UFO PHENOMENONS Essay, Research Paper

Two brothers by the name of Jesse and John noticed an odd looking metallic structure down the hill near their house in Rogerville, Tennessee. When they turned around, a very tall slender humanoid-like being emitted a bright light from his stick and that?s when he and his brother blacked out. When Jesse awoke, he found himself being carried through metal corridors, and then he was placed on a cold table. Although Jesse was able to observe the surroundings, he said he was also paralyzed (Confirmation). Do you believe this story to be true of false? This is just one of many astonishing stories that have been told. Since the words ?unidentified flying objects? were first used, there have been a few selected examples that can provide plausible proof for their existence. The history of UFOs and flying saucers surprisingly has been reported as early as 100 BC by Julius Obsequens. He was a 4th century Latin Poet who wrote, ?At sunset a circular object like a shield was seen to sweep across the sky from West to East? (Tracker 12). Strange sightings have been seen and written about but were never officially recorded as UFOs. In 1656, a Jesuit priest and scholar, Athanasius Kircher, wrote a book about two ?Angles? that accompanied him on an out-of-body travel to the moon, sun, and five planets (Fitzgerald 4). These are just a couple of examples of early phenomenon, but it was not until the middle of the 20th century that mankind finally had the technology to fly and create an Air Force. It was an Air Force department search team that reported a strange sighting over the mountain peaks near the northern Pacific. Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and a veteran pilot, saw nine objects flying around the peaks similar to saucer plates skipping across water. At the time of the sight, Kenneth Arnold was assisting the Air Force to search for a C-46 transport plane, which was reported to be missing. Reporters from all over the country received reports of the incident and consequently ran articles, which credited Arnold for the term ?flying saucers? (Hendry 12). This then created a domino effect with people throughout the country reporting to have seen UFOs. According to a 1978 Gallup Poll, 13 million Americans have encountered aerial objects that they could not identify (1). The complete book of UFOs stated that fifty percent of the American people think UFOs are real and that there are humanoid type beings like us that live on other plants in the universe (12). UFOs ?debunked? as identified flying objects (IFOs) like weather phenomenons, planets, stars, man-made aerial crafts, vivid imaginations, and if anything else hoaxes. The reason for the confusion between UFOs and IFOs is because scientists believe average people cannot tell the difference between the two or have the knowledge about astronomy. In the middle of the century, amidst the paranoia of the Cold War, people were frightful of spy-like air crafts and missiles from the other powering nations. Skeptics believe that this was the reason why it was known as the American ?quirk? (Hendry 7). Americans were searching and anticipating some sort of objects from the sky. This was about the same time our government began having secret test flights and nuclear bombings. If a person was at the right vicinity, some people did indeed witness unusual flying objects made by mankind for the government. Since the government wanted to conceal their project from the American people, common folks therefore could not conceive nor explain the strange technologies that the government tried to build. What people could not recognize were assumed as UFOs. From The UFO Handbook, most IFOs are just the stars and planets doing things in an unusual array of lights. Thirty-five percent of all IFO encounters are related to the illusions that stars and planets make under special circumstances. That is the reason why reported times are usually from dusk until dawn. Science contends that with the right angle of light source, and at a certain time of day, starlight can be refracted into a rapid sequence of colors. Astronomers claim that stars can be made to appear in motion due to long staring and the involuntary jerking movements of the human eye. A number of people have reported that stars are UFOs simply because it was following them. This is not true. Scientists determined that bright stars and planets have the illusions of following moving vehicles because the vehicle itself is in motion and the person was looking at the star, therefore having the illusion that the star or planet was following them (Hendry 26). Skepticism about UFOs result from the hoaxes and stereotypes about the people who claimed to witnesses. These witnesses are stereotyped as mid-American folks whose relation with their families is anything but virtues. These are the kind of people who thinks that the and that their main hobby is to make moonshine to drink. In reality, most witnesses are not believed to be credible and are thought to lack a sense for reasoning. As bob Park, a physicist at University of Maryland stated, ?Calling in all the people who have seen strange things just gets you a roomful of strange people? (Kestenbaum 21). Scientist who discredited witnesses as strange of crackpots, should have had reevaluated their statements when they heard reports about UFOs during the Apollo 11 mission. On July 19, 1969, the crewmembers of Apollo 11 spotted an energy force pacing with the capsule showing a sign of intelligence. Neil Armstrong went to retrieve the camera, but the object vanished. All these information were transmitted back to the base where Walter Cronkite, a highly respected news anchor, stated, ??Neil Armstrong is not a man given to fanciful imagination and it wasn?t just one of the crewmembers that saw it- they all did, and you have to respect those men? (Oberg 38). That night, astronauts experienced more than just landing on the moon. If astronauts cannot be credible then I don?t know who is. In the late 1940?s, UFO sightings rose to new heights. To keep all the sightings under control from the public, the government developed projects such as the Grudge (1940-52), Sign (1948-49), and the Blue Book (1953-69) (Sagan, Thorton 54). The government acknowledged the projects gut did not admit to any such cover up. If so, then why is it that under section III, any pilot who reveals an official UFO report can be imprisoned for one to ten years and fined up to $10,000 (Title 18, U.S. Code, 793) (Keyhoe 13). In the Roswell incident in 1947, the Army first came out and stated at the first press meeting that they retrieved a flying saucer at Corona, New Mexico. The very next day, after the CIA arrived, the Army coincidentally retracted their first statement and said that it was only a government weather balloon (ISUR.com). It was very interesting that the Army could not recognize their own weather balloon until the CIA was there. The government then confirmed that the alien bodies were test dummies used to test the experimental parachutes. In the Army record, the parachute tests were not tested for another five years after the incident (Confirmation). In 1955, the Maier sisters reported a recorded radio sound to be of alien messages. When the government heard about the radio sounds, they sent two officers from the Contact Division (CD) to investigate the tape. The officers then confiscated the tapes to be analyzed. They found messages to be plain old Morse code. Leon Davidson, an UFOlogist who heard about the story, did not believe the government that easily. Davidson found out that the officers were not actually from the Air Force Agency, but from the CIA. When Davidson wrote the letters asking what agency analyzed the tape, neither accepted the responsibility. Realizing that there was something wrong with the consistency of the stories, Davidson asked the names of the Morse code operator and the agency where it had come from. The CIA agreed to help. The CIA phoned Davidson to tell him that since the signal was of known U.S. origin, the tape and notes had been destroyed to conserve file space (Haines 11-12). It is hard to dispute that UFOs are merely illusions, weather phenomenon, of hoaxes. Ancient witnesses made claims of falling meteors from the sky, but it took science two centuries to accept the fact (Koemer 52). Just like witnesses to the meteors, people were not taken seriously and they were probably labeled crackpots and ignorant back then as well. There may be thousands of reports and maybe 90% are identified as IFOs, but doesn?t science need to acknowledge that the other 10% be handled more seriously? There are plenty of credible witnesses who say something and there were plenty of unexplainable photos. Of all the photos collected, the most plausible UFO photos ever taken, UFOlogist selected the simple black-and-white snapshots taken by Paul Trent, a farmer in McMinnville, Oregon. The photo was taken on May 11, 1950; when Trent, his father-in-law and wife had seen a pieplane flying machine. When the film was developed, Trent showed it to his friend Frank Wortman, a local banker who displayed the pictures in the back?s window. A news reporter spotted the photos and published them. When the photos circulated in the newspapers and magazines, the FBI and the Air Force got a hold of the photo and interviewed the Trents. The picture then disappeared for 17 years until it was found in a new wire photo archive. Skeptics, up until this day, would not disparage the Trents integrity, and no financial motive for having faked UFO pictures. The Trents never receive a dime for their photo. Computers analyzed the photo, but researchers could not find any strings, and the smooth bottom and sharp edges suggested an artificial object (Wilson 63). On NBC, they interviewed a dozen or more witness to an unusual sighting in Trumbull County, Ohio 1999. Most of the witnesses happened to be law officers and a dispatcher. The dispatcher?s boards were lit up that one particular evening in the city of Liberty Township in Trumbull County. She was getting calls about a strange object lurking in the sky with multiple colors of lights. The dispatcher then relayed the news to the officers so they can check the problems. Sgt. Toby Meloro decided to investigate the matter. He went to the source where it was last seen and an old man told him it went north. Sgt. Meloro proceeded and started noticing the light in the sky. When the strange object hovered over his vehicle, the vehicle?s power shut down completely. This was when the officer decided to step out of his car and look directly up towards the bright light. That moment he noticed the colors were changing from white to green to red. Slowly the aircraft proceeded down the road towards Brookfield Township. What was peculiar to the officer was that the UFO did not make any noise at all. What he found even stranger was that his car started back on as soon as the aircraft moved away. Lt. James Baker from Brookfield Township decided to take a look at what all the fuss was about. Baker drove to an abandoned radio tower and climbed all the way to the top. The tower was about 60 ft tall, so the officer was high enough to see the other side of town. On the tower Baker say three UFOs hovering over the other side of town. One was in the middle just above the other two, making a triangle formation. Another officer saw the objects with a pair of binoculars and even claimed the UFOs had shape and structure (Confirmation). When skeptics can?t discredit the witnesses of the photos, some skeptics want more. Some cynics who had seen the Trent photo wanted more credible witnesses, but when skeptics heard about the Tumbull County incident, cynics wanted photos. Well, the obvious is very clear that skeptics would not be satisfied until there was both credible witnesses and photos. In Brazil, the Brazilian navy set up a weather station on the small rocky island of Trindade, in the South Atlantic Ocean. In January 1958, observers began spotting unusual aerial activity. On the night of January 16, 1947 crewmembers of the Brazilian naval vessel Almirante Saldanha had seen a flying disc object above the mountaintop. Amongst the navy crewmembers was a civilian photographer who snapped a series of six photos. The photos were developed on board the vessel, and then they were turn over to the Brazilian Navy Ministry. Analyst determined the photos to be authentic and concluded they showed a 150 ft.?dia. Object moving at 600 mph (Wilson 65). Given the number of witnesses and numerous photos analysis that even the skeptics finally ran short on explanations. Does this mean that skeptic will convert to side of the believers? No, on the contrary now skeptics wanted more tangible evidence. They wanted real alien objects. Thousands of people reported that they have seen UFOs, but very few have claimed to have actually been abducted by aliens. One man only Paul from the video taken by NBC on Wednesday 16, 1999, claimed that he was taken by aliens. On a routine exam, Paul had his body x-rayed from top to bottom. What the doctors had seen were very tiny foreign objects appearing all over his body. Some doctors dismiss it only as injuries that were caused by sharp objects when he was younger, so that was why he could not remember most of these objects. One particular object lodged in his right thumb was the most bizarre. The reason being is that if the object cut its way in, then why were there no scars? That got some doctors interested. Paul the abductee decided to have surgery to remove the foreign object. The doctor cut his thumb open, and removed what to analyze the object was to break it open to get the elements from the inside. At the University of Texas at San Antonio, Robert K. Smith, Ph.D. crushed the object and used the inside of the material to analyze. After a careful and thorough analysis, the elements of the foreign object did not match with the 65,000 known substances I their computer file (Confirmation). There are so many things that we do not know. Take for example that science has yet concluded real solid evidence that we evolved from apes. They talk about ?missing links?, but all they have is theories. These are the some of the same scientists that debunks UFOs before they could really understand. This subject is as complex as evolution and the Bible, and no one seems to really know what is true and what is not. Just like the falling meteor incident, maybe there is a bit of truth in everything. We have learned different types of ethnicity, ages, structural classes, and credible and non-credible witnesses have reported UFO sightings. My reasoning for believing in UFOs is the incidents I have presented can not dismiss there existence of prove the skeptics correct. We cannot be the only life forms in this universe because there is so much that we don?t know.

BibliographyConfirmation: The Hard Evidence? Writer. Starling Price. With Robert Davi. KNBC. Burbank, Ca., 17 Feb. 1999.Fitzgerald, Randall. The Complete Book of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.,

1979: 12.Haines, Gerald K. A Die-Hard Issue: CIA?s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90. 21 Feb. 1999. Bedlam.Rutger: 16-18.

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