CATALOGO UFOCAT, PUBLICA DOS CASOS DIFUNDIDOS POR SIGLO XXX

EL PRESENTE REPORTE ES PARTE DEL TRABAJO DEL SEÑOR VICENTE-JUAN BALLESTER OLMOS EN SU EXTENSO CATALOGO SOBRE EL FENÓMENO OVNI. EN ESTE, EL NÚMERO 5, TOMA DOS CASOS PUBLICADOS EN NUESTRA PÁGINA WWW,SIGLO30.COM POR SU INTERÉS LO PUBLICAMOS Y SON LOS CASOS 4 Y 6. Se encuentra en idioma inglés. Usted puede utilizar el traductor Google (lado izquierdo de nuestra portada), para pasarlo a español. El estudio consta de 35 páginas.

ESPERAMOS LO ANALICE Y USTED TIENE LA ÚLTIMA PALABRA.

FOTOCAT REPORT #5

RESUMEN

Objetos o luces de posible apariencia esférica, fotografiados o filmados

desde aeronaves, se han buscado en el mayor banco de datos de informes

de Fenómenos Aéreos No Identificados registrados en película. Sólo se

han seleccionado 7 sucesos para su estudio y éstos se han analizado hasta

el límite de la información disponible. El nivel medio de documentación

permanece bajo, a pesar de los esfuerzos de los autores por mejorarlo,

pero 4 casos muestran razonables explicaciones triviales. Los 3 restantes

apenas son evaluables y carecen de extrañeza. En términos generales,

todas las imágenes consideradas son altamente ambiguas. Los autores

recomiendan que se tomen pasos para aumentar la profesionalidad de la

investigación sobre estos fenómenos.

Table 2 lists the 7 events saved for this presentation

(dates are day-month-year).

Case #1 30031972 Pyrenees Mountains (Spain)

Case #2 07031973 Coronda, Santa Fe (Argentina)

Case #3 1996 New York City to Orlando (USA)

Case #4 17071997 Tehuantepeque Isthmus (Mexico)

Case #5 27041999 Pennsylvania airspace (USA)

Case #6 042004 Belize to San Pedro Sula (Honduras)

Case #7 09052004 Ireland

Catalogue of Cases

Case #4

Date: July 17, 1997

Time: 11:00

Location: Over the Tehuantepeque Isthmus (Mexico)

Cameraperson: Gerardo Eduardo Mendoza Palacios

Mode: Photograph, analog (scanned picture)

Figure 10. July 17, 1997, over the Tehuantepeque isthmus

(Mexico), photograph #1. © G.E. Mendoza Palacios.

There is a web site in Guatemala (http://www.siglo30.com/)

which stands as the online support to the Spanish language

radio program Siglo XXX (30th century), which has broadcast

since 1973, according to the web page. The contact person is

Mr. Gerardo Eduardo Mendoza Palacios who signs many of the

site’s texts and appears as general director of Siglo XXX. It

was here that we found this photograph some time ago. Later on

the link to it was lost during a web format readjustment, but

we had already saved the images and the related brief

information.

Figure 11. Close-up of “object”, photograph #1. © G.E. Mendoza

Palacios.

The short information initially provided by the source

follows:

“This photograph was taken aboard a Jumbo 747 commercial

airplane. The dot attracted the attention of several passengers

because it did not look like another airplane due to the

intense light it produced, to the point that one of the members

of the S.C. family (see below, for real identity) said: It was

as if it was self-luminous and the light emanated from the very

object”.

The caption in the web page claimed that the blow-up shows

it not to be round and besides that the digital camera flash

was not used, to deny it was a reflection. The site also

reported that when the image was inspected through the computer

three or four luminous, weaker dots were observed. The

photograph was submitted to the web site by someone only

identified as L.M. (Initials were used to hide the identities

of witnesses).

The main picture shows the KLM logo of the Royal Dutch

Airlines and the wing geometry, engines, winglet etc positively

identify the aircraft as a Boeing 747. We have checked out that

Boeing 747 was the type of aircraft used by this company to fly

South American routes (8).

Once again in this case lacking the basic data needed for

a proper analysis, a request was submitted to the source for

additional information. A series of questions were raised and

from received responses the following detailed narrative could

be built.

The informant, Eduardo Mendoza (54 years of age), was on a

flight from Guatemala City to Mexico, D.F., with his now exwife

(O.S.C.) and her 17-year-old daughter (A.L.M.S.), this one

being the main eyewitness. It was the youngster, sitting beside

the window, who suddenly noticed some “lights or reflections”

outside the cabin and alerted Mendoza. It was around 11 a.m.,

at the mid-point of the route between the international

airports of La Aurora (Guatemala) and Beníto Juárez (México,

D.F.) and the flight status screen informed them that the

airplane was over flying the Isthmus of Tehuantepeque (Mexico),

at an altitude of 36,000 ft (11,000 m). It was Mr. Mendoza

himself who took two photographs, looking east, the first one

showing the main light located at “four o’clock” as well as

another showing big cumulus clouds and two other secondary

white dots placed at “two o’clock”, hard to distinguish in the

reproduction. No flash was used, as can be confirmed by

inspection of the border of the window pane, and the camera

used was a domestic analog Cannon, with ASA 100 film. It had no

zoom. The actual pictures were scanned for online usage. The

photographer stated that he had misplaced the original

negatives, “among many that I have”.

The duration of the sighting was around one minute, then

the lights disappeared because of the changing position either

of the airplane or of the clouds. The lights were apparently

moving very slowly in an opposite direction to the aircraft

course. The photographer’s guess is that, because the lights

were at an altitude “parallel to the airplane”, these were not

at sea level. He specifically commented: “I have traveled this

route tens of times and I can identify (especially in the

night) the gas exhausts from the oil rigs in the Gulf of

Mexico” (9).

Figure 12. Photograph #2 with arrows to show two tiny white

dots above the clouds. © G.E. Mendoza Palacios.

As these two UAPs are practically invisible to the naked

eye in the reproduction (scanned from a print), we have

produced Fig. 13 with an enlarged (3x) and contrast-enhanced

picture.

Figure 13. Close-up and enhanced photograph #2.

The sequence of events was as follows: the young girl

(window seat) sees the main light “or reflection from

something”, she tells her parents and her father (sitting in

the aisle seat) position himself to take the first photo

(Fig.10). The mother was in the center seat (unsure if she saw

it). Then the girl sees the pair of dim lights and Mr. Mendoza,

again, takes the second photo (Fig.12), without actually seeing

the lights, hoping to be able to snap them successfully. Some

30 sec elapsed between one photo and the next. After taking the

second photo the main light was not seen anymore: “The truth is

that it did not last long before I could sit down again and my

daughter got accommodated in her seat. We thought that in this

lapse of time and due to the speed of the aircraft we had left

the light behind the angle of the window”, Mr. Mendoza told us.

The three lights never were seen simultaneously. According to

the girl (the principal visual witness), both the source

visible in Fig.10 and the two faint sources in Fig.12 “were as

they looked in the pictures”. In view of the difficulty of

saying anything meaningful about the image in Fig.12, the

following discussion focuses on the image of main light

(Fig.10).

From plans of the Boeing 747 (10) we measured the

approximate distance from the camera position forward of the

right hand wing to the winglet on the wingtip, which is 128 ft

(40 m). The width of the winglet was measured at approximately

7.7 ft (2.4 m) at the root. The angular width of the winglet is

therefore ~3.5º, enabling us to measure the angular diameter of

the UAP as lying in the range 0.3º to 0.6º (it is not possible

to identify a perfectly sharp edge), a diameter comparable to

the full moon.

Enlargement shows that the source is correct to state that

the UAP image is not quite perfectly circular.

The line of sight (LOS) to the UAP is rotated backwards

from the camera position, at an angle close to 135º from the

aircraft's forward centerline, and the FOV contains both the

near and far edges of a window frame whose near edge is inside

the lens hyper focal distance and significantly blurred. The

angle of the LOS intercepts the plane of the window glass at

~45º. This rules out the possibility of a reflection from a LED

status light on the camera (such lights are commonly red in any

case) or from other sources close to the photographer.

However the angle of photography indicates that the window

must be adjacent to a seat row behind the camera position. At

the bottom center of the frame we find what appears to be a

reflection in the window glass of a light-colored interior

object partially overlapping the shadowed engine nacelle. We

suspect other interior reflections higher in the image, merging

with the clouds, reflections which are hard to identify but

could be from light areas of the seat immediately behind the

photographer or from the clothing of a passenger occupying this

seat.

Considering the photograph in isolation from the personal

testimony for the moment, this suggests the possibility that

the "UAP" could also be a secondary window reflection from a

nearby interior cabin source.

A possible primary source would be a specular reflection

in, say, a spectacle lens, a camera lens or shiny jewellery.

Inspection of the light and shadow on the window frame appears

to confirm the correctness of the source's statement that no

camera flash was used; therefore the obvious source of a

specular reflection would be the sun. To investigate this we

looked at the sun angle.

On the outboard engine pod we can clearly identify the

shadow of the point on the wing leading edge where the pylon is

attached (at the "hip" where the leading edge sweep changes by

a couple of degrees). Dropping a line to the shadow indicates

that the sun was high, at a zenith angle of approximately 40º

(or strictly speaking at an elevation of 50º relative to the

local horizontal defined by the fore-aft aircraft axis) and on

a bearing roughly behind the plane, several degrees to

starboard of the aircraft centerline. This latter angle may be

larger than it appears to the eye because the outboard 747

engine pod is itself "toed-in" towards the centerline by about

2º. Nevertheless it seems unlikely that the sun would have been

in a position to directly illuminate a specular reflector in

the cabin position implied. Whether indirect scattered light

from the clouds would be sufficient to cause such a reflection

seems doubtful.

It remains possible, if not very probable, that it is a

reflection of some other interior light source, such as an

electric reading lamp or similar. But, in general, reflection

theories are unattractive if the report information is

trustworthy and if several people viewed the UAP with the naked

eye at the time.

Turning then to other explanations, we determined above

that the principal UAP (Fig.10) has approximately the angular

diameter of the full moon. Could it be the moon, perhaps

blurred by a thin cirrus haze? The UAP appears almost circular,

and the phase of the moon around the sighting date was very

nearly full, 94%.

This seems unlikely for several reasons: the likely

altitude of the sun suggests full daylight and the intrinsic

brightness of the moon would be insufficient. Regardless of the

true time of day, a nearly-full moon requires that the UAP

should make an angle with the sun approaching 180º, yet the

angle between the UAP and the sun determined from the shadow on

the aircraft engine pod is only around 90º. And finally, if the

reported date and location are approximately correct the moon

is ruled out because the moon set a couple of hours before

sunrise and remained below the Earth until early evening.

Venus can sometimes be seen in daylight when near maximum

brightness, although around this date it was far from maximum

brightness (magnitude -2.7). In this region it rose at about

9:30-10:00am local time in the ENE on the sighting date, and

would have been low in the sky to the right of an aircraft

heading NW from Guatemala into Mexico on the morning of July 17

1997, consistent with the photo. However Venus was only ~27º

from the sun, and therefore is fairly conclusively ruled out by

the shadow angle indicating that the UAP is nearly 90º away

from the sun.

We note that the sun's bearing and high elevation is not

inconsistent with cruise on a heading roughly NW during the

morning in the summer at a low northern latitude, which would

fit the journey reported from Guatemala to Mexico. From the

reported location (11,000 m above the Isthmus of

Tehuantepeque), the Bay of Campeche would lie to the right of

the aircraft, and it is conceivable that it could be near

enough -within perhaps a few tens of miles- for oil rig burnoff

flares in the Bay to be visible (11). The source notes that

other fainter lights are visible on the original (though these

are not very evident on the jpeg available), conceivably

indicating a group of flares in this busy oilfield. This theory

would imply that the blue background is the ocean and that the

plane is banking to the right, which in turn would strongly

strengthen the inference from the shadow angle that this was a

morning flight.

However, information provided by the photographer appears

to rule this out. In response to other questions he indicated

without being prompted that he was a frequent flyer on this

route and was very familiar with the oil-field flares (at

night, at least), adding that the photographed lights were in

his opinion well above the sea horizon and appeared level with

the aircraft.

Another, possibly more plausible, theory is that the photo

shows the landing lights of another jet, heading almost

directly towards the camera. Landing lights are very powerful

and might be seen from miles away even in daylight. It might be

objected that landing lights are only for night operation, but

this is not the case. It seems there are differing conventions

and few international regulations about this (12), but many

operators, pilots and aviation authorities in many countries

make it standard practice to require landing lights during

daylight to enhance visibility and reduce collision risk either

when below a certain height (say 10,000 ft or 3,000 m), when

within 10 miles (some 20 km) of a runway, when in any Terminal

Maneuvering Area, when in reduced visibility, when in busy

airspace en route, or in some cases all the time.

In summary, whilst this photo is not without potential

interest it is impossible to evaluate confidently on the basis

of the limited information available.

Case #6

Date: April 2004

Time: not known (daylight)

Location: Somewhere between Belize-Puerto Barrios (Guatemala)-

San Pedro Sula (Honduras)

Cameraperson: Mónica Monje

Mode: Photograph, analog (scanned picture)

In his regular online news chronicle, the Argentinean

ufologist Guillermo Giménez published in 2006 a couple of UAP

photographs taken from a small plane. The following caption

-translated from Spanish- was accompanying the picture: “Two

planes were flying from Belize to San Pedro Sula on July 17,

2001 (sic). Pilots (were) Fredy Koppy and Rudy Bermudes. One of

the passengers was taking pictures of the colleagues in the

second aircraft. One object was following them by a stretch of

the flight. In this photograph, it can be seen below the front

of the airplane”. (Belize, formerly British Honduras, is a

country in the northeast of Central America bordered by Mexico

to the north, Guatemala to the south and west, and the

Caribbean Sea to the east. San Pedro Sula is the second biggest

city in Honduras).

Figure 19. April 2004, from Belize to San Pedro Sula

The following information was then added: “During the

flight several maneuvers were performed. (In the second

photograph) the plane’s propeller can be seen on the far right

side. The object (is) lower than the flight horizon”.

Figure 20. April 2004, from Belize to San Pedro Sula

And a final caption reads: “Blow-up of the object of

metallic and round features. You can see the sun's reflection

on its surface”.

Figure 21. April 2004, from Belize to San Pedro Sula

This is the entire dossier reported. When we consulted

Giménez, he answered he had copied the information from the

Siglo XXX web site, but this was no longer there. In Case #4 we

had already found another airborne UAP image (curiously also

dated a July 17th of four years before) taken from the same

source, managed by Eduardo Mendoza, and we contacted him once

more for additional details.

The information Mendoza has kindly provided to us about

this episode corrected some mistakes that either the web site

or the previous informer had introduced, and he has presented

us with a more comprehensive report (9).

From a short note published by Mendoza in a magazine

called Enigma he edited for 7 issues in 2009 (number 4, page

16) and from personal correspondence with the first author (9)

we found out that the event took place in April 2004 when two

planes owned by Transportes de Montaña, a private

transportation charter company, carried two groups of

executives from Belize to San Pedro Sula (Honduras), through

Puerto Barrios (Guatemala). During the flight, Mrs. Mónica

Monje, TV employee and then the wife of one of the pilots took

2 analog photographs of the escort ship as there was a

spherical object that moved hand in hand with the two planes.

“When the photographs were developed the presence of the UAP

was evidenced, located below the front fuselage”, the article

said.

Thanks to the successful contact established with Mendoza

to better document the photographs taken by his daughter (Case

#4), we sent him a number of pertinent questions regarding

these two pictures in order to collect additional data to work

upon. This set of questions was to be submitted to the lady

photographer, who luckly is working for a TV program directed

by Mendoza himself and is thus closely available. However,

communication has ceased since, our questions have not been

answered and we are left with a very limited amount of data.

For instance, we do not know if these photographs were taken at

the same time or in different stages of the flight. We are not

even aware if the photographer actually saw anything strange

with her own eyes during the flight or if the round objects

appeared later in the prints.

We have studied the two photographic stills and Fig.22

shows a comparison of the first and second photographs.

Figure 22. April 2004, from Belize to San Pedro Sula

(Honduras), close-up comparison of originals and contrastenhanced

versions.

Photograph #1 seems to show some structure around it, the

shape appears more elongated. The radius of curvature of the

highlight is too large for a sphere. It could be an approximate

ellipsoid, but the highlight appears to be significantly less

bright than the bright areas of the white-painted plane, so is

probably not a specular reflection but a diffuse reflection

from a light-colored surface. Could it be motion-blurred wings

of a bird? The altitude is probably low enough.

Photograph #1 (Fig.19) is clearly centered on the body of

the airplane as if it and only it was the focus for the

attention of the photographer, not any anomalous object flying

underneath. Absence of further photographs of the same “object”

would suggest there was nothing uncommon to be seen.

Photograph #2 is possibly spherical, or else is a nearly

end-on projection of an ellipsoid. The brightness and sharpedged

circularity of the highlight looks like a specular

reflection of the sun. The surface could be metallic.

The only available print for photograph #2 (Fig.20) is a

cropped, enlarged picture, which might indicate –again- that

the apparently strange object was not the center of interest

when the photo was taken.

Incidentally, we doubt that the object visible in the

upper right corner can be "the plane's propeller", as claimed.

All indications are that these two aircraft are single-engine

light planes of the same or similar type, in which case the

only part of the plane's propeller that could possibly intrude

into the frame in this way would be a blade tip. But light and

shade reveal an intricately shaped structure in reasonably good

focus which does not resemble the tip of a propeller. Moreover

it shows no apparent motion blur.

Examination of photograph #1 (Fig.19) shows that the other

plane's propeller is considerably blurred by rotation during

the exposure. The lighting conditions appear similar, and it

seems unlikely that the photographer would have manually

selected a much faster shutter speed between the two photos.

Indeed we doubt that the unspecified "analog camera" could have

provided the ultra-high shutter speed required to 'stop' a

Cessna propeller so perfectly.

Fig.23 A detail of the alleged "propeller" from photo #2

(Fig.20).

The propeller of a light plane such as a Cessna runs

typically at about 2,500 rpm and the blade tips trace a circle

of diameter approximately 6 ft (1.8 m) whose circumference is

~5.6 m (18 ft). The rate of the blade tip is therefore such

that even with a very fast shutter speed of 1/1,000 sec the

blade tip would travel 23.5 cm (10") during the exposure, a

distance clearly comparable to its own chord (breadth) or more,

blurring its image very significantly - much as we see in photo

#1 (Fig.19). We therefore conclude that unless the engine has

stalled, or unless the photographer was able to switch -between

photos- to an extraordinary shutter speed in the order 1/10,000

sec, this unidentified object in photo #2 (Fig.20) is not part

of a propeller blade, and indeed is not obviously any part of a

light aircraft.

Without an answer to the questions posed to the

photographer, the possibility exists that (1) these are two

unrelated photos of different objects, and (2) the objects were

not visually observed at the time of taking the pictures, only

to appear after development, which would leave the door open to

a number of non-mysterious explanations.

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