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Commentary by John Shirley
We were almost an hour into the two-hour (with commercials) special "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs -- Seeing Is Believing" (February 25, 2005) before a skeptic was given a real chance to speak. Over the course of the show, believers -- as usual -- got more play than skeptics, and they got the last word. Indeed, the last word was given to the least believable of all believers, an "abductee" -- though clearly Jennings doesn't take them seriously.
But to my mind, what was even worse than the shortage of skeptical input were the dozens of "UFO photos" and bits of film in this special shown without any discussion of the believability of UFO photography. Television is a visual medium--people are more convinced by what they see than what they hear. A lot of people will come away from the special convinced by all that photography. Unfortunately, no one bothered to mention that it's really easy to fake a UFO photo, it's really easy, in fact, to stage a UFO event--use a Mylar helium balloon, a flashlight taped onto a little platform under it, that's one popular way. People do it all the time. Stunt kites, filmed in a certain way, is another method for making "photographic evidence" of apparently "real" UFOs--something unidentified, after all, is seen flying in the film. Objects hung from fishing wire or simply thrown in the air are popular subjects for UFO photography; double exposures are the source of many faked UFO photos.
Many other UFO photos, however, are taken by perfectly sincere people, who are innocently photographing stars distorted by heat waves (I've seen "UFO" myself that looked really mysterious and vehicle-like until the air cooled off and I saw the object was a star), blimps seen through fog, clouds seen in peculiar lighting circumstances, Mylar balloons (thousands of these reflective objects go flitting through the atmosphere every month), and especially aircraft seen in the distance, or at night, in a situation that conceals their identity.
There's a well-known 8mm film of a UFO over Catalina Island near LA, looks just like a disk flying over the hills. Jet Propulsion Labs did a digital analysis of the film, and you can clearly see, up close, that it's a Piper Cub. An ordinary small airplane. I've seen the same thing often enough myself: small planes (even large ones) appear to be wingless ellipses in certain lights and with a certain amount of haze. I've also seen many mysterious-looking "flying triangles" that turned out to be -- when I'd continued watching --ordinary passenger aircraft. If I'd run off to tell my friends I'd seen "a flying triangle" I'd never have learned it was a plane. I saw a shimmering-orange elliptical object that was moving in a slow falling-leaf kind of way in the sky once. It looked very solid. As I watched, the light shifted and the wind picked up, and I saw that it was a cloud caught in the first rays of sunset. Again, if I'd turned my back to shout to my friends, it would have "mysteriously vanished".
There's a famous case where an astronaut, Gordon Cooper, saw a film of a strange ovoid object floating over the ground near the fence of a military installation. Someone on the base had taken it and it was sent to military HQ and the film was not heard from again. James Oberg investigated this and discovered that a weather balloon had gone astray in that very area that same day, and that it was seen floating *half deflated* (an ovoid shape now) near the ground not far from the base. That's almost certainly what was filmed.
Typically, Believers of the Alien Hypothesis will point to the Catalina film and cite that Gordon Cooper case and completely ignore the subsequent investigations solving the mysteries. They pretend those investigations never happened. There are some exceptions to that blindered attitude--but not many.
The special spends some time on "flying triangles and there are some pretty convincing flying triangle stories out there--as with those seen by hundreds of people, filmed to some extent too, over Belgium. The possibility exists that some UFO reports are experimental aircraft. Project Aurora is rumored to be a nearly silent lighter-than-air craft, a sort of 'stealth blimp', large and delta shaped, which might've been tested over Belgium--they were testing its stealth capabilities in a foreign country. When our familiar stealth fighters were first seen, their odd manta-ray shape seemed otherworldly.
Jennings and company did well to cover the neurological and psychological explanations for most alien abduction stories. It might also have been mentioned that some of the most famous cases, e.g. the Betty Hill case, were fraught with imagery that was a near exact duplicate of story details in flying saucer movies that came out right before the abductions. A good book on the so-called abductions, co-written by UFO expert (and believer, to a large extent, by the way) Kevin Randle, PhD, is THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA
To his credit Jennings also had the courage to flatly state that the Roswell story is a myth. Every last credible bit of the Roswell UFO-crash story can be traced to the military's secret Mogul spy-balloon project. There was indeed a bit of a cover up about what happened at Roswell, for years--because it involved a top-secret project for spying on the USSR.
I have no doubt that the military men and cops interviewed by ABC saw something real -- the question is what did they see? There are strange atmospheric phenomena, such as earth lights to consider; there are (and this is quite real!) flying spheres of spider webs, filled with infant spiders, which can be quite large and which blow through the air for thousands of miles and which, being translucent, seem to glow in the upper atmosphere; there are boloid meteors, which fly along horizontally for a long ways; there are electrified plasma effects. The size of objects seen in the sky often cannot be accurately gauged--the backdrop of sky is itself prone to creating illusions about size.
This doesn't mean that no alien spacecraft exist anywhere. Probably somewhere in the galaxy there are craft capable of moving from solar system to solar system. It just feels likely to me -- sort of...inevitable. Someday we'll do it too.
And it's not impossible we've been visited. Kevin Randle thinks only about 1% of UFO sightings represent alien craft. I don't know if any of them do--I've seen no convincing evidence of it. Occam's Razor always suggests a simpler, more probable explanation for strange things seen in the sky, besides alien spacecraft.
But the possibility does exist -- they might drop in on us now and then.
As for that ABC special, it was, at least, more balanced and intelligent than the flying-saucer hucksterism that goes on at Fox and the SciFi channel...
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