In the first and second part of this case, we examined reports of an unsymmetrical, non-disk-like craft photographed throughout California in 2007 and reported to be part of a secret U.S. government-run project, according to a whistleblower account. In this third part, we weigh the credibility of both the witnesses and skeptics, and the case itself, and consider the alleged workings of the craft
EVALUATING THE CRITICISMS
Until now, we haven’t addressed any issues brought up by debunkers, doubters, or skeptics. As you can see, the sheer amount of detail in what has been presented to the public is in itself exhaustive; to add all possible skeptical angles to this would be tiresome and confusing. We can readily acknowledge that besides the emails and photographs sent to Coast to Coast AM and to Earthfiles.com, no other concrete evidence exists to corroborate this case. However, that is some evidence, and much more than any skeptic has put forward. Skeptics in this case have relied predominantly on simple disbelief, denying the plausibility of the case by merely refusing to believe it. One of the common skeptical responses is that the entire case is a hoax, perpetrated by someone with a shrewd sense of humor and sufficient funds to realize it. Another is that the images have been cooked up, or fabricated, on a computer. Either of these theories would be feasible were it not for the fact that the identities of the witnesses who later agreed to speak with Linda Moulton Howe (and we heard from one of them), as well as those who refuted the claims by the park ranger that the craft was a government monitoring device, have been verified. Having self-identified, these witnesses would have had to be part of a coverup using private citizens willing to expose themselves and be very convincing voice actors.
Our exploration of the case now turns to the credibility of witnesses and their reports, as well as the feasibility of the technology from a modern physics perspective. Our assessment looks at five questions, explored below.
DIGITAL COPIES: HOW FEASIBLE?
One favorite avenue for debunkers is to attempt to reproduce the conditions under which a hoaxer might have created a digital version of a UFO. Then, the debunkers attempt to prove that the original reports are false by demonstrating or performing their reproduction. However, creating a copy of something under imagined conditions is not the same as proving that an original is fake. Many obscure painters have copied Picasso paintings in an attempt to sell them as original Picassos. On close examination, the copies are determined to be fakes – for example, by their use of modern paint compounds that didn’t exist during Picasso’s lifetime. Since verification of a painting as a hoax does not affect the authenticity of the original Picasso, the “copying technique” used to debunk UFOs doesn’t work in any other field, and it shouldn’t in the study of UFOs, either. The only fact that a debunker who makes a copy of an original UFO photo or video proves is that he or she has made a fake image, not that the original is a fake.
This is why the accounts of verified witnesses, who saw the object flying near them, become so important. A debunker would have to prove that the witnesses were lying and that the images were faked. We have already discussed the futility of creating fake images as a way to discredit the original photos and videos. As to the witness accounts, these were, whether out of ignorance or convenience, entirely overlooked.
In fact, the witness accounts we discussed (and all others, in fact) were excluded from all “conclusive” reports of both skeptics – and, surprisingly, even some prominent UFO researchers. As an example of the latter, on Mar 19, 2008, an episode of the TV program UFO Hunters was broadcast on the History channel in the US (and A + E Networks worldwide) under the title “Reverse Engineering.” Emphasizing on-location research and eyewitness accounts, UFO Hunters ran for 26 episodes and was a better and longer-running series than many others that explored UFO phenomena. In 2008, one year after the initial photos of the Dragonfly UFO began circulating, the episode “Reverse Engineering” aired, and it examined this particular UFO case. Given that witness accounts began reaching Linda Moulton Howe’s Earthfiles.com site around this time, and for years afterward, perhaps it was too soon for the UFO Hunters production to have learned of witnesses, and, lacking these, the episode resorted only to showing the photographs to (so-called) experts in photography and video, in hopes that they could shed some light on the images’ veracity.
Once again, these experts attempted to reproduce the Dragonfly UFO on computer and, having superimposed these reproductions on photographic backgrounds that resembled those of the submitted images, concluded that they – the original photographs – were fake.
To take the “digital reproduction strategy” a step further, there is an additional confusion factor: Kris Avery, a British digital artist who saw the photographs of the dragonfly UFO created 3D renderings of it that are completely photorealistic, and these were placed on several sites:
This was released 15 years ago, along with a music video showing the craft being disassembled into its wireframe primitives (which proves that the artist did use Lightwave, a 3D rendering program). As recently as eight months ago, the artist released a high definition version of the music video:
These animations were produced one year after the initial Dragofly UFOs reports:
Lest we believe these images are of a real craft, Kris also animated a wireframe version of the Dragonfly UFO:
Subsequently, other artists tried their hand at the digital fakery with their own animations:
Predictably, skeptics jumped on some of these recreations, unaware of their context (as when they overlooked the witness testimonies), as a means to “debunk” the original UFO images and videos, falling again into the logical trap mentioned earlier: copying an original video with a fake one doesn’t render the original less authentic.
2. THE LAB: HOW FEASIBLE?
In fact, there is no need to delve into technical visual wizardry in order to question more fundamental aspects of the case. Much simpler questions can do the job better. There is, for example, one criticism that skeptics haven’t brought up, but that deserves some consideration – the name of the lab itself. If the outfit in question were truly secret, it would not likely be producing findings in a document formatted as a research report – not that private industry doesn’t do classified work, but rather that, in a report of this kind, material isn’t typically laid out in such a casual way. There is a lot of classified government-sponsored research. In the U.S. Navy alone, we should consider that the Office of Naval Research has a budget of roughly $1.7 billion, much of which is administered in research and development contracts and grants. And much has been said recently about government efforts in the area of alien research being privatized so that they are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests (with which government document systems are obligated to comply).
However, the blatant use of the words “Extraterrestrial Technology” makes obvious that this company’s work is highly unconventional. Since it is involved in “commercial applications research,” it is not actually developing commercial applications themselves (research labs exist to produce research, not products). Without profit from products, someone was funding this lab, and we might speculate on who is paying for this research.
All arrows point to a government unit or department, at a level above top secret, and very well-funded, for, adding up the personnel involved in Isaac’s report, the count of employees comes to several hundred, guards included (and the fact that armed guards are in a research facility itself provides a clue as to the funder’s concerns and government connections). Knowing how the structure of the federal government operates, we can deduce some facts.
The privatization of research is not possible at the whim of, say, some middle manager in the Department of Commerce. This is because of government rules controlling how any manager can outsource activities. There are two conditions: (1) the hiring of outside companies must not export or expose any classified information at or above the current compartmented clearance level without higher approval, and (2) the tasks for which a government unit or person hires an outsourced company cannot exceed the supervisory level of the highest manager commissioning the work. For a trivial example, a middle manager running an internal audit team can commission an outside company to paint the walls in a certain area of the manager’s offices, but not the entire building, as he lacks the authority to decide at that higher scope. But even within his or her section, the manager cannot outsource the task of evaluating personnel performance, since that would reveal identities and work assignments that are not cleared for public review. As regards approval in condition (1) above, the U.S. Air Force and CIA were allowed to hire a private company’s team (known then as Lockheed Advanced Development Projects) to develop super-secret high performance airplanes that eventually became known as the U-2 and the SR-71 many years before even other government agencies knew of their existence.
In light of these limitations, the name “Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology” seems a bit of a “giveaway,” particularly for a government that prefers euphemisms to hide projects. Surely, “Extraterrestrial Technology” could have been replaced by “Advanced Technology” — why, if it is so secret, would a lab advertise “Extraterrestrial Technology”? Moreover, this name would not likely have been approved within the Pentagon as a cover entity. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has always employed nomenclature systems, like the old Code Word Nickname and Exercise Term System, colloquially known as NICKA (since superseded by another system) which (like many government naming schemes) employs a naming formula as described here. In fact, I’ve never seen a classified program whose name makes direct reference to its work. Even as a cover organization for classified research, you might see CARET or PACL on the directory of an office building, but what is the receptionist’s answer when someone called to ask what CARET is or does? “Us? We do what the name says, we have extraterrestrial technology and are trying to find commercial applications for it.” There are reasons that certain names and titles have to remain hidden. Lastly, the CIA itself has a cover operations naming scheme (to review an older version of it, see, Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA by Miles Copeland Jr, a 17-year career case officer). All of these considerations are why the name of the lab is not trivial. In spite of these doubts, there is a lot here, not because the name should be overlooked, but because by 2016, 20 separate witnesses had reported and/or photographed this craft. Therefore, regardless of our theories on the lab’s name, the flying craft was really there. The lab name may seem a bit suspect, but the craft was indeed a real flying object.
3. THE WHISTLEBLOWER - HOW FEASIBLE?
Turning to the long letter by the whistleblower, some are skeptical of the author, “Isaac,” and his revelations, given how little we know of him. He defends his anonymity on the grounds that this project is managed by the Department of Defense and that he was cleared into it. Therefore, by exposing any information, he faces government prosecution.
That's logical. But is his secrecy plausible? Or is this part of a convenient ruse to avoid revealing himself as a hoaxer?
On one hand, many witnesses of UFOs report having been bullied into silence by agents of some government outfit, most likely within the U.S. Air Force. This appears to be true: one presumed member of the Air Force's elite OSI - Office of Special Investigations - is Richard Doty, whose access to classified projects of this kind has been verified by people who saw him provide said access.
Richard Doty, former Special Agent, U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI)
Richard has on more than one occasion mentioned that OSI were (at least some of) the men in black involved in witness tampering and disseminating disinformation under the direction of U.S. Air Force superiors.
At the same time, any witness claim of anonymity comes by definition with a credibility problem: when the witness can't be authenticated, neither can much of the reported account. The identity of witnesses is no guarantee of the authenticity of what they report. But we should also be clear that anonymity is not automatic evidence of falsehood.
The temptation to classify this case as a hoax (which many have done) isn’t logical if we look under the surface. This case possesses several unique characteristics that aren’t shared by hoax cases. The first is the temporal extension of the case. From hindsight, we might consider all of the evidence as though it had come from a single person or moment in time. In truth, however, various photographs were sent to various outlets over the course of months and years.
4. WITNESS CREDIBILITY: HOW FEASIBLE?
In investigations, there is an adage that says that if you can’t confirm the evidence but can confirm the witnesses, you have evidence. Every year in the U.S. criminal court system, many people are put on trial for murder, and many verdicts are decided on witness testimony rather than scientific evidence. Let us imagine this scenario: Two men are alone in a house. The next day, one of the men is murdered. There are five witnesses who say they saw both together - and no one else - until the body was found. No camera captured the killing. Here, we must resort to the witnesses’ credibility. If they have regular jobs, normal lives, and no motive for the accusation, they become the evidence that the case lacks. Without them, a defense attorney could insist that the prosecution produce photographs and videos showing the defendant actually committing the murder. In these situations, the weight of consistent testimony given by multiple credible witnesses has historically sufficed to gain a conviction, as it rules out all other possible culprits.
If that kind of witness testimony is acceptable for a conviction on murder, then surely a similar standard of proof can apply to the consistent witness accounts in this UFO case. What remains to determine is (a) how similar the accounts are and (b) how credible the witnesses?
The primary (although not the first) recipient of photographic material and related information in 2007 is someone whom we have already met in Part 1 of our investigation: the Emmy-award winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe. We have seen the accounts sent to her (as well as to George Noory, host of the Coast to Coast AM radio program) are rich in detail, depth, and photographic evidence. But are the witnesses credible?
In the interest of time, let us select one of these witnesses. Howe received an email on May 18, 2007 from a retired California Department of Developmental Services Mental Health Technician living in Central Valley, California, and, to verify the details in it, contacted the author, asking if she would share her experience on the air. Consequently, Howe broadcast an episode of her Earthfiles podcast that is worth reflecting on for the amount of detail that the witness shares, as well as for the frankness in the witness’s voice and account. The episode’s Url and description are below:
Episode 17 – Three Eyewitnesses of Mysterious Aerial “Drones” – Earthfiles Podcast archive
Episode Description: Since May 5, 2007, images of dragonfly-shaped mysterious aerial objects have been sent to Earthfiles and other internet sites with reports by the alleged photographers in Lake Tahoe, Capitola and Central California. The photographs provoked three eyewitnesses to contact Earthfiles Editor and Reporter, Linda Moulton Howe, about seeing the approximately 25-foot-long “dragonfly” in 2006, 2005 and around 1987.
The witness’s account suggests that she may have accidentally encountered a government conspiracy. At minimum, a government agent (a park ranger) was lied to by someone who appeared to have high authority over him. The story begins when the witness had gotten lost while driving around Sequoia National Park. Suddenly finding a park ranger standing outside his ranger station, she pulled over to get directions from him. For a sense of her credibility, I’ve included the witness’s ten-minute phone interview below – listen for yourself:
Earthfiles, Episode 17, Eyewitness Caller
This call (whose transcript is available on Linda Moulton Howe’s Earthfiles archive) provides highly consequential testimony: with a credible witness whose identity is verified and who reports having physically seen the craft, we can confirm that the Dragonfly incident cannot have been a digital hoax, a computer-generated trick, or the work of a practical joker, as has been widely claimed. Of primary relevance are both what the witness claims and her credibility.
Let’s look at another curious observation made by the witness. Listening to the recording, we hear the witness relate this event:
Came over talking to this Ranger, and while we were talking, this weird thing flew overhead. Never seen anything like it my whole life. And I asked the park ranger, I go, “What is that?” And he just, you know, very casually, he just went, “Yeah, you know, I'm told that it's some kind of a communications device. It's supposed to help the Park Service to monitor any possible problems, you know, fires and such.”
As the focus now turns to the strange (lack of) reaction from the park ranger, Linda Moulton Howe probes for more:
HOWE: When you think back to that moment, when you stopped to ask the Sequoia park ranger for directions, and this object moving in the sky so oddly catches your attention, and you ask the park ranger, “What is that?,” did he look up?
CALLER: I don't recall him looking up…As if he knew exactly what was there.
Further focusing on this individual:
HOWE: If a park ranger would talk to you so casually about an object in the sky that none of us have ever seen before, he is privy to information that nobody else is privy to, which raises a question in my mind: was he a Sequoia park ranger also doing double duty for another agency, or the military?
At the end of the call, the witness makes it clear that this was no hoax:
CALLER: I can tell you right now, that what I saw that day, that was not a Photoshop. I mean, I saw that in the real world.
Soon after this account aired, Howe began receiving correspondence from listeners and viewers. One letter offered an important rebuttal to the claims made by the (so-called) park ranger:
I have been a park ranger for 30 years and I have never seen or heard of such a device. The Park Service can barely afford regular helicopters, much less highly secret craft like this. Signed, Carol McElheney, Sacramento County park rangers.
Can we believe the author of this letter? The website LinkedIn lists Ms. McElheney as a retired peace officer from the park rangers:
Her address and photo can be found on the internet. This response, moreover, is much more in line with what we would expect from park rangers, and it is of a thirty-year veteran. This craft was anything but what the park ranger described. In fairness to him, he said he had been told that it was a monitoring craft - he might have seen it many times, and actually come to believe the cover story.
But this is all circumstantial, and so, the ranger’s story isn’t credible, either way. Therefore, being a top-notch investigator, Howe made direct inquiries about the park ranger’s claims to officials in six agencies – the United States Department of Interior, the Sequoia National Park Rangers Office in Tulare County, a regional branch of the US Department of Agriculture, the United States Forest Service Giant Sequoia National Monument, and the Sequoia National Forest Public Affairs Office. No one had any knowledge of the object in the photos, or of a monitoring drone.
5. FANLESS LEVITATION: HOW FEASIBLE?
The idea, as claimed by the park ranger, that drones are monitoring or communications devices seems a feasible idea today, but the technology of drones in 2006–2007 was embryonic, and at minimum, we can assert that no drone in that time would have flown without rotary blades. While on this topic, we might wonder today, in 2023: can a drone work without fan blades, and if so, what would that look like? A recent (2021) engineering paper shows a proof-of-concept design for a fanless drone operating on the same principles as the commercially popular bladeless Dyson fans, which force air not through an open loop but through small holes along a static outer ring, and – come to think of it – didn’t we see loops in the dragonfly drones?
Here is the design of the fanless drone as presented in the research paper:
This deflective force is called the Coanda effect, a demonstration of which is here:
And as there is indeed some similarity here with at least one of the dragonfly drones, we are tempted to imagine that the dragonfly drones are powered by an aerodynamic mechanism. But the drones observed by witnesses were silent, and none of the witnesses who were close, in fact almost directly underneath the drones, experienced any forceful air flow or similar turbulence. Propulsion is our model for motion, but it is not efficient, because, rather than diverting energy around it, it is based on thrust, pushing material behind or underneath it. More likely, the drones have been utilizing a vector system to ventilate, not air, but magnetic fields (this is my preferred theory for alien craft propulsion, as readers may have previously deduced). In this process, magneto dynamic flow is created, and lift is achieved by the Lorentz force evident in electricity.
This video explains it best:
To return to Linda Moulton Howe, her airing of the material - and responses from (fake) debunkers - caused Isaac to respond to the doubters, which is intriguing in that at that time, a few months after the documents were leaked, the person known as Isaac was still free (no doubt he would have been the subject of some follow-up by USAF OSI or other government enforcement). Since that year, Isaac has gone silent.
In May of 2007, barely weeks after the initial photos appeared, Howe received this assessment from a hardware engineer who had worked for Honeywell, a key defense contractor:
The circular design of the body with the antenna bent in an almost ‘candle-like’ fashion, combined with the 360 degree array, permit for a possible phased array with a directional sensing ability. This is due to the signal being able to strike the antenna array from one direction and then back scattering across what would be the inside of the ring. From this, a differential can be made and direction calculated based in part on signal strength among other things. It should be noted, too, that the angle of the bend on each element permits a nearly vertical aperture perspective, enabling higher flying craft (or lower flying, as the case may be) to be able to communicate with this ring-drone; a sort of look-down-look-up communicating ability with no loss of sight. The bend also enables a variety of frequencies to be ‘sniffed’; they are not uniform in the sense of being a straight rod as we see commonly as in a television antenna. This is bent and bent for good reason. Without knowing the diameter of the ring I can’t guess accurately what the frequency range would be that this ring-drone would be designed to transceive. If I got it right, there are 14 elements, evenly spaced about the ring body, each being approximately 25.7 degrees apart. Length, spacing, forward element, rear element, all come into play to figuring out the detail and without some sense of dimension I’d hesitate to offer anything. Once this is known, the operating frequency range can be more accurately known. No doubt it is millimeter.
The design strategy of charged ion / shaped plasma ‘buoyancy’ devices does bear some relevancy here. For instance, the circular array of curved ‘antennae’ coming out of the center of the device is very similar to a form of wave guide / shaping mechanism for a charged plasma / ion field.
I agree with this assessment, given the connection to plasma, a gas-like state of matter whose particles have become ionized, which is to say that some or all of its atoms have lost or gained electrons. This ionization process gives plasma unique properties, such as the ability to conduct electricity and respond to magnetic fields. And in this connection, plasma is indeed magnetic because charged particles in plasma produce magnetic fields and respond to external magnetic fields – many already know my thesis, which is that UFOs fly through electromagnetic fields that they create and modulate in reflection to (or repulsion against) the magnetic forces circling the earth. Given that plasma modulation generates magnetic forces, this could provide future evidence.
Howe’s public presence in this case attracted other correspondence, and she received another letter in late May of 2007 from a man who had observed a similar craft in flight in Birmingham, Alabama. He provided identifying information, which Howe was able to confirm, and, at his request, it was kept private. But what made this report interesting wasn’t just the photo that he attached:
While on a business visit in a residential section of Birmingham, the witness provides a clue to where all of this is pointing:
I was looking at some new construction when I heard a low buzzing sound like a transformer. I looked around and finally up. I saw what looked like an electrical device sticking out of the electrical pole. When I moved to get a better look, the thing seemed to be floating. I decided this was an optical effect and thought that it was probably attached to the wires and was some sort of device being used at the construction. I took a picture and then walked away to get someone to tell me what it was. When I looked back, it was gone. The time was around 3:00 PM, I think. It was strange, but I did not want to get involved in anything, so I let it go.
Two days later, the witness provided the photo shown below, remarking on a white pickup truck with an attached trailer (“New it is down to the tires and no markings,” he wrote) and with a thick cable coming from the truck to what appears the utility pole near where the craft had been sighted.
The trailer is unusual in three respects that might otherwise be overlooked. On the roof are unusual elements, here shown enhanced for greater clarity:
The large protrusion is semicircular and nearly dome-like, except that it is straight in the rear and slackens downward toward the front of the trailer. This is a typical housing for a radar, such as the classic Furuno model.
Toward the rear of the roof, there is an additional orange object as well as a smaller, antenna-like flat element:
The flattened dome is more evident in this transformation:
The vehicle’s rear door has a window, which is painted in a blackout color:
There is an atypical window (also blacked out) in the rear of the vehicle:
Lastly, there is a thick (approx. 3-inch) cable emerging from the trailer through a raised interface of unknown design:
In fact, one consistent element throughout the photos and eyewitness observations in this case is the proximity of these craft to utility poles and power lines. Isaac did say that the craft were being controlled remotely. When the second witness in Howe’s Earthfiles program mentioned the trailers that seemed shiny and out of place, he also observed that, from these trailers, there were cables coming up to a utility pole. This makes it almost inevitable that the craft are most likely being remotely controlled from utility poles.
Other credible venues of UFO research have reported this story, each with additional data. Sometimes, research points in the opposite direction of what it seems to be indicating, as in the case of an episode of Coast to Coast AM, the radio program mentioned earlier, which, like Linda Moulton Howe, has been reporting on paranormal phenomena for more than thirty years.
In May, 2015, eight years after the first craft reports, a guest was invited on the Coast to Coast AM show per the host’s attempt to get further clarification about these crafts through the technique of remote viewing, in which a person trained in the technique is able to focus on remote objects, people, and locations and draw their impressions of the target object.
The guest concluded that “the craft is not actually an object at all, but a hoaxed computer generated superimposition between the clouds and the ground,” which might be a credible dismissal except for the witnesses, from whom we have already heard: they actually saw the craft with their own eyes. Then the dismissal became obvious: the remote viewing session was performed by a retired U.S. Army major(!). This hardly neutral expert should have instead been invited to expose the public government policy on the dragonfly craft. Given his government background, his dismissal is highly suspect; it is more likely a cover story. And, for what it’s worth, he was consistently wrong about every other prediction which has already come to pass. The fact that he is billed as the world’s foremost remote viewing teacher may explain why I don’t put much faith in that technique (this is not to say that it doesn’t work occasionally).
We have considered the accounts, the skeptics, the “experts,” and the technology. The most enigmatic and possibly true element of Isaac’s claim is that the symbols placed on the craft are what have powered its flight.
Can that be true? In the next and final installment of our four-part investigation, we see how this kind of symbology comes with an important but mysterious history as a way to generate various means of transformation. See you then.