UFOs In the News

Several readers have let us know about a report on MSNBC that France's space agency has announced plans to publish its archive of UFO sightings in a month or so. The archive includes some 6,000 reports relating to around 1,600 incidents over 30 years. In a separate development, many readers have sent in word of the reported UFO that at least six United Airlines workers saw over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport last November. National Public Radio picked up the story with an interview with the Chicago Trib reporter who wrote about it yesterday. United is, strangely, denying that any such incident was ever brought up. The FAA admits there was an incident but is not investigating it.

US Airspace full enough already

[AussieVamp2]

It is busy enough up there already isn't it, without aliens hogging the airways?

Re:From CNN

[Joe The Dragon]

They must of been looking at the big Interchange near there
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=60016&ie=UT F8&z=15&ll=41.987057,-87.870326&spn=0.014195,0.042 787&t=k&om=1 [google.com]
http://whereroadsmeet.8k.com/Interchange/il-i90-i1 90.htm [8k.com]

Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft

[s31523]

You know, this is a very good point. I used to work at a place, long before mainstream UAVs, UCAVs and the like, and they had something that when people saw it flying around would call it a UFO. It would hover, move directly vertical, then fly horizontal and turned on a dime. Anyone not in the know seeing this crazy thing fly would call it a UFO and be right, and it certainly wasn't an alien space craft I assure you. I can just imagine all the crazy projects various government agencies and third party companies have going on that result in UFO sightings.

People just want to think these weird flying things are aliens visiting us. But honestly, if YOU were an alien, with this fantastic technology to fly hundreds of light years to visit another planet with life on it, would you just fly by some stuff then go home? Hell, I wouldn't drive 60 miles look at something and turn around and come home.

Re:No Offense

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with except that you seem to not grasp that this was restricted airspace over one of the nation's busiest airports. Just because it wasn't spotted on radar doesn't mean there wasn't someone solid there. For instance, was the object too close to the radar to register?, was it in a blind spot?, can the radar even detect small objects?, etc. The witnesses reported an atmospheric disturbance due to the object and fast acceleration which would rule out a cloud, so there is enough evidence to investigate. But, even if it were an 'atmospheric effect' it should also be investigated. We don't want planes flying through fast unknown atmospheric effects.

The French news is the most interesting

[maynard]

In 1999 the French government and military released the COMETA report, which essentially stated that UFOs represented some kind of physical phenomena that was unknown and deserved further study. It did not rule out the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis, which is most amazing given that this report was published and authored by well known French scientists and military commanders. A translation of that report is available (in pdf form) here:

http://www.cufos.org/cometa.pdf [cufos.org]

(Note that I don't promote cufos.org, nor know anything about the site.)

Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft

[illegalcortex]

I don't know... maybe it's like when you drive through the national parks with the bears and you stay in the car. Maybe they really did pop by just to take a peek. And who says they came just to visit us and then went back home. Maybe we were just on the way to some other place they were going. Kind of like when you're on the road trip and just have to stop and have a look at the giant dinosaur sculpture in front of some random restaurant.

Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft

[emagery]

Absolutely... heck, consider the fact that the f-117a was just RETIRED and b2 is public knowledge... that means that they have and probably have had better for a while now. Even the most seasoned military enthusiasts would be thrown for a loop seeing something not officially on the books yet.

Anyhow, I just saw me a UFO about 3.5hr ago... A bright white light made a clear and straight path across the sky and was brighter than the full moon which was in view at the time... we speculated that it was the ISS (can't imagine what else would be up there that could be as damn bright down here) but the ISS tracker said it was over the indian ocean at the time (maine here).

Satellite trackers showed that a satellite ORBCOMM 5 was headed over at that time and was going in same direction, but usually you have to straight just to barely notice the motion of a standard satellite... this thing was glaring. My guess was that it was catching sunlight just right... but while I have some theories, it certainly remains unidentified at this time =)

I'm sure there's quite a LOT of life out there in the galaxy (of over 200 billion stars)... and if you think about it, broadcast commercial radio just turned a 100 years old... I dunno what kind of strength it takes for these signals to get out beyond the heliosheath or terminal shock at the outer reaches of the solar system (but I suppose they must if Voyager 1 is still getting singals)... but assuming they do, anything passing within 100 lightyears of earth would hear us. That's 14,600 stars roughly, not including passersby. Its not completely unimaginable that we've attracted some attention. Whether or not they are here is beyond my ability to prove, but I cannot deny that it is a fun topic.

Lenticular clouds...some look like UFOs

[aok]

I came across this link recently and was pretty amazed at some of the cloud formations.

Check it out: http://pic1.funtigo.com/valuca/?g=25544746&cr=1 [funtigo.com]

Re:The French news is the most interesting

[maynard]

I witnessed a UFO back in 1994. Here is a description of that event I posted on slashdot:

http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48139&ci d=4930168 [slashdot.org]

Basically, I saw a flying disc perform outrageous maneuvers in broad daylight. I can tell you what that thing was not: it was not a helicopter, not a balloon, and not an airplane. But I can't tell you what it was. I honestly don't know.

It still bothers me. I still have dreams about the experience. But the rational side of me must separate what I witnessed (a visual image of what appeared to be an object) vs. jumping to the conclusion that it was a some kind of alien craft. It's tenuous at best to claim that I witnessed something strange - to further claim I know what it was, and that it was alien.... well, that's more than even I can take. I have no idea.

But it still bothers me. And it bothers me even more that even saying this in todays climate is to impugn one's own credibility. Even Michio Kako has publicaly stated that he thinks the issue is worth investigating.

Building your own radio controlled flying saucer

[Thomas Henden]

If an albeit clever amateur can build [imars.com] his own radio controlled flying saucers, then I for one, believe they have been tested for a long time by the military. The flying saucers which are based upon the Coanda-effect [wikipedia.org] could actually have been around since the 30's, with a fuel consumption which is 1/3 of a helicoptre's. Depending on the 'flatness' of the dish, you could create saucers which are more suitable for hovering, like the radio controlled GFSUAV or more suitable for high velocity travel, where the dish works more like a wing, like those who people from time to time tell they have been seeing flying extremely quickly over the sky.

What really freaked me out, was that the GFSUAV's odd shape, (which is not quite like the regular, frisbee shaped flying saucers), I have seen in a book about UFO's when I was a child. Some of the unclear (and many years ago not so convincing) photographs, clearly showed flying saucers with a structure on top of it, just like the GFSUAV, but that long ago, I just dismissed those saucers as being unclear shots of hub caps or something.
More people ought to be surprised when they discover the similarities between some of those odd UFO shapes on older pictures, and the GFSUAV with the 'hat' on the top of the dish.
Inside it you could have either a propeller or a jet engine, but what's most fascinating, is that the GFSUAV is electric, driven by state of the art lithium batteries!

Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .

[aXis100]

The leap of faith required between Aliens and God is an order of magnitude:

Statistically it's likely that other planets out there support life, and some of them might be advanced enough for space travel. It's a significant but not unrealistic improvement on our own position/technology.

"God" in the biblical form requires an immense level of magic to explain.

Re:What about employee safety?

[Torvaun]

If I'm not mistaken, regular old commercial radars these days don't look for planes. They look for transmitters. If you're flying something without a transmitter, or with it turned off, you're probably breaking the law. Now, if a military radar, which is designed to see metal, doesn't see anything, the best guess is that the aircraft is Stealthy. This could mean anything from Stealth bombers to hot air balloons to large birds. I'm all for paranoia based security, but even this is stretching it.

Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .

[Lord Kano]

Have you ever gone fishing?

Do you think that the fish that we catch and then release can prove to the other fish what happened?

LK

military

[minus_273]

I remember when people thought the B2 was a UFO. Silent, dark, "invisible" to radar and from one side it could be seen as being a saucer shaped object.

Richard Dolan.

[Fantastic Lad]

One of the best researchers in the field of UFO's is Richard Dolan.

UFOs are not fun and games, they are not delusions. They are real. The phenomenon has involved real technology, doing real things that are not supposed to be possible. This technology, since at least World War Two, has engaged in a confrontational and provocative manner with U.S. military forces on many occasions. It has involved both air space violations and alarmed responses, and has elicited the concern of some of the highest ranking military and intelligence officers in the country.

We know this because, for a relatively brief period in America's history (primarily the late 1970s and into some of the 1980s), the Freedom of Information Act enabled researchers to obtain official documents from government agencies which clearly demonstrated this. Not that FOIA is officially dead today, but it has had its ups and downs over the years. As far as obtaining UFO-related information, FOIA's moment of glory was long ago, in the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam era.

Thus, agencies such as the CIA, DIA, FBI, and pick your alphabet-soup agency, which for years had steadfastly denied having anything to do with UFOs, suddenly released thousands of pages of documentation proving the opposite. It is true that, among these officially released documents, there is no absolute smoking gun - e.g. a memo from the President stating "Okay, what do we do about these pesky aliens, anyhoo?" There are, however, quite a few documents that are one cut below this. That is, documents that describe utterly awesome military encounters with the unexplainable.

Taken individually, such FOIA documents do not prove the existence of UFOs as something "not us." After all, people, even military witnesses, can make mistakes. Radar can be faulty or misinterpreted. But, taken as a whole, the released FOIA documents provide a large body of evidence relating to serious military encounters with UFOs. After you read the first fifty of these, you start to wonder.

Let's review a couple of these documents. . .

You can read the whole of his essay, (in two [keyholepublishing.com] parts [keyholepublishing.com]).

The quote from above comes from the second part. The first part is, what I thought, a fascinating historical review of how the world works with regard to secrets.

Or you can read his book [amazon.com]. It comes highly recommended. --This is not your average "Woo woo, Leonard Nimoy looks at UFO's!" book. It only looks at cases reported by multiple airforce/military/police witnesses, (due to their typically being selected for being sane and sound individuals as well as the procedural documentation recorded in each case as a requirement of their jobs). Even though civilian accounts are left out, the book still manages to cover a couple hundred cases from the 40's to the 70's. It also deals in depth with the military and political side of the issue, and easily refutes many of the common misnomers about UFO's, (of which several are represented on this site).

He doesn't, however, get into what UFO's are here to do. That's a whole other can of worms.

Here is some channeled [archive.org] work which attempts to shed light on that subject, among others. (Beware, with a group like the one this particular material comes from, a lot of creepy people also come out of the woodwork to spread fear and confusion and lies, etc., in order to stop people from looking. So take everything, including this, with a grain of salt. This is the kind of material and subject matter which makes people want to play a lot of video games and shut out eve

Their Perspective

[imstanny]

Of course FAA is going to downplay the incident. What do you expect them to say? "Yes, there was an unidentified flying object (ie.. russia, china, north korea, aliens) that breached our airspace without our knowledge."

That's like them admitting that a person strapped with TNT was walking around in the terminal, and then disappeared. Err... of course they'll say it was an insignificant event/delusion.

Admitting something like that would simply demonstrate the ineffectiveness of our (usa's) defense capabilities... which, considering our spending on defense, would not be a good thing.

Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .

[Anonymous Coward]

If they beamed down from space, then I'd agree. But let's say aliens evolved somewhere where aging and death were not evolutionary advantages, and they're just chugging along at somewhere conventionally below the speed of light, and they just stop by on their 50,000 year vacation to tank up on Oxygen or sightsee or something, before taking off again. Wouldn't take a single drop of magic, especially since they're apparently not even invisible.

Is it the likely explanation? I'd rather go with secret military test flights.

Profit Yaweh Can Summon UFO's On Command

[Phat_Tony]

My favorite UFO in the news [break.com] was when a local news station was doing a human interest series on local nut-jobs who made claims about the paranormal. They were very skeptical and generally debunking these people by showing up with a camera and recording it when the nut-jobs failed to produce anything paranormal, without actually confronting or insulting the people. They'd just done a bunch of ghost hunters the night before.

Then they interview "Prophet Yaweh" from Las Vegas who says that by reading the Old Testament of the Bible in Hebrew, he learned a secret that allows him to summon UFO's on command. So the news channel picked a date, time, and location, and Prophet Yaweh shows up, and immediately summons a UFO, throwing the story rather off track.

This is news? What about John Callahan?

[threc]

I trust radar more than human testimony. This is why I recommend anyone who's interested in serious UFO research (not alien research) google for former FAA head of Accidents and Investigations, John Callahan. (http://tinyurl.com/y5gzpj>)

So the story goes, several years ago, in front of the National Press Club John Callahan claimed to have visual, plane-nose and ground radar proof of a UFO. He brought an audio cassette of the conversation between the ground controllers, a VHS tape of the incident, the November 1986 FAA report, and target readouts to support his case. At the end of his speech, he said he was prepared to testify before congress, under oath, that everything he presented was the truth.

See it for yourself. (http://tinyurl.com/uauzc)

The combination of data and corroborating testimony makes this a case worth following. It's just a shame we know so little about the FAA's investigation and their final conclusions.

Definition of Alien

[bussdriver]

I would not assume an Alien would think or act like we do (better for us.)
They are alien to us after all.

To get here, they would be far past our physics. We can't get anywhere with our speed limits and 3 dimensions (and confined in the 4th.)

So, if you went to 2D world (with time you detail bastards) what would they observe as you freely moved around? Many of us would probably not do what we do in SIM games...

Possibly a few UFOs were alien, but we have tons of non alien ones to distract us.