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[Occurred : 11/7/2006 16:30 (Entered as : 110706 16:30)

Reported: 11/21/2006 4:08:16 PM 16:08 Posted: 12/7/2006

Location: Chicago O'Hare Airport, IL]

These dates tell us a lot. As is typical of UFO sightings, the person giving the interview describing the object as "metallic" or "moving at high speed" or "not like a natural object" only does so after days or weeks pass after the actual sighting.

One would think that if the observer really saw what he described, then he would rush to tell everyone about it right away and describe it the same way right from the start but, for some reason, they always wait.

It's almost as if, in the weeks that follow his sighting of some unusual and impressive weather movements in the stratosphere, his memory of the event slowly begins to change as he plays it over and over in his mind, and maybe it DID move a lot faster, and maybe it DID have a metallic look, and maybe it DID look like something artificial, and just MAYBE I should tell everyone all about it because it sure would make an interesting story and the public will want to hear what I have to tell them......

Reality check: This is how people think and it's part of being human! It doesn't mean there is something wrong with a person's brain or that someone is stupid or being deceitful. People just love to tell a good story (even more than they enjoy hearing one) and it's natural for all of us to B.S. ourselves in order to create and perpetuate a good story.

I have been looking at the UFO phenomeon for decades. My father and our neighbor saw one. They rarely talked about it, they just shrugged it off, no big deal. A good friend of mine saw one fairly close, a couple of hundred yards from him, in the Gaspe Peninsula, as a field geologist.He only told a few friends about it, and rarely speaks about the sighting.He was alone at the time and took a picture of it at twilight, after he put a couple of miles distance between him and the object. It was glowing a deep scarlet color.

The real fact is that we have a consistent unexplained phenomenon, which is really tied up in a lot of emotional hoo haw, and denial. Perhaps you one day will get to see one yourself. The individuals I just spoke of were ordinary salt of the earth people, not blow hards, not people who " like to tell a story." If anything they are masters of understatement in my experience, knowing them as I do.

So the old, "you didn't see what you thought you saw" $hit really doesn't work anymore. It simply proves how invested such people are in their own world view. Alvin Toffler talks a lot about this phenomenon in his work about paradigm shift. And if you pretend they are not there hard enough, they will just go away.

Sorry, they have not gone away for centuries, and the history of UFO sightings is well documented for thousands of years, if you include the corpus of Indian works in Sanskrit.

So keep talkin your talk, while the rest of us try to figure out what these things are as phenomenon. But please, stop telling people that trained observers do not see what they thought they saw, especially if you yourself did not see it as an observer. Its just an insult to ordinary human intelligence.

"he would rush to tell everyone about it right away"

Maybe, but when I saw something in the sky like this, I told my wife and a close friend but it was really hard because I didn't want them to think I was wacko or be made fun of. Five of us saw it. We didn't go out and tell everyone because it sounded too weird.

While it is true that the mind can add details to a memory to change reality of the memory, that doesn't disprove all eye witness accounts of events.