Please forgive my intrusion. I'm not a cantinista but this is an interesting thread and I just broke up with someone so I need something to get my mind off of that
Back in 1970 my family lived in a little town in southern Arizona about an hours drive east of Fort Huachuca. For some reason the Air Force used to fly a large number of training missions down there and it was not uncommon to see Phantoms or even a refueling mission go overhead sometimes at very low altitudes. I remember one time even seeing a jet thread it's way between the 200' stacks of the copper smelter located on the west edge of town. Hueys from the local gaurd unit would also fly through the area as well as the Border Patrols helicopters. My dad and grandpa were both pilots and they would identify the various aircraft that we would see for us kids. Anyway, we were pretty familiar and comfortable with all this stuff and knew what it was.
But one day we saw something we weren't familiar with at all.
My sister saw it first and pointed it out to me. Directly overhead was a white triangular shaped aircraft, hovering without sound, approximately 100 yrds overhead (best guestimate). I think that it wasn't too big maybe the size of an F-16 or a T-38. Like I said it was white but more like a dirty or matte white and on the bottom was a single, pulsing red light. It just sat there stone still and silent until suddenly it took off, literally like a shot, making a broad sweeping turn to the north until we lost sight of it behind some hills about 10 miles to the east.
We kept looking for it and were quickly rewarded by it's return from out of the north, as if it had flown in an oval racetrack pattern to return to its point of origin. It stopped directly over us again and hovered silently. The weird thing was and what began, as I recall, to make me scared was that when this thing stopped it was like watching a cartoon because this aircraft didn't slow down and stop it just went from hauling a** to dead still on a dime, as if there was no inertial forces affecting it at all. I may have only been a kid but even then I knew that wasn't right. It did this several more times, take off and come back and hover, all with no sound and then finally it took off again and never came back.
My sister and I did tell my folks about it but they never believed us and my dad finally told us that he never wanted to hear about it again, which basically ended all discussion right there. I've never seen anything remotely like it since. My sister and I have talked about it a few times over the years but never really did anything about it. I mean, what can you do?
Do I believe that it was aliens? No, I don't. Other than the outrageous flight characteristics of the craft there is no evidence of extraterrestial origin. I don't know what it was or where it was from though my personal inclination is to believe that it was a piece of technology, a test bed, that may have proved to be untenable. Something cooked up in a black budget program that proved too dangerous to follow up on with the current level of supporting technology.
I don't know anything about the scientific method, I studied law and socieology. I do know this though, that despite all the hoaxing that goes on in the UFO community there is a very large body of anecdotal evidence and a smaller body of physical evidence. Enough I believe to merit that research be done in this area at least to determine exactly what is going on, and what the function or purpose of it is. Certainly enough to satisfy a court that an investigation should go forward.
If I can't produce evidence of a phenomena or explain it yet the phenomena still exists does the scientific method declare that it should be ignored? I hope not. Think of some of things that are being witnessed in the exteme reaches of our atmosphere, things which to the best of my knowledge still can't be explained yet, except as some type of plasma discharge. These phenomena have been filmed by shuttle missions and from the international space station. They can't explain them, can't reproduce them, all they have is the same type of anecdotal evidence as is present with UFOs, film and eyewitness testimony. Should it be ignored? Will it be ignored? I think not.
The same should go with the UFO stuff and perhaps maybe it is. Certainly it gets discussed to death but unfortunatly discussion is not research nor does it bring resolution. Most importantly though it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because you can't park it in a lab and put it in a test tube. I don't know what it was I saw, I don't know what thousands of others have seen but I do know that the phenomena of sightings of unorthodox aircraft exists, say what you will about the individual sightings and the nature of what is seen, the phenomena undeniably exists.
