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Sci-Fi Science

UFOs In the News 449

Posted by kdawson from the green-and-the-gray dept.
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.
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UFOs In the News More

UFOs In the News

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

    • Re:US Airspace full enough already (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lithdren ( 605362 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @08:47PM (#17437962)
      But these aliens may be illegal, or terrorists, or maybe even Iraqi!

      I for one welcome our unidentified overlords...I think, Im not really sure who they are yet. Where'd I leave my foil hat...
    • Exactly the point of the United Employees- though I have to wonder, given the flight characteristics of your standard comercial jet liner, how an object estimated to be hovering 1900 feet over the runway is in anybody's flight path- it usually takes 2-3 miles to climb that high, and similar profile on landing.

      • Pattern altitude is 800 - 1200 ft... 1900 is too close, especially unregulated.

        • Yes- but you usually fly your pattern *around* the airport, not right smack dab over the runways, at least, not until you're ready to *land* or *take off* in which case by definition you're going to be flying *below* 800 feet, as at that time you're going to be leaving the pattern behind.

          • The FAA takes a dim view of unregulated TCA transients...

          • Re:US Airspace full enough already (Score:5, Informative)

            by ptbarnett ( 159784 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:28PM (#17438382)
            Yes- but you usually fly your pattern *around* the airport, not right smack dab over the runways, at least, not until you're ready to *land* or *take off* in which case by definition you're going to be flying *below* 800 feet, as at that time you're going to be leaving the pattern behind.

            Aircraft transiting over an airport like O'Hare are vectored directly OVER the airport. When I've done it (albeit at other airports), I was directed to follow the cross-wind runway that is more or less perpendicular to the active runway(s).

            This keeps the transiting aircraft directly above the aircraft ON THE GROUND, but out of the airspace used for landing and takeoff. 1900 feet is a bit low for that, but I've made the transit at no more than 4000 feet AGL.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Ikcor ( 676683 )
      Maybe if we start charging the aliens landing fees we can get ticket prices to go down.

  • From CNN (Score:5, Funny)

    by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @08:48PM (#17437966)
    At least one O'Hare controller, union official Craig Burzych, was amused by it all.

    "To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," he said.

  • UFO vs. alien spacecraft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @08:51PM (#17438002) Homepage Journal
    A while back I was reading some book of short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, and in an essay between stories, he described the time he saw a U.F.O. I was taken aback. Here's an author who practically invented "hard sci-fi," talking about seeing a U.F.O. By the end of the essay he mentioned what it turned out to be (I forget what, exactly, but it was something mundane and Earth-based). But at the time, "UFO" was the appropriate term, not because he thought it was a spacecraft, but because he couldn't figure out what it was.

    That left an impression on me. People tend to use "UFO" as a shorthand for alien spacecraft... but when you get down to it, "Unidentified Flying Object" refers to anything unidentified that you see in the sky. A segment of a sun halo, a satellite, an odd cloud, a distant airplane with the sun glinting off of it... The same would apply to the "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" term used in the O'Hare article.

    Conversely, if alien spacecraft are ever verified, they wouldn't really be UFOs, would they?

    • Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft (Score:5, Interesting)

      by s31523 ( 926314 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:05PM (#17438176)
      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: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by illegalcortex ( 1007791 )
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @11:21PM (#17439292) Journal
          The reason UFOs are a crock isn't that they are fundamentally impossible in some absolute sense, it's that the line about "If there are aliens that powerful, they aren't going to just buzz us in UFOs" is far, far more true than 1950s scientists could ever have dreamed of.

          Read Accelerando [accelerando.org] (free eBook available), and consider that nothing in that book is particularly physically implausible.

          It is exceedingly unlikely that aliens that are just like we are now, only with spaceships, would come by and buzz us. At this point it seems far more likely that if any aliens ever do make "contact", it'll be in the form of a fully-automated colony ship that stops somewhere, maybe in the rings of Saturn or the asteroid belt, and proceeds turning our entire Solar System into computronium [wikipedia.org]. All we could do is hope and pray the probe is programmed to do something nice for us, because we sure as hell couldn't stop it.

          Any civilization that has the resources to cross the stars is extremely unlikely to use those resources to build a tin can capable of holding meat-bodies in it, with mass that could instead be made into enough computronium to perform mind-blowing amounts of computation, and blow unspeakable numbers of human-lifetimes worth of energy moving that across the stars, just to buzz humans for no apparently reason. (Yes; in a world of computronium, one standardized human life can be used as measurement of energy.)

          The putative aliens of the UFOs are a product of a very peculiar sort of shortsightedness about the ultimate limits of technology that dates from a relatively narrow understanding of science, and are as out-of-date as the idea that the world only needs five computers. Interestingly, both ideas are out-of-date for the same basic reason...

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by myowntrueself ( 607117 )
            You are anthropomorphising extraterrestrials.

            Try to think outside the box.

            When Carl Sagan stated that it was scientifically impossible for aliens to visit Earth due to how long it would take to cross the vast gulfs of interstellare space, I wish I'd been there to say "So there can't possibly be aliens with a lifespan measured in thousands of years?"

            Don't Anthropomorphise Aliens!!!!!

          • Definition of Alien (Score:3, Interesting)

            by bussdriver ( 620565 )
            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.

          • Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft (Score:5, Informative)

            by kalirion ( 728907 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @11:22AM (#17444502)
            "They're made out of meat."
            "Meat?"
            "Meat. They're made out of meat."
            "Meat?"
            "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
            "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
            "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
            "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
            "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
            "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
            "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
            "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
            "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
            "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
            "Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
            "No brain?"
            "Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
            "So ... what does the thinking?"
            "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
            "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
            "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
            "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
            "Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
            "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
            "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
            "We're supposed to talk to meat."
            "That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
            "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
            "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
            "I thought you just told me they used radio."
            "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
            "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
            "Officially or unofficially?"
            "Both."
            "Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
            "I was hoping you would say that."
            "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
            "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
            "Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
            "So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
            "That's it."
            "Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't rememb

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by emagery ( 914122 )
        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 (

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > 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?

        But honestly, if YOU were a human, with this fantastic technology to travel thousands of miles to visit another continent with other humans on it, would you just take photos of a stolen lawn gnome in front of various landmarks then go home?

        > People just want to think these weird flying things are aliens visiting

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Chris Burke ( 6130 )
        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 yes! I'd do nothing but do flybys of primitive worlds like ours, then laugh my ass off at the cacophony of "It's an alien!" "No, it's a weather balloon combined with swamp gas you cook!" "Quiet heathen, it's obviously Space Jesus come to save us!" "Space Jesus is a government conspiracy caused by hallucinogens in the w

      • to: Lshelverfn (Score:5, Funny)

        by mysticgoat ( 582871 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @11:06PM (#17439142) Homepage Journal

        As suggested, this message up near the front of postings but buried in 3rd or 4th level I am putting. if(scanSubject(/Lshelverfn/) == is_good) { this buried enough for hiding will be } else { signalWith(flare) <-- like 20 rotations back --> && I will { backUpTalker('ON'); this.Talker('OFF") }.

        Oops. Pardon the above, still need to tweak the english emitter. This somewhat better seems it to be.

        Quick report: Hiding am I yet; can walk the streets and ride "Elevated" but not good yet with face2face. Have deflated boobs as incompatible with facial hair these seeming to be. Still with problems with "left" opposed to "right" with footware. It is subtle. Internetspeak okay-- blend in with ESLs and with the L3373s and specially A-OK with fragment code interspersing. /. anonymizing well & intercepting unproblematical as would be dismissed as juvenile prankyprank and either +5 insightful or -1 doubleplus unfunny. Ping nobody's radar either way this would.

        Ok better on the english emitter, now, I think. I hope the translator routines don't frobnicate on this material. (That is a "joke"; I need to practice those if I am going to pass in F2F situations here).

        Pretest of observation platforms over "airports" has gone well with the notable exception of the one large "airport" near the long big lake. Although that incident has been adequately contained, with the first general news stories not surfacing until 50 rotations after, it demonstrated that we cannot rely on the Acme Cloaking Device Incorporated products. See my last report before I left for this assignment about my concerns with Acme's quality assurance program and let us get it right next time. Request that you hurryup on finding replacements. The opportunity to study the mass religious festivals at these "airports" at the time of Big Bird Feast was lost on this orbit because of this snafu. We definitely want to be prepared for the one next orbit.

        I need to get back into the hot shower before my skin melts again. Will look for your ACK in the Hubble pics.

        Oh, if you NEED to signal me with a flare again, please dial down the intensity. That last one was WAY too noticeable.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by uufnord ( 999299 )
      when you get down to it, "Unidentified Flying Object" refers to anything unidentified that you see in the sky.

      Almost. Remember that it has to be flying as well, which is a pretty descriptive attribute that takes away alot of possibilities.

      A segment of a sun halo

      That either not an object or it's not flying. I dunno. Pick one.

      a satellite

      There is no lift being generated by an satellite in orbit, and therefore it isn't flight. If it's not in orbit, then I'm pretty sure it's referred to as "falling", not "fl
  • Welcome to O'Hare Intergalactic Airport.
  • "Unidentified" means just that. Until it's been identified as an alien spaceship, it could just as well be the spaghetti monster. I don't know why everyone assumes just because humans can't identify something in the sky it MUST be aliens. Humans have terrible long range vision and generally very poor video recording devices. Most people probably can't identify something 1 mile in front of them on the ground.
    • Humans have terrible long range vision and generally very poor video recording devices. Most people probably can't identify something 1 mile in front of them on the ground.

            Pfft. Even if you can't hear him, Rush Limbaugh leaves little to the imagination at a mile.
    • "Alien" means just that. Until it's been identified as a alien spaceship, it could just as well be the alien spaghetti monster. I don't know why everyone assumes just because humans can't identify something in the sky it MUST be little green men from space. Humans have terrible long range vision and generally very poor video recording devices. Most people probably can't identify something 1 mile in front of them on the ground.
  • The FAA admits there was an incident but is not investigating it.

    But do people really want the Unidentified to be Identified? Honestly, if the FAA went around Identifying these Flying Objects, nobody would have any cool UFO stories. They'd just have cool Weather Balloon stories.

  • GWB needs to do something about these aliens (Score:5, Funny)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @08:53PM (#17438052)
    like build a wall around the earth
    • That would solve the global warming problem but then he would have to put all the prisoners in Gitmo to work as human batteries, Matrix style. ;)


  • you, know, after watching quite a few UFO documentaries on supposed reputable stations the only thing I can say is screw em. Until Aliens have the decency to walk up in broad daylight and say hello obviously they dont want to be seen. So leave them be, if they wanted to be discovered I dont' think it woudl be very difficult. So lets assume they don't want to, and up until they send there arrival notice press lets ignore them and go back to our lives.

    If this was a case in the supreme court it would be thrown
    • Until Aliens have the decency to walk up in broad daylight and say hello obviously they dont want to be seen. So leave them be, if they wanted to be discovered I dont' think it woudl be very difficult.
      They clearly don't want to be discovered, I agree. But then, if they had nothing to hide, why would they avoid discovery? Clearly, the fact that they are hard to discover proves that they are up to no good.
  • Shiny headgear keeps the mind probes at bay.

  • Local Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frinkster ( 149158 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:00PM (#17438108)
    While I doubt what they saw is locally-made, I used to live in that area and have seen some crazy stuff at some nearby forest preserves. Many of the forest preserves near O'Hare have radio controlled aircraft landing strips and are heavily used by local hobbyists. Last year I personally saw a home-built craft performing some absolutely incredible tricks and maneuvers with a small radio controlled helicopter-like machine.

  • It Left a Hole in the Clouds (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toonerh ( 518351 ) * on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:03PM (#17438152)
    The fact observers said it made a hole in the cloud deck for minutes, to me, rules out any purely optical effect. It must have been some physical device, whatever that may be. Further, professional airline pilots saw it and stated it was not familiar to them as a known aircraft. My take is a new stealth military craft - hence all the coverup by the FAA.

    • Re:It Left a Hole in the Clouds (Score:5, Insightful)

      by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:39PM (#17438466) Journal

      My take is a new stealth military craft - hence all the coverup by the FAA.
      I don't have a problem with the secret military aircraft theory except for one problem.

      What the hell is a secret military aircraft doing in the middle of the busiest airport in America?

      First, if it's supposed to be a secret, it certainly shouldn't be hovering over an airport. It should be out in a more deserted environment. Second, even if it was some kind of weird test, the fact that it distracted people who were doing things like driving airplanes, repairing airplanes, etc. implies a threat to public safety and I don't think the military would go for that. Finally, the risk that something could go wrong--collision, malfunction, etc.--and end up spilling the beans and potentially injuring people would be really stupid. Even the military isn't that stupid.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by MECC ( 8478 ) *
        What the hell is a secret military aircraft doing in the middle of the busiest airport in America?

        Never let rookies fly the stealth UFOs

    • The fact observers said it made a hole in the cloud deck for minutes, to me, rules out any purely optical effect.
      it also rules out it being any kind of large body. Our airplanes do not make holes in clouds. The most likely thing that can make a hole in the cloud deck is something which modified the density of the air in the region. Sounds like a large release of some underground gas. Lucky for the planes it was above the airport and not along the flight paths, because a disturbance that could affect could
      • well, that's not entirely true. Although I do believe that an airplane diving, or rising, nose first through a cloud wouldn't leave much of a hole, I have witnessed on several occasions clouds that got ripped apart by an airplane traversing through them. The only reason I saw this, though, is because the clouds were pretty thin. This picture might show something like it, though in my case it was a lot more subtle.. it was also a lot higher up: http://www.capetownskies.com/dane/apr75_24cirrus_ b andb.jpg [capetownskies.com]

        It

  • Smells like a hoax... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:07PM (#17438192) Homepage
    All those people saw it and no one took a moment to use a cell phone camera to take a pic? Sure a cell phone camera doesn't prove or disprove anything, but at least we could take more guesses as to what was actually seen. I keep waiting for photos of this to appear, but none have surfaced AFAIK.

  • The French news is the most interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:10PM (#17438222) Journal
    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.)

  • Shouldn't that be illegal alien craft? (Score:5, Funny)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:12PM (#17438238)
    If you want proper funding for UFO research have them declared terrorists threatening our borders and Homeland Security will give you all the money you want. If you filed the right paperwork you could probably get a couple of mill in research grants to calculate the amount of explosive one flying saucer could carry. Just imagine the destruction a UFO crammed full of explosives could cause if it crashed into Big Thunder Mountain at Disneyland. Seeing pictures of Mickey Mouse and Goofy splattered across the sidewalk could bring this country to it's knees. The invading UFOs must be stopped!
    • You sir, are a craftsman.

      Never let the haters/serious people take your ability away from you.

      Keep up the amazingly good work.

      Yours Truly,

      (Meta Mods, please ignore my comment and see parent)

  • Correct (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dino213b ( 949816 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:14PM (#17438258)
    Sure, a UFO is a bone fide sighting. It means exactly what it stands for: Unidentified Flying Object. Only an idiot would jump to some kind of a conclusion that it's the master alien race visiting Earth under the command of god-king Marduk without concrete evidence.
  • So people at an airport saw something in the sky they could not identify. Does that mean that the most probably explanation is that it is an alien aircraft and the incident is being covered up by the government? Or could it be that there was an aircraft or cloud that was lit up unusually? Must be the aliens...

  • Any photos? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Eric Pierce ( 636318 )
    So where are the photos? It sounds like there were enough witnesses and viewing time that there should be some photos taken of this UAP.

    The FAA is probably sitting on them.

    EP
  • It was waxing gibbous last night, and it's full tomorrow.

    Add in some water vapor (oh yeah, it did rain in Chicago yesterday), and I'm surprised there wasn't a remedial weather/astronomy check.

  • Lenticular clouds...some look like UFOs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aok ( 5389 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:52PM (#17438566)
    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]

  • Feynman quote (Score:4, Funny)

    by oggiejnr ( 999258 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @09:58PM (#17438630)
    "I believe that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational efforts of terrestrial intelligence rather than the unknown irrational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence"

    Pretty much sums up my attitude to the whole thing as well

  • TSA (Score:3, Funny)

    by SQLz ( 564901 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @10:56PM (#17439074) Homepage Journal
    So, is the TSA still relegated to makeup/hand lotion patrol?

  • Richard Dolan. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @11:31PM (#17439380)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by imstanny ( 722685 ) on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @11:56PM (#17439564)
    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.

  • Profit Yaweh Can Summon UFO's On Command (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Phat_Tony ( 661117 ) on Wednesday January 03, 2007 @12:27AM (#17439788)
    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.

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