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People keep saying that but I don't see the similarity at all. Not even in the most superficial sense.

I will quote you only one of many examples:

"Fellowship of the Ring"; Gandalf falls to his "death" into the the crevass in at the bridge at Kazak-Dum (spelling?) while being pursued by the beastly Balrog. Later he returns in a somewhat altered form to help his friends defeat the forces of Darkness.

"Babylon 5"; Sheridan leaps/falls to his "death" into the crevass on the Shadow's home planet of Zaha'Dum while being pursued by the beastly Shadows. Later, he returns in a somewhat altered form to help his friends defeat the forces of Darkness (The Shadows).

Ok. Here's another:

"LOTR"; The last time the forces of Light and Dark battled in LOTR was thousands of years ago when Light won out in a final, pitched battle where all was but lost except for the efforts of one valiant warrior who then goes on to lead men as King.

"B5"; The last time the forces of Light and Dark battled in B5 was thousands of years ago when Light won out in a final, pitched battle except for the efforts of one valiant warrior (Sinclair on Babylon 4) who then goes on to lead men as King (Valen).

Check out Lurker's guide, JMS was pretty open about drawing heavily from LOTR. His defense was that LOTR is probably the ultimate good vs evil story told in the grand epic scale and he would be a fool not to take lessons from it and would be rude to not pay it the occasional homage.

I will quote you only one of many examples:

Your examples are created by stating situations in very broad terms that automatically downplay the differences. If you want to see that level of comparison as proof of similarity, that's up to you. But playing that same game, one can find comparisons between all sorts of things, including just about any epic science fiction or fantasy epic ever written. It's the whole Texas sharpshooter situation that produces things like that list of coincidental similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy. I can't say, for example, that I ever saw Sheridan as a Gandalf figure nor was the King in LotR a time traveller but if those comparisons work for you, go for it.

Every post I ever saw by JMS on the Babylon 5 newsgroup had him denying that he was emulating this work or that and, trust me, fans claimed he was borrowing/stealing from everything. Did he borrow elements here and there? I'm sure he did, either consciously or subconsciously. But there are only so many ways to write an epic and there are bound to be comparisons between any two epics. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be "master plot" books out there with formulas for different types of stories. A big reason why I don't try to find the similarities is that it annoys the heck out of authors to constantly be told that they stole everything from some other story. It annoyed Tolkien. From what I've seen of his response, it annoys JMS, too.