper so he could spend time on this and the result was a book (Project Identification) which is pretty much a very long physics report.

He never concluded they were "spacemen" or some such, he simply observed and reported, and only used his own observations. Despite being dry, it is a very interesting read - a downright page-turner for me.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Rutledge

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Project-Identification-First-Scientif...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/UAP/comments/d5gtcs/project_identif... (contains link with pdf)

There have been plenty of credible scientists rising alarms over the years, none more tragic and important than James McDonald:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._McDonald

Powerful read of his life story. A man of great conviction, who only sought the truth. he would be ridiculed in our time too

I also recommend the work of Micheal Persinger on this and related subjects. He worked in a similar vein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Persinger

There was similar incident in UK called Rendlesham Forest incident.

Later, it was revealed, that it may actually been an SAS prank to USAF military personel residing on site. See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6539849/Has-mystery...

Fascinating. More examples of large organizations encountering unknown and non-reproducible phenomena.

Like everybody else, I have no idea what this is. I have, however, consumed scads of stories about military organizations encountering things they can't deal with. Some of these are quite prosaic for their situation, such as UN forces figuring out that the Chinese were entering the Koran War.

I _think_ I have enough of these examples to reach a tentative conclusion: for many organizations, the information that they've had incursions and are stumped is extremely important. If there's a known weakness, other competing powers might take advantage of it. What actually happened is besides the point. The mission is to control information, access to information, and the larger narrative.

You layer on half-remembered (and perhaps exaggerated) stories from fifty years ago and you get articles like this. My best guess is that this is very similar to what happened to the US Navy recently, only in this case the military has managed to confuse the issue enough that investigators will be debating details for decades to come.

Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. If we can't observe or manipulate something, there's no way for us to scientifically reason about it. That's tough for a lot of folks to deal with.

I know from my own experience that even with normal news stories, most miss the point at some level because the journalists have incomplete information or cherry pick to reach a desired conclusion.

In these scenarios with the military, you’re guaranteed that anyone who knows what is going on isn’t talking. Especially on a SAC base. And it’s highly probable that anyone who is talking has no clue or is delivering BS information.

Just after this time period, there were a number of UFO sightings in the northeast, especially around Plattsburgh AFB, Rome AFB and Fort Drum. The UFO aspect was widely reported, and later the “sightings” were attributed to flight testing of terrain comparison navigation systems for cruise missiles. I’d look more at that type of explanation than anything else.

> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof. If we can't observe or manipulate something, there's no way for us to scientifically reason about it. That's tough for a lot of folks to deal with.

The standards of scientific proof are rules to avoid error that we made in the past.

For example with 'Oumuamua, one guy think it is a solar sail, another guy thinks it is made of Hydrogen ice and another one thinks that it is made of very low density dust. We know that two of them are wrong, at least. With a low enough standard, someone can claim that one of the answers is the correct.

For another examples think about low temperature fission or high temperature superconductivity. Well we have strong proof of the later now.

It happens to the Navy all the time, what happened recently was some public acknowledgement.

Also there's a non-zero chance that all the Lazar stories are true, and there is a body of knowledge, just kept from the wider military.

> Reality is not required to conform to our standards of scientific proof.

Yep, this comes up with quantum superdeterminism, too.

> The men in the crew decided not to report what they had seen, because they had entered a restricted area and could have been arrested for the violation.

Some classic conspiracy theory quotes: "we met with alien life for the first time, but did not report for fear of disciplinary action".

Also, what are the real odds that the first guy would've been ordered to not shoot a helicopter snooping on nuclear arsenal for three nights in a row? I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.

Yeah the lack of a shoot-down makes this already unbelievable story even less likely. A helicopter hovering 150 feet above a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Please. This place would have had a 10 mile restricted airspace around it with a no-questions-asked shoot-down policy.

I want to believe just like anyone else, but I’m not willing to ignore my gut instincts to get there. I think this entire thing is a perfect storm of group thought, suggestion and paranoia.

A plausible explanation could be that the chain of command already knew about these and they were scared to start a fight. Would you start a fight with someone who had a gun and you only had a rock?

A more plausible explanation is that they were testing the security of a base; the higher ups were fully aware of what the "mystery helicopter" was, because they sent it in to gauge the base's response.

I was wondering that exact thing, especially after the command to not shoot it down unless it attempted to land. Seems to me that if I had a facility this sensitive, I’d want to see how the people running it reacted to someone—especially several skilled someones—attempting to break in.

I’ll admit I lean towards the skeptical end as far as UFOs having an extraterrestrial origin, although I’d say anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics is technically possible. I can’t explain the accounts of aircraft maneuvering in ways that seem impossible for a physical aircraft to do, but one of the more interesting explanations I’ve heard is that, at least as far as the ones observed over Groom Lake, they might not have been physical aircraft at all:

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...

A big thing to consider, especially with aircraft, is that your brain is bad at judging distances and speeds. What may look like a crazy maneuver may be a sane one if you understood the distances and angles involved. It isn't like we're hearing stories about people flying within 200 feet of a craft, waving at aliens, and then they just turn 90 degrees at mach 2.

As fo Groom Lake, it would make a lot of sense for high performance unmanned vehicles to be trained out there. You could also confuse a small aircraft close up for a large air craft being far away (this is actually quite common and applies outside of UFOs). I wouldn't be surprised if they had drones all the way from the size of your hand to the size of a F16. That's the kind of things those people work on out there. It isn't like we're talking about a technology that is extremely advanced, just something that's 20 years ahead of the commercial space (which we saw that stuff like laptops were invented 20 years before it became a public item. Same with many inventions. Moving from proof of concept to viable mass product takes time). I'm not sure why people think it is a far reach for a secret facility that works on advanced aircraft to produce aircraft (manned and unmanned) that can do things that no aircraft today could possibly do. Really, if they aren't accomplishing those feats then where the fuck is my taxpayer money going?

There are indeed reports of exactly that, and some of them from professional aerial observers like pilots, reporting on objects in the sky performing what are to us physically impossible maneuvers of sharp turns at supersonic speeds, or accelerations from full stop to hypersonic in absurdly quick times. The 2004 Air Force encounters alone were absolutely bizarre:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-...

a military report of the same incident: https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...

Save yourself time and watch the Mick West debunking videos... https://youtu.be/Q7jcBGLIpus

Oh please. His conclusions are awful and especially his conclusion on the 2004 video. I actually emailed the guy to clarify a few points just to see if i'd misunderstood something he'd said and no, as per our email exchange, he essentially bases his entire debunk on the video itself while totally ignoring the wealth of eyewitness accounts from all the days prior to it being recorded.

With that, he arrives at the conclusion that this was a plane (in the 2004 video), despite the pilots and radar operators involved emphatically stating very, very different observations about what they saw during the 2 weeks or so of these events.

Rational, analytical debunking is good, so long as it forms reasonable and grounded conclusions. In this case though, Mick West essentially seems to fall into the trap of: I'm a debunker, so I have to debunk, no matter the contortions and deliberate disregards involved.

It's unfortunate.

Indeed. And to reduce the number of US personnel that knew such a test was happening, the higher ups could have arranged for their allies in the RCAF to be the ones executing the test.

I hadn’t considered this. It’s a very good possibility.

The whole two man patrol over the area with 10 guys on standby as it repeatedly happened? The response does not appear at all proportional to the paranoia of that era.

> I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.

Having been detected, yes. Delayed detection begets delayed response. The implication is this craft was not immediately detectable electronically. I don't think any ground-based security force (e.g. some folks standing guard or patrolling in vehicles) are under standing orders to just shoot at something they see in the sky.

If you can get your mini-drone past the radar, you've got a chance at getting some good video and stills and getting your drone back.

> Also, what are the real odds that the first guy would've been ordered to not shoot a helicopter snooping on nuclear arsenal for three nights in a row?

Could be a friendly running a test for some jamming technology with orders to fly specific patterns on top of a real installation to gather data in the form of radar and witness reports.

>I imagine you'd get shot down immediately if you as much as tried to enter the vicinity of a military zone.

I don't think that is the protocol when the military encounters an object they can't identify. It would seem that decision would need to fulfill a set of requirements. I'm pretty sure that if they were able to say it was Chinese or Russian, etc, it would get shot down, but something that doesn't even register to the senses probably gets a pass. When you think about it, what are they going to shoot at, a elongated football the length of 3-4 cars that seems to be in a temporal zone it created?

> When you think about it, what are they going to shoot at, a elongated football the length of 3-4 cars that seems to be in a temporal zone it created?

How about the first description of the aircraft, which appeared to be a helicopter with red and white strobing lights?

Did they confirm it? or was that what it looked like to them? Without reading the article again, I was under the assumption they later said there was no noise coming from it.

Before I realised how dangerous and ecologically unsound they are, I flew a number of backyard 'hot air balloons'.

These often presented amazing shows from the ground - flying in a 'formation', strobing, changing direction and speed as they hit different wind patterns, 'disappearing' as the fuel went out, sometimes dropping burning wax.

Once launched it was so hard to see how far away they were on a dark night or even that they were fire balloons.

The track of this thing coming over nightly from Canada was so well known to the locals that they'd sit out and wait for it - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32608477-charlie-red-sta...

I know someone who lives just south of the border in Maine. They have told me many times over the years that they see unusual lights sometimes for numerous nights in a row.

I have a few pictures they've taken over the years but honestly it is hard to say what anything in them could be. Not enough magnification in the camera, focusing problems, color saturation, etc. I can confirm that they fit the description of the lights reported in the Loring descriptions.

You can grab the Loring qriteup from the site listed in a post here but you have to navigate through their history page and then almost to the bottom of the historical events they documented. It is a pdf of the events and the investigations.

[Loring AFB - Reading Room - pdf of UFO Event near bottom of list](http://www.loringremembers.com/park/multimedia/reading-room)

After reading this story I decided to see where this Loring SAC base was located. It turns out that the lights this person has observed are close to the old base (tens of miles). I have confirmed that their appearance is not explained by the rise of planets in the evening, stars, etc since I know within a few meters where they were taken and have located ground features visible in the photos on a map.

If you see something, take video. With reference points in the video if at all possible. Get others nearby to take video. Don't bunch up; get some different points of view. Upload the videos to YouTube. Somebody will crunch on that and get 3D positions. Few optical illusions hold up from multiple viewpoints.

These days this type of report would seem to be classified under the phenomenon of ball lightning, no? [1]

It seems irresponsible for the article to not even mention it. On the other hand, I suppose that would puncture the fun that it would be actual extraterrestrial spaceships or something...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

I never heard of ball lightning masquerading as a Huey.

The article starts off with a report of what sounds like an actual helicopter, but then the bulk of the article is about reports of lights moving around and changing direction far faster than a helicopter could.

The author seems to be deliberately confusing the two for the reader. But obviously an article about a couple of rogue helicopter visits wouldn't be worth reading about.

Funny you mention that. In an earlier comment, I shared a link to the website of Tom Mahood, an engineer/Area-51 observer. Mahood had a theory that the lights seen over Area 51—moving in ways no known craft could maneuver—were, essentially, artificial ball lightning.

I don’t think my scientific credentials are sufficient to critique this idea, especially in regards to what happened here. As far as a lot of those other reports describing supernaturally fast and maneuverable craft, however, the idea that this is a non-physical object of some sort sounds plausible to me in a way that theories about extraterrestrial technology generally don’t.

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...

Yes, I got the same impression. It seems like they're also confusing a small number of official reports with old war stories on a website for veterans who used to be stationed there. Overall this story seems far less interesting than the 2004 Nimitz incident.

Happening in 1975 makes it about the only case I've heard of that I wouldn't immediately suspect CIA involuntary drugging, though I wouldn't rule out some military intelligence agency research.

Yeah my guess it's one big psychological warfare magic show, the modern equivalent of the WWII Ghost Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor says 1968–1989, but it does seem a little early.

Condor, the musical: https://imgur.com/a/3b65X

Truly a pearl of dark and cynic humor, right up my alley! Skrreeee.

As in, you think the drugging stopped?

As in during the Church Committee is about the only time I think the CIA wouldn't willingly drug a whole base

The article refers to loringremembers.com which shows a domainparking website. But loringremembers.com/home shows more info.

https://sites.google.com/site/loringremembers/

Human memory is not very trustworthy. 45 year old human memories even less so.

Was the second, more distant object (a combat chopper?), shooting a prototype particle accelerator to mess up with the base and test their readiness?

.....there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.....

Anti gravity tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com