UFOs: Mass sightings

Not long ago, I was watching one of those UFO shows on an obscure channel.

You know the kind of show I'm talking about, right? Has really sinister sounding music bed? An ominous narrator warns of "global conspiracy" and the "alien threat among us?" Interviews done with Ufologists spouting bafflegab without evidence in what looks like a cable access studio? Yeah, those are the ones.  In this case, however, my interest was piqued.

It was a show on mass UFO sightings with the thesis being, "eventually there's going to be one so big and witnessed by so many people that The Powers That Be will no longer be able to hold their conspiracy together." What exactly is meant by "mass sighting?" Well the phrase is rather self-explanatory and I've posted about them before, but I think it's best defined by case examples:


The Phoenix Lights- This case garnered enormous national TV attention in March, 1997. I was excited to hear about it as well as eager to see the video one of the witnesses caught. My pal Armando had already seen it and cautioned me. "If it really is a spacecraft, then it's one the size of the motherships from Independence Day." As I watched the arc of bright orbs appear in the night skies over Phoenix, I had to admit that was exactly what it looked like. Turns out it was flares dropped by Air Force A-10s.
Too bad that doesn't cover the case. Hundreds of witnesses, including current and former Air Force personnel and the then-governor of Arizona, reported seeing not the lights in the sky but a diamond-shaped, craft that was black in color and boomerang in shape with five lights under the fuselage.

Belgian Triangle Wave- During 1990, a black, triangular craft was seen by numerous witnesses in the sky over Belgium. Witnesses included police officers, political officials, and military pilots. In the case of the latter, a pair of Belgian F-16s were scrambled to intercept the triangle and treat it as hostile. The triangle then disappeared at a speed in excess of MACH 8. Belgian authorities publicly acknowledged the flap in a press conference and played gun camera footage from the F-16. They also stated that they had no clue what it was but consider it to be a hostile intrusion into their sovereign airspace.

Saucers over the Capitol- in a wave of successive nights in July of 1952, saucer-shaped UFOs appeared over Washington D.C. Once more, there were many witnesses, including one who snapped the above picture. There is radar confirmation of the objects and again jet fighters are sent after the UFOs and again to no avail. President Truman went on national television to announce that he took the matter "seriously." It is thought that this helped instigate Project Stork.

I suppose one might argue for another definition of "mass sighting,"one that doesn't require the number of witnesses to be in the hundreds. An example of such a case might be say, an entire airliner full of people. Case files released by the British Ministry of Defense are said to detail such close encounters between UFOs and commercial passenger planes. Of course in regard to the MoD files, final release of all the documents has been delayed, eliciting cries of "cover up!" from the conspiracy crowd.

What exactly does a mass sighting tell us? Aside from the fact that it's nice to have numerous witnesses as opposed to a couple people in the middle of nowhere claiming "I saw something"? In light of these cases, I have two thoughts.

First, they are most likely tests of highly classified aircraft. They appeared over highly populated areas either by mistake or by design. In the case of Belgium, I am suspicious that the triangle was an American aircraft running through its capabilities in a field test over a modestly armed ally. That last bit is important for if anything goes wrong, you're not suddenly sending special ops to go rescue your pilots. Phoenix has all the earmarks of a military screw up. The top secret aircraft is in the wrong place and a dog-and-pony show of flares is arranged to create a distraction and a plausible explanation. For all we know, the UFOs over D.C. were military as well.

If these were not experimental planes and if evidence is not available for more prosaic explanations, then we are left with genuine UFOs. Are they aliens? Well, I can't get over a problem with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) and these cases are good illustrations for why.

It's as if UFOs want to be seen. If aliens were really here and really wanted to do-whatever-it-is-they-do and to do so without notice or contact, they easily could. These on the other hand were high profile sightings. Even with our current gear we could get what we wanted and still not exactly make our presence known. It's almost like the phenomenon is popping onto the scene, waving while shouting "Hey! Look at me!" and then disappearing once more into the ether. A popular jab by skeptics is "Why don't UFOs just land on the White House lawn?" Well in the D.C. case of 1952, they almost did. But why?

To me, this indicates entities other than aliens, other intelligences. They are attempting to interact with us in bizarre ways but perhaps in the only ways that they can. But why, I have no idea.

Will there ever be a sighting so big that the reality of UFOs can no longer be denied? Perhaps. Even so, I wouldn't anticipate any kind of earth-shaking "disclosure."

I suspect that our government is basically as much in the dark as the rest of us.





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