A UFO flies over New Jersey in this July 31, 1952 photo taken by an amateur photographer.
Are they really out there? Or is this just another trick to lure gullible humans like many of us?
Well, for sure if flying saucers would appear in the sky carrying the “M” logo of MacDonald’s or the “F” of Froodee or some other logos of consumer brands, then of course they’re advertising gimmicks.
But what some former US military pilots and other observers – including Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich – have seen lately appear to be the real alien thang – UFOs as in Unidentified Flying Objects (no, Virginia, not the Unidentified Froodee Observers who have been posting comments here).
Risking ridicule, Kucinich said he has indeed seen a UFO. If elected President of the US in November, the first thing he’d probably do is to thank the aliens from Mars or Venus or Wherever Planet for voting for him.
Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter have also been reported to have claimed UFO sightings. But of course it’s lunatic to think that Reagan contracted his Alzheimers from an alien … but on second thought, could it be? And maybe Carter with his pointed ears could be an alien himself!?
Last Monday, an international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials formally called on the U.S. government 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.
“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns … which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.
The panelists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.
UFO believers lament that the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations.
Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington was one of the believers. He said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.
“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.
The US Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in what was known as Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in operation.
“Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations,” the Air Force said on its Web site.
Well, of course if the aliens aboard the UFOs would start zapping the US with their fiery ray guns, the military would start noticing. Hey, haven’t UFOs visited California lately? There was a massive forest fire out there recently.