UFOs: They Do Exist By S. McElheney With all of the millions of stars and galaxies in our universe, any rational person would agree that we could not be the only intelligent life. The chances of life occurring elsewhere in the universe on a planet like ours are very high, and that the civilizations could have begun millions of years before ours is another good possibility. And if these alien civilizations were much more advanced than ours, it is a good possibility that they would be capable of interstellar space flight and perhaps even visit worlds alien to theirs, namely Earth. To try and prove the existence of unidentified flying objects is not a very difficult task, there are thousands of reports and the evidence is there, its just sorting through it all and coming up with the most believable and best documentented. I will attempt to use the evidence that I have collected to prove that UFOs exist; I'll also talk about government involvement, alien abductions, and some documented history of UFOs. Many UFO researchers--or ufologists--believe that aliens have been making routine visits to our planet for millions of years. Hieroglyphics in Egypt and rock paintings in Australia portray alien beings descending from the sky. Some ufologists say that the most impressive UFO stories are found in the Bible. The most elaborate of the Bible's possible UFO sightings comes from the prophet Ezekiel, a priest in one of Babylon's captive Jewish settlements. When he was thirty years old, in about 593B.C., he had a vision: "As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming bronze. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings." (Time-Life, 12-14) Ezekiel interpreted this sight, which is all at the opening of the old Testament, as "the likeness of the glory of the Lord." But some researchers said it was "the arrival of an extraterrestrial spaceship" (Time-Life, 14). Josef F. Blumrich, an engineer at NASA, who helped build the Saturn V rocket, was convinced that Ezekiel's description would fail under a rocket engineer's rigorous examination. However, he found that the description could be adapted into a practical design for a landing module launched from a mother ship. The date of the earliest UFO sightings is unknown. Some UFO researchers believe that there were UFO sightings in ancient times... Most UFO researchers date the beginning of the UFO phenomenon with the sighting of dirigible-like "mystery airships" over the U.S. during 1896-97. The next significant group of reports came during World War II from Allied and Axis pilots who reported seeing strange metal-like objects, which they called "foo fighters," in controlled flight around their planes. In 1946 people in Europe, particularly Scandinavia, reported large-scale sightings of silent "ghost rockets." None of these phenomena has been satisfactorily explained. (Jacobs, 1) At 3pm on Tuesday June 24, 1947 in the state of Washington, the modern UFO phenomenon began. 32 year old private pilot, Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho spotted the strong sunlight reflecting off of something far in the distance. When he got in closer to investigate, Arnold saw nine flat-ended, cresent-shaped discs flying in a formation not unlike that of a flock of geese. He described their movements as being like "saucers skipping over water" and thus, the term flying saucer was born. He later told American radio journalist, Ed Murrow in 1950, that he "judged their [flying saucers] wing-span to be at least 100ft across" and that they were moving at over 1000mph. In 1950, that out-flew anything that could be man made. On July 6, 1947 one of the most famous UFO crashes and government cover-ups occurred. In Roswell, New Mexico, a large glowing disc was seen over the desert. A sheep rancher who heard an explosion went out the next day to investigate and found strange wreckage. That was the sight were the UFO allegedly crashed the first time, it left some pieces behind and started out again. 150 miles away, in Magdalene, a man named Barnett saw something shiny in the sand. He found the wreckage of a disc that was 30 feet across. He had not heard about any of the other sightings of the UFO that night. He thought that it might be some type of experimental aircraft but,: "Barnett did not believe that this was so. He had good reason. He had seen bodies--apparently dead and thrown from the wreck. They were not wearing army uniforms. In fact they did not look human. From a distance, it was hard to see in detail, but they seemed to be wearing silvery suits, and they were only 1 meter (3 feet) tall!" (Randles, 18-19). The debris from the crash was said to be remarkably light, yet exceptionally tough, metallic in appearance but different from any known metal and covered partially by pictorial markings not unlike hieroglyphics. Many "...witnesses also spoke of an undentable thin foil that, after folding, returned to its original shape with no crease mark." (Clark, 92). The government quickly took all the evidence they could move to the Roswell Air Force base and made everyone involved swear to secrecy. An official at the base originally and accidentally, leaked to local radio and news stations that a UFO had crashed but a few days later the report was denied by the government and said it was only a crashed weather balloon. News of the crash never really made it out of New Mexico. "It was definately not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile... It was something I had never seen before, or since... it certainly wasn't anything built by us." (Extract from an interview about the Roswell crash given in 1979 by the intelligence officer who was first on the scene in 1947, then Major Jesse Marcel). (Randles, 20). "...the Air Force knew by the middle of July 1947 that the saucers were real and not man made... the technology represented by the (recovered) disc... was so far beyond our own that it could not be understood immediately... Therefore it would be necessary to treat the disc as a military secret. This would mean containing all information about it within one small group." (Part of paper by US Navy Physicist, Dr. Bruce Maccabee.) (Randles, 22). In 1948, the U.S. Air Force started Project Blue Book. It lasted from 1948 to 1969 and its purpose was to investigate UFO reports. Witnesses received an eight-page questionnaire, the photographs and negatives were analyzed, and field interviews were conducted. The project, on the whole, successfully weeded out UFO reports that were obvious hoaxes or could be explained by natural phenomenon. However, the group operated under an undisguised bias that UFOs did not exist. So, for the small percentage of cases that could not be solved, investigators would either admit they failed in indentifying the object or embrace any remotely feasible explanation. In 1976, edited versions of most of Project Blue Book's files were released under the 'Freedom of Information' Act. The following cases are some of the most curious pieces of evidence of alien life. Each of these cases are still under investigation: The Kecksburg "Acorn" At 4:15pm on December 9, 1965, thousands of people in several Midwestern and Eastern states observed the passage of a glowing object whose long smoke trail remained visible for as long as 20 minutes after the object itself was gone. Investigators who later tracked its trajectory concluded that the object had been moving slightly faster than 1,000 miles per hour (meteors travel at a minimum of 27,000 mph) in a southeasterly direction from Flint, Michigan, to the Cleveland area, where it made a 25' turn and headed east. Outside Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a number of local people observed the object descend in a smooth and controlled fashion. Those who ventured into the woods in the evening darkness, according to reports, discovered a large gold, acorn-shaped object that emitted a strange blue light. In a band along side of the object was hieroglyphiclike writing. Soon, as members of the Aerospace Defense Command's 662nd Radar Squadron appeared on the scene, civilians were ordered to leave the area. Later, Kecksburg residents reported an Army flatbed truck carrying something covered with a tarpaulin; its shape was that of a giant upright acorn. The official explanation of the Kecksburg object is "meteorite," although no such object has ever been produced and none of the eyewitness testimony supports that particular interpretation... Disc in the Desert In the Seventies, veteran UFO researcher Raymond Fowler investigated the case of the pseudonymous "Fritz Werner," an engineer who served at Wright-Patterson Air Force base and later at the Atomic Proving Ground in Nevada. In an adfidavit Werner swore that on May 21, 1953, he and others were driven to nearby Indian Springs Air Force Base, but on a bus with blackened windows, and informed that they were to participate in the recovery of a "supersecret Air Force vehicle." After four hours they were let out in what Werner surmised was the Kingman, Arizona, area. They were shown an oval object that "looked like two deep saucers, one inverted upon another," about 30 feet in diameter. His particular job, he asserted, was to determine how fast the craft had been traveling when it hit the sand. At one point, Werner claimed, he happened to look into a tent at the site; there he saw the "dead body of a four-foot, humanlike creature in a silver, metallic-looking suit." As he was leaving he talked briefly with an airman who said that he had seen the interior of the craft, where there were "two swivellike seats as well as instruments and displays." All participants were sworn to secrecy. Another investigator, Leonard Stringfield. interviewed as former Air Force metallurgist who claimed that in the spring of 1953 he had been flown blindfolded to a "hot and sandy area" to participate in the recovery of a vehicle much like the one Werner described. (Clark, 93) Bruce Maccabee believes that the government is covering up the existence of UFOs, covering up that it really doesn't know what's going on, and covering up that it doesn't know what to do about it, namely what would happen if it went public with all this. Government agencies still have hundreds of UFO documents that they refused to release after the Freedom of Information Act made them release most of the files. The National Security Agency (NSA) admits it has withheld more than 100 UFO related documents, the CIA still has about 50 and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) says it's withholding six. UFOs have been investigated by every major government on earth, and are still being studied at the official level in China, France, Spain, the USSR, the USA, and the United Kingdom - to name but six leading nations. If UFOs were 'bunk', or of no great importance, do you really think every leading power and super power would make the same crass error and submit to this absurdity? "Yet... these nations (except one or two who are refreshingly open) play a dangerous game of double bluff. Their records and actions speak for themselves." (Randles, 8) Recently, Belgium's military has begun to work together with private groups to track UFOs and it has been called the most coordinated UFO investigation to date. On November 8, 1989, hundreds of people in two Belgian towns--Eupen and Wavre--reported seeing a dark grey deltoid shape, with one white light on each tip, gliding across the night sky. The unknown object, with a wingspan of 50 to 100 meters, was apparently silent and no one reported seeing it land. By March, 1990, everyone from farmers to teenagers to high-ranking military officers and professors claimed to have seen the UFO. On March 30th, controllers at a radar station in Glons detected a foreign object on their screens. They confirmed the slow moving blip with another station in Ghent. "At this point it had become a scientific problem deserving serious investigation," says Professor Leon Brenig, a physicist at the Free University of Brussels. "It couldn't be steel coming back into the atmosphere because the edges were smooth, not bent. It couldn't be a NATO aircraft because its capacity for flight seemed to outreach current technology. I decided it was worth my time." (Livermore, 75) Belgium's military contributed two F-16's, an expert crew, and instruments to hunt later that spring. When a watch group spotted something, they alerted the F-16's, which were equipped with infrared cameras to photograph the giant triangle. The pilots couldn't get photographs because of the deltoid's great speed. Engineers and physicists are analyzing radar images of the UFO. UFO photos are being analyzed by computer at Ecole Royale Militaire, the air force training school. Also, botanists are examining burn patterns in the fields where the triangle was reportedly seen. Aliens have also been accused of abducting people and inserting BB-sized implants into them. Abductee's stories are generally hard to prove and there is almost no evidence of alien abduction, except for occasional odd burn marks, and the people's descriptions, which tend to match up when they are closely reviewed by researchers. Many abductees describe the same scenery inside the UFO ships and the same aliens. According to UFO abduction expert, Budd Hopkins, ...a number of radiologists are privately doing MRI scans (magnetic resonance imaging) on people who claim they have been abducted by aliens--and that the aliens have inserted devices in their bodies or brains. But a neurosurgeon advised... that if, as claimed, implants exist somewhere above the upper nasal passages, then they are near the optic nerve. In that case, he says, "it would be very risky for a surgeon to try and get one out." What does Hopkins say about the prospect of actually validating these weird alien implants? "It'd have a devastating societal impact," he says, "I am not looking forward to something like this." (McCarthy, 81) The amount of information I found on all topics having to do with UFOs is overwhelming, to fully research, compile and document all the information would have called for me writing an entire book of my own. To fully get everything out of this subject, I suggest that you, the reader, look into the books and articles I have on the works cited sheet, so that you may discover what has been going on in our skies for millions of years. The UFOs are here, that much, I have no question about, because I and others have seen a UFO with our own eyes and that is enough to convince me. The evidence is there, its just a matter of finding it all. The government seems to be involved with covering up most UFO crashes and sightings, saying that the UFO was really something else or it was never there in the first place. But why would the world governments spend so much time and money investigating UFOs if they didn't exist? They would be wasting their energy. Therefore, I must conclude that they are investigating something. The thousands of pages of UFO documents generated by the CIA, FBI, Air Force, State Department, and other government agencies, which were released under the Freedom of Information Act, wouldn't be there if no one were interested and the government thought UFOs did not exist. There is something out there worth investigating. Works Cited Clark, Jerome. "Crash Landings." Omni December 1990: 92-93. Editors of Time-Life Books. The UFO Phenomenon. Alexandria: Time-Life Books, 1988. Huyghe, Patrick. "What the Government Isn't Saying About UFOs." Omni December 1990: 90-94. Jacobs, David M. "Unidentified Flying Object." Prodigy Academic American Encyclopedia. 1992 ed. Jueneman, Frederic B. "The UFO Incident." Research And Development May 1989: 49. Livermore, Beth. "Antimatter, UFO Update:" Omni July 1991: 75. McCarthy, Paul. "Antimatter, UFO Update:" Omni June 1991: 81. Randles, Jenny. The UFO Conspiracy: The First Forty Years. London: Javelin Books, 1987.