Posted on 11/13/2007 1:23:06 PM PST by stainlessbanner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich may have been ridiculed for saying he had seen a UFO, but for some former military pilots and other observers, unidentified flying objects are no laughing matter.
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
"Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns ... which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters," they said in a statement released at a news conference.
The panellists from seven countries, including former senior military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an official investigation into UFO phenomena.
The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the U.S. presidential race last month when Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he had seen one.
Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported to have claimed UFO sightings.
Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or meteors. A panellist who once worked for Britain's Ministry of Defense said 5 percent of incidents cannot be explained.
But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper investigations, UFO activists say.
"It's a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or the government?" remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a jumbo jet in Alaska.
The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO investigations through the U.S. Air Force or NASA.
"It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this issue," said former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who said he was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.
The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in what was known as Project Blue Book. Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in operation.
"Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations," the Air Force said on its Web site.
YAUFOT!
(Yet another UFO thread!) LOL
Escalation ping
I believe there has to be intelligent life elsewhere, however I think they saw our political system here in the US and decided to move on. ;)
Dennis is gonna be “Swift-Saucered”.
OK...Name them or else the story is pure Bravo Sierra.
ping
QUACK! Call Dennis Kucinich.
I just knew that that’s what this article would be about - trying to cover for a lefty loon.
Can’t we just go and get the old “My Favorite Martian” episodes out of storage and rerun those?
There is a group of people who used to scan the sky all the time, made telescopes, and knew what they were looking at. They don’t often report UFOs because they know what they are looking at most of the time. There aren’t as many of these people because the skies really suck for amateur astronomy a lot of places, and UFO sightings have increased as those who know what the heck they are looking at has decreased.
My beliefs waver over UFOs...or actually whether there is intelligent life out there. There could be...I don’t know.
But once I watched some program on the subject. There was an interview with a seemingly normal, elderly gentleman who was describing his alleged encounter with a UFO. Went along very rationally, and just about had me convinced, until an interviewer asked the man to describe the space aliens. The man started off with this seemingly plausible description at first, until he said, “and they wore uniforms much like our Greyhound bus drivers.”
I never laughed so hard in my entire life.
This has all the markings of a Dem hit, like:
“Former US troops campaign for peace.”
“Former US generals call Bush Iraq strategy a failure.”
“Former CIA agents claim Bush Administration uses torture.”
“Former pilots and officials call for new U.S. UFO probe”
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER...EARTHLINGS.
Hopefully, the same delta-shaped craft with no lights will soon be unseen over Iran!!!
“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns ... which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.
????????????
I’m at a loss for words.
No, it’s true! I heard it on Coast-to-Coast last night!.........
When will we take the next step and tie 9/11 to UFO’s?? Think of all the DVDs somebody could sell to the tinfoil-hat crowd.
They’s a bunch of delta craft at the Atlanta airport
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