Chapter 3. UFOs

Lights in the sky

The sky is full of lights, some, like a supernova or the planet Venus, like meteors, comets, and fireballs, come in from outer space, some come from the earth, like St. Elmo’s fire, the glint from a satellite, or the lights of an airliner, and some, like aurora borealis, come from in between. Distance and a layer of heat can make a lake appear on a desert, so why couldn’t they seem to round the corners of familiar things, a missile test, a jet, a bird, an unexpected reflection, or a weather balloon, so that it seemed like something else entirely? Clouds and temperature inversions can do funny things, take odd shapes, and the rest could just be swamp gas. People are funny, too, and we may be too easy to fool, but everything isn’t as simple as black and white. We see what we see, and we’re not crazy. You can take our stories for what they are and judge for yourself our sincerity and credulity.

Historical sightings

In the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the princess of the moon, Kaguya, returns with a delegation on a flying saucer that arrived with a strange blinding light. In the 12th century in southwest England, religious pilgrims reported a fire-belching dragon that emerged from the sea and flew off into the sky. An aerial battle occurred over Nuremberg in 1561 at dawn in which flying disks, rods, globes, and a large black triangle fought each other causing them all to burn and crash to the ground.

Identified types

When we say they are unidentified, we mean they’re not manmade, although, of course, we could be wrong. Some are shaped like sausages or cigars. These have been called mystery airships. Many are shaped like saucers or discs with a bump on the top. These run about thirty feet in diameter and are gray or metallic with various lights. Some are green fireballs. These usually appear around military installations and shadow the flights of military jets. Some are very large black triangles with pulsing colored lights on each corner that move slowly, usually at night. UFOs of each type tend to cluster together around the same area of the world, in the same period of time. Maybe the power of suggestion is a factor, or maybe the creatures that fly these aircraft always want to have the latest model.

Coincidences

Something flew overhead on a lonely country road and disappeared behind a stand of trees. When they got to where they thought it landed, grass had been matted down in a circle. When, working as a night watchman, he watched a flying saucer approach and a humanoid descend from it on a ladder, he was completely paralyzed except for his eyes.

Government cover-up

Fearing the public’s “probable alarmist tendencies,” the Air Force and the CIA decided to conceal their investigations of UFO phenomena. It was abundantly clear that each reported sighting influenced what people would see next inspiring copycats and hoaxes. Reports of UFOs multiplied, including many crashed UFOs and alien corpses, even though one might wonder why superior and advanced technology would crash so often. Who could believe a government study that debunks every UFO sighting when the Air Force was whisking away all the evidence?

If we only knew

Obviously, UFOs can do things that we with our existing technology are not able to do; therefore, if we took these phenomena seriously and could discover their secrets, there could be enormous benefits to humanity., not to mention providing occupations for kooks and entertainment for the public.