While the Battelle group did not have such information available to them, they did suspect it and tried to point it out (my emphasis in bold):

...the data were subjective, consisting of qualified estimates of physical characteristics rather than of precise measurements.

Furthermore, most of the reports were not reduced to written form immediately.

The time between sighting and report varied from one day to several years. Both of these factors introduced an element of doubt concerning the validity of the original data, and increased its subjectivity. This was intensified by the recognized inability of the average individual to estimate speeds, distances, and sizes of objects in the air with any degree of accuracy...The danger lies in the possibility of forgetting the subjectivity of the data at the time that conclusions are drawn from the analysis. It must be emphasized, again and again, that the conclusions contained in this report are based NOT on facts, but on what many observers thought and estimated the true facts to be. 4

So, when examining the “Good” and “Excellent” results, one has to be careful in assigning too much weight to the results obtained. One also has to wonder how many of these “Good” and “Excellent” unknowns were reports written weeks, months, or even years after the actual event.

To top this off, one has to wonder how reports can be classified as “Good” or “Excellent” when some of these reports were described as “insufficient information” (3.6% for Good and 4.2% for Excellent)! How can they assign these classifications when the reports had “missing” information?

How many of the “unknowns” in these categories had incorrect/missing information that prevented their identification?

Allan Hendry pointed out in his UFO Handbook that certain characteristics (shape and duration) were missing from about a fourth of all the UFO and IFO reports in the study:

...I would never have DREAMED of making IFO/UFO judgment without important parameters like shape or duration. Instead of dumping these reports into the “insufficient

information” pile where they belong (or better yet, seeking out additional data) they saw fit to make commitments on them. To judge reports like these as “UFOs” and “IFOs” and to include them in chi-square tests is sloppy investigative and statistical process…5

With all of this in mind, can we really draw any valid conclusions about this statistical study? Is it simply a case of Garbage in = Garbage out (GIGO)?

Reevaluation of the Unknowns 

Something rarely mentioned by UFO proponents regarding Special report 14 is the attempt to reevaluate the 434 “unknowns” that were created by the initial evaluation. The effort was to identify “possible knowns”, “unknowns”, and “good unknowns”. While the report gave no numbers, they stated that a majority of these “unknowns” could have been observations of familiar objects that just could not be positively identified. It is interesting to note that the reevaluation reduced the numbers of “unknowns” significantly.

It doesn’t say much for those 434 “unknowns” if a majority of them could be considered to have reasonable explanations.

Following this, the report goes on to present what it considered the best cases for futher evaluation:

Thus out of the 434 OBJECT SIGHTINGS that were identified as UNKNOWNS by the data reduction process, there were only 12 that were described with sufficient detail that they could be used in an attempt to derive a model of a “flying saucer”. 6

These final twelve cases involved such events as the Chiles-Whitted sighting, which was probably a bright fireball. Remember, these are the cases that survived the culling and were considered the best. Many of these cases did not even end up on the final list of Bluebooks unknowns! If these cases were the best and found to have possible explanations, what does it say about the data originally used and the results obtained?

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Quelle: SUNlite 4/2011