Thank you for reading my newsletter! Monday editions are free; Tuesday and Thursday editions are for paid subscribers only (though everyone gets a free peek). Today’s is late because sometimes I don’t see the difference between AM and PM on the publishing time thingie. I beg your forgiveness.
I’ve said it before, I hammered the point home a hundred times in The UFO Movie, and I’ll say it again: It is very important to have a high bar for the quality of evidence that we accept.
For my sins, I happened upon a list of The 5 Most Credible Modern UFO Sightings published by that bastion of enlightenment, HISTORY.
1. The New Jersey Turnpike Sighting (2001)
A group of a dozen or more yellow-orange flare-like lights drifted in the sky over the New Jersey Turnpike on the night of July 17, 2001.
The funny thing about this event is that it happened during a period in history where ghost hunting financier Robert Bigelow had successfully lobbied the FAA to forward all public phone calls reporting UFOs to his Skinwalker Ranch property in Utah (no fooling).
As many as 75 cars stopped along the turnpike to watch the lights. One driver had a night vision rangefinder (why??) which with he showed a state trooper that the lights were only 1,800 feet (.55 km) away. Pretty much everyone agreed that these were merely parachute flares, but whether some plane had dropped them, or some prankster had fired them from some yachting flare gun, or tied them to balloons, does not appear to have ever been established.
But even the guys at Skinwalker Ranch, who normally would be the first to declare the UFO to have been a shapeshifting reptoid peeking in from another dimension, said it was flares.
2. The Tic-Tac Navy video (2004)
Honestly, if by this point you still feel the Navy’s three UFO videos released in 2017 have anything interesting to offer, UFOs should no longer be a hobby of yours.
In short, none of the three show anything remarkable, unless the effects of the motion parallax illusion, the changing of zoom levels, and the rotation of a camera on its gimbal are exciting to your soul. You can see all three of these videos explained in detail in The UFO Movie. None of them belong on this list.