Richard Clark Interview, 11 July 2003
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| at ten. The higher you're up, the shorter the area is going to be. I don't know if that makes sense to you or not. | ||
| TT: | You'd never had another experience with anything of this nature. | |
| RC: | No, this is nothing like anything— | |
| TT: | Yeah, that's the irony about radar. Back in '52 they brought in this idea that a lot of these spurious radar cases were being caused by inversions, I mean there are mirages obviously and the angels and so on and so forth, but they started to use it as a general explanation for everything. Even on this case, the guy at FTD, one of his explanations for the case is that there was an inversion, and its weak in this case but they still use it whether it's valid or not. His explanation for this is that was ball lightning. But, you know, explain how a ball lightning on a clear night can pace an aircraft. | |
| RC: | Yeah, basically, trying to explain it away. | |
| TT: | Ball lightning, was that something that you had any experience with—electrical discharges in the atmosphere you had to deal with when analyzing radar photos or anything like that? | |
| RC: | Yeah, I mean, these guys flew in rain, they flew in lightning and stuff—not like that [pointing to radar scope photo], it's not that. | |
| TT: | How about inversions? Where they a problem for you in analysis? | |
| RC: | [Shakes head no]. | |
| TT: | No. How about angels where you get sort of like a truck on the ground bouncing off the inversion and picking it up on radar? | |
| RC: | At this altitude [pointing to scope photos] if you were going to the ground, and it is a single truck you're not going to see it. Not at that altitude. | |
| TT: | But at lower altitudes that could be an issue? | |
| RC: | Yeah. It could be, you know, at that altitude you're not going to see a single truck | |
| TT: | Is radar that problematic? | |
| RC: | No, big, ground-based radar systems can be affected by more things, you know this is actually more sophisticated because it's covering a smaller area than what those ground based systems are. | |
| TT: | Yeah, and it's controllable in range too. Yeah, the fact that he was within that station keep, which is 5 miles, puts it in the immediate area around the aircraft. These are the |
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