Nick Pope's 8 page UFO study in The Sun

Nick Pope, one of the most preeminent, not to mention level-headed, UFO researchers out there, got himself an eight page spread in The Sun.

Er, his research did, I mean.  Yes, yes I know many of you are probably making pffft noises and rolling your eyes before saying The Sun.  But, the fact is that it's difficult to get any mainstream media source to take the UFO matter seriously.  More to the point, to basically turn the reins of writing over to a UFO researcher is almost unheard of.

Being a British paper, much of the eight page section is devoted to Pope's time at the Ministry of Defense where UFOs were his sole charge.  "We told Parliament, the media, and the public that there was nothing to worry about.  The reality was very different," so goes one of Pope's quotes, one that cuts to the heart of things, I believe.  He goes on then into detail in regards to the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident of 1980, on which Pope is likely one of the world's foremost authorities.

I love lists.  It's one of my odd quirks.  Nick Pope's article comes with a list of his Top Ten UFO Cases.  There are the usual suspects, a few of which I've covered here, such as the Belgian triangle sightings, Roswell, Valentich's disappearance over Australia, the Phoenix Lights and the Chicago/O'Hare sightings, the Tehran Incident, and of course, good ol' Kenneth Arnold.

There were, however, a few other cases listed.  They were good selections.  While I have nowhere near the time to go into them in as much detail as I would like (in the months ahead, perhaps), I would like to present them here in a brief form:

The Cash/Landrum Incident--three members of the same family are driving in their car near a small town in Texas and spot a brilliant, diamond-shaped UFO.  They report numerous US military helicopters around the craft.  Later, all three family members became seriously ill.  Their physicians suspected radiation sickness.

The Trans-en-Provence Incident--a French farmer named Renato Nicolai witnessed a saucer-shaped UFO land on his property and then later take off.  The landing left behind a burned stretch of ground and impressions in the dirt.  Investigation revealed that the object must have weighed approximately five tons and that the ground had been heated to over 600 degrees Celsius.  No plants have grown there since and plants surrounding the area have demonstrated mutation, including the loss of chlorophyll.

Travis Walton's abduction--I was a bit surprised by the inclusion of this case.  Perhaps that means I need to take a closer look at it and thereby present a blog post.  Anyway, if you've seen Fire in the Sky, then you know that Travis Walton was one of a group of loggers who sighted a UFO in a forest in Arizona in 1975.  Walton approached the craft.  When he did, he was hit with a beam of light and lifted into the UFO.  His coworkers fled.  Walton was missing for five days and the other loggers were suspected of killing him. Luckily for them, Walton showed up and reported that he had been abducted by "aliens."  In the time since, Walton has consistently passed lie detector tests as have his companions from that day.  While their stories have remained consistent, the tale of what happened to Walton aboard the UFO is fairly inconsistent with other abduction claims.  But that's for another time.

As I said before, The Sun may not be a paragon of journalism, but it's better than nothing.  The fact that they devoted so many color pages to the subject and allowed an actual researcher to do the writing, says to me that the public is beginning to consider UFOs in a more serious sense.   

 
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