UFOs - A Second Look ( american singles interest )
The truth is out there - somewhere
By Randy Fitzgerald

To James And Fawn Clemens of Kingman, Arizona, the bright but fuzzy amber light hanging above the northwestern horizon seemed odd. It was 8 p.m. ,March 13,1997,and the couple, both 42, were in their yard.
Looking through binoculars, the Clemenses seemed to see five intense orange lights, in a "V" formation, heading southeast. Then reports began streaming into locall law enforcement agencies, media outlets and civilian UFO groups.
Retired Northwest Airlines Captain Trig Johnston says an object the size of 25 airliners floated slowly
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Sky watchers - James and Fawn Clemens were
among many who saw the mystery lights

and soundlessly past his home in north Scottsdale. "It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen, " he told Reader's Digest. A 43-second videotape, recorded at 8.28 p.m. by man in north Phoenix, shows five white lights in a "V" formation. At 8.30 p.m. the cockpit crew of an America West 757 airliner a 17000 feet near Lake Pleasant, Arizona, noticed the lights off to their right and just above them.
"There's a UFO! " co-pilot John Middleton kidded to pilot Larry Campbell. They queried the regional air - traffic - control centre in Albuquerque, Nie Mexico. A controller radioed back that it was a formation of CT-144s flying at 19000 feet.
Overhearing this exchange, someone claiming to be pilot in the formation radioed Middleton. "We 're Canadian Snowbirds flying Tutors, a man said.
The Canadian Snowbirds are the elite air - show performance team of the Canadian air force. Snowbird pilots fly CT--144s, a two - seat training jet nicknamed the Tutor, which has a single landing light in its nose.
But Captain Michael Perry, spuadron logistics officer for the Snowbirds, denied that any of his planes were in Arizona that month. " We don't travel in a V-shaped formation, and we don't cruise with landing lights on , "he told."

Officials at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas and Edwards Air Force Base in Rosamund, California, all denied that any of their planes were responsible for the sightings, Federal Avialtion Administration officials profess to be baffled. " We don't have any knowledge of the incident, " says Martin Hardy, the Phoenix air traffic-control manager.
Was it a secret military excercise ,an elaborate hoax - or something else?Themass sightings of whatever flew over northern Arizona that night have added new fuel to the UFO controversy

And Old Mystery

Unexplained aerial phenomena have been observed for centuries, but the modern UFO era began in 1947, when there was an unprecedented number of reported sightings,Observers have offered a wide range of reasons for the surge - from Cold War hysteria to visitors from outer space investigation nuclear explosions.The US Air Force investigated some 12618 sightings over the next 22 years. Most were explained as misidentifications of natural atmospheric phenomena, such as meteors or planets, or as weather ballons and other man made flying craft. Still 701 remained unexplained, and Northwestern University astronomer J.Allen Hynek, the Air Force's scientific consultant on UFOs, concluded that some of these could be extra terrestrial in origin.That view was challenged by a 1969 University of Colorado study funed by the US Air Force, which examined 59 of the more celebrated cases. Some were also revealed as misidentifications of hoaxes. Although 23 still remained unexplained, project director Dr Edward Condon concluded that no evidence of extraterrestial visitation existed and "further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.Nevertheless, UFO reports continue, and interest in the subject remains widespread. In 1997 a panel of nine scientists from France, Germany and the United States, all affiliated with universities, laboratories and observatories, examined the reports of eight UFO investtigators, The panel, funded by Laurance Rockefeller, a wealthy philanthropist long interested in the subject, took up cases where physical evidence of some sort existed such as radare trackings, damage to vegetation, or documentable injuries to witnesses.The panel concluded that some of the incidents may have been due to rare atmospheric phenomena. They found no proof that any UFOs were extraterrestrial. But they didn't rule out the possibility either. The panel's report was met with scepticism from the committee for the scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a group that specialises in debunking fringe science. CSICOP fellow Philip Klass, a contributing editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology, dismisses the idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial: " In 50 years there hasn't been a single piece of credible physical evidence." Perhaps not. At any rate, I've taken a second look at a pair of the cases examined by the Rockefeller panel, interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing official documents.Like the lights over Arizona, these episodes remain fascinating - and mysterious.

Molten MetalAt

7.45 P.M. on December 17,1977 ,Mike and Criss Moore, both 24,were driving to visit Mike's mother in Council Bluffs, Iowa , when they say they saw a bright red ball glowing above the treetops about a kilometre away Three other people reported watching an object fall in Big Lake Park. Motorists who converged on the site found a pond levee glowing redorange from a mass of molten metal that was boiling over the frozen ground.Council Bluffs assistant fire chief Jack Moore, Mike's father, arrived within 15 minutes to discover " a big puddle of metal about four inchesthick, bubbling and red in spots.Local astronomer Robert Allen for warded samples of the debris to metallurgists at Iowa State University and the US Air Force's Foreign Technology Division at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.The sample was composed chiefly of iron with small amounts of nickel and chromium , making it carbon steel. " Analytic results make it highly unlikely that the material is of meteoric origin, " reported Robert Hansen, director of the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State.Goverment scientists offered no explanation for the object's origin, but were certain the material was unrelated to military or space projects. "Re entering space craft debris does not impact the earth's surface in a molten state, " colonel Charles Senn wrote to Allen in 1978. Was this an elaborate hoax? Allen could find only one local foundry with the equipment to produce molten metals. It had not been operating on the night of the incident. "Even then, "adds Allen, "no one can explain how a thousand pounds of molten metal could have been dropped from such a height. "

Fire in the sky

Shortly after 9 P.M. on December 29,1980. Betty Cash,52, was driving through a pine forest on a deserted rural road to her home in Dayton, Texas. In the car was her friend Vickie Landrum, 57,and Landrum's grandson, six year olf colby. The two woman say a brilliant object descended directly ahead of them, spitting flames from its underside. Cash jammed on her brakes and stopped about 50 metres from the object. Immediately they felt intense heat inside the car and heard a loud roaring sound.They got out of the car and stared at a blinding light and a metallic structure, big as the 60 metre tall water tower in Dayton, and shaped like a diamond with a blunt top. The object seemed to be struggling to ascend above the treetops, emitting blasts of fire and a continuous roar that reminded the women of a shrill welding torch, only much louder.After ten minutes the object rose above the trees, tilted itself onto one side, and began moving slowly south. Then,they say,up to 23 helicopters eventually appeared, apparently following the object.On the drive home, Landrum, Cash and Cloby said they suffered headaches and later nausea, and over the next few days experienced bouts of vomiting, diarrhoea and skin burn. Cash also lost large clumps of hair, and on January 2,1981, she was admitted to hospital as a burns patient. She spent four of the next five weeks under supervised care.Cash and Landrum contacted the state's police agencies and military bases, but no one could provide an explanation. Cash was advised to contact John Schuessler, a NASA contractor, project manager for the Space Shuttle Flight Operations, and an authority on UFOs. Schuessler and NASA physicist Alan Holt also interviewed Landrum and Colby, who led them to the encounter site." Where the object came down, the highway's yellow line wiggled from the melting of a heat blast," Schuessler told "A roughly twenty foot circle of the road surface appeared to have melted and then resolidified. On the trees about twenty fet up there were blackened areas facing the road."Schuessler found five witnesses who had observed a similar UFO the same night:another eight witnesses, including a Dayton police officer, claimed to have seen the swarm of helicopters but not the UFO. Over the next five years Schuessler tried without success to identify the helicopters and where they came from.The incident was examined by an Inspector General from the Department of the Army. He found no anser, but did condlude that there "was no perception that anyone was trying to exaggerate the truth."Meanwhile, health problems continued to plague cash, Landrum and Colby. Cash moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where, as Dr Bryan McClelland said in an interview, "The illness that she suffered after her exposure was an absolute classic radiation injury in which she lost skin and haie, then had diarrhoea and vomiting . She could not have made it up."

A New Dimension

Von Eshleman, a retired Stanford University electrial engineer who cochaired the Rockefeller panel. says the panel acknowledges that a few recent UFO cases may " have their origins in secret military activities. "Still, the explanation for others may lie elsewhere. Computer scientist Jacques Valle, an panel adviser, notes that "the UFO debate has always been locked into two points of view that it's either all nonsense or it's extraterrestrial. Maybe the real answer will be stranger than we can now imagine."