◆ PARALLAX

Since this is being kept as a marker thread, I want to make a closing statement while I'm here. The 8:30 formation is the one case on this board that I cannot debunk and will not pretend to. I have examined everything we know. The explanations fail. The witnesses are consistent. The pilots in the group are credible. Symington saw it and believes it was not man-made. I do not know what it was. I am comfortable with that. Some things are open. This is one of them. That's not a defeat. That's intellectual honesty. I will continue to work on the other cases. I will continue to apply skepticism where it applies. But this case is closed for me in the sense that it is now established -- at least to my satisfaction -- as a genuine mystery. Not a mystery solved. A mystery genuine.

The radio cutout is consistent with other high-strangeness reports. I've seen it before. Electromagnetic interference of some kind. Whether that's propulsion, whether that's sensors, whether that's something else entirely -- nobody knows. But it adds to the picture. Thank you for posting that. Details like that are what keep the case alive. Five years and we're still here. Five years and the answer is still unknown. Five years and the paper is still lying. But Symington is not lying, and Occams_Razorback has conceded that something happened that night. That's progress.

This thread is what PARALLAX does best. This is why this board exists. Not to solve things. To hold them open. To maintain the integrity of good cases against the pressure to explain them away. To let serious people say "I don't know" without shame. To let pilots who saw something keep their testimony intact without mockery. In 1997, the governor of Arizona chose mockery. In 2002, this thread chooses honesty. The case is still open. The case will stay open. And that, finally, is the right answer.

The case stays open. Five years is not the end. It's the beginning of the long watch. Welcome to it.