New Pentagon UFO files detail sightings over Catalina Island
A new batch of files from the Pentagon detailed apparent UFO sightings over Catalina Island in the 1940s and 1950s.
A report from three Boy Scouts in August 1952 says the group claimed to see a silver object fly faster than a typical jet at an unknown altitude. A record from November 1953 says a man reported seeing a round, purplish-white object over the island remaining stationary before moving toward Los Angeles.
Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, said we should take these newly declassified reports with a grain of salt.
While he believes there is life beyond our solar system, he's skeptical of the spaceships and green aliens that would drop by to check out Earth and get spotted by Boy Scouts on a camping trip.
"It's hard to imagine coming all this way and then flying by for a couple of hours and then leaving," Diamond said.
He notes that the documents dropped on Friday are from an era when science fiction was king and advances in space research and technology had imaginations running wild.
"There are more pictures of UFOs from that period than there are now, and we have literally billions of very capable high-resolution cameras in the hands of people all over the world," Diamond said.
He did concede that some eyewitness accounts of UFOs could be legitimate.
"The statistical evidence is such that the probability that there is no other life out there in the universe is pretty much zero, but that doesn't mean it's easy to find or easy to interact with or encounter," Diamond said.
