[Lonesome in Massachussets]

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.

[Quix]

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.