Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“Feb. 25, 1942: Searchlights converge on an unknown object in the skies over Los Angeles. During the early morning air-raid alert, more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells are fired.

The incident, now referred to as the Battle of L.A., occurred less than three months after the Pearl Harbor attack and two days after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil facility near Santa Barbara.

The next day, on Feb. 26, The  Times published a photo page with a retouched version of the above searchlight photo and seven other images of damage from falling anti-aircraft shells.”

Do you hear that sound? It’s one “classic” UFO case falling apart in the most basic form. In an article by Scott Harrison published by the same LA Times, we are informed that an original, unretouched negative of the famous image was recently found at the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive at UCLA, and that:

“In the retouched version, many light beams were lightened and widened with white paint, while other beams were eliminated.

In earlier years, it was common for newspapers to use artists to retouch images due to poor reproduction — basically 10 shades of gray if you were lucky.

Thus my conclusion:  the retouching was needed to reproduce the image. But man, I wish the retouching had been more faithful to the original. With our current standards, this image would not be published.”

Previously, Tim Printy had already delved into the whole Battle of LA case in his SUNlite Vol..3 No.1, where he had already speculated the famous image could have been retouched. He also noted that another photo of the Battle of LA published on LIFE magazine shortly afterwards didn’t show anything at all:

As it turns out, just like the original unretouched LA Times image.

Printy’s article also goes into the very small detail that most promoting an UFO link seem to ignore, that the Battle of LA happened a couple of days after an actual Japanese attack on the west coast.

Interestingly, and quite amazingly, all the panic that night may have started with a  weather balloon. One of the major cases before the word UFO was even coined involved a weather balloon.

Believe it or not – and if you do read more about the historical context, it actually is quite believable – fact is that the only physical evidence for an alleged alien spacecraft that night has just vanished.

As it was never actually there.

UPDATE 03/13/2011: A looping animation between the original and retouched versions:

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Here’s a 32 year-old Carl Sagan speaking about flying saucers.

Fascinating bit of history. In that same year, the young astronomer published the book “Intelligent Life in the Universe”, along with Soviet Iosef Shklovskii. In that book, a scientific collaboration during the Cold War, Sagan and his Soviet fellow would delve and speculate into questions that unfortunately have not changed very much half a century later.

This is both because they were visionaries – the ubiquity of exoplanets was by no means a given in the 1960s, much to the contrary – and also because we still have not made contact nor found any conclusive evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Sadly.

This book is also very notable because, even before one Swiss guy exploited the idea, Sagan and Shklovskii analyzed seriously the idea of gods as ancient astronauts. Even a famous Sumerian tablet with several planets is discussed, decades before another alleged “expert” made a lot of fuss about it.

Now, back to the video interview, the man besides Sagan is also very notable, and not only because of the eypatch (due to an automobile accident) or the fact he lights up a smoking pipe. He’s Thornton Page, a noted astronomer and previously part of the Robertson panel on UFOs. Most importantly, along with the same Carl Sagan, he would promote a UFO symposium on the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That’s right, in 1969, one of the most representative institutions of science, the one that actually publishes Science, held a symposium about UFOs. Paul E. McCarthy has a very interesting dissertation on the backstage of this episode of UFO, and science, history: Politicking and Paradigm Shifting: James E. McDonald and the UFO case study. [hattip to Leonardo Stern]

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At the beginning of the month, a “mysterious missile launch” recorded from South California sparked a lot of media interest until it was identified as a commercial flight UPS902 from Honolulu to Ontario, California. The sunlit contrail looked like a rocket exhaust, but unlike any rocket, its source moved very slowly.

Mick West over at ContrailScience did a superb job presenting the evidence for the identification, as this may be one of the most irrefutable explanations for an intriguing aerial phenomenon in the history of intriguing aerial phenomena.

It goes from multiple photos allowing triangulation which matches in time and space the radar track of flight UPS902 to satellite imagery of the contrail and even previous cases of contrails that look like rocket plumes. Just check all the evidence, it’s quite beautiful to see so many independent evidence converging into one single and clear explanation thanks to the wonders of the modern information age – and Mick West and his many collaborators, of course.

Now, though most people called it a “mysterious missile launch”, one could just as well name it a “ghost rocket”. As Bob Sheaffer noted, the classic 1946 photo of a ghost rocket in Sweden, the only known photo of the wave that anticipated modern ufology by a year, is usually interpreted as a meteor.

But couldn’t that actually be a contrail? “People in Sweden, seeing [in 1946] the unfamiliar new phenomenon of high-altitude contrails, [may have] perceived them as menacing rockets launched by one great power or another.”

It would have been quite a feat to capture a meteor trail in the sky with an old camera, but a contrail not unlike the recent California one would be in the sky for several minutes. Much easier. Much more probable?

Contemporary investigations did mention contrails as one of several explanations for the “ghost rockets” (none of them involving actual rockets, nor alien spaceships), but it would be quite curious if the sole photo of that wave is of a contrail rather than a meteor.

Much more so that more than six decades later, with people in California very familiar with contrails, ghost rockets may still cause a lot of confusion.

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Do the photos above seem different? One is an allegedly alien spacecraft by Billy Meier. The other is one of the top 60 remakes by Phil Langdon, made with a plastic garbage lid and other trinkets.

People have long been seeing the obvious tricks used to create such UFO photos, involving mainly forced perspective – including the use of a small bonsai-like tree.

But Phil Langdon managed to match almost every little detail of Meier’s photos. Here he is with the small tree and one of the models:

Click for the full gallery on The Biggest Secret Forum.

Of course, one may think unnecessary to debunk such photos. Who would believe them in the first place?

Well, Fox Mulder wanted to believe, as the poster on his office was a cropped version of one of Meier’s photos.

Meier’s original shot is here, and Langdon’s remake of that classic shot is here.

The Meier case is quite interesting, as besides using a garbage can lid as part of an alien spacecraft, he sold photos of TV dancers as beautiful humanoids from the DAL-Universe and illustrations as shots from space, the future or the past.

Note two of the previous links go to Meier’s explanations to such exposes, where he actually claims that the original sources were created a posteriori to discredit him, and/or that the photos he sold were switched with hoaxed ones without his knowledge by Men in Black.

It sounds like something out of the plot of the final seasons of X-Files. Which is not good at all.

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Last month, excerpts of the conclusions of the official military investigations on the “Varginha Case” were published by IstoE magazine. As would be expected, they caused quite a furor among enthusiasts because there Lt Col Lúcio Finholdt Pereira raised as “the most probable hypothesis” that a local with disabilities, known as “Luizinho” – or Little Luis:

“being probably dirty, due to the heavy rain, seen crouching against a wall, was mistaken by three terrified girls as a ‘creature from space’”.

In short, as can be seen in the comparison above, part of the military inquest, Little Luis was allegedly mistaken for an alien. Being that some local ufologists claim the Varginha Case is the best UFO evidence ever, the idea that it could be explained so simply is bound to be met with derision.

The bombshell brings to mind the official explanations for the Roswell case, including the claim that it was a Case Closed. It must be taken with a grain of salt. Here’s to our ordinary look at this new development, which from the start, is not actually new.

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