Such thinking does make some sense. If a person can't recognize the stars, the moon, meteors, or in some cases, the lights on radio towers that had been in the area for years, why waste time and a questionnaire. The observer was unreliable.
Interestingly, that doesn't hold true. Charles B. Moore made UFO reports to the Air Force project on two occasions. Both his sightings are labeled as "unidentified." His first sighting, near Array, New Mexico, isn't very spectacular. Moore, along with a crew from General Mills, and a naval officer Douglas C. McLaughlin (misidentified in some reports as Robert or "R" McLaughlin according to an AFOSI document in the Project Blue Book file) were launching balloons. They had "released 350 gram balloon about 1020 MST and were following it with a standard ML-47 David White Theodolite." Moore made a reading at 10:30 a.m. and then took over at the theodolite.
According to his report, made to Project Grudge, he had looked up to acquire the balloon with the naked eye and spotted what he thought was the balloon. Moore wrote, "When the distance between the theodolite and the supposed balloon became apparent, I took over the theodolite and found the true balloon still there, whereupon I abandoned it and picked up the object after it came out of the sun. The object was moving too fast to crank the theodolite around; therefore, one of the men pointed the theodolite and I looked. The object was ellipsoid… white in color except for a light yellow of one side as thought it were in shadow."
"The object," according to Moore, "was not a balloon and was some distance away. Assuming escape velocity, a track is enclosed which figures elevation above the station of about 300,000 feet over the observed period. If this is true, the flight would have probably gone over the White Sands Proving Ground (later White Sands Missile Range), Holloman Air Force Base, and Los Alamos."
They lost sight of the object in the distance, after watching it for about 60 seconds. They had made measurements using their equipment and a stopwatch but took no photographs.
Menzel, of course, later did what the Air Force couldn't in their investigation. He identified the object seen by Moore and his crew. According to Menzel, the object was a mirage. That is, Menzel believed it to be an atmospheric reflection of the true balloon, making it appear as if there were two objects in the sky instead of one. He was so sure of this that he told Moore about the solution.
Moore, however, is an atmospheric physicist. He is as qualified as Menzel to discuss the dynamics of the atmosphere, and, according to him when interviewed on El Paso radio station KTSM, the weather conditions were not right for the creation of mirages. Since Moore was on the scene, and since his training qualified him to make judgments about the conditions of the atmosphere at the time of the sighting, his observations are more important than Menzel's wild speculations.
When Moore spoke to Menzel, the Harvard professor would not listen to what Moore had to say. Menzel had found what to him was a satisfactory solution for the sighting, and he didn't want to discuss it seriously, or have his conclusions challenged. Air Force investigators, however, left the sighting labeled as "unidentified."
Just over two years later, on October 11, 1951, Moore, still conducting balloon research with General Mills, along with a number of other people including J.J. Kaliszewki, Doug Smith and Dick Reilly spotted another UFO. The object came in high and fast, slowed, and then made slow climbing circles for two minutes before it shot off to the east. A second one appeared, and using a theodolite, it was carefully observed, as it flew across the sky.
Moore, then, according to the Air Force files was one of those rare birds who saw UFOs on two separate occasions. Both times he was able to make observations using his equipment. And, as mentioned, on both occasions, his sightings were not readily identifiable.
Moore, however, is not alone. Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, the only living human to have discovered a planet in our Solar System, reported UFOs on more than one occasion. According to Tombaugh, "I saw the object about eleven o'clock on night in August 1949 from the backyard of my home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I happened to be looking at zenith, admiring the beautiful transparent sky of stars, when suddenly I spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light similar to the 'Lubbock lights' [It should be noted that his report was written after the Lubbock Lights case in September 1951]. My wife and her mother were sitting in the yard with me and they saw them also. The group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space of formation smaller, (at first about one degree across) and the intensity duller, fading from view at about 35 degrees above the horizon. Total time of visibility was about three seconds. I was too flabbergasted to count the number of rectangles of light, or to note some other features I wondered about later. There was no sound. I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight so strange of this. The rectangles were of low luminosity; had there been a full moon in the sky, I am sure they would not have been visible."
Naturally, Tombaugh's sighting, because of who he is, has caused a great deal of speculation. Donald Menzel wrote about it, praising Tombaugh as a scientist, but then, after a fashion, explaining that Tombaugh had been fooled because of a thin inversion layer over New Mexico that night.
Menzel, in his 1953 book, Flying Saucers wrote, "But what were these mysterious lights? I can only hazard here the same guess I made about the Lubbock lights — that a low, thin layer of haze or smoke reflected the lights of a distant house or some other multiple source. The haze must have been inconspicuous to the eye, because Tombaugh comments on the unusual clarity of the sky." (Must I actually note that Tombaugh commented on the unusual clarity of the sky but Menzel postulates a thin layer of haze. It seems to be a real contradiction.)
A year or two after his first sighting, Tombaugh had a second that he told to J. Allen Hynek, who reported it in a memo that was originally classified. According to that document, Tombaugh, "while at Telescope No. 3 at White Sands observed an object of -6 magnitude travelling from the zenith to the southern horizon in about three seconds. The object executed the same maneuvers as the nighttime luminous object he had seen earlier."
What this demonstrates is that the Air Force criterion for rejecting the sightings of those who report UFOs more than once is flawed. It shouldn't have been assumed that anyone seeing UFOs more than once is unreliable. Certainly, there are unreliable observers out there, but the criterion should be more than multiple sightings. Air Force rejection of sightings for that reason alone was proper, and it wasn't scientific.
This idea goes hand in hand with another. That is, the higher the education of the observer, and the more details provided for the sighting, the more likely it will be identified. A survey of the data showed that the opposite was true. The higher the education and the more information provided resulted in a lower number of the cases being solved. A light in the night sky, if an airplane can be found in the right place, is easy to explain. But a disc-shaped object, at high noon, with observers on the ground and in the air, is difficult to observe, unless you ignore some of the data. That is, of course exactly what happened in the Salt Lake City case.
We have mentioned the name of Donald Menzel a number of times. He "solved" cases that others had left as unidentified. He applied a skeptical eye to the case, finding solutions where others could not. He challenged the observers, such as C.B. Moore, inventing conditions that those at the scene never saw. He told Moore that he'd seen a mirage, but Moore, equally qualified, and on the scene, said he hadn't.