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PRINCETON AREA: COUNTERPOINT: Opinion: The truth is out there?

By Michael Redmond Lifestyle Editor
    ‘Common sense is the quintessence of the experiences and prejudices of its time. It is a most unreliable advisor when one is confronted with a perfectly new situation.’
— Gustav Naan (1919-1994),
Estonian physicist and phi losopher 
     In “Friends in High Places: Our Journey from Little Rock to Washington, D.C.” (1997), Web Hubbell, an Arkansas pal whom President Bill Clinton named as deputy attorney general, reports the following:
    “Clinton had said, ‘If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?’
    “Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting,” Hubbell wrote.
    Well, neither is anybody else, it seems, ranging from professional skeptics who decry any serious discussion of “the paranormal” as the legitimizing of old wives’ tales and tabloid fantasies, to UFO “believers” who will confidently tell you that 57 species of extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth — and some of them look just like us.
    The skeptics point out that UFOs have been a staple of the American popular imagination for more than 60 years, since businessman Kenneth A. Arnold made headlines with the first highly publicized sighting on June 24, 1947, yet no incontrovertible evidence has been produced that they exist, let alone that they’re not of this world. There’s no UFO report the skeptics cannot explain, mind you – even when, as is famously true of “swamp gas,” flocks of birds, weather balloons, lenticular clouds and the ever- reliable planet Venus, the explanation sounds no more credible than the report.
    The believers insist that there’s plenty of evidence for the existence of UFOs, if your standard of proof is something less than a touchdown on the South Lawn of the White House at high noon on the Fourth of July. Concerning such questions as what UFOs actually are, where they come from and why, who or what is piloting them, and whether the government is telling “the truth” about what it knows, the UFO community is simply aswirl with conspiracy theories. Enter the door marked “UFO Department” and it isn’t long before you encounter alien abductions, Bigfoot, the Bavarian Illuminati, hauntings, past lives, Nikola Tesla, cures for cancer, the Bermuda Triangle, psychic spies, Nazis in Antarctica, etc.
    The skeptics are no doubt correct that most UFO reports have perfectly ordinary explanations, including hoaxes, such as the one recently perpetrated in the skies over Morris County by a couple of activist geeks seeking to expose how gullible the public and the media really are. Point taken, guys, and you certainly got a lot of press.
    Also exposed was how lax the media can be about doing its homework. At the same time as a Fox News reporter was going gaga about aliens over Morris County, a team of investigators from the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON – since 1969, the nation’s oldest and largest citizens’ group devoted to UFO investigation and data collection, and to the promotion of research and education about “the UFO phenomenon and its potential impact on society” – was concluding that the Morris County sightings were hoaxes.
    Although the sightings, which date back to September of last year, were widely reported by the media, the media had never called MUFON, even though the organization is the best known and best resourced UFO group in the country, as these things go, and has a well-earned reputation for being an honest broker. And MUFON’s report wasn’t news, either, until after the hoaxers gleefully outed themselves on skeptic.com.
    Hoaxes aside, weather balloons aside, atmospheric anomalies aside, there are more unsettling UFO cases with well-established facts that simply cannot be explained away than one would think.
    Forget the archetypal case of the reported crash of a UFO near Roswell, N.M., during the summer of 1947. Roswell has become something like a religious cult. In a July 2008 interview with Daily Grail Publishing, Jacques F. Vallée, the French computer scientist and Internet pioneer whose views about the UFO phenomenon are both controversial and authoritative, dismisses Roswell as “a blind alley. It is a major tactical mistake to base the argument for UFOs entirely on a case that has so little scientific evidence and so much ambiguous and conflicting testimony surrounding it.”
    Instead, Dr. Vallée speaks of UFO cases involving “physical traces, interference with car ignition, patterns of light phenomena and energy (that) have all been documented by serious authors. The physiological factors include evidence of exposure to UV radiation, frequent effects on the eyes, from conjunctivitis to temporary blindness, skin blisters or injuries in reaction to focused beams of light, temporary inhibition of muscle control, disturbances in the sleep cycle, and general fatigue and anemia lasting over seven days and life- threatening in some extreme cases.”
    People who do substantial research into this subject come up with their personal lists of “Best Evidence” cases. What’s surprising, as noted above, is how many such cases there are to choose among.
    If you want physiological effects, there’s the Cash- Landrum “close encounter” on Dec. 29, 1980, near Huffman, Texas, in which a 20-minute exposure to a brilliant, fiery, diamond-shaped UFO “the size of a water tower” left the three witnesses (two women and a boy) nauseated, vomiting, and heat-blistered, losing clumps of hair. One of the women, Betty Cash, hospitalized a few days later, never recovered her health.
    Then are there are the cases — too numerous to mention — based upon testimony by police officers, senior military officers and other military personnel, airline pilots and other experienced observers.
    On Nov. 7, 2006, a spinning, disc-shaped UFO was witnessed by a dozen United Airlines employees, including pilots and supervisors, hovering above Gate C-17 at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The whatever-it- was then accelerated straight up and out of sight, leaving a visible hole in the cloud cover. The sighting lasted about two minutes. The case would not go away because the witnesses, alarmed by the safety and security ramifications, refused to shut up. The Chicago Tribune caught United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration in a fib or two after filing a FOIA request. The upshot? The FAA, which is mandated to oversee the security of the nation’s airports, dismissed the sighting as “a weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.
    You would prefer military? Here’s an old case, but it’s a beauty, and we have the British government to thank for it, as the matter was kept secret until 2005, when the Brits began opening their UFO files to the public:
    On May 20, 1957, U.S. Air Force pilot Lt. Milton Torres, flying a fully loaded F-86 Sabre, was ordered up into the skies over East Anglia to intercept and shoot down — yes, you read that right — a UFO “the size of an aircraft carrier” that had been picked up and tracked by radar and which exhibited “very unusual flight patterns,” including the ability to remain “motionless for long intervals.”
    Lt. Torres got within 4,000 yards of whatever-it- was before “the bogey” zoomed away at an astonishing speed, later estimated by the RAF as exceeding 7,000 miles an hour (Mach 10). Afterward, he was sworn to secrecy and threatened by “a civilian … waving NSA (National Security Agency) ID … (who advised him) this would be considered highly classified and that I should not discuss it with anybody, not even my commander.”
    The official explanation? There isn’t one, really, other than the suggestion of “a radar anomaly.”
    In recent years, Britain, France, Canada, Denmark and Brazil have thrown open their UFO files. I mean, you can even find them online, that’s how “open” open is. Repeated calls for the United States to do the same have been met with silence. Either the federal government has some really hot stuff, and they don’t want the public to know, or they have nothing, and they don’t want us to know that they’re clueless, too.
    On April 20, during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell “called upon the new Democratic administration under President Barack Obama to end a six-decade-long truth embargo imposed by elements within the United States government and confirm to the American people the reality of an extraterrestrial, non-human intelligence engaging the human race.”
    The truth is out there? Maybe so, but I wouldn’t count on finding it anytime soon.