At what point did the fighter jets break off? is it possible the afterburners where seen that nite? if Cooper was on the stairs for several minutes. you would think he could only see from behind. I think it would have to be pretty well timed to guess where you were 40 + minutes into the flight.

"Just guessing but I don't think you would even see a flare until it was down at about 5000 feet and below that I have no doubt you would see it, especially if there was a cloud layer reflecting its light from above - it would glow red hot and bright. That's my supposition. And if that cloud above it contained ice crystals to disperse the light around, I am sure you would see it and could follow its course ..."

Sounds plausible. the problem I see know is Janet claiming they were being tossed from the back of the plane, or the stairs I believe it was said. should be a simple enough test. take a flare on a back road and light it up. drive away and see where you start to see it fade. one mile is a little over 5,000.

a flare............not to reveal your location to the world, but to an individual for ground location and pick-up.

No worries. It's been one of those Mondays. Business trip last week and today was all about being cheek deep in alligators and putting out fires.
 
I have not been able to find any experiments with flares at the distances we are talking about on the internet. I have found you-tube videos but nothing that I can correlate to the criteria for that night.
I do think that no one's memory, especially from forty years ago, is immune to unconscious embellishment. However, far from discounting post-event eye-witness flare accounts out of hand, I would like to know from actual practice whether it is likely that Janet and others saw what they think they saw. An experiment would be a step in that direction.

On the subject of memory....

This is one of the best mini-essays I've seen on memory away from the statistics and neuroscience of it all.....   

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
an excerpt......
.....Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.

This last part is really important, and bears as well on the limitations of eyewitness testimony. Whenever people witness an event — a fender-bender in the parking lot, an argument between co-workers, the assault on Little Round Top — their perspective is necessarily different from that of other witnesses, and usually incomplete. Human memory is not a simple video recorder that inscribes a fixed and unchanging record of what we see and do; it’s fluid and dynamic process that changes over time. Our brains are wired by evolution and experience to makes sense of all those sensory inputs, to help us understand and react to what we’ve seen. In the process, we fill in gaps and make assumptions that establish a more coherent narrative to ourselves. This is involuntary and mostly unconscious. Such embellishment is not lying or deception, but neither does it reflect actual reality.