From: Martin Shough <parcellular.nul>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 17:48:23 +0100
Archived: Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:09:09 -0400
Subject: April 2007 Channel Islands Sighting


Dear List

Those who would like to read a concise summary of the
investigation into this sighting can find an article in the new
issue of Journal of Scientific Exploration:

Jean-Francois Baure, David Clarke, Paul Fuller & Martin Shough,
'Unusual Atmospheric Phenomena Observed Near Channel Islands, UK,
23 April 2007', JSE, Vol 22, No 3, pp. 291-308, 2008.

A version of the article will in due course be available
alongside the complete report which is still available at:

www.guernsey.uk-ufo.org

The bottom line for those who haven't read it is that we tried
very hard to explain the observations in as conservative a way as
possible, putting a number of different conventional hypotheses
under the microscope. Many were eliminated quickly as impossible
or highly implausible. We narrowed the remaining options down to
two, neither of which was very compelling despite our best
efforts.

We acknowledge that there are several features of the main
sighting which, taken alone, would seem suggestive of an
atmospheric-optical mechanism, but we failed to make this work
convincingly.

Other features, again taken alone, would seem suggestive of
objective phenomena in the air at the location triangulated by
two lines of sight, but we were unable to find a convincing
explanation of this type either (no radar evidence was uncovered
to confirm this interpretation and some simultaneous visual
observers in other aircraft failed to observe anything when they
"ought" to have been able to).

We found no internal reason to discount the problematic features
of the observation (that is, the only argument for doing so would
be the ad hoc one that they make explanation problematic). In
short, the phenomena remain unidentified. It was not our purpose
to speculate further.


Martin Shough



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