F-16s Pursue Unknown Craft Over Region

If you don't work for the ADL, then why do you post their material unattributed?

(As you did in a thread with 'Police State' in the title.)

For someone who claims to be conservative, to post ADL material at all is questionable, but to post it unattributed reveals your true nature.

_Addios _My _Friend,

Here is your post of unattributed ADL material - it is a direct lift from their website.

To: Magician

NO WONDER these guys get a bad name - it's just one more chapter in:

Flashpoint America: Surviving a Traffic Stop Confrontation with an Anti-Government Extremist

It is late at night and the rain beats down on the windshield of your patrol car. A Chevy Blazer speeds by, dousing your vehicle with a spray of fine mist. As the wipers clear your view, you notice that something is strange about that Blazer. The rear license plate had a lot of funny writing on it. They were obviously not plates from your state, but they didn’t seem to be plates from any other state you’d ever seen before, either.
Who would make up their own plates? It seems a little odd. But you pull out into the road and accelerate to catch up to the Blazer. It’s hard to see the plates because of the rain, but they are clearly not legitimate plates. In fact, you can just barely make out the wording on them: "Sovereign Private Property...Immunity Declared at Law...Non- Commercial American." This is a little bit more exotic than a "Save our Lakes" specialty plate. You turn on your lights.
The Blazer ignores them, keeps going. Irritated, you turn on the siren. Finally, the vehicle in front of you pulls over to the side of the road. You get out of the patrol car, curse the rain, and walk up to the Blazer. The back of the vehicle is festooned with bumper stickers. "End Judicial Dictatorship." "FREEDOM wasn’t won with a REGISTERED GUN." "Sovereign Forever, New World Order--Never." You’ve never seen stickers like this before. Judicial dictatorship?
As you walk past the vehicle, you see a message in vinyl letters posted on one of the side windows: ''No One Is Bound to Obey an Unconstitutional Law and No Courts Are Bound To Enforce It, 16th Am Jur 2 Ed 256.'' You reach the driver-side door. The window rolls down part-way and an angry face greets you. It is attached to a middle-aged man, Caucasian, scraggly hair, dressed in work clothes.
"Could you roll down your window, sir?" you ask.
"Are you arresting me?" the driver asks belligerently.
‘Sir, could you please roll down your window?"
Instead of complying, the driver hands you a folded up sheet of paper. You pull out your flashlight to take a look at it, trying to protect it from the rain. It seems about as strange as the license plates and the bumper stickers.
"NOTICE TO ARRESTING OFFICER WITH MIRANDA WARNING," it reads. It identifies the driver as a "Civil Rights Investigator." It’s hard to read the fine print on the document, but it seems to be saying that you cannot arrest the driver without a warrant unless you immediately take him to a judge to determine if the arrest was lawful. It threatens to sue you "in your INDIVIDUAL capacity" if you improperly arrest him without a warrant. Near the bottom it states that if you ignore these warnings, "it will show bad faith on your part and prima facie evidence of your deliberate indifference to Constitutionally mandated rights."
You shine the flashlight on the driver. He is smiling at you.
What do you do?

72 posted on 3/14/02 11:12 AM Pacific by _Jim
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Now lets see, you say you are not affiliated with the ADL, and yet you post their material without attribution. Hmmmmm.

Radar tapes have been confiscated in a number of UFO cases. Air traffic controllers have been intimidated into silence.
Not sure how you'd explain such.

The skeptic's lot is not an easy one. Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have said that he could sooner believe that a couple of Yankee professors would lie than that rocks fell out of the sky.

Space really does not permit a catalog of radar phenomenology that can be misinterperted and their explanation. Merril Skolnik in his book, "Introduction to Radar", describes the effect of multipath on height estimation radar, where the operators perceive a target to be manouveuring violently in altitude, when all they are really seeing is the scattering of the echos off the surface of the sea coupled into an antenna side lobe.

Phillip Klass reports a case of an apparent UFO tracked by an airborne radar that could also be completely explained by assuming a bad relay. As the Rev. Thomas Bayes explained, whether one decides to attribute the track to a failed relay or visits by extraterrestial beings depends on the prior probabilities that one assigns the two hypotheses and the decision costs - decision costs in this case begining what part of ones belief system one is forced to give up.

I could sooner believe that a relay would fail than that beings from distant planets ocassionally like to fly figure eights around military airplanes.

One Air Traffic controller friend in Alaska noted that often "ground scatter" was asserted to explain UFO sitings. She said that was nonsense. She also personally saw a UFO on the ground in Alaska.

Then there's the JAL freighter that had a UFO the size of 2 or 3 aircraft carriers flying circles around it for all to see for more than 40 minutes. I talked personally to Japan's leading UFO expert who was well briefed on that one and asserted it's authenticity.

I've spent over 20 years designing and testing all kinds of radar systems. Regardless of my beliefs about UFO's I'll stick with my view that radar phenomenology is never credible evidence of UFO's, your controller friend notwithstanding.

Probably I wasn't very clear.

My friend was asserting that when her supriors told the press that the purported UFO was due to "radar ground scatter" that such an assertion was utter nonsense.

I must say, as a layman, you make the complexities and frailties of radar sound so IFFY, complex and prone to confusion that one wonders how it's of any use at all.

As a radioman in the Navy, I assume that a similar phenomenon would be true for highly skilled radar operators--that regardless of the flaws, idiosyncracies etc. of the equipment--if the equipment was ANY GOOD AT ALL, the operators would learn the flaws and skillfully work around them to give quality info to the ranks above.

I dare say that when a skilled radar operator said they had something exceedingly strange--i.e. extremely out of the norm in terms of the readings etc. they were perceiving on their gear--they were probably well experienced and well qualified to say that--GARDLESS of the flaws of the equuipment.

"Normal abnormalities" of the gear tend to occur on watches at all hours in all seasons and senior, well seasoned personnel pass down to junior personnel such idiosyncracies and their probable causes and work arounds. Subtract ALL OF THAT out--and SOMETIMES there are still very strange things hard to account for.

You seem very intent on explaining ALL strange things as due to equipment idisyncracies and physical phenomena of a very mundane sort. That explanation to me remains exceedingly inadequate for SOME data. It may help you sleep better at night but it won't wash with old salt radar operators.

Lemme summarize: $hit happens, it's complicated. Most of the time stuff works good, sometimes strange things happen. Every radar I've ever worked on had thousands of "bug reports" from the field. I don't recall any for which the most likely explanation was ET's.

Regardless of the realities and the facts,

I'd doubt any radar operator I've ever known of would ever be remotely stupid enough to send in a bug report with a probable cause as: UFO . . . even if the UFO was a mother ship and parked off their port bow for a week.

Please give the kids SOME credit! They do have SOME self-preservation instinct in "the system."