Wow, many thanks for the comments and links Tjw!
I am also suggesting that the Sunset conditions played a role, that the cloud was silhouetted against the sky, making its appearance more striking very much like the nice photo I used for my demonstration.
Lance
Hi Lance.
I've read through the thread on Paracast and the only things that don't seem to get a mention (and one helps in positioning the Lockheed though I freely admit not accurately) is that we have a take off time;
"I participated in a test flight of a Navy Super Constellation WV-2, taking off at 4:29 p.m."
(Thoren)
And we have a time that the sighting started Coleman Thoren and Ware state estimates of 5.00pm (Wimmer doesn't state a time).
So the Lockheed was in the air for approx 31 minutes before they noticed the object. We know it ended up with a speed of 225mph (but someone more knowledgeable about flying and airspeed whilst climbing to the altitudes mentioned will have more accurate calculations that me) and we know where it took off from.
My rough calculation at the moment tells me that the plane flew between 85 and 100 miles during that time. Taking in account various mentions of heading out "over the ocean" a "South East" direction parallel to the coast and a turn West (that's when they report first noticing the object), that indeed puts the plane in the Catalina Channel. I think this alone rules out the much closer stated point of Coleman who put the plane much further North at Santa Monica.
The other thing is that Although it's the most likely line of sight from Johnson's ranch, directly towards Pt. Mugu to state the object was actually on that line when Johnson couldn't see Mugu from his home because of mountains and was again estimating as we know by his use of "roughly over Point Mugu", perhaps it's wise to also take into account that he mentions two other headings ("between 240° and 260°") as the object "departed". This of course still fit's with the 255° given for Mugu but means that the object could have had a 20° variation from one extreme to the other (that would be the equivalent of being out by 8 miles if the object were 25 miles away and 14.5 miles if the object were 40 miles away etc). this further makes Sparks' claim for triangulation nonsense, whilst maintaining the integrity of the witness (we're not saying Johnson was wrong about any of the factual information he's given).
In fact when you take the factual stuff (removed form the stuff which he makes clear is subjective opinion), his account stands up as well written and I don't see anything self contradictory in it.
The only other thing that strikes me is this claim that something that is 200' wide can be seen from 25 miles away (notwithstanding that we have no idea how wide it was, nor really how far away it was) Sparks seems to be using working backwards from if it was too small to see it would have to be X big at Y distance. And then claiming that he's used Y distance to work out how big X is (circular reasoning).
His claim about what the human eye can physically resolve may be correct at 1 arc minute and then extrapolating that to an object 4 arc minutes across for an object 200' wide at 25 miles, but what he's conveniently forgetting is that the same object is less than 1 arc minute high, so regardless of how wide it is, you won't be able to see it at that distance if it's a 7:1 or 10:1 ratio ellipse. Or for that matter any other plane I can think of who's wingspan has an angular size of 4 arc minutes.
Hope this helps, I'll try and get some diagrams done over the weekend to illustrate these points.
