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Documentary Sparks Debate Over UFOs

By BRIAN ROONEY,
ABC News
Posted: 2007-07-07 17:36:30
Filed Under: Science News
(July 6) -- It's an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe?

As the documentary "Out of the Blue" rightly points out, brilliant and reputable scientists believe that the conditions for intelligent life exist on thousands of planets. But then there's that other question that separates the scientists from the believers, the witnesses from the skeptics - if aliens are out there, have they come to visit?

James Fox, the producer of "Out of the Blue," says that aliens are out there. "They're flying around. They're here and they've been here."

He also believes that they have incredible technical ability, saying that they can "fly rings around our fastest jets. Yes. That's what I've been told. They can literally almost disappear in place."

"Out of the Blue" is an attempt to weed out the wackos and present credible witnesses who say they saw what looked like alien spacecraft. Witnesses like former President Carter, who said, "I saw one, but I don't know where. It just disappeared." And Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, who says he saw "this typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic."

Flying Saucers
"I looked up and all of a sudden there was this, you know, I got to say it, flying saucer," said Sean Thackery, from Marin, Calif., one of the eyewitnesses in the film.

"You've got this phenomenon taking place that's never been properly explained," said Fox. "You know, people -- people wanna know."

The subject of UFOs is one of those things that never gets a satisfactory answer, and never quite seems to go away. Now, 60 years after the reported crash of a UFO in Roswell, N.M., and with the French government releasing its UFO archives, there are new efforts to prove alien spacecrafts really exist.

The documentary begins with an odd, but in a way undeniable, incident that occurred in Phoenix in March 1997, known as the "Phoenix Lights."

Hundreds and possibly thousands of people, many of them looking at the Hale-Bopp comet, reported seeing an array of lights and an enormous delta-shaped craft. The first report of a strange flying object came about 8:20 p.m. from a former police officer in Paulden, Ariz. Over the next 40 minutes, people gave similar reports of an object along a 20-mile route south to Phoenix and Tempe.

"It's coming across the sky," said witness Tim Ley of Phoenix, "and as it's moving, it's blocking and unblocking the stars. There was actually a shape."

"It passed right in front of us. It was just about right above eye length," said Mike Fortson. "My estimate of the size of the craft from the nose as it passed us where we lived to the end of the left wing that passed in front of us was over 5,000 foot long."

There was such an uproar about what people described seeing that ABC News did a story about it back in 1997. At the time, then Arizona Gov. Fife Symington called a news conference, spoofing the whole thing by bringing an "alien" into the room.

'I Know What I Saw'
What Symington did not say then was that he also had seen the object over Phoenix. But in "Out of the Blue," he says that "we all experienced a very exciting sighting of some kind of a craft of unknown origin. Nobody's ever been able to explain it. & Most of us feel that it was definitely, you know, of alien origin. Enormous. Inexplicable."

Symington is an Air Force veteran, and a pilot. When asked whether he was worried about speaking out, he said, "I know what I saw and what I believe and I'm not afraid to say it publicly. & I'm, I'm really not concerned about somebody's opinion about that, frankly."

Among other claims, Fox focuses on a 1980 report of UFO sightings at an American air force base in England  the so-called "Bentwaters" incident. Three former Air Force security officers told Fox about actually touching a small, strange craft that landed outside the base.

"There's no doubt about it, there's some type of strange, flashing red lighting ahead," said Lt. Colonel Halt in the documentary. "The closer we got, the more the white light dissipated, but what appeared was a triangular craft. When we approached it, it was, I'd say it measured probably about nine feet long, maybe six feet high."

Sgt. Jim Penniston made drawings of what appeared to be symbolic drawings that, he said, were on the skin of the craft.

'That's Not How Science Works'
But when it comes to UFOs, there are plenty of skeptics. One man who makes his living as a professional skeptic is, well, skeptical.

Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic Magazine, says, "The parade of astronauts or police officers or politicians like Jimmy Carter -- it's irrelevant. Because they're human and they're brains and nervous systems and sensory apparatus are structured just like the average Joes."

Shermer spends a lot of time with reports of UFOs and space aliens, and has this to say about the documentary: "Um, the facts are true. The, uh, the story is well told and well produced. But that's not how science works. In science we have to have some way of testing to get an answer. It's this or this. And we have to have some way of weighing the evidence. And short of an actual experiment to run you have to have debate."

UFO sightings, even the most interesting ones, tend to share similar characteristics. There are no pictures, or the pictures are blurry. Or maybe there are pictures, but they disappeared into government archives never to be seen again.

That's what the late astronaut Gordon Cooper said, but the documentary says that, "Not every government chooses to deny the existence of UFOs. Since the fall of communism in 1989, information surrounding the subject has become much more accessible in Russia."

Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich was one of Russia's earliest cosmonauts. He joins the ranks of an increasing number of military personnel who have testified as to the validity of the UFO phenomena.

A Leap of Explanation
The documentary ends by saying that, "The discovery that we are being visited by extraterrestrials would be one of the greatest in human history. Such a discovery would profoundly alter the perception of ourselves and our place in the universe."

But Shermer remains unconvinced. "You can't discount the fact, unfortunately, that people lie & or they misperceive and then tell the story incorrectly or exaggerate. Everybody knows about the human foibles of deception and self-deception and exaggeration. We all do it. So unfortunately we can't just, we can't always count [on] eyewitness accounts being reliable."

Shermer says the problem comes in a kind of leap of faith -- with UFOs it's a leap of explanation.

"In science it's OK to just say, 'Let's just withhold judgment for now and do more research. We don't have to commit to some big, grand theory of aliens visiting us. Let's just say we don't know what it is.' But we have to follow the standards of evidence in science that we apply everywhere else. In no other science would anybody accept just a few random anecdotal stories and grainy videos and blurry photographs."

"The question itself I think is legitimate," he said. "It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?"

Copyright 2008 ABCNEWS.com
2007-07-07 12:54:28
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4102 comments

ckc27955 11:41:55 AM Jul 14 2007

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In the summer of 1965 or 1966, UFOs were reported in NW Arkansas, so we watched outdoors to see if we could spot one. We lived in Rogers, with population of about 8000 at the time. About 10 pm, a large dark object moved silently overhead, giving us goosebumps. A few days later govt officials found a crashed kite-like object with battery operated lights which they said was the culprit. That debunked the hundreds of people who knew darn well what a kite looked like. I was thinking then of a conspiracy coverup, to keep people from talking and looking. And that was BEFORE we knew anything about Roswell!

miamigros 04:43:53 PM Jul 13 2007

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I can see from all of the negative comments here that you still have not read
The Phoenix Lights www.thephoenixlights.net or seen the excellent
documentary of the same name. It will surely explain to the skeptics
how much research has still not uncovered the secrets of our universe
surely because people in the know of have been instructed not to
discuss the matter. I am referring to the government employees who,
after many years of silence, have been willing to state what they have
known about for years and many scientists who have become more
convinced of this phenomenon with every new presentation and sighting.
Dr. Lynne Kitei was a witness on the evening of March 13, 1977 together
with 10,000 other people in Arizona to the amazing lights which remain
a mystery to many because the Armed Forces could not duplicate the
lights with flares or anything else. Believe me, they tried. PG

lisadawson 10:44:12 PM Jul 10 2007

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For those of us who have seen UFO's, the seeing is enough. Let the nay-sayers doubt all they want. I was at a drive-in movie with my mother in the late 60's in Tucson, Arizona. The movie was "How the West was Won" which doesn't put you into a UFO frame of mind. Yet when I looked to the left for some reason - there is no doubt what I saw. It was unlike anything I've ever heard described anywhere. Therefore, I'm not going to describe it now. But I know it was not one of our craft. All the other people I have known who have seen UFO's , maybe 5 or 6 people, are equally lucid and unequivolcal about their sightings.

lisadawson 10:44:07 PM Jul 10 2007

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For those of us who have seen UFO's, the seeing is enough. Let the nay-sayers doubt all they want. I was at a drive-in movie with my mother in the late 60's in Tucson, Arizona. The movie was "How the West was Won" which doesn't put you into a UFO frame of mind. Yet when I looked to the left for some reason - there is no doubt what I saw. It was unlike anything I've ever heard described anywhere. Therefore, I'm not going to describe it now. But I know it was not one of our craft. All the other people I have known who have seen UFO's , maybe 5 or 6 people, are equally lucid and unequivolcal about their sightings.

bobcol2000 09:56:08 PM Jul 10 2007

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Why hasn't anyone mentioned the "Disc" which "hovered" over the United Airlines terminal at Chicago O'hare? It seems to me that 9 (I think it was) United employees were hihgly qualified observers. Where is the official investigation into this matter?

PS: If there are aliens visiting Earth, could they do anything about the cost of gasoline? $3/gal is absurd!

drkjhildebrandt 05:28:55 PM Jul 10 2007

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We live in the outer region of the spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. The older parts are in near the core, and if life developed there, it would almost certainly have been around for a much longer time than we have been. What's seen in one part of the sky, is seen somewhere else. To think that life only developed here, and we're the most evolved technologically, is ludicrous.

Not only did Carter see a UFO, but so did Reagan, and Ford pushed for disclosure when he was a congressman. Since this topic has once again gained the forefront of the corporate news, I've also added another video entitled, What's that in the Sky?, posted freely on the site listed below, if you get the latest cache.

The UFO issue is also discussed with video evidence in Your Movie, posted freely at http://majormediabypass.com . No one to date has been able to explain what we filmed at the beach on July 01, 2003. For those of you with dial-up, it's also in the video SPEECHLESS, posted near the bottom.

smithichie 04:01:06 PM Jul 10 2007

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The effects of sleep paralysis are quite real to the person going through it and explain 'alien abductions' quite nicely.
I don't think most people who claim to have been abducted are lying but I do think they are misinterpreting a known condition for something that it's not.
In the past it was thought that those suffering from epilepsy were possessed by demons. The condition itself may have been used as evidence that demons were real. Just like the condidtion of sleep paralysis is being used today as 'evidence' that aliens are real.

smithichie 03:51:46 PM Jul 10 2007

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mesk8rdude
Just because YOU see a spaceship in a painting of the Baptism of Jesus does not mean that's what was intended by the artist. Who are you to say that it's a spaceship and not an angel for instance? A shooting star? The moon? A mistake?
What's your evidence that it's a spaceship? Does it say 'spaceship' on it's side?
Drawing upon weak examples? Weak examples is all you have.
I ask for the same type of evidence for alien visitors as we have for elephants and you speak of 'phantom DNA' and paintings.
An alien wrench would be more powerful evidence than ALL you have presented.
A coin or trinket made of an alloy that is impossible to make outside of 0 g's would
likewise be powerful evidence. Certain metals won't combine on Earth but do combine in space ( 0 gravity) conditions. Pyramids are one thing for ancients to build but certain alloys would have been impossible, and thus make excellent evidence for alien visitors. Got anything like that?

mesk8rdude 02:02:44 PM Jul 10 2007

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I completely agree-- Shermer is so full of B.S!!!! That is like saying witnesses have no credibility, ever! For example; hypothetically speaking let's say I saw some lady get stabbed in a convenient store... According to Shermer I will not be a good witness because I will exxagerate the story, or I am making it all up in a big lie! Shermer is basically saying everyone who has seen or had an encounter with a UFO is crazy and not capable of making a rational, logical decision whether or not it was real or a halucination... There have been studies done on abduction victims and the results have shown time and time again that a huge percentage of these people seem to be normal, average people who are telling the truth, with only a very small percentage labeled as "imaginers."

I know what I have seen before and it was definitely not from this world. Shermer is un-informed because the new science is there to prove the existence and even the visitation of Earth by ETs.

courtneys1st 03:39:35 AM Jul 10 2007

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Shermer must br GOD or so he thinks, he can tell what the astronaut is seeing without even being there.
Don

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