UFOs Still Flying 60 Years After Roswell

What Are The Odds That There Are Other Intelligent Beings In The Universe?

(CBS)  UFO sightings have been playing out on movie screens for over 50 years. With a little help from Hollywood, aliens in every shape and size have landed on earth either to wage war, like "Independence Day," make friends, like "E.T.," or even give existential advice, like Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories."

But in real life, between 3,000 and 4,000 sightings are documented in the U.S. every year, according to the "National UFO Reporting Center." Even President Jimmy Carter claimed to have a close encounter and, as a congressman, Gerald Ford pressed for a UFO investigation. More recently, a sighting last November at O'Hare airport made the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

So where can you hope to spot E.T.? Start in Roswell, N.M. From its local restaurants to its alien head lamp posts to its space-aged McDonald's, the town is like an intergalactic shrine. The main attraction, of course, is the international UFO Museum where Julie Shuster is the director.

"A majority of the people that come through our doors believe there is more out there. That there is life out there — that UFOs and extraterrestrial are totally plausible," she told CBS News technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg.

Roughly 2.5 million earthlings have visited this Roswell institution since its inception in 1992. That's about 160,000 every year. They've come from all 50 states and 35 countries. Some are just curious while others are firm believers.

"I was awakened in the middle of the night, the curtains were just glowing orange and just pulsating, and this loud noise humming sound, I got up and went to the window and looked out and there was one big as this ceiling hovering above my junkyard," Museum Visitor Dwaine Grammer said.

Shuster says they hear stories like this a lot.

"We get abductions," she said. "We had a man from Australia that came in, who felt he had been abducted. We got him in touch with a leading UFO abduction researcher. That's what we do."

But perhaps the most famous incident of all occurred in Roswell 60 years ago, when a local rancher heard an explosion and found mysterious debris on his property. Experts from the nearby Army air field were called in. Shuster's father was the public information officer.

"On July 8, 1947, he issued a press release under orders from Colonel William Blanchard, saying basically, 'We have in our possession a flying saucer,'" Shuster said. "Then on July 9th, 1947, General Rayme out of Fort Worth, issued the story that, 'No, it was a weather balloon.' And the story was kept quiet until 1979, when the first book was issued."

Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, a preeminent UFO Researcher, co-authored a book on Roswell, says maybe human beings are not the masters of the universe and maybe there are other civilizations out there.

"We know that the government knows a great deal about it and has kept it secret, successfully, for 60 years," he said. "We know that there's proof positive that the planet's being visited, that the government is lying."

The government eventually admitted that the crash stemmed from a top-secret effort to monitor Soviet-era nuclear testing.

"So the fact they lied and said it was a weather balloon instead of a Cold War technology does not make it an alien spacecraft," Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics' Society and publisher of Skeptic magazine, said. "When UFOlogists say, 'You know the government lies to people,' Well, no kidding. I mean you needed UFOs to understand that?"

But Friedman, who has spent the last three decades lecturing on why space aliens are real, doesn't buy it. He conducts his lectures armed with photographs of alleged UFO sightings, which are all saucer shaped.

"Well, if you want an ideal flying vehicle, think about it," he said. "It can literally fly circles around anything we got flying, but it can hover, move straight up, straight down. We don't have things that can do that."

Many of the images also appear grainy. Friedman says that doesn't mean they are not real.

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, now there's good reason," he said. "I talked to a cop who was standing outside his police car, always has a camera in the car, traffic accidents, that sort of thing. Saucer comes. Goes right over the car. Is he thinking about the camera? Heck, no. He's astonished by the saucer."

Shermer says he receives a lot of mail from people who say they had encounters with UFOs at 3 a.m. while driving down a deserted rural road, where it always seems to happen.

"It's not like, 'I was sitting there in Dodgers Stadium with 50,000 other people, Barry Bonds is up to bat and a UFO came over,' you know," he said. "Why does that never happen?"

But Friedman is an unwavering believer and says we don't understand what aliens are doing because they are here for their own purposes, not to satisfy us. He is not alone in his convictions. A CBS News poll last year revealed that one in five Americans believe that intelligent beings from other planets have made contact with humans on earth. And almost half of all Americans think there is intelligent life beyond our planet.

"Any day now we could have an existential shock when it's announced that scientists have identified an earth-like twin in outer space," said Professor Michio Kaku, a theoretical scientist at City College. "A new wave of satellites is going up in orbit, which could settle the question once and for all. And we hope to find other planets with liquid oceans that can perhaps recreate the conditions for life that we found on the planet Earth."

Even before we find that life, Kaku says, it may already have found us.

"I've looked at a lot of UFO sightings and the one that really sends shivers up your spine is the famous JAL sighting," he said. "We had a JAL, Japan Airlines airliner, where the pilots, seasoned Japanese pilots, saw something in the distance. It was tracked by radar."

For now, the most definitive UFO sightings remain at the movies, where aliens are not shy about making themselves known. Shermer says he needs concrete proof to believe they exist in real life.

"I say the same thing to the alien abductees and the UFOlogists that I say to the Big Foot people and the Lock Ness people," Shermer said. "Fine, you might be right, but show me the body. Where is the Big Foot body? Where is the Lock Ness creature's that we can dissect and take a photograph of. Put it in National Geographic. Everybody can study it."

But even though Friedman has never himself seen a UFO or alien, he remains focused on proving their existence.

"I chased neutrons and gamma rays for 14 years; I never saw one," he said. "I can't give you one and say, 'Here's what I'm talking about. Well, they're there, but you can't see 'em. Don't worry about it.' I've never seen Tokyo. It's there. Most of us learn about the world, not by first-hand experience. And so, I don't need to see a flying saucer."

For Julie Schuster, the proof is simple: "My daddy said – and my dad never lied – he said it was real."

[brianbwb-2009]

UFO is an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object. Anything in the air that cannot be identified is a UFO, a prototype aircraft, a flock of flying mammals, an unusually shaped kite, swamp gas ignition, ball lightning, anything in the air that cannot be readily identified at the time of sighting.

So yes, I can say there are definitely UFOs.

Now as to whether there are UFOs containing aliens from another place in the cosmos, that is another question.

[njr148]

Mankind has the desire to worship. Many North American's have rejected the almighty living God as their creator, so now they are on the search for answers........and UFO's seem to be a safe solution to many people's questions.
Genesis 1:1 actually is the beginning to the true answer.....search no farther, you can find your answers in the Word of God, The Bible, the best selling book and most translated book in the world.

[byrdjenkins]

Ever wonder why the common alien (Greys) have so many similar features to man. Ie. Stands on two legs, two eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Flying saucers are not actually space ships - they are time machines. Aliens are not from another planet - they are humans from the distant future coming back in time to observe where they went wrong. They are trying there best not to be noticed in order to not throw the future too far out of whack.

[tnt1954]

most ufo's who come to earth are fugitives
after escaping from a prison in another
galaxy, they know we feel sorry for them,
hide them out. we give them sanctuary.
we will protect e.t. if he calls home,
they'll come down and return him to trial.
e.t. do not call home.

[tnt1954]

chariots of the gods, is best documentary
i have ever seen about this subject.

[tnt1954]

even the devil knows god is real. he's
scared of him. war in heaven. lucifer
kicked out. tried to revolt against god.
was tired of him being the eternal father.
he wanted to be god for awhile. by very
daffynishion, devil lived. and still does.
oh, you may think he was cast into the
fiery pit, by jesus who said, depart from
me ye accursed into everlasting fire prepared
for the devil and his angels, and then
everything was just hunky dory after that.
but god has a special plan to bedevil us all
with devil's food cake and deviled eggs and
deviled ham. getting hot out isn't it.
and hotter and hotter, and more and more sinful.
a sin, is a violation of a code or law.
how many laws did you accidentally break
today. i broke all kinds of them. because
there are so many laws on the books, its
impossible to be alive. the bible says
the wages of sin is death. see christ
did not come to abolish the law and the prophets
as the bible says, but to fulfill them.
easter honey bunny. sinner. not all who
say lord, lord will be saved. from what?

Very early one morning, trying to get a good telescope view of a distant comet as it rose a little ahead the sun, I was stunned to see five UFO%u2019s.

As a trained scientist, I never believed in them but here were five glowing objects flying in a perfect V formation, heading east toward Baltimore Harbor at an extreme rate of speed.

After checking out the comet, daylight forced me to put the telescope back in my shed. I walked across the lawn toward my house and there, in the sky the early morning sun revealed the same five objects, now heading west.

They were ducks. Apparently their eastward flight had just caught the above-ground rays of the sun enough to make them glow but not reveal details of shape. The larger %u201Csize%u201D one mentally assigns a UFO made them seem much farther away and therefore they seemed to be moving much faster.

Had I not by chance glanced up at the daylight sky, I would probably be swearing to all who would listen how I had witnessed five UFOs. I wonder how many other claims, made in earnest, have similar explanations.

Very early one morning, trying to get a good telescope view of a distant comet as it rose a little ahead the sun, I was stunned to see five UFO%u2019s.

As a trained scientist, I never believed in them but here were five glowing objects flying in a perfect V formation, heading east toward Baltimore Harbor at an extreme rate of speed.

After checking out the comet, daylight forced me to put the telescope back in my shed. I walked across the lawn toward my house and there, in the sky the early morning sun revealed the same five objects, now heading west.

They were ducks. Apparently their eastward flight had just caught the above-ground rays of the sun enough to make them glow but not reveal details of shape. The larger %u201Csize%u201D one mentally assigns a UFO made them seem much farther away and therefore they seemed to be moving much faster.

Had I not by chance glanced up at the daylight sky, I would probably be swearing to all who would listen how I had witnessed five UFOs. I wonder how many other claims, made in earnest, have similar explanations.

[huanaco]

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT AMERICA IS IN NEED OF ALL TYPES OF STUPIDITY , THE UFO ISSUE IS A FANTASY, HOLLYWOOD IS TO BLAME FOR IT, WITH SO MANY MOVIES ABOUT THIS SUBJECT PEOPLE TEND TO BELIEVE THEY ARE TRUE. WAKE UP AMERICA .

[gdwarner]

ToolMangler --

Your snippets are from two famous SF stories.

The one where the stars began to wink out is from Arthur C. Clark's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (check WikiPedia).

The other is called "Knock," by Frederick Brown ... which, if I recall correctly, was a 'story-within-a-story.' Again, check WikiPedia.

As for the topic in question, it is just too broad to post a short comment ... but I will note that on a recent Coast to Coast AM, Stanton Friedman and Michael Schermer had a debate about UFOs ... and Mr. Shermer was beaten pretty badly, because Stanton could cite sources, while Dr. Shermer could only say things like, "Yeah, but where's the aliens? Why don't they land on the White House lawn?"

In light of the Phoenix Lights incident (there's a book about it if you don't know what that was ... and YouTube has video), the "land on the white house lawn" idea just doesn't wash.

Then there's the STS-80 video, shot from one of the space shuttle missions, of some strange happenings in the distance ... all the weird things going on in the Soviet Union (see Paul Stonehill's book) ... and the strange psychic abilities exhibited by some abductees (see Brad Steiger's "Gods of Aquarius" for info on that).

But, as I said, so much stuff, too little space to do it justice ... and Roswell ... still more stuff coming from more dying witnesses to this day!

--gdw