By Bob Hohler, Globe Staff
April 14th 1997,
The Boston Globe (City Edition)
WASHINGTON -- No one cited Hale-Bopp or Heaven's Gate when a UFO group, backed by an astronaut who has walked on the moon, called last week for hearings on an alleged government cover-up of earthly visits by extraterrestrial life forms.
The only references to "Independence Day" or the "X Files" were uttered by Dr. Steven M. Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, who assailed the sci-fi fare as part of the "90 percent of what people are exposed to on this subject: rubbish, complete and utter nonsense."
Greer and the former NASA astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, told reporters and congressional officials in separate closed-door briefings that their assessment of extraterrestrial activities, although widely disputed, requires urgent federal attention for the good of humankind.
Greer, Mitchell and a panel of "witnesses" asserted that several extraterrestrial civilizations -- working together from bases within the solar system and possibly from temporary outposts under water on Earth -- regularly visit the planet and are prepared for wide-scale contact with humans.
All that stands between such an intergalactic moment, Greer asserted, is human civilization reaching out with a new foreign diplomacy.
"What has been lacking is an appropriate response from planet Earth," said Greer, an emergency room physician from Asheville, N. C., who has spent several years examining whether UFOs exist. "Look at our response so far: ridicule by the media, denials by our officials and frequent shooting by our military assets."
The group's push for hearings into extraterrestrial matters and the government's role in the phenomenon comes amid a sci-fi craze.
Mostly a multimillion-dollar entertainment boom, the fad took a dark turn last month when 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., believing that a spacecraft shielded by the Hale-Bopp comet would deliver them to a "level beyond human."
Among the testimony that Greer's group presented in a Washington hotel last Wednesday and Thursday was that of former military pilots, radar operators and radio engineers who told tales of close encounters with alien spacecraft. One purported incident was said to have involved an alien spaceship hovering over a cluster of B-52 bombers one night in 1969 at Loring Air Force Base in northern Maine.
The group also presented several hundred pages of UFO reports and related documents, most of them obtained from government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act.
Air Force Secretary Harold Brown told the House panel in 1966 that there was no evidence of visitors from space.
Nor is there evidence now, according to NASA officials and several scientists studying the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Ed Weiler, chief scientist for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and director of the agency's Origins investigation of life in the universe, said astronomers know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.
"In my personal opinion, the odds that somewhere in the universe there is life at least as intelligent as us are 100 percent," Weiler said. "But I haven't seen any hard evidence that extraterrestrial life or spacecraft has visited us."
Officials at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a privately funded science project in California, agreed. After years of research, the California project has yielded no hard evidence that extraterrestrial life or spacecraft exist or are likely to appear soon, said a spokeswoman, Tanaqqi Leonian.
"The scientific community doesn't support something like that," Leonian said of the assertions by Greer's group. "It's more for the `X Files' fanatics."
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the Air Force investigated 12,618 reports of UFOs between 1947 and 1969 and found no evidence they were "extraterrestrial vehicles."
Bacon also dismissed longstanding assertions made by Greer's group and others that the US government continues to hold wreckage of an alien spacecraft and the bodies of its occupants the military retrieved, perhaps as early as 1947.
At the White House, where President Clinton has requested $1 billion over five years to fund the NASA Origins search, there has been no formal response to a written request by the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence to convene hearings on the group's assertions.
Clinton's spokesman, Michael D. McCurry, citing the Pentagon findings, said there would be no push for congressional hearings. "The White House is pushing a lot of things on Congress," he said, "but that is not one of them."
Greer, who has met privately with members of Congress and the Clinton administration to press for hearings, asserted that evidence of extraterrestrial activity has surfaced since 1966. Yet no one in government has been willing to support his campaign.
By Bob Hohler, Globe Staff
April 15th 1997,
The Boston Globe (City Edition)
No one cited Hale-Bopp or Heaven's Gate when a UFO group, backed by an astronaut who has walked on the moon, called last week for hearings on an alleged government coverup of earthly visits by extraterrestrial life forms.
Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the former NASA astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, told reporters and congressional officials that their assessment of extraterrestrial activities, although widely disputed, requires urgent federal attention for the good of humankind.
Greer, Mitchell and a panel of "witnesses" asserted that several extraterrestrial civilizations - working together from bases within the solar system and possibly from temporary outposts under water on Earth - regularly visit the planet and are prepared for widescale contact with humans. All that stands between such an intergalactic moment, Greer asserted, is a new foreign diplomacy.
"What has been lacking is an appropriate response from planet Earth," said Greer, an emergency room physician from Asheville, N.C.
The group's push for hearings comes amid a sci-fi craze. The fad took a dark turn last month when 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., believing that a spacecraft shielded by the Hale-Bopp comet would take them.
Among the testimony that Greer's group presented in a Washington hotel last week was that of former military pilots, radar operators and radio engineers who told tales of close encounters with alien spacecraft. One purported incident involved an alien spaceship hovering over a cluster of B2 bombers in 1969 at Loring Air Force Base in northern Maine.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the Air Force had found no evidence of "extraterrestrial vehicles."
By Kevin POTTER
April 16th 1997,
The News & Observer Raleigh, NC
It was nearly midnight when Steve Lee spotted the cluster of 30 odd yellow lights over his North Raleigh neighborhood.
They looked like fireworks - but didn't fizzle and fade. They reminded him of hovering helicopters - but didn't make a sound. He watched for 10 minutes as they moved slowly to the north.
"I was amazed because I had never seen anything like this," said Lee, who called the Raleigh police to report the unidentified flying objects.
The officer who checked it out didn't find invading aliens or even strange lights, but he did have a close encounter with another phenomenon: The persistent and growing belief in UFOs.
That fascination - some would say obsession - has exploded onto the American mainstream, racing down the information superhighway into home pages created by UFO enthusiasts, and fueled by scientific discoveries that suggest life may be possible on other planets.
UFO interest even touches the highest levels of government. Last week, a former NASA astronaut and a doctor from Asheville called on Congress to conduct hearings into an alleged cover-up of extraterrestrial visits to Earth.
The fascination turned to horror last month with the mass suicide in California of 39 Heaven's Gate cult members. Those followers of Marshall Applewhite claimed that an alien spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet would whisk them away once they shed their "earthly containers."
Those cult members - many of them avid viewers of the "X-Files" and "Star Trek" TV series - took their own lives despite 50 years of skepticism by scientists and government officials.
Many UFO researchers trace the first credible sighting to pilot Kenneth Arnold's June 24, 1947, report of nine disk-shaped "flying saucers" near Washington's Mount Rainier. Two weeks later, New Mexico residents reported that an alien spacecraft had crashed near the town of Roswell.
Since then, technology has expanded human ability to understand - and debunk - strange sights in the skies. But those advances haven't dispelled UFO interest. Indeed, they may have fueled the belief that we are regularly visited by beings from other worlds.
A 1996 Newsweek poll, which surveyed 769 American adults, found that 48 percent believe UFOs are real, and 29 percent think humans have made contact with aliens.
Among the believers - although he prefers to call himself a "non-skeptic" - is George Fawcett of Lincolnton, who has investigated 1,200 UFO reports over the past 53 years.
For the first seven of those years, Fawcett was skeptical. But then, on a July morning in 1951, he saw a strange object hovering over the campus of Lynchburg College in Virginia. "I estimate that 300 feet above the ground was this disk-shaped object, and it was orange," he said. "This persuaded me pretty quickly that there was something to UFO sightings."
Now a popular speaker at UFO conventions across the country, Fawcett wants to establish a $5 million UFO museum in North Carolina.
He attributes the growing UFO acceptance in part to scientific discoveries that suggest the conditions necessary for life may exist on other worlds. Astronomers theorize that primitive life may have existed on Mars and Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. And they believe they have found planets orbiting faraway stars, some of which may harbor life.
The information superhighway is adding to the fire. An Internet surfer can wade for weeks through Internet home pages created by UFO believers. Some insist that extraterrestrials regularly visit Earth from great distances, or from different dimensions - able to avoid human detection.
That's nonsense, according to skeptics. They say UFOs are the result of less exciting causes such as natural phenomena, military maneuvers and over-active imaginations.
"I can almost guarantee, if you spend three hours staring at the night sky, you can see something you can't explain," said Philip J. Klass, a contributing editor to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine.
In 30 years of investigating UFO sightings, Klass hasn't found a shred of credible evidence that beings from other worlds have stopped by our corner of the galaxy.
As assistant director of the Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Austin Guiles is no stranger to UFO reports. But at least half the sightings he hears about are easily explained.
Sometimes a "UFO" is the planet Venus, he said. Other times, it may be a military airplane or an atmospheric testing rocket launched by NASA from Wallops Island, Va.
"With all the military activity on the east coast of the state, we get some strange things that people see that can be explained by military maneuvers," Guiles said.
If the U.S. government is to be believed - and some UFO believers doubt that it should - the Air Force determined in 1969 that only 701 of 12,618 reported UFO sightings lacked clear explanations. That followed the military's famous "Project Blue Book" UFO investigation between 1947 and 1969.
Fawcett - known by friends as "Mr. UFO" - thinks the government isn't telling all it knows, but objects in the sky can't be kept secret.
The nation is experiencing an upswing in UFO reports, he said, part of what he calls a 10-year cycle. In North Carolina, where most reports are from the western Piedmont and the mountains, that has included a spate of about five sightings late last year.
On one occasion, two people driving on N.C. 66 near Rural Hall, in Forsyth County, said they witnessed a floating object with a dome-shaped top and a triangular underside. Jack Edwards told a local newspaper that the UFO, which he and his boss saw about 6:45 a.m. on Dec. 19, was "as big as a jumbo jet."
An emergency room physician from Asheville, meanwhile, believes that several alien civilizations have bases in our solar system.
Dr. Steven M. Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, said human leaders should contact the extraterrestrials in the neighborhood.
Greer traveled to Washington last week with former astronaut Edgar Mitchell to encourage a new national UFO policy. Greer and Mitchell, who has walked on the moon, also urged congressional officials to investigate an alleged UFO cover-up by the government.
"What has been lacking is an appropriate response from planet Earth," he told a reporter for The Boston Globe. "Look at our response so far: ridicule by the media {and} denials by our officials."
Klass, the skeptic, acknowledges that many regular folks believe in UFOs. He attributes UFO mania to "pseudo-documentary" television programs, such as "Unsolved Mysteries," and to leaders of the nationwide UFO-abduction movement.
It's generally harmless for Americans to believe they've glimpsed alien spacecraft, he said. But he has long believed that the UFO abduction movement - led by Whitley Strieber, author of the 1987 best seller "Communion," among others - would prove "dangerous."
"When people get caught up in this, there's no convincing them otherwise," he said.
UFO enthusiast Fawcett insists that misinformation and misuse of the Internet are to blame for the Heaven's Gate tragedy. That incident shouldn't be lumped with legitimate experiences pointing to the existence of UFOs controlled by "non-humans," he said.
His investigations have indicated that 20 percent of UFO sightings are legitimate, he said. "They're not coming from drunks and crackpots."
Unfortunately, according to Charlotte resident George Lund, many credible people are reluctant to talk about UFOs. "As soon as they start talking about UFOs in certain circles, they're automatically ridiculed," said Lund, who is assistant director of the North Carolina chapter of the Mutual UFO Network.
For that reason, the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Wash., does not release the names and addresses of the people who phone the organization's hotline.
"At least 50 percent of the reported sightings are not worth the ink they're printed with," said Peter Davenport, the group's director. But others are lent credence by credible sources and large groups of witnesses, he said.
Specifically, he recalled a barrage of calls in March about a cluster of "bizarre" lights passing over Arizona. According to a document on the organization's web site, witnesses said the object or objects - described with red, yellow or white lights - passed silently overhead.
"All of the observers volunteered during their telephoned reports that they had strained their ears, trying to hear some sound from the object, but none was heard, which contributed to the eerie nature of the sighting," it said. Those sightings seem at least vaguely similar to Lee's over North Raleigh.
Lt. M.E. Matthews, the Raleigh police officer who investigated that UFO report, doesn't have any theories about the origin of the mystery lights. Nor did he file a police report about them. "It's tough to investigate UFOs," he admitted. "We do what you can do - we go out and look."
Lee, the North Raleigh resident, doesn't think that law enforcement officials take UFO sightings like his seriously. Someone should have made more of an effort to find out the origin of the mysterious lights over Brentwood Avenue, he said.
"There was definitely something out there, and somebody should have investigated that, somebody should have sent aircraft up there," said Lee, 29.
Lee said he believes there's a logical explanation for the lights, which he watched for 10 to 15 minutes. Several possibilities crossed his mind that March 4 evening: Top-secret military aircraft. Debris falling from space. Alien vehicles passing above Raleigh.
"I believe there's a lot of stuff out there; I'm sure there is," he said. "We're not the only ones. It's big out there."
Copyright © Dow Jones and Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Washington Digest
April 15th 1997, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
WASHINGTON - No one cited Comet Hale-Bopp or Heaven's Gate when a
UFO group, backed by an astronaut who has walked on the moon, called
last week for hearings on what they say is a government cover-up of
earthly visits by extraterrestrial life forms. Greer, Mitchell and a panel of "witnesses" asserted that several
extraterrestrial civilizations - working together from bases within
the solar system and possibly from temporary outposts under water on
Earth - regularly visit the planet and are prepared for widespread
contact with humans.
Copyright Dow Jones and Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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