ena as phenomena that exhibit "suspiciously careful or watchful" behavior in selecting where and to whom they will appear. He then explains that UFOs must be a "jealous" phenomenon because they appear only to small groups or to individuals, never flying over a crowded football game or a large city in broad daylight. He adds that UFOs appear only when there is a single photographer, never when there are several photographers present. He also adds that Jealous phenomena should not be confused with rare ones. A phenomenon that objectively exists, no matter how rare, will eventually be brought into the open. He says that ball lighting is not jealous, it is simply rare. Sheaffer is admittedly attempting to show in this chapter that jealous behavior is the earmark of a nonexistent phenomenon. Do Sheaffer's arguments hold water? Does he show that UFOs are "jealous" (and therefore nonexistent)and ball lighting simply rare? I think he makes several mistakes in his attempt to show this. First, he lumps all UFO sightings together, including sighting reports by pilots, meteorologists, and astronomers together with those of contactees, abductees, and UFO cultists. Having done this, he says:Ball lightning is not reported to persist for many minutes, or even hours, as are UFOs, it is not reported to return repeatedly to the same favored individuals, as are UFOs, and it does not appear that there are fifteen million Americans who claim to have seen it - that is the number who have claimed to have seen UFOs. If ball lightning were reported as frequently as UFOs and had as many eager investigators hot on its trail, then it indeed would be remarkable that better evidence has not been obtained. See the lumping together? If you really study UFO reports, you know that the vast majority of them are of very short duration - seconds or scant minutes, not hours. The majority of cases in the Bluebook "Unexplained" category did not involve "favored individuals" wh...
