THE US REPORT

(Jacksonville, Fla.)--The British Ministry of Defence recently released information covering 19 years of sightings and reports, and UFO enthusiasts must be pleased because reports of unidentified flying objects continue to surface around the world. Some Texas sightings cannot be explained and nor can reports of objects spotted along the coast of Southern Africa in Namibia. In April, ‘The Phoenix Lights’ documentary was released. Tony Ortega, a former Arizona newspaper reporter writing for 'The Village Voice' completely debunks the research spearheaded by Dr. Lynne D. Kitei; he also debunks the recent 'Dateline NBC' special 10 Close Encounters Caught on Tape. Ortega says the Phoenix lights actually involved two different incidents, one he defines as an airplane and the other as military flares. Ortega seems to bristle with anger in his article as he debunks claims from those who believe they actually saw UFOs. A quibble from this reader is his evidence—he believes a young man who claims he saw what others saw in one incident, only this young man says the lights clearly were planes. Ortega says the fellow, who used a Dobsonian telescope, also has a witness—his mom.

NASA reports
Some years ago, my husband and I saw strange lights in the night sky as we headed home from fishing in the swamp. They were multi-colored and visible through the trees. It didn’t occur to us this was a UFO. We just talked about what strange lights they were and we still have no idea what we saw. NASA even has a photo based on about 4 seconds of video taken by Apollo 16 astronauts as they returned from the moon in April, 1972. (photo above) The image is otherworldly, but NASA makes a good case the image was simply the spacewalk floodlight boom. On the NASA website, you can take a look at the photo beside a photo of the boom and make up your own mind.

Did ancients see UFOs?
Stories about lights in the sky date to ancient times. One of the most famous, for Westerners, is Ezekiel’s wheel of fire, a story from the Bible. Read today, the description of the wheel bears a striking resemblance to the images we see of UFOs. American Indian tribes have various creation myths, and one very interesting tale that spurs as many questions as Ezekiel’s is an Ojibway tale of a ladder to the sky. The ladder was actually a vine connecting the sky to the earth; humans weren’t permitted to use it. But when an old woman tried to climb upwards in a search for her runaway grandson, disease and death struck her people. In a telling of this story at Turtletrack,  there’s this description of the people who lived in the sky: “Then one day, the air was filled with strange blue lights, and the spirit beings came drifting down out of the sky.”

The Phoenix Lights and a South Carolina tale
I purchased Dr. Ketei’s documentary and found it very level-headed. The people interviewed come from all walks of life. They don’t claim encounters with extra-terrestrials, but rather state simply they saw lights that can’t be explained. Photo experts looked at images and basically discounted the possibility these lights could have been planes or flares. The reporter, Ortega, does make a point that data from two different events are merged, but even if you accept that, there are still solid grounds for not accepting conventional explanations for whatever did appear over Phoenix in March, 1997. Ketei points out that Russia, China and Japan take the idea of UFOs more seriously than the US.

In my April 22 column, I mentioned a story I did for a daily newspaper years ago about a South Carolinian who claimed he’d been abducted by aliens. The man passed lie detector tests, and his story appeared in various tabloids. For me, he was a very credible interview subject, but according to one recent report I found, he has now recanted his story.

US information readily available; other countries proactive
More recently, strange lights in Erath County, Texas, have drawn a great deal of media attention. Many historical documents related to UFO reports in the US, compiled as part of Project Blue Book, are available online now at the National Security Agency website. A US Air Force fact sheet states, “Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained unidentified.” Like the lights I saw years ago, no one really knows what those 701 sightings comprised. In the US at the present time, Science has become the god of all. But science can’t explain the lights we sometimes see in the sky, and it still can’t cure a common cold or completely dispel menstrual cramps either. Compare the histories of various religions and science and you will find both can claim various missteps.

I don’t know about alien abductions, but I do know there are mysteries aplenty left for man to contemplate. In the sense that the sky holds inexplicable phenomena, UFOs are real. I believe that however, neither proves nor disproves extraterrestrial creatures or life. What do you think?

(Filed by Kay B. Day; to read source material and related articles, click on the ‘References’ link below. Photo above is courtesy of NASA.)