Hi Shadow, I remember this very topic coming up on another [now defunct] site some years ago mate, and it turned out that 'Mr Dean' emerged as a bit of a slippery character and an untrustworthy individual all round.
as I thought fake..thanksHi Shadow, I remember this very topic coming up on another [now defunct] site some years ago mate, and it turned out that 'Mr Dean' emerged as a bit of a slippery character and an untrustworthy individual all round.
You see the whole bunch of 'anomalous photos' [that he was getting paid to expose] turned out to be no more anomalous that any other freely accessible NASA photos that can be found easily online. These were pictures from the Apollo 12 mission which was the sixth manned flight in the United States Apollo programme and the second to land on the moon, It was launched on November 14, 1969 and all of the photos can be found here.... https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/catalog/70mm/mission/?12
...And if you notice all of the numbers that Dean quoted had been mixed up! [intentionally i'll warrant!] ...as you can see, the "AS12-51-8553" that Dean quoted doesn't even exist, [the highest frame number on Magazine R (51) is 7588] The image claimed to be "AS12-51-8553" is actually AS12-50-7341 and is a distorted blow-up of the Saturn V third stage.
Cheers Buddy.
This is exactly the kind of remarkably knowledgeable post that makes a good chat forum like this so worthwhile. It’s rare to encounter people with this depth of familiarity with the intricacies of a topic like this.... but anyway apologies for the thread derailment and back to the Trent photos, and in summary ... the object was seen by a couple of hard working 'salt-of-the-earth' farmers who didn't know what they were seeing , but knew that it was something unusual, the photos were taken by the Trents [Paul] and eventually found their way to the local press and then national media took up the story, then after a bit of intense scrutiny by the [hired for purpose] 'Condon Committee debunker' Dr. William K. Hartmann were declared a true mystery as there was no evidence of the pictures being hoaxed. All of this is classified as being "scientifically investigated" and therefore passed as being a true anomaly. Subsequently investigated in greater detail over a great period of years by the chief optical physicist for the U.S. Navy Bruce Maccabee [as well as many others] who came to the same conclusion. .... .And then many years later, disturbed by the possibilities that their detractor-doctrine was in danger of being blown away by there actually being unchallenged evidence of anomalous flying objects in our atmosphere [flying saucers] ...Phil Klass and his young ward Robert Sheaffer decided to perform an "expert" analysis [hatchet job] on both the photographs and the character of Paul and Evelyn Trent. ... To cut a long story short, though of course their predictable 'skullduggery based hoax explanation' gained the expected traction among the other naysayers in the field, and instantly became a hit with the 'self-claimed-scientifically-minded-fortean- connoisseurs' [hard-line sceptics] whom invariably do not apply the same standards of 'onus of proof' to declare the 'debunk' as being the scientific investigation! ... ... But as anyone with the simple understanding of the phrase "scientific proof' can easily see, it was nowhere near the scientific standard of 'un-fudged investigation'! And so the Klass/Sheaffer declaration of "comprehensively debunked" has been in turn challenged and unequivocally rebutted by many qualified authorities, a couple of which, I posted earlier [Sparks and Maccabbee]
.... But then persistence of claim is the king-mantra in the closed minded professional debunking ranks, and time and again proves to be quite fruitful in adversarial conditions such as the Trent photos, and is pretty much effective it would seem, as evidenced by the fact that their profoundly unscientifically supported assertions of 'proven foul-play' are still circulating the web and literature about the case, and that there are still an unbelievable number of 'less fact discerning ' sceptics [punters] that are all too eager to believe and pass off the erroneous debunk as "FACT" without bothering to properly check if they are right or not! ... and even ignore presented legitimate literature and links that detract from their preconceived notions.
Yep Thomas, this is a pretty sad state of affairs matey. . [but a bit funny anyway.]
Cheers Buddy.
I’m glad that you enjoy the very dry and droll humor that I sometimes find in these debates as well - we are here to have some fun, as well as to learn a few things, after all =)Hi Thomas, hope you are well my friend.
Not really any point to this post, except... well I know that you'll already be too aware, but I just read through the thread since my last post and have chuckled so much that it actually cheered an otherwise drab day up!... so much so that for some inexplicable reason I feel compelled to actually post and to point out the obvious to you mate....
It can be an amusing diversion, or else I wouldn’t bother with it =)...anyway mate, unless the futility of trying to educate pork into engaging logical free thought into their analytical mentation when considering 'possibilities' instead of dutifully following the Menzel-Klass-mantra of "I did not see it, but I know that the witnesses are liars, idiots or charlatans and this is what it was... so be it!" .... then keep going and make me smile again matey.
That’s very kind of you, thank you 1963. The best is yet to come. Soon I’ll share the work that I’ve been absorbed with over the last couple of years ;Oh!... and I checked out your site a couple of months back, 'and it rocks' [as does your extremely brilliant artworks] ... I also checked out the interview tape on youtube 'Sculpting a Vision' and have to confess to being in awe of your god given talent Sir.
I find post by both you and 1963 to be informative and helpful. It is members like you that make this a wonderful place to chat. thank you agsin.Great post 1963, thank you. Let’s start at the end and end at the beginning:
This is exactly the kind of remarkably knowledgeable post that makes a good chat forum like this so worthwhile. It’s rare to encounter people with this depth of familiarity with the intricacies of a topic like this.
You hit the nail on the head: the people who are most eager to claim the mantle of “scientism” to discredit this field and every single piece of significant evidence that comes to light…ironically and hilariously fail to present a compelling empirical/scientific argument to support their claims. Typically I only find that top researchers like Brad Sparks and his colleagues really see through this stinky faux-scientific charade that’s vaunted before the public in order to shout down any and all genuine public interest and investigation into this subject. But it’s encouraging to see that impassioned independent investigators like yourself can dig deep enough under the quagmire to see what’s really going on here: these pitiful and self-important armchair debunkers aren’t actually trying to practice science or skepticism – they’re only interested in presenting a sufficiently plausible-looking veneer of rational scrutiny to convince the predominantly scientifically inept public who has a casual interest in this subject, that these facile debunking efforts are legit and the evidence is unworthy of further consideration. And of course they enjoy making a name for themselves along the way, for whatever lurid ego gratification that can provide.
Finding the actual truth of all this is not a consideration for such people. They are driven solely by a quasi-theological agenda to assert themselves into the public mind as self-appointed priests of cynicism: snarky standard-bearers for the dull and dreary worldview that they embrace and proselytize for. That’s every bit as revolting as the opportunists and narcissists of the world like David Wilcock and Corey Good: in fact they’re two sides of the exact same coin.
Both of these competing theologies – the Church of Cynicism and the Church of Credulousness, prey upon the natural human thirst for certainty. It’s psychologically uncomfortable for people to dwell in uncertainty and simply admit “I don’t know.” In fact it’s so unthinkable to some people, that just in the last couple of pages in this thread, people have proven to be incapable of seeing the words “I don’t know” and actually accept them as a valid position on this particular case. But that’s my position: I see insufficient empirical evidence here to make a sound assessment. This is why we need legitimate scientific inquiry into this subject: to conduct a proper empirical analysis of cases like this one so we can arrive at an informed, impartial, and unemotional conclusion based on facts…not hype or hysteria.
I’m glad that you enjoy the very dry and droll humor that I sometimes find in these debates as well - we are here to have some fun, as well as to learn a few things, after all =)
And I’m rather fond of this one, for its amusing and ironic sense of dignity:
But to be fair – I’ve only had to keep repeating myself because my adversaries keep raising the same points even after I’ve discredited each one, sometimes on multiple occasions. The ole “na na na…I can’t hear you!” defense.
It can be an amusing diversion, or else I wouldn’t bother with it =)
Honestly the older I get, the simpler people’s motives appear to be. And so it appears that this entire cult of denial is driven primarily by the jealousy and resentment of the enormously bloated human ego – it simply galls some people that they’ve never witnessed something this truly astonishing and inspiring, so it’s much more palatable to just lash out like infants and try to prove to themselves that nobody has ever actually witnessed or photographed these devices operating in our airspace. That’s a much easier pill to swallow, than the notion that something really cool happened, and they missed out on it. Because if they missed out, then their basis of knowledge is missing a vital data point that others have, and the ego finds that intolerable: “how dare anyone else see something that I’m not privy to!” It’s unfair, granted. But that’s life.
That’s very kind of you, thank you 1963. The best is yet to come. Soon I’ll share the work that I’ve been absorbed with over the last couple of years ;
and then there was the ladder, wich for some reason was out in the open in the trent farmBeen staring at the Trent pics to kill time on a train. In the edge-on one you can see that it's intergalactic communicator antenna/deflector array doesn't appear to be perpendicular to the body. Maybe it's on a ball socket like a mirror would be also. Practical engineers those Zeta Reticulans.
Also, stand to the right and behind the camera and chuck the 'mundane object likely to be found on a farm in 1950' and then look at the two photos. Or consider someone behind the shed doing that in the opposite direction. I used to do stuff like that with my friend when I was a little kid with a 110 camera. I'll post them if I can find any. If it were above 10 degrees outside I might try to duplicate it. I admit if they just chucked something and snapped two pics they got very lucky with that result.
Wonder why they waited to have the film developed? My family was a bunch of rural farmers just like that and believe me, rural practicality fully factored in, if someone thought they caught a real flying saucer on film they would have had it developed and not waited to finish the roll.
more than likely this was done by the very owners of the thirdphaseofmoon page, they have been caught hoaxing beforeAt first I was delighted by this video clip, that I've seen on the ThirdPhaseOfTheMoon YT channel. Finally there was a video of an UFO with extraordinary level of detail. Finally there was a proof for my skeptic friends. According to the story, there were even two witnesses, shooting video from two angles. Or, so I thought:
INSANE! Best UFO Sightings Of June 2015 [Breaking News] Share This!
go to 43:01
But than, before I started showing the video around, I wonted to double check that video. Because that's what anyone should always do that.
So, I spent days and weeks magnifying individual video frames and looking into details. And hurray, I was over the roof in enlightenment since, at first, I thought that I discovered some gravitational lensing just bellow the central axis of the craft. That was a potential bombshell, because it would directly link UFOs to General Relativity, warp drives etc. That would explain how UFOs can fly faster than speed of light. This is what I've seen in some of close-up frames:
As 'UFO' rotated notch disappeared and re-appeared just under the center of the mass of the craft. For weeks, I dwelled on the notion that that disappearing notch was caused by gravitational lensing just in the right place where UFO's propulsion should had been. That is, till I noticed this unusual dark brown (rusty) cylinder:
That 'cylinder' looked exactly as a rusty old SHAFT!
It was a total and utter climb down for my hopes. These two witnesses, found some metal contraption that looked just right for a saucer and mounted it on a shaft. Than they shot a video against a sky. Because sky is large area with low contrast, you just go to any video editing software and you copy & paste a patch of sky to cover the shaft. Because of the generally uniform background and low contrast of the patch, one can easily blend patch with background. Anybody experienced with video editing would know how to do that. And to do a good job, hoaxers cut-off the shaft, with the imposed patch of sky, exactly where rim of the 'saucer' would be.
And to top it off, during the interview that I found later, witness sounded so negative and unresponsive as if he was hiding something. One almost felt that he felt guilty because his hoax worked much better than he expected and that so many people (myself included) were duped and got really serious about it.
It would be nice if some mechanical engineer can actually recognize that round part. It's definitely not just a car wheel hub. It must be a part of a bigger machine.
You're referring to the photo taken by the Life magazine photographer weeks later:and then there was the ladder, wich for some reason was out in the open in the trent farm
and then there was the ladder, wich for some reason was out in the open in the trent farm
We really don't know why their son was put up on that ladder in the yard to take this photo:
and then there was the ladder, wich for some reason was out in the open in the trent farm
As I read through the various comments I see that Lance has asked for an 'apology'...which (if there is one) must come from the source of any error made.
That source is, as he knows, James Oberg. Oberg is a well-known space 'journalist' with professional ties to NASA who has been admired by Lance-like skeptics (such as Tim Printy) for a very long time.
It is Oberg who is the origin of the problem.
The inescapable fact is that it is Oberg who made the first public display on the net of the 'ladder boy' image- not me.
He did this three years ago on the ATS (Above Top Secret) forum. He deliberately dropped the "bombshell" photo of the boy on the ladder on a an ATS forum apparently in a misguided effort to further the belief that Trent had hoaxed the UFO photos.
All Oberg would state when questioned by those on ATS was that LIFE 'bought the rights' to the 'ladder boy' photo.
Oberg did not attempt to clarify the image beyond saying that LIFE had to pay for it, indicating that they had 'acquired' it. He preferred to perpetuate a mystery about the 'ladder boy photo' by failing to say anything more about it- and then deleting the image on the site.
And I am not the first or only to fall for the Oberg misinformation:
As I mentioned in an earlier comment, other posters on other site forums (including this past July on Unexplained Mysteries) understood Oberg as meaning that the rights to the 'ladder boy' photo were acquired by LIFE (i.e. purchased) and not made by an employee of LIFE, leading one long-time poster to also conclude and state -when he reproduced the Oberg image of the boy on the ladder on Unexplained Mysteries- that they were from the same roll as the UFO photos.
And I will not embarrass 'researcher' and skeptic Joel Carpenter (who is Lance's associate) but to say that he privately sent to me an email earlier today that was laced with extreme vulgarities such as "f*** Oberg" and which was peppered with even more extreme obscenities to describe the Oberg I cannot repeat.
As Lance is aware, it was Carpenter who did the apologizing to me in another email this evening, sorrowful about the language that he had used to describe how he feels about Oberg.
It is clear that Carpenter and Lance know that Oberg is the source of the 'controversy' over this photo.
But even after Joel Carpenter used a string of expletives to me to describe Oberg, he still felt compelled to excuse Oberg's error by saying that Oberg 'says things in odd ways' - whatever that means.
And Lance himself, in an earlier comment on this site, said that Oberg is merely "mistaken." He asks no 'apology' of Oberg as he does of me...
And finally, it is interesting that both Lance and Carpenter are generally in agreement with people like Oberg- but in this case they are willing to "throw him under the bus."
And apparently me too... because I trusted Oberg, a rabid skeptic like they are, who in this case, I thought was telling the truth.
To have been 'taken in' by a skeptic and then excoriated by skeptics for having believed one of their own is just incredible.
AJB
Top 5 sculptors....lol. Ok, well we don't want to take up any of your valuable time - the Play-Doh might dry out while you are trying to convince yourself (and the rest of us) that Trent didn't photograph a truck mirror.You know you're in serious trouble when the guy agreeing with you is a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Humanoidlord believes that UFOs are real, but he thinks they're magical manifestations of an invisible, virtually omnipotent Loki-like deity that resides in an imaginary adjacent "dimension" to our own, and makes UFOs as some kind of prank upon humanity. That's who's agreeing with you.
Resorting to another logical fallacy - the particularly loathsome and despicable ad hominem attack - in lieu of an actual argument, is an admission of defeat.
And by the way I'm one of the top five sculptors in America. I wonder where you rank as a pilot, lol. And I earned my Series 7 and 63 SEC licenses at the age of 20, to become one of the youngest stockbrokers in the country - I only mention it since you seem to think that a license makes you better than other people, which it doesn't, of course. And invoking your pilot's license is actually yet another logical fallacy: an appeal to authority (and an especially awkward and irrational example, at that: "I can't be wrong - I'm a pilot!!!").
I guess we'll have to wait for Robert Sheaffer to tell you what to think, before we can get a response to any of the perfectly reasonable points that I've raised against your flagrantly biased and logically flawed arguments. Oh well.
You know that attacking me personally from behind an anonymous account only proves to people what an intellectually dishonest, pitiful little coward you are, right?Top 5 sculptors....lol. Ok, well we don't want to take up any of your valuable time - the Play-Doh might dry out while you are trying to convince yourself (and the rest of us) that Trent didn't photograph a truck mirror.
I don't know what's in the McMinnville photos...[snip]...it would be foolish and intellectually dishonest of me to claim that I know what that object is, one way or the other.
In fact I’ve repeatedly and consistently stated in clear and simple terms that there’s insufficient data to perform a decisive assessment, so it might be a truck mirror, and it might not be a truck mirror. At this point there are credible arguments both for and against that hypothesis.
My daughter Debbie Found 2 unknown pics. I think that it is fake. the 2nd is fake as well I post to identify the pics and the objects in question. View attachment 4994 View attachment 4995
its still something to keep in mindYou're referring to the photo taken by the Life magazine photographer weeks later:
"Quite recently it got a bit of a revival when a big bunch of photos from a LIFE photoreport became available online. This report contains professional photos by a journalist taken a few weeks after the alleged sightings and includes a pretty thorough overview of the Trent farm area, among other things. Somebody found one particular photo to be of great interest - it showed Trents son standing on a ladder underneath the power lines that many have assumed that an UFO model was suspended from. This piece of news quickly made its way around blogs and forums, initially believed to be part of Trents original film roll (i.e. the UFO roll) which according to some would have made it a "smoking gun".
Obviously that soon proved not to be the case, though many initially fell for it."
Famous McMinnville/Trent saucer photos of 1950 a hoax?
We really don't know why their son was put up on that ladder in the yard to take this photo:
I think it's simply a farm boy fooling about with ladder, maybe his father left it outside because he was fixing a roof or doing any other of hundred chores on a farm. Than an army of armchair phylosphers (who never go out, anyway) 'discovered' it and found it ominous.
I personally think that this 'conspiratrial' type of search for truth can never find the truth, because it has unlimited number of degrees of freedom. There is nothing to constrain a conspiracy theory because human imagination is unlimited. For the same reason I would say that legal standard of proof is not even 10% of the scientific proof, which is 6 sigma, as we know. When it comes to politics and conspiracies, people are just trying to assert their world view, so we are talking about sub 1%.
again its something we should keep in mind, we never know...Oh my god! The Trents owned a ladder?
Shit, case closed.
well i obviously din't know of the sketchy story behind this photo, neither that mr oberg had done such a thing, i never thought of him as a bad character anywayAh!.. I wondered if the 'infamous boy-on-ladder-photo' would rear it's ugly head on this thread.... and yes of course it did.
Well HL, I don't want to come across as being arbitrarily conceited about this particular case, but I have been intensely interested in the photographs and the accompanying background story of them since ...well as long as I can remember. [from the time forty-odd years ago when I first came across them in one of my first special books that I earned money to buy from the male-order book company by delivering newspapers before and after school]
... and I don't mind saying that even though my initial personal judgement on the validity of these photographs [as well as many others...in this case, it was more a case of them not living up to my expectations really].. was that they were fakes' , I was eager to learn whether or not they would be easily explained away as such. And here I am now after all of these years finding myself actually defending their rights to be included in the 'genuine UFO photo' files. Not that I would put my life, or life savings on them being a pair of photographs of alien craft being piloted by 'Klaatu and Gort', ... but genuine UFO's in that they have not been at all adequately explained as being photographs of an everyday prosaic object, or that they have been demonstrated to have been a mocked-up photo made specially for the personal gain of the photographer.
The truth is that though there has been a myriad of attempts to dismiss these pictures as being 'fakes' one way or another, but as has been stressed on many occasions in this thread alone, there has been 'No Scientifically Empirical Debunk' of these 68 years old photos, no matter how loud and perseverant the detractors are! In other words 'they are lying in order to prove what they believe to be a lie'. And believe it or not, that doesn't make it true!
As we discussed earlier, there have been many attempts to cast doubt on the veracity of these pictures going way back to the early aftermath of their public introduction, all of which can be described as at best pure-speculation, and in some instances this speculation is falsely bolstered by iffy-supplements such as the one that you have latched on to [as you were meant to do] ... the boy on the ladder photo that was intended for your personal deductive skills to assume that they were actual photos from the same roll of film that snapped the UFO that had been hidden from you ...until they were posted for someone to discover and put two and two together. [and come up with 5?] And in this instance the devious 'red herring merchant' was in fact no other than [my old sparring partner over on a different site] James Oberg! ... And the hapless dupe in this saga was no other than my friend [from that same site] Anthony Bagalia. ... whom sadly, not for the last time allowed himself to be lead down the garden path by a nefarious self serving source.
https://www.ufoexplorations.com/make-believe-in-mcminville
...And then after his many corrective emails and letters from old hands in the genre that knew damn well that these pictures had nothing to do with the event, and weren't even taken anywhere near the time , or by the same photographer or even the same camera as the UFO pictures , and the many admonishments from his more knowledgeable peers, Anthony promptly backtracked and posted his reply on the UFO Iconoclast site....
Although it might be deemed a little funny that such a self assured, and highly dedicated and very capable researcher such as Anthony Bragalia could be taken in so completely by a forked tongued snake oil salesman such as James Oberg ... I personally find it pretty sad really, because as I said previously, I regard Anthony as a friend [well as friendly as the internet gets] and know him to be of good character , the type of person that is always seeking the truth either way it drops and not merely to trying to accrue prestige and notoriety in the genre ... and that someone such as Oberg, gets away scot free and with a smirk on his face, [unlike Anthony's egg] because he achieved what he set out to achieve , and that is that he not only somewhat discredited Anthony and slightly dented the reputation of 'the other side', .. but he managed to get this "False Idea" into peoples heads that the photos that were taken by the LIFE photographer over a month later are clear proof that the UFO photos were the result of a prank perpetrated by Paul with the whole Trent family's participation . Which is patently a LIE. ... But the damage has been done, and though you are just one poster on one site blindly pushing this slyly thought out total BS erroneous propaganda , there are countless other posters on countless other sites still posting the same crap in order to desperately win a point without checking out the provenance of the so-called evidence, and thus contaminating the innocent thought process and deductive prowess of newer students to the genre, when the open minded cerebration of this subject is mind bogglingly hard enough even with an even playing field.!!
So yep HL! ... the Trents had a ladder on their farm,..... so what?
By the way, when I asked Jim Oberg about this saga, all he would say was that "he never claimed that Paul Trent took the pictures, that's all on Bragalia's head,.. but why do you suppose that the Life photographer did? ... was it his way of saying that .that's the way he thought that Trent had performed the hoax?".
"No Jim, I replied, that's just your in built intentional biased interpretation of the photos and you are a smart fellow, but dishonest!"
Cheers.
the 1 picture shows damage (or maybe dirt) to the original apollo negativeMy daughter Debbie Found 2 unknown pics. I think that it is fake. the 2nd is fake as well I post to identify the pics and the objects in question. View attachment 4994 View attachment 4995