
The mysterious Cold War case of unidentified aircraft descending on Loring AFB - bookofjoe
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-mystery-of-unexplained-aerial-incursions-over-loring-air-force-base
======
Eupolemos
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Rutledge)

[1]: [https://www.amazon.com/Project-Identification-First-
Scientif...](https://www.amazon.com/Project-Identification-First-Scientific-
Phenomena/dp/0137307055)

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

~~~
armitron
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._McDonald)

~~~
tetris11
Powerful read of his life story. A man of great conviction, who only sought
the truth. he would be ridiculed in our time too

------
severak_cz
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...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6539849/Has-mystery-
Britains-Roswell-finally-solved.html)

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
Spooky23
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.

------
ricardobeat
> 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.

~~~
IAmGraydon
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.

~~~
bostonsre
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?

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

~~~
csilverman
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...](https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-
places/looking-at-the-bob-lazar-story-from-the-perspective-of-2018/)

~~~
godelski
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?

~~~
shadowprofile77
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-...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-
a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html)

a military report of the same incident:
[https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...](https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf)

~~~
infradig
Save yourself time and watch the Mick West debunking videos...
[https://youtu.be/Q7jcBGLIpus](https://youtu.be/Q7jcBGLIpus)

~~~
shadowprofile77
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.

------
andygroundwater
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...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32608477-charlie-red-star)

~~~
doodlebugging
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](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.

------
Animats
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.

------
crazygringo
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning)

~~~
tgflynn
I never heard of ball lightning masquerading as a Huey.

~~~
crazygringo
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.

~~~
csilverman
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...](https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-
places/looking-at-the-bob-lazar-story-from-the-perspective-of-2018/)

------
boomboomsubban
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.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor](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](https://imgur.com/a/3b65X)

~~~
kelvin0
Truly a pearl of dark and cynic humor, right up my alley! Skrreeee.

------
j3th9n
The article refers to loringremembers.com which shows a domainparking website.
But loringremembers.com/home shows more info.

~~~
XzetaU8
[https://sites.google.com/site/loringremembers/](https://sites.google.com/site/loringremembers/)

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

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

------
myrandomcomment
.....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.....

------
swader999
Anti gravity tech.

