From what I can see we have a problem that the AFOSI agent was investigating nearly 3 months after the event, AFOSI at some level was reluctant and had to be dragged into it via Wash DC and the agent was not a happy camper.  Maybe he didn't like driving across the State of Washington and down the coast of Oregon.  He seemed to be trying to snipe at the witnesses with bogus or questionable "gotchas" and I am not buying it.  This is an example of an investigation that may have created error in the witness recollections using the uncertainty in memory introduced by the needless and gratuitous 3-month delay and a hostile investigator.  

Maybe UFO witnesses need defense attorneys as well as private PhD scientist consultants to protect themselves from abusive debunker investigators.  Debunkers set witnesses up as strawmen to be knocked down, pretending that the witness has PhD knowledge and training so that when they fail, as they must because they are not in fact PhD's in most cases, every scientific deficiency is then held against the witness instead of the debunker.  "Anything you say can and will be held against in a court of debunking."  The AFOSI agent dragged out a bogus "gotcha" that father-in-law Smith supposedly contradicted himself (insinuated by saying "however") by saying the UFO was at a 45 degree "angle" (does that mean the disc shape was tilted at 45 degs or was it 45 degs above the horizon?) and "however, also states that it flew directly over his head."  In fact it is not a contradiction at all but I won't belabor it here.  

The agent also insinuates that the father-in-law was old and doddering (about 65-70) and was hoaxing his confirmatory sighting to help his daughter and son-in-law with alleged ridicule over their sighting -- but got the wrong date, Jan 24 instead of 23 (not actually commented on by the agent, just implied).  There is no evidence whatsoever of any "ridicule" hence no such motive for hoaxing, and the date error recalled 3 months after-the-fact may simply be due to the fact the Portland Oregonian article was published on Jan 24, so maybe the father-in-law had saved the paper and used that for reference and saw the "Jan. 24" date on the paper when the agent interviewed him on April 11.  Competent investigation would have explored that instead of trashing the witness (no comment was made about a date discrepancy, the two dates were reported without comment, so did the AFOSI agent know this alleged discrepancy would not hold up so he didn't want to call too much attention to it?).  

Interesting that the father-in-law wasn't so doddering as to simplistically copycat the sighting details printed in the paper -- he didn't.  In fact, he seemingly (ONLY seemingly) contradicted his daughter who said she could "not tell whether it was moving" whereas her dad later told the agent it was moving at about 30-35 mph (it is not an actual contradiction, except to debunkers, because she was in a moving car that would have made it difficult to detect motion in a slow-moving object in the sky, unlike her dad who was on solid ground at home in the back yard).  

The AFOSI agent also implies that the father-in-law might have seen the same plane on the next date, Jan. 24, when it was in flight in the morning.  So the agent wants to have it both ways -- it's a hoax of seeing what was not actually seen AND the same IFO airplane but actually seen (not lied about) the next day!  It can't be both.  Why isn't THAT held against the AFOSI agent as HIS self-contradiction?  

The flight from Tillamook Airport on Jan 23, 1949, had a flight plan to take off at 10:50 AM to fly to McMinnville and back.  AFOSI found out the pilot flew S to Hebo first then headed E to McMinnville.  This would mean that the civil aircraft would have been about 20 miles ESE of the witnesses at the time of the sighting about 11:05 AM and would have presented only about 20 feet to view from that angle and would have been less than 1 arcminute in angular size, thus unresolvable to the naked eye.  This is an enormous distance.  If you think it's easy try an experiment the next time you land or take off in an airliner in the daytime -- see if you can even see a 20-foot truck from 20 miles.  You won't even be able to see the road let alone the truck (I do this experiment every time I fly).  This is the Mantell Phenomenon again -- a known IFO in roughly the right direction at the right time but several times too distant to even be seen by the unaided eye and certainly not of such prominence as to catch anyone's attention.  The Tillamook airplane would have been a tiny barely visible speck in the sky even if twice as close.  The solar phase angle would have been bad for lighting up the airplane, with the sun behind the aircraft (off to one side not directly behind), in effect being shadowed by the wings and fuselage to the witnesses.  Aircraft are not built to have mirror-like surfaces to blind pilots' eyes.  Leckington said the object had the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off of stainless steel (like a mirror). 

The aircraft would not have had visibility problems if it had been at the distances estimated or computable from witness data, i.e., less than a mile (and over 1 Full Moon in angular size).  But then it would have the opposite problem of being too close and too large in angular size, and would have easily been seen to be civil aircraft.  It would have been to the SW instead of the SE reported by the witnesses.  Traveling at about 120 mph cruising speed or about 2 miles per minute, it would have taken about 15 minutes to disappear due to distance to the naked eye on its S-then-E dogleg path, not the 2-1/2 to 3 minutes reported.  Leckington would have had plenty of time to retrieve his binoculars and follow the aircraft (if that is what it was) all the way to McMinnville and it would have never disappeared in the binoculars in the cloudless clear blue sky. 

Brad

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