From: Gildas Bourdais <bourdais.gildas.nul>
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 17:41:47 +0100
Archived: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:45:00 -0400
Subject: Re: Percentages Of 'Real' Sightings


>From: David Rudiak <drudiak.nul>
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <post.nul>
>Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:26:09 -0700
>Subject: Re: Percentages Of 'Real' Sightings

>>From: Ray Dickenson <r.dickenson.nul>
>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto" <post.nul>
>>Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:18:39 -0000
>>Subject: Percentages Of 'Real' Sightings

>>Watching I Know What I Saw and noted that the French
>>representative, talking of GEPAN's conclusions, said that "15%
>>of cases were unidentified." - while the UK rep stuck to the
>>US/UK line that "only 5% are unidentified".

>The only reason the USAF final Blue Book percentage ended up
>around 5% (actually 6%) was because they received marching
>orders in 1953 (Air Force Regulation 200-2, issued soon after
>the CIA Robertson Panel recommending public debunkery of UFOs)
>to reduce the number of unknowns down to a mininum, ideally 0%.
>Prior to this, Blue Book unknown percentages were always well
>over 20%.  The Battelle study (Blue Book Special Report #14),
>issued in 1955 whittled down the AF unknowns to a "mere" 21.5%,
>but after AFR 200-2, the yearly unknown percentages from Blue
>Book typically plummetted down into the 1% or 2% range.

>In addition, we know that most of the really important cases
>after AFR 200-2 actually got sent to other newly formed units to
>investigate, out of the public eye, leaving Blue Book largely
>with the prosaic cases, another way to whittle down the
>percentage of unknowns.  Good cases still in the public domain
>were largely "explained" with totally absurd explanations.

>Maybe he UK just followed the U.S.'s lead in UFO debunkery.

>>Wonder if the difference is down to the more pragmatic nature of
>>French people - either those reporting or those investigating?

>The French investigations (GEPAN/SEPRA/GEIPAN) were under the
>auspices of the French space agency and were conducted more
>scientifically than Blue Book ever was.  Last I looked, the true
>unknown figure was around 14% of all cases studied, but when you
>throw in the fact that over 40% of all the cases studied were
>deemed to have insufficient information and instead consider
>only the higher quality cases deemed to have sufficient
>information to make a determination, the percentage of unknowns
>rises to around 25%, very similar to the early days of Projects
>Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book before the debunkery directive of
>1953.


David,

I think that your presentation is quite right.

The percentage of unknown at Geipan is similar to the one in
Report 14 of the Battelle Institute and Blue Book.

The percentages of  2 or 5 % are obtained when cases are not
selected well enough, not eliminating cases with insufficent
data.


Gildas Bourdais



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