If the truth is out there, Hamilton air-traffic controller Graeme Opie plans to find it. Opie has set up an online system for UFO (unidentified flying object) spotters and wants Kiwi skygazers to document their findings. Opie, who moonlights as a sighting report investigator for UFO Focus New Zealand, said the reporting system asked people to write what they saw, where they saw it and what effect the sighting had on them.
Sixty years after bigheaded, toothpick-limbed green aliens allegedly crashed in the New Mexico desert leaving little but paranoia in their wake Roswell embraces the extraterrestrial. To a point. A McDonald's mimics a UFO. A wall of Wal-Mart displays a large rendering of a green spaceman. Arby's restaurant is hospitable: "Aliens Welcome," reads the big sign out front. The city draws thousands of enthusiasts to its annual UFO festival, which runs this weekend.
It's 60 years since the term flying saucer was coined and the most celebrated "extraterrestrial" episode - Roswell. Alien believers are dismissed as cranks, but even the earthly explanations of objects in the sky are fascinating.
There can always be a good mundane 'explanation' for any visual document in debunking terms - "it's CGI" or "why did the camera stop/start, focus/not focus etc,. (delete as appropriate ) or I've even seen "it's too good to be true." No one's making any declaration of reality - but people are and should report and discuss what they see / hear in the knowledge that at least they will not be ridiculed but instead will be listened to and treated with dignity and respect.
"Flying saucer" -- the term -- was coined 60 years ago, when salesman and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in a "V" formation over Mount Rainier, Washington. Arnold told a reporter on June 24, 1947 that the UFOs flew erratically, fluttering and tipping their wings, like "a saucer if you skip it across water" -- and a worldwide subculture was born.
Flying saucers spin from snow-capped mountains Sixty years ago this Sunday the US businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his aircraft near the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. In a clear blue sky he spotted a formation of nine silvery, disc-shaped objects darting around, which he described as like pie plates skipping over the water. They moved in perfect synchrony and occasionally flashed brightly. The next day a newspaper report of the sighting coined the phrase flying saucers, and within weeks hundreds of such reports had swept the US.
One of the largest UFOs ever seen has been observed by the crew and passengers of an airliner over the Channel Islands. An official air-miss report on the incident several weeks ago appears in Pilot magazine. Aurigny Airlines captain Ray Bowyer, 50, flying close to Alderney first spotted the object, described as "a cigar-shaped brilliant white light".
Businesses here have been cashing in on the UFO craze for years paintings and replicas of UFOs and space aliens adorn downtown buildings, and even the McDonalds and Wal-Mart are UFO- and space-themed. Now city officials want to take it to another level with a UFO-themed amusement park, complete with an indoor roller coaster that would take passengers on a simulated alien abduction. Read more
Two experienced airline pilots at the controls of separate flights have reported seeing a mystery object "up to a mile wide" hovering off the coast of Alderney on Monday, This is Guernsey reports. Captain Ray Bowyer, 50, of local airline Aurigny, spotted a "bright-yellow light" 10 miles west of Alderney at about 3pm during a flight from Southampton while his aircraft was 30 miles from the island at 4,000ft.
The Shag Harbour Incident Society has tentatively set Monday, April 30 as its grand opening date at its temporary location in a donated building next to R & D Nickerson Fisheries Ltd. The group, which formed last fall, is working towards the construction of a permanent site to display the history of Shag Harbour, including a mysterious UFO incident in 1967.