Sunday, March 08, 2015

The Arizona UFO Controversy | 18th Anniversary of The Phoenix Lights

The Arizona UFO Controversy | 18th Anniversary of The Phoenix Lights

By Tim Printy
SUNlite
3-6-15


Trying to misrepresent the skeptical arguments

     . . . Dr. Kitei, and her supporters, want everyone to believe that skeptics state the 8 PM event was produced by flares dropped over the Barry Goldwater range. I have never seen an informed skeptic make that claim and those that have, alter their viewpoints once they become aware of all the facts. My articles in SUNlite and elsewhere have made it clear that the flares only explained the 10PM event. The promoters of the Arizona UFO event, who continue to misrepresent the skeptic’s position are guilty of either being ignorant of that position or deliberately misleading people in order to make skeptics appear to be uninformed.

I know what I saw

This is the last refuge of the UFO investigator, or UFO witness, who is not willing to admit they might have been mistaken. Nobody wants to be wrong but, when the evidence points towards a probable explanation, witnesses and investigators have to recognize they could have erred in their perception of the event. What Dr. Kitei, who is a UFO promoter, does not want to tell everyone is that she has been fooled by two different flare exercises. She gave her videos to Dr. Bruce Maccabee back in 1998 for analysis. Through triangulation, he determined that all the videos, including hers, were of lights hovering over the Barry Goldwater range at the same time the Maryland and Michigan National Guards had been conducting exercises involving dropping of illumination flares. Unless Dr. Maccabee can be proven to be wrong, then Dr. Kitei is wrong and knows that she was wrong. Still, she promotes
her images as “true UFOs”.

Because Dr. Kitei apparently did not like the results of this analysis, she asked Dr. Maccabee to see if her March 13, 1997 videos showed lights in front of the Estrella mountains and not behind them.2 He was unable to determine one way or the other because the lights were on, or slightly below, the ridge line when they disappeared. Dr. Maccabee did mention that there was a potential for error in his alignments, which might lead to the lights being slightly below the ridge before they disappeared. Considering the very close proximity of the lights to the ridge line and the triangulation results, it seems very probable that the lights were disappearing behind the ridge line just like all the other videos taken that night. Her continued promotion of these images/videos demonstrates she is ignoring any scientific evaluation of the evidence. . . .



1 comment :

  1. The problem with Tim Printy is that he purports to be an un-biased skeptic. Yet he continues to only select witnesses to events such as the 8:00pm 1997 Phoenix Lights that support a skeptics view. He tends to disregard witnesses that do not fit some hypothesis of his. Kind of like 'UFO Believers' in reverse. He does has some interesting observations but does not seem inclined to look at all of the possibilities. There are so few persons that investigate this phenomena that seem truly neutral or un-biased. Tim Printy is not one of them.

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