Thursday, January 24, 2002
UFO Sightings on the Rise in Gainesville Area
By JONATHAN LEWIS
Sun Staff Reporter
Lights in the sky? Little green men? Unidentified flying objects? It all sounds like a story from 1950's era New Mexico, or a more recent addition to the X-Files series. In Gainesville, reports were limited to the outside world until recently. An increase in reports of unidentified "black" spots in the night sky have locals searching the stars in hopes of a sighting, and more professional curiousity seems to be headed this way.
Not since the 1992 sighting of a UFO in Gulf Breeze, Florida has such a wide scale paranormal investigation been launched. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the head researcher for the Gulf Breeze "Magnetic UFO" team, was not available for comment, however, the Florida director of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) has scheduled a trip to Gainesville to view photographic evidence and speak with eyewitnesses.
Speculation on this new phenomenon is widespread. Are extraterrestrial objects flying the Gainesville night? While guiding her cart of groceries through the 13th Street Wal-Mart parking lot late in the evening of last Sunday, Evelyn Guaria looked up to the sky when the starlight overhead dimmed. "The lot got very dark all of a sudden. I looked up to see if the light overhead had gone out, but it was as if the entire sky had been covered over. Whatever it was, it was very near to the ground to hide the street lamp." The black spot then moved away, and she returned home to tell her husband. When Juan Alejandro Guaria heard his wife's story, he didn't discount it. He told the Sun, "I had heard stories like this from my grandmother many years ago, but it seemed like superstition. The day before Evelyn saw this shadow in the parking lot, a co-worker told me that he had seen something similar in his back yard. I believe what she saw."
The Guaria's are not alone. Although the Gainesville Police Department would not comment on the number of reports, they did acknowledge a rising number of reports involving unidentified shadows and black spots blotting out the night sky. These "black spots" do not appear to pose any danger to residents and are therefore not a priority to the GPD. They have aroused some curiousity at the Gainesville airport, however. Despite no radar activity that would prove these "black spots" to be substantial, more than one sighting has been put on record. Returning form a day trip to Tampa, pilot Rick Mayfield called in to ground support when he witnessed a bulky dark shadow passing just below his small twin engine plane. "I would have thought it was a bird, but it was so large. I've heard stories about UFOs and government spy planes, but nothing on earth could fly this fast and still manuever as easily as it did. I was told that nothing showed up on radar and that it must just be a bird or a cloud. I landed without any problems, and haven't seen it again."
Is ET looking for a good place to land? Or have citizens been seeing low lying clouds or dark birds and allowing their imagination to get the better of them? MUFON ensures us that more information will become available when they arrive to study the phenomenon. Until then, it won't hurt to keep your eyes to the sky.