Trumbull County mass UFO sighting

[Magical Realist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfJfUe2yYI8

[C C]

Somehow, the incident –known by some as the “Trumbull County Disturbance” – missed the local newspapers entirely and wasn’t brought to light until two years later. (LINK)

Well, I guess that would explain the current era's absence of newspaper accounts being retrospectively available online for something which happened in 1994. Though not why such a curiosity would be completely ignored by the county's local media. The "two years later" stuff, as something direct or non-mediated by UFO culture websites, seems absent as well. Another account sounds as if nothing emerged news-wise in the broader world until over three years later (or TV, at least):

Further, it was stated that 'Confirmation' broke the story for the first time on television. This was a slight inaccuracy, as WXIX FOX-19 News in Cincinnati broke the story of the Trumbull County Disturbance last summer. [...] Astronomer Mr. James E. McGaha was also shown on the segment, given airtime to 'dismiss' the Trumbull County Disturbance. McGaha asserted that 'twinkling stars' were to blame for the event and a simple 'fireball' was responsible for the light reported by Officer Melero. The 'shutdown' of the patrol cruiser, McGaha proclaimed, was sheer coincidence while the fireball was seen overhead. (Trumbull County on 'Confirmation' ... Feb, 1999)

Astronomers have tried to explain the sightings as simple stars that appeared low in the sky, and appear to change colors. Of course, this does not explain the malfunction of police vehicles, lights engulfing them, or objects moving across the landscape being chased by policemen. Some have theorized that the object seen by the policemen of Trumbull County was a top-secret craft from the Youngstown Air Reserve Base. However, Captain John Keytack, from the base, stated that there were no planes, experimental or otherwise, flying that night. The policemen of Ohio have spoken often about what they saw on December 14, 1994 - Police cars that inexplicably stalled, light beams engulfing their vehicles, one or more structured craft of a nature never seen before or since. The 1994 sightings of Trumbull County have never been adequately explained by conventional flying objects. (1994 - The Trumbull County, Ohio, UFO Incident)

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[Zinjanthropos]

Did I hear it right? Once the UFO moved away from the police cruiser, the car started up again? Without turning the ignition key? For an internal combustion engine? Something doesn't sound right there unless the aliens have some neat little tricks up their spacesuit sleeves.

[Magical Realist]

Did I hear it right? Once the UFO moved away from the police cruiser, the car started up again? Without turning the ignition key? For an internal combustion engine? Something doesn't sound right there unless the aliens have some neat little tricks up their spacesuit sleeves.

http://www.nicap.org/papers/ufointerf.htm

"The proximate cause of engine interferences in the above categories is ionization of the atmosphere. (Reference 1) (Ionization is the process by which electrons become detached from their parent atoms, leaving as separate particles the electron itself and the positively charged remnant of the atom that is called an ion.

ENGINE DISRUPTION AND FAILURE

UFOs evidently ionize the atmosphere. Luminous, colored halos sometimes surrounding them must be produced by the recombination of free electrons with ions of the atmospheric gases. (Reference 2) At other times UFOs are reported to be buried inside a dazzling white cloud that is clearly a plasma, a highly dissociated state of electrons and ions. Beyond the luminous boundary one would expect that gases are also being ionized but to a lesser degree. Witnesses repeatedly tell of feeling electricity in the air, hair standing up, prickly sensations, or electrical shocks. Such expressions point directly to electrical phenomena. They are well enough understood, but investigators may have no mental framework into which the message can be fitted, so they may be ignored or forgotten.

Until recently it has been nearly impossible to deal with engine interference cases properly because the mass of data was so widely scattered throughout the literature. It would have required a monumental effort to collect the cases, summarize them, perform statistical analyses, and publish a reference document. But two such documents have now become available. One by the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1979 (Reference 3) and the other by the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in 1981 (Reference 4). Their respective authors, Geoffrey Falla and Mark Rodeghier, deserve admiration and gratitude for these outstanding contributions. It is now relatively easy to scan the worldwide record of vehicle interferences.

Where was the witness when his engine failed? -- In the driver's seat. What could he see when looking under the hood at a dead engine? -- Nothing. Where was he when attempting to re-start the car? -- Back in the driver's seat. These circumstances contrive to prevent the witness from observing anything significant, except in one crucial case. (Reference 5) Relevant details of that case are extracted from the British summary. As a very bright light approached a car it mimicked several series of flashlight signals. "....The car radio started to be affected and the engine faltered, the interior of the car became very hot, then the engine failed completely. The driver got out of the car, noted that the object was directly overhead and felt a prickling sensation like small electric shocks. He lifted the car hood and asked his wife to try to start the engine. The engine turned over, but sparks were seen to jump from the plug leads across the coil to the metal side of the car and back again. The man was a master mechanic and had never seen such an effect before. As another vehicle approached the object moved away at high speed. The car engine could then be started immediately...." (Emphasis supplied by the present author.) It is fortuitous that this event took place at 10 o'clock at night as the sparks may not have been noticed in daylight. So of several hundred cases of engine interference, we have one in which the cause was actually observed. And by a mechanic at that:

What does this mean? Very strong electrical surges of 15,000 to 20,000 volts are delivered to the spark plugs through heavily insulated wires. These wires fan out from the distributor to each plug, lying rather snugly to the engine block and grounded components. In normal operation, rubber insulation plus that provided by spatial separation assures that the electrical surge is delivered to the plugs. The insulating properties of air are impressive. It can sustain an electrical tension without breakdown of about 76,000 volts per inch. For a wire carrying a charge of 15,000 volts only half an inch from the engine block, the electric field strength would be roughly 30,000 volts per inch; so the margin for preventing the charge from shorting out is not great. Now comes a UFO that ionizes the air. Free electrons in such a strong electrical gradient will be accelerated. They will quickly acquire sufficient speed and kinetic energy to knock electrons off of other atoms. These, in turn, produce grandchildren, etc. The net result is an avalanche of charge as the atmosphere breaks down in a spark. By this method, Geiger counters register the passage of a single ionizing particle. Once the charge has been dissipated to ground, the conducting path heals itself. This mechanism would prevent the high-voltage surge from reaching the spark plugs. The onset of this condition would first be observed as a disruption of the engine when one or a few cylinders was starved, because their wires were closer to ground or their insulation had deteriorated. When a sufficient number of cylinders do not receive a spark, the engine will fail.

FAILURE TO RESTART

Having reached a possible understanding of how UFOs could interfere with internal combustion engines, it is relatively simple to see why the engine might not restart as long as the UFO is present. Turning the ignition switch will crank the engine, but it could not be started as long as high-voltage pulses intended for the spark plugs are shorted to ground by the breakdown of ionized air. There is another sub-category of this phenomenon, namely, cases in which the starting motor reportedly refuses to crank the engine at all. This problem, focusing upon the starter solenoid, is extremely complex, and since it is apparently unrelated to ionization, it must be set aside for the present .

SELF- STARTS

The most exasperating aspect of engine interference cases is the claim that an engine started by itself when the UFO departed, even though the driver's efforts were futile while it was nearby. This is such a ridiculous notion that even trained mechanics scoff at it. Others find it an impossible concept. (Reference 6) Yet it has happened, if witnesses are to be believed at all. Appendix A gives 27 abstracts of cases taken from the Rodegheir catalogue. Obvious push-starts are not included and the list may not be comprehensive.

Rodeghier found a total of 268 engine failures not including, of course, instances of mere rough running or loss of power. Comparing this number with the 27 self starts, one sees that the latter phenomenon is rare, amounting to only about 10% of the time. At any rate, these cases are adequate to establish some essential factors for self starting. The presence of a UFO is obviously required, usually at rather short range. (No mysterious engine failures followed by self starts are known to the author to have been reported apart from a UFO sighting.) Self- starts occur only in conjunction with departure of the UFO, either simultaneously, within seconds, or a few minutes at most. Cars, trucks, vans, and motorcycles are subject to the phenomenon. All are presumed to have had internal combustion engines using spark plugs as none of the available summaries indicated diesel engines. Based upon conditions within the engines that are necessary for self starting, the rarity of these events will become explicable.

Most people have a pretty clear, if not detailed, idea of how car engines work. Electric current from the battery flows through the primary circuit of the coil until it is broken by the opening of the breaker points. The resulting collapse of a magnetic field in the coil induces a high-voltage surge in the secondary windings that is distributed in a certain order to the spark plugs. A fuel-air mixture is then ignited to create high pressure within the cylinder. Not so well known is the fact that the spark is normally timed somewhat early because the propagation of the flame front in the cylinder and the build up of pressure are relatively sluggish. At idling speed, the spark is ignited while the cylinder is still approaching top-dead-center (TDC) on the compression stroke. It is usually set at about 5 degrees of crankshaft rotation ahead of TDC, but automatic devices advance it much farther in proportion to the engine speed.

There is a natural threat of sparking across the opening points that would rapidly erode the point surfaces. To offset this problem, a small condenser is included in the circuit to take up the current temporarily when the points open. Thus sparking is prevented. If the air around the points was ionized, however, an electrical breakdown between the points would be likely. Fairly high electrical field strengths exist at the instant of point separation. With a supply of free electrons and ions around the points, a spark over could easily occur and persist while the points continued to recede to their maximum spacing. Such a current is technically known as an arc discharge. These arcs, having a negative resistance characteristic, produce a runaway current unless it is limited by resistance in the circuit itself. As the current under normal conditions is limited by the resistance in the primary circuit, it will be limited in the arc to exactly the design value. Only when the UFO leaves the scene would the ionization be reduced until the arc could no longer be sustained. It would then extinguish itself instantly. As far as the electrical behavior of the primary circuit is concerned, this event would not be distinguishable from normal opening of the points, that is, a sudden breaking of the circuit. A strong surge must then be induced in the secondary circuit. It could then reach the spark plugs if departure of the UFO has removed the cause of such surges being shorted to ground. So a cylinder in a warm engine, being fully charged with a fuel-air mixture is ignited. If it had come to rest somewhat past TDC, the force due to firing will crank the engine gingerly. One need only remember how push-starts were done in manual shift cars. One cylinder firing and off you went:

Cranking of the engine would be effective from a cylinder position between a few degrees past TDC to 1200 or so. But the crankshaft rotates twice for each power stroke of a cylinder in a 4-cycle engine. So, as a first approximation, one could estimate the favorable circumstances for a given cylinder to be about (120/2x360) x 100 16.4%, if the rest position was purely random. However, it is not. Cylinders act in pairs with one in the compression stroke being balanced by another in the power stroke. If the valves opened and closed at exactly O and 180-degrees, the trapped gases in a non-firing engine would merely act as efficient springs, balancing out the net torque on the shaft. Again, because of the relatively sluggish movement of the gases into and out of the cylinders, valves are timed to operate in anticipation of these two angles. A net torque causes a coasting and stopping engine to approach, then slightly back away from TDC. Its companion would correspondingly approach and slightly back away from its bottom position at 180-degrees, an unfavorable location for self starting. Hence the probability of favorable circumstances for a given cylinder should be much less than 16%. Furthermore, if the engine remained dead for a long time, the fuel-air mixture would leak out past the rings, making self starts impossible. The duration of engine failure is seldom reported, but it must be limited to a matter of minutes, or even to several seconds. While calculating the probability of self starts seems to be impossible, these conditions illustrate why it is so small in the case histories."

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Well, I guess that would explain the current era's absence of newspaper accounts being retrospectively available online for something which happened in 1994. Though not why such a curiosity would be completely ignored by the county's local media.

For some reason, there was a huge reluctance on the part of the witnesses to come forward much less even talk about it. Even most of the 15 police officers backed off. Perhaps there were a few visits by MIB's or even real government agents that scared everyone. It doesn't take much to keep people quiet about an experience that only seems to get mocked and scorned at the watercooler and in the media anyway.

[Zinjanthropos]

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=we...ZsBbkfmcYA

MR, long blog but you might like it. I was wondering why more planes haven't plunged out of the sky because of UFO encounters, particularly due to engine failure.

Excerpt: This point can be generalized by pointing to a study of aircraft malfunctions blamed on nearby UFOs. (Haines & Weinstein, 2001) A table on severity of effects noted that of 33 incidents in which the relevant information is provided, 31 involved only one sub-system. Only two incidents claimed multiple malfunctions involving three or more subsystems. (Haines and Weinstein, 2001: Table 7)

Just one – 23/3/1955 – involved nine separate subsystems – an anonymous six sentence account of flight instruction gone wrong over the Ryuku Islands. The pilot reports the UFO was looking him over when the engine sputtered and all his instruments failed. He dove to escape its influence, but it followed him down. Curiously, it is nearly the shortest narrative in the case catalogue and leaves many unanswered questions like whether a mechanic looked the plane over afterwards.

Most of the malfunctions in this study involved either the radio or compass. Elsewhere Haines has reported finding only 9 cases of aeroplane engine malfunction in the totality of UFO history – a notably small figure particularly considering they are spread over 5 decades. (Haines, 1992; Table 12)

Far be it from me to discourage ufologists from taking their problem to hardened scientists, but you don’t have to be a cynic to sense they are not going to come back with an enthusiastic verdict that alien spacecraft with huge magnetic fields can be the only or the best explanation.

[Magical Realist]

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=we...ZsBbkfmcYA

MR, long blog but you might like it. I was wondering why more planes haven't plunged out of the sky because of UFO encounters, particularly due to engine failure.

Discounts magnetism as a cause of ufo-caused engine failure, and then goes into a long rambling account of sci fi stories dealing with alien electrical weapons. Not really relevant to the stated plausible idea of air ionization as the cause for engine failure.

As for why planes don't fall out of the sky when encountering ufos, how will we ever know they don't? Numerous planes fall out of the sky everyday. It's certainly plausible that some could have been caused by ufos.

January 7, 1948: "Saucer Appears Over Kentucky. Early in the afternoon, dozens of residents of the Madisonville, KY area telephoned police to report that they had seen what a news account later described as “a circular object hovering overhead and giving off a brilliant glow.” State police then alerted Air Force officials at Goodman Field, an air base at Fort Knox. 15 minutes later, the airfield’s tower crew spotted the UFO as well, and used the radio to ask a squadron of P-51 fighters already aloft to investigate. Squadron leader Capt. Thomas Mantell, Jr. an expert pilot who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during World War II, responded that he had spotted the UFO and was in pursuit. “I’m closing in now to take a good look,” Mantell reported in his last radio transmission at 3:15 p.m. “The thing looks metallic, and is tremendous in size.” Three minutes later, Mantell crashed and was killed. The official conclusion was that he had run out of oxygen, but UFOlogists have long doubted that explanation."----http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/ch...s-of-ufos/

[Zinjanthropos]

I remember reading long ago that the saucer shape was absolutely necessary for time travel. Can't remember why though. Navigating wormholes? Do ufologists discount the chance that the saucers are actually time travel vessels or do they still think it possible?

[Magical Realist]

Do ufologists discount the chance that the saucers are actually time travel vessels or do they still think it possible?

Only the most honest of them don't. Eyewitness accounts support the crafts being somehow teleported to locations. UFOs are known to suddenly vanish and reappear in different parts of the sky. Whether they're time travelers, ET's or interdimensionals we just don't know yet.

[Zinjanthropos]

I think it would be extremely cool if one day we discover that traversimg the universe is easier via time or interdimemsional. Reports of UFO sightings at historical events (ie: moon landings) is not that uncommon, is it not?

[Magical Realist]

I don't know if any ufos were seen by astronauts on the moon or not. Maybe they did and kept it a secret. We'll never know.