We can also consider the contextual historicity of the testimony. Clarence L. Johnson says he believes in “flying saucers”. He believes he has previously seen “flying saucers”. He describes the “flying saucer” he witnessed as a black elliptical form. The concept of “flying saucers” goes back to a much earlier report of pilot reporting unidentified objects that resembled tossed saucers skipping over water. As a child, I skipped small flat stones over creeks—never saucers, but I get the picture. I would have called them “skipping stones” rather than “flying saucers”. And they were almost certainly actually a flock of birds.
But the media had a field day over the “flying saucers” story. People ate it up. For some reason artists put one saucer on top of another to create the alien space ship. So the popular culture science fiction version of an alien aircraft was basically a dark ellipse form. Keep in mind, this idea of an alien aircraft being based on a report if something that very much likely was not an alien aircraft and even required a great deal of artistic license to morph into the Hollywood dark steel gray ellipse alien aircraft. Yet, of all the possible forms an actual alien aircraft could take, the one Johnson reported seeing happened to fit exactly with our essentially made-up Hollywood version.
And some of the testimony doesn’t make sense.
I wondered why this one object was so dark, considering that the sun was behind it.
An object lighted from behind looks dark…because the light only hits the back. Even small uneducated children can figure this out. I don’t understand why he would even wonder about this.
As he watches it, wondering what it may be, totally unsure of what he is seeing, wanting to getting a closer look, asking his wife to get his binoculars, in order to figure out what he is actually seeing, which he doesn’t know, he concludes:
which by now I had recognized as a so-called saucer.
Oh. So after seeing some vague dark shape in the sky against the sun and not knowing what it is and asking for binoculars, he had already recognized it as and alien flying saucer spaceship. Which he then…couldn’t see clearly because of the “haze”.
It was “black and distinct” but he “could make out no detail”. But he could clearly tell “its speed was very high” due to the “fore-shortening of its major axis”. Yet “the object…appeared to be very large but, not knowing its distance from me, I could not estimate its dimensions.” Of course those dimensions would very much dictate the speed based on the change in the major axis, so he really had no idea of the speed either, even though he claims he did. But he goes on to estimate the position of the object…somehow. He had no idea of the size, position, speed, or exact shape of the object he witnessed.
What he saw could have been a cloud, or a distant plane, or a close plane, or some kid’s Batman kite that got caught in the wind.
The details of the testimony are either contradictory or unsupported, and have evidence of bias toward attempting to support “flying saucers”. As such, we have here evidence amounting to nothing more than someone claiming to have seem something that could be anything from a cloud to a plane to a kite. And apparently biased evidence at that.
