Portage County/Ravenna UFO chase 1966

I've never mistaken the planet Venus for 45 ft across elliptical brilliant object with a cone of light shining on the ground. Not even on my best shroom trip...
Funny that is just so easy to do.

Of course I should have mentioned my remark was a generalisation and in no way related specifically to the matter under discussion.

And having had my experience I can imagine that folk could look at Venus and think it was an object as close as a plane.

Alex
 
The sequence is provided by Spaur himself and his description of what he experienced.
Where is the sequence provided? Link please.

That is totally reliable, just as everything else he said he saw is reliable.
How do you know? What checking have you done?

What about the definite errors he made, such as the 180 directional error I pointed out earlier? That's very far from totally reliable, isn't it?

Editing his account to fit your theory isn't going to work.
Wherever I have quoted him I have quoted him accurately.

So what? Knock yourself out..lol!
So it is important to identify errors made in the case, such as Hynek getting the rise time of Venus wrong. Quintinella got it even more wildly wrong when he interviewed Spaur, by the way; Quintinella sounds like he doesn't know what he's talking about in that interview.

And errors like this get recycled through various analyses of the case, because nobody bothers to check. Least of all the UFO believers like yourself.
 
I don't believe you. I believe the astronomer Allen J. Hynek..He was there, remember?
You're a true idiot then, Magical Realist, and I can do nothing more to help you.

I've given you the very tool you can use to check for yourself, but you shut your eyes and whinge and refuse to do any work.

What are you so afraid of? That if you check you'll have to admit I'm right?

Or are you afraid that you're too stupid to be able to work out how to use the astronomy software?

Either way, you're just wasting everybody's time here with your pathetic nonsense. It's one thing to make claims that may be true but are hard to check. It's quite another to continually repeat claims that are demonstrably false, ignoring basic facts that go against what you wish was true.
 
Where is the sequence provided? Link please.


How do you know? What checking have you done?

What about the definite errors he made, such as the 180 directional error I pointed out earlier? That's very far from totally reliable, isn't it?


Wherever I have quoted him I have quoted him accurately.


So it is important to identify errors made in the case, such as Hynek getting the rise time of Venus wrong. Quintinella got it even more wildly wrong when he interviewed Spaur, by the way; Quintinella sounds like he doesn't know what he's talking about in that interview.

And errors like this get recycled through various analyses of the case, because nobody bothers to check. Least of all the UFO believers like yourself.

You're the only one practicing confirmation bias here--editing the accounts to fit your conclusion. I have no idea if your calculations are correct. And I don't care. So far you have totally failed to debunk this case, and it's starting to show in your flopping and twitching on irrelevancies like when the sun rose, whether your fictional meteor exploded as most do, and what Spaur made up in his recorded accounts. I didn't realize your were so desperate to debunk this famous case. I guess you are, for whatever weird psychological reason. Unfortunately you are failing, just like you always do.
 
I just got it..shroom trip.
You refer to the happy state enduced by magic mushrooms?
Yes?
I thought you meant driving down the road going zooom.
But you raise an interesting aspect.
Many folk are on medication or permantely intoxicated in one form or another and may be prone to "seeing" things and I do wonder just how many eye witness reports can be relied upon...but I have said that before.
Alex
 
You're a true idiot then, Magical Realist, and I can do nothing more to help you.

I've given you the very tool you can use to check for yourself, but you shut your eyes and whinge and refuse to do any work.

What are you so afraid of? That if you check you'll have to admit I'm right?

Or are you afraid that you're too stupid to be able to work out how to use the astronomy software?

Either way, you're just wasting everybody's time here with your pathetic nonsense. It's one thing to make claims that may be true but are hard to check. It's quite another to continually repeat claims that are demonstrably false, ignoring basic facts that go against what you wish was true.

Reported for insults. My aren't we getting testy..
 
Magical Realist:

Since you aren't providing anything to back up your wishful thinking, you're not getting very far here. And your attempts to turn this into a personal argument aren't getting you anywhere either.

I think you should take some time out and let the adults sort this one out. You're useless here.
 
Magical Realist:

Since you aren't providing anything to back up your wishful thinking, you're not getting very far here. And your attempts to turn this into a personal argument aren't getting you anywhere either.

I think you should take some time out and let the adults sort this one out. You're useless here.

Hey..other posters are even starting to laugh at you now. Maybe we should call it day. You're certainly not doing yourself any good with this pedantic hairspitting just to debunk a big shining ufo racing alongside 2 police cruisers thru 2 states on April 17, 1966. In fact you're starting to lose it. Why is that oh master debunker? lol!
 
You're just trolling now, Magical Realist. Stop it. Leave the thread for those who want to examine the case.
 
You're just trolling now, Magical Realist. Stop it. Leave the thread for those who want to examine the case.

Right..like all those other posters who have been participating in this thread? Is that like all those people on the Internet who are so interested in everything you post? Get a real life James..
 
Take some time out, Magical Realist. When you come back to this thread, please talk about the topic.
 
Hey..other posters are even starting to laugh at you now. Maybe we should call it day. You're certainly not doing yourself any good with this pedantic hairspitting just to debunk a big shining ufo racing alongside 2 police cruisers thru 2 states on April 17, 1966. In fact you're starting to lose it. Why is that oh master debunker? lol!
There certainly laughing at you in your pretentious nonsense, in claiming that you never directly claim they are inter-dimensional time travellers or other manner of Alien controlled aircraft, while at the same time ignorantly writing off all other meteorological, astronomical possibilities, or any affliction which sometimes humans are apt to have like, delusions, illusions or any manner of other illness, trickery or whatever....leaving open that which you are so anxious to get this forum to accept. :)
Get used to it MR, most are reasoanbly explained, and a small percentage remain UFO's nothing more, nothing less: "Unidentified"
And you have shown them to be nothing more.
 
Federal oversight of time zones began in 1918 with the enactment of the Standard Time Act, which vested the Interstate Commerce Commission with the responsibility for establishing boundaries between the standard time zones in the continental United States. This responsibility was transferred from the Interstate Commerce Commission to DOT when Congress created DOT in 1966.
https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/time-act

From 1945 to 1966, there was no US federal law about daylight saving time. By the early 1960s, observance of daylight saving time was inconsistent, with some states on DST, and no agreement when to change clocks.
...
Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore—but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles!
...
This continued until 1966 when Federal laws were enacted governing the implementation of daylight savings time.
http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Daylight_Savings_Time_-_Chaos_in_the_60s.html

So there seems to have been some confusion on that issue that only actual research would take to untangle.
And except for the fact that two sources confirm that Venus rose at 3:35 AM, everything would be peachy!
Those sources might have been observatories at location where Venus did rise at 3:35 AM. The further east you go, the earlier the sun, moon and planets rise.
Details matter. Being able to trace the source of a factual claim matters. Two sources can't confirm anything if both trace back to the same erroneous source.

http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/Venusufo.htm
 
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Last night I saw a UFO.

It was about 10:30 pm and after watching some tennis on TV I went outside to look at the stars. The half-moon was up in the northwest, and the usual stars were visible. But to the west there was a very bright light in the sky.

I knew the bright light wasn't a star. Sirius was up above and it's the brightest star in the sky; this light was brighter than that. My first thought was that it might be a planet - perhaps Jupiter. But I didn't know what it was. It was a UFO.

I have an 8 inch telescope, and it was quite a good night for watching the stars anyway (warm and clear at this time). So, I set up the scope and turned it to the bright light in the sky.

After changing eyepieces a couple of times, I looked through the scope with the highest power eyepiece I have. The light in the sky looked like a kind of squashed ellipse. It also seemed to have coloured bands, and it shimmered as I looked at it. It was kind of yellow on the top half, and below that its colour seemed to graduate through a reddish colour, with a dark blue below.

There's no way this was a star, because it had a definite size in the scope, quite unlike the sharp pointlike appearance that stars usually have. I could only observe it for about 10 minutes before it dropped below the level of the roof of the house next door.

Could I solve the mystery of this UFO?

There are a couple of clues. First, the object appeared to be "setting" in the sky at the same rate as the nearby stars. That suggested to me that it was an astronomical object rather than a flying craft of some kind in the sky. But if I didn't know better I could easily have reported it as "hovering" over the nearby houses. If I'd had to guess at its size, the only thing I would have had to compare it to would have been those nearby rooftops, chimneys and so on. To the naked eye, it looked big and bright, so if I had assumed it was close I could easily have reported its size as about the size of a Boeing 747 at a distance of a few blocks away from where I was watching it. It made no sound like a "regular" aircraft at that distance. It shimmered in the air, both to the naked eye and in the telescope.

That shimmering is another clue. This was a warm night. With daylight saving, the sun had set only about an hour and a half before I saw the UFO. Warm air rising off the earth can cause shimmering of astronomical objects - astronomers call this "seeing". It is responsible for the "twinkling" of stars. And here I was looking westwards towards the horizon (over the rooftops), with the object quite low in the sky. That meant I was observing it through a large thickness of atmosphere.

What of the object's appearance? A squashed ellipse? The atmosphere can cause some refraction of light, making circular objects near the horizon appear elliptical. But that effect alone was not enough to account for the squashed appearance of this object.

There was a half moon. We see a half moon when the directions of the Sun and moon, as seen from Earth, are at a 90 degree angle to one another. So, what about this object? Suppose it was a planet. Can planets show phases like the moon? Can we possibly see a half-Venus, for example? The answer is "yes".

Did the appearance of the object indicate possible reflection of sunlight from a planet? Through the scope, the top half of the object was bright, and the bottom half was dark. The sun had just set in the west no long before, so the sun was "below" me. But that would mean that if the Sun was lighting the UFO then the bottom half of the UFO should be bright and the top half dark. But that wasn't what I saw through the scope; I saw the opposite.

Colour? The predominant colour of the UFO was yellow-orange. Other colours seen could be due to imperfect telescope lenses/mirrors, atmospheric refraction and the like.

So, bright yellow-orangish object in the sky? I knew it wasn't Jupiter or Saturn, because with my telescope I can make out bands on Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and I could see no such thing here. So, how about Mars?

The object's colour was not exactly what I expected for Mars, but it was approximately right. But if this was Mars, why was the top half (the half on the "opposite" side to the Sun) illuminated? Answer: my telescope gives an inverted view of the sky (it's a Newtonian reflector). With the naked eye, I couldn't tell which side the UFO was illuminated - the thing just looked like an elliptical light - but the scope gave a better, and accurate, view.

I tentatively identified my UFO as the planet Mars.

I spent another hour and half at the telescope, looking at the "Jewel Box" in the Southern Cross, the Orion Nebula and its Trapezium of new stars, at the Pleiades (the "seven sisters" of Greek mythology), at the beautiful global cluster in the Tucana constellation near the south celestial pole. I saw directly that Alpha Centauri - the brightest "pointer" to the Southern Cross - is not a single star at all, but two distinguishable stars (actually there are three, but I can't see Proxima with my scope). Then I went to bed.

This morning, I checked the positions of the planets with a "night sky" app. Right now, Venus, Mars and Uranus are all close together in the night sky. But Uranus is invisible even through my scope, and Venus was below the rooftops by the time I went outside last night.

And Mars? Mars was exactly where I saw the UFO. My UFO was Mars.

I wonder what I might have thought if I had been a policeman back in 1966 Portage County, watching the same object "hovering" above the rooftops. A policeman with no particular interest in astronomy, who had heard and read many recent reports of alien spaceships in the sky. A policeman with no ready access to astronomy texts or phone apps.
 
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And Mars? Mars was exactly where I saw the UFO. My UFO was Mars.

Wow. You're sharp as a tac. lol!

So why the hell would you think a non-moving reddish "star" in the sky was a ufo? Or are you just making this entire episode up so you can ramble on about the Portage County UFO?
 
Wow. You're sharp as a tac. lol!
Thanks, Magical Realist!

So why the hell would you think a non-moving reddish "star" in the sky was a ufo?
It did move. It appeared to hover above the rooftops. It then moved downwards until it was out of sight, and that was the last I saw of it.

A UFO is an unidentified object in the sky. This was a UFO - until I identified it.

Or are you just making this entire episode up so you can ramble on about the Portage County UFO?
Why would I make it up?

It's a useful, instructive story, don't you think?

By the way, this thing was quite bright. And the whole area was lit up so that I could see quite clearly without needing any additional light.

Not so surprising, though, because the half-moon was up, plus all the stars, and the bright Mars in the sky.

---

Let's face it: if you had read my story on a UFO website, without my explanation and analysis, you would have said this was a compelling case for aliens, or whatever. You have eyewitness testimony that could no doubt be backed up by numerous other eyewitnesses. That's the gold standard for you, isn't it?
 
It did move. It appeared to hover above the rooftops. It then moved downwards until it was out of sight, and that was the last I saw of it.

No adult remotely familiar with the nightsky would mistake a non-moving reddish star for a moving ufo. Unless they were so obsessed with trying to make a point that they'd fool themselves about it just so they could post about it later on. That's pretty much what you're doing isn't it? Pretending to believe things you don't believe just to prove some point about how planets can be mistaken for ufos. Isn't that intellectual dishonesty? Why yes..it certaintly is. You're not fooling anyone fortunately..
 
No adult remotely familiar with the nightsky would mistake a non-moving reddish star for a moving ufo. Unless they were so obsessed with trying to make a point that they'd fool themselves about it just so they could post about it later on. That's pretty much what you're doing isn't it? Pretending to believe things you don't believe just to prove some point about how planets can be mistaken for ufos. Isn't that intellectual dishonesty? Why yes..it certaintly is. You're not fooling anyone fortunately..
You mean to say Mars or Venus or Jupiter or the Moon even are NOT known for bathing folks in a blinding light that makes them wonder if their clothes were on fire? Or for shooting straight up in front of them at high speed? Like those silly, clearly delusional Portage County cops only THOUGHT they experienced and saw? Surely everyone knew Mars could do all of that, and so much more!
 
No adult remotely familiar with the nightsky would mistake a non-moving reddish star for a moving ufo.
But they do! And regularly. Besides, it did move.

Also, not all adults are remotely familiar with the night sky. These days, most people live in cities where light pollution washes out a lot of the night sky.

A lot of people aren't even aware that the stars move at night. They don't watch them for long enough to notice.

Unless they were so obsessed with trying to make a point that they'd fool themselves about it just so they could post about it later on.
I didn't fool myself at any point. As you'll see from above, my first thought was "that's probably a planet - maybe Jupiter". But I didn't know it was a planet - or which planet it was - until later.

If I had a been a credulous believer in alien visitation rather than somebody with some education in astronomy and experience in observing the night sky, there's a good chance that my first thought would have been something quite different.

That's pretty much what you're doing isn't it? Pretending to believe things you don't believe just to prove some point about how planets can be mistaken for ufos. Isn't that intellectual dishonesty? Why yes..it certaintly is.
You seem very upset about my story. Is that because it makes it more plausible to you that the Portage County policemen chased the planet Venus?
 
You mean to say Mars or Venus or Jupiter or the Moon even are NOT known for bathing folks in a blinding light that makes them wonder if their clothes were on fire?
Go outside just about an hour after sunset tonight and take a good look at Mars and Venus for yourself. They will be almost due west in the sky and quite close together. Check out how bright they are.

This is assuming, of course, that you don't live in the middle of city surrounded by bright streetlights, neon signs and the like that completely wash out your view of the sky. Portage County, Ohio, in 1966 didn't have a lot of light pollution.

Or for shooting straight up in front of them at high speed?
Only none of the witnesses reported that in the first instance, immediately following the events. That detail was added later.

Like those silly, clearly delusional Portage County cops only THOUGHT they experienced and saw?
Nobody said they were delusional. They really did see Venus.
 
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