First Bigfoot, Now UFO's in the News

Opinion by Bruce Simmons

My Reference:
Weirdness is back in the headlines as "An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings."

They point to 9/11 as the instigator of their underlying concerns and the safety of aircraft.

The subject is back in the media when a U.S. presidential race candidate last month, Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen a UFO. And I presume, either completely doomed him, or garnered some fringe votes in his back pocket.

On the other hand, peanut farmers and actors have claimed to see UFO's too, they being Jimmy Carter & Ronald Reagan. Heck, even I've seen unidentified things in the sky.

In most cases, the investigations that are conducted, seem to show most sightings are misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panelist who once worked for Britain's Ministry of Defense said 5 percent of incidents cannot be explained and further investigations are not carried out.

"It's a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?" remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.

The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the U.S. Air Force or NASA.

Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.

In the inspiring article I link to later, the impromptu surveys indicate that 31% of them have seen a UFO and 86% would like to see the government start up their investigations again!

My Opinion:
I can understand the desire of a collect few attempting to gain credibility on the UFO subject, but even if you do gain some credibility, it gets shot to crap by fringe believers who make wild claims about rather explainable items, objects or evidence.

So many people are wanting to believe so badly, they jump to conclusions and state the "facts" before anything can be properly explained, or if there are no explanations, quickly point to government cover ups and the guys in black suits and black helicopters. That just doesn't help the issue, if there is an issue to be had.

At one point 10 to 15 years ago, one of the more credible researchers in the field quit just because the outer fringe of believers diluted his work so much, it wasn't worth his time, and that disappointed me to have him go, but I understood why.

I've seen websites and magazines that have pictures of "strange" items on government land, and if you didn't know any better, their explanations sure sounded plausible, but if you knew what it was they were highlighting in their images, you'd know they were baffling more people with confusion rather than facts.

Scientists seem to have some explanations to interesting phenomena like Will 'O Wisp energy balls (swamp gas) and what not, but some things, if you don't have time to really get photographic or physical evidence, can remain the mystery they were when they flitted through one's moment in life.

In my lifetime, on 12 occasions, (Here's my categories of unique experiences: outside bedroom window, nite birds, rocket explosion, swamp gas on rental car, satellite turning left (2x), hair brush falling, coughing from room, angry dog, claws scraping down tree, bad smell (2x)) I've seen and experienced some interesting things that caused me confusion, fear, or just plain old head thumping, but in the end, I'd say 5 of the 12 were fairly explainable as adrenaline, 3 were derived from my imagination, 2 was me being hopeful, leaving 2 that made me scratch my head, and I'm sure I could explain those away also, but I'd be stretching the idea and lying to make it a real world event.

My point is, I think we like the idea of a good mystery, or the hope of an advanced civilization, or the idea of 'magic' existing all around us. They can be pretty neat concepts. (OH!! I need to add a few items to my previous list, that I will chalk up to fortuitous, insightful timing on my part.. ) Concepts that to date, only have substance in some of our favorite science fiction tales of mystery and intrigue until the hard line constituency of science accidentally ends up proving one of these facets of disbelief into provable theory!!

Thanks for reading.
Source for my Inspiration: AOL NEWS Article
Image from article source of Hale Bopp.