21.07.2025

The 701 club weak cases

While I was reviewing the list of remaining unknowns, that I had covered in the 701 club, I began to recognize there were some cases on the list that never should have been there in the first place. While performing reviews, I had developed a rule that cases that were submitted over 2-3 months after the fact should be considered unreliable. Most of these reports made months/years after the fact are what I refer to as “me too” stories. People read or hear about UFO reports in the media, and decide to send in a report based on some old memories. While one has to consider the possibility that these reports are accurate, most of them contain details that appear more exaggeration than fact. I classify such cases “unreliable” because one cannot trust the details to be that precise.

An example of the problems with these kinds of cases can be seen in the Longmont, Colorado case of July 27 or 29, 1957. In that case, the report surfaced in a letter to Hynek dated October 14, 1964. He, apparently, talked to Hynek about the case at an earlier date but this was the first time it made it into the record. The witness could not remember the exact date but listed the time as being 4:17 AM MST. He stated that the sun had already risen. However, sunrise on these two dates was about 4:54 AM. Additionally, on the reporting form, he gave four different dates July 27, 29, August 4 and 17. This witness did tell Hynek that he had a second sighting “two weeks later” but it seems like he was just guessing. To add to the confusion, the witness told Hynek in his letter the event lasted 10 minutes but, on the report form, he states it was 20 minutes. Lastly, he put on the report for the date of him completing the report was July 20, 1960. All of these inconsistencies make one consider this case, and the witness, unreliable.

I made some exceptions to this rule based on if the witness had appeared to have recorded the data down instead of working from memory. For instance, there was one report by an 11-year old from Glen Ellyn, Illinois on July 1, 1963. He had sent his first letter to NASA before they directed him to send the report to Blue Book. It wasn’t until towards the end of the year that he got his report mailed to Blue Book. He filled out the report form with details that appeared accurate and his initial letter was probably just a copy of the one he sent to NASA. I felt that such a report did not fall into the “me too” category even if the witness was such a young individual.

I did not remove cases that had their files missing. However, I did consider removing some cases where the information reported was limited. If they were missing important data such as basic positional data, date, time, course, I labeled them as insufficient data.

No matter how extraordinary the observation, if that data is missing, one cannot possibly look for a potential source of the report without this information. Some readers might consider this a way of disposing of “unidentifieds”. That may be the case but it is my goal to determine what cases are worthy of the label of UNIDENTIFIED. Proving something is truly “unidentified” requires that all potential explanations have been eliminated. If you don’t have enough data then you can’t accomplish this. That makes the case bad data.

Lastly, there were some cases that contained conflicting or confusing information. Either the witness gave conflicting or confusing information in their reports or multiple witnesses of the same event had given descriptions that conflicted with each other. I am not talking about the directions being slightly different. I am talking about descriptions of the object’s behavior being in conflict with each other to the point they appear to be describing a completely different event.

With that being said, this is a list of the 39 cases I am removing from the list of Blue Book UNIDENTIFIED/UNKNOWNS, and placing on the 701 club list.

Quelle: SUNlite 2/2025