Earlier Chicago UFO (2005) with similar description to 11/2006 sightingFrom BLOGCRITICS http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/05/100827.php
About Those Chicago UFO Sightings
Written by Glen Boyd
Published January 05, 2007
When it comes to coverage by the national media, UFOs (or Unidentified Flying
Objects), generally speaking at least, are not a story topping the agenda of
your more credible news organizations. In fact, when it comes to such stories,
the unwritten rule has always seemed to be that such reporting is best left to
the supermarket tabloids.
This week however, was one where the mainstream media apparently never got that
memo. Unless I've missed something, three stories topped the mainstream news
this week:
Gerald Ford's funeral.
Saddam Hussein's execution.
And the UFO sighted by numerous eyewitnesses at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
According to the reports, several eyewitnesses (including pilots and other
credible personnel) watched a classic disc-shaped UFO hover over the airport
before it shot straight up into the air at a very high rate of speed and
disappeared into the clouds. If you missed it, you can view an interview with
the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story here:
So here's a confession.
I've actually followed the subject of UFOs most of my life. I first got
interested when, as a pre-teen boy, I saw something strange myself. Without
going into all of the details, I saw what I would call a grey, football-shaped
object up in the sky while peering out the back window of my parents car during
an afternoon drive in the country.
In the years since, I've read most of the literature dealing with UFOs out
there. I even briefly wrote the "Webwatch" column for UFO Magazine, recommending
the best UFO websites to readers during the nineties, the UFO "boom years."
Like the roughly one half (or better) of all Americans who believe there
actually may be something to all this flying saucer stuff, I've come to a few
conclusions. Now before you reach over to cue the X-Files music, please note my
hesitance to state what that "something" may actually be.
I do believe "something" that is not birds or conventional aircraft is flying
around out there and has been for sometime. I also believe that most people
probably don't give it a second thought - at least if you believe the surveys
concluding that more than half of the population shares the view that UFOs are
real.
This is why I find many of the circumstances surrounding the Chicago UFO
sighting reported this week so inexplicable. According to the Chicago Tribune
report, both the airline and the FAA initially denied anybody saw anything. When
further digging by the reporter — armed with a Freedom Of Information Act
request no less — revealed otherwise, the FAA admitted they had been contacted
about the sighting, which they now dismiss as being due to odd weather
conditions at the time.
Perhaps those "conditions" include the perfect "hole in the sky" that some
witnesses described the object left after it tore through the cloud cover at
O'Hare, and off into space that day.
Speaking of that day, the sighting occurred on November 7th. So why did the
national news media wait until this week to report the story en masse?
Incidentally, that kind of lag time is not a first when it comes to the media's
timetable in reporting a mass UFO sighting over a major American city.
As I mentioned above, the nineties were kind of a "boom time" for UFOs. Between
things like the X-Files on TV, and movies like Independence Day and Men In
Black, UFOs and aliens became as much a part of American Pop Culture in the
nineties as Gangsta Rap and Monday Night Wrestling. The most popular national
late night radio show of the time, hosted by Art Bell, was itself devoted almost
entirely to the subject of UFOs. Just between you and me — from lunchboxes to TV
car ads — those little grey guys seemed to be just about everywhere.
On March 13, 1997, a spectacular mass UFO sighting took place in the American
Southwest. Though it has since come to be known as the "Phoenix Lights"
sighting, the strange V-shaped formation of unidentified lights — which
stretched across the entire night sky — was seen by hundreds of witnesses across
the entire state of Arizona. It was also videotaped by dozens of them.
The videos can still be easily found with a Google search. To save you the
trouble, you can check it out here:
The original "Phoenix Lights" event quickly became the buzz of UFOlogy through
the Internet and shows like Art Bell's. Still, as was the case with the Chicago
sighting reported this week, it would not be covered by the mainstream media
until several weeks later. The "Phoenix Lights" story eventually devolved into a
media circus with city politicians donning alien costumes for the cameras, even
as one (now former) councilwoman named Frances Barwood urged officials to
conduct a serious investigation into the mass sighting.
The question now, as then, is simply this:
If there really isn't anything to all of this crazy UFO stuff, just why is it
that so many folks in powerful positions act so crazy when it comes to the
subject? You'd almost swear they were actually hiding something. At the very
least, it would seem they'd prefer you and I didn't know about it.
Now you can go ahead and cue that X-Files music.
Mystery Lingers Over Chicago UFO Claims
The head of the National UFO Reporting Center gives his theories about the
strange sighting over Chicago’s main airport.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Jessica Bennett
Newsweek
Updated: 3:33 p.m. ET Jan 4, 2007
Jan. 4, 2007 - The Federal Aviation Administration says it must have been a
weird weather phenomenon, and United Airlines denies any knowledge of the case.
But though it has been two months since what appeared to be an unidentified
flying object (UFO) was spotted over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the
incident is still raising questions about what exactly was seen and whether the
authorities are trying to downplay it.
As many as a dozen United Airlines employees swear the mysterious object they
saw on Nov. 7 was real—hovering for several minutes above the United Airlines
terminal and then shooting up through the clouds so powerfully that it left an
eerie hole in overcast skies. "At first we laughed to each other" when the
report came over the radio, a witness told the National UFO Reporting Center, a
Seattle-based nonprofit that maintains a UFO hotline and is listed as a resource
in the FAA's official Aeronautical Information Manual. But then I saw the "dark
gray, hazy, round object" and seconds later "there was an almost perfect circle
in the cloud layer where the craft had been." His statement is published on the
Web site of the National UFO Reporting Center, which says its policy is to
protect the anonymity of its witnesses.
So was it a UFO? A secret military aircraft? And why did it take two months for
the details to come out? It may sound like the oldest hoax in the book, but the
United workers—including several pilots—who say they saw the object are
reportedly upset their claims have been ignored. The FAA has said it won't be
investigating the incident further, and it wasn't until this week that The
Chicago Tribune broke the story, speaking to several unnamed witnesses after a
tip-off from the head of the National UFO Reporting Center. Peter Davenport
heads that organization, and has a lot to say about the way the incident has
been handled. A self-described UFOologist, Davenport spoke with NEWSWEEK's
Jessica Bennett. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Your Web site has documented more than 3,000 UFO sightings just in the
last year. Is that normal?
Peter Davenport: We get reports that number certainly into the thousands, and
sometimes into the tens of thousands.
How many of these do you believe are real, and how do you determine whether they
are real?
The overwhelming majority of [reports we get] are not UFOs. Many people report
stars and planets and aircraft and humming birds and pelicans and Frisbees and
hubcaps—there are thousands of things people can look at and not be able to
identify. We rely on our experience to try to quickly identify those cases that
are probably not genuine UFOs.
How long have you known about this particular incident in Chicago?
I found out about this on the day of the event. We got multiple communications.
We released the information about the 12th or 13th of November, put it on our
homepage, and, frankly, I was flabbergasted that nobody was paying attention.
Do you think there has been an effort to downplay it?
My strong suspicion is that this case showed up on the 8th of November—the day
after it happened—in the intelligence briefing document that the president
apparently reads every morning. Are we to believe that a UFO can appear over a
major U.S. airport and the American intelligence community is not informed of
it? That proposition is absurd.
If that's the case, why would the federal government keep those findings from
the public?
You've got to go directly to the government or to United Airlines [for the
answer to that question]. I'm shocked by their response to this, except for the
fact that we've seen this kind of response—certainly on behalf of the
government—for the past 59 and a half years.
What happened 59 years ago?
That takes us back to the first formal sighting that caused a ripple in the
press, which was June 24, 1947, here in the state of Washington. That was Mr.
[Kenneth] Arnold, who saw a string of [disc]-shaped objects streaking down the
Cascade Mountains [near Mount Rainier]. That was the event that gave us the term
"flying saucer."
Still, there are a lot of UFO skeptics out there. What do you say to them?
I've been asked that question about half a dozen times before. Skeptics are free
to think whatever they wish. All I do is release the information—hopefully,
accurate information—and people may read it or consume it anyway they wish. But
many of these hard-boiled skeptics simply do not look at the data. They have a
preconceived notion of how the universe works—what is possible, what is not
possible—to the extent that they no longer have to look at data.
What is that data?
The data are the cases that come in, the information that we're receiving on a
steady basis—over the telephone, over the Internet, photographs and so on.
Probably the most reliable source of data that we receive is eyewitness accounts
from responsible witnesses who seem to be independent of one another. That's not
true of all the people who contact us, of course. We get calls of many, many
stripes. But we focus on the cases that are very well documented—as in the case
of the O'Hare sighting.
So you've spoken to the witnesses in this case.
Yes, that's how we got the information.
And you think they're credible?
The witnesses [in this case] are not only responsible but they're qualified by
virtue of the fact that they've worked in the aviation industry for decades—each
one of them. They're familiar with aircraft, they're familiar with weather
phenomena. United Airlines and the FAA have apparently taken the position that
it either didn't happen, or if it did happen it was a weather aberration. Well,
the written communications that I have in my possession clearly belie that
position.
So you obviously believe that UFOs do exist.
My objective is to give the American people the information that they need to
have, in my opinion, in order to make a rational decision with regard to the UFO
phenomenon. In a sense, I guess I'm an advocate for the notion that our planet
is visited on a frequent basis by these things we call UFOs. If my theory and
the theory of many other UFO investigators is correct, then the U.S. government
certainly knows about this [phenomenon], and has known about it for at least six
decades and is not sharing that with the American people. I believe that is
wrong.
How do you define a UFO, and what elements of that definition were visible in
what was seen at O'Hare?
From my standpoint, [UFOs] are those objects that exhibit characteristics that
strongly suggest that they, almost without a doubt, are not of man's
manufacture. That statement I think is supported by the fact that these UFO
sightings appear to go back hundreds or thousands of years. We have reports on
our Web site from the 1930s, from the 1890s, from 1860, and I have two written
reports on file—one from China in the 12th century A.D. and a report from
ancient Egypt from 1770 B.C. So could that be the U.S. Air Force experimenting
with aircraft? Clearly not. In the case of this object at O'Hare, [the object
sighted] seemed to accelerate so fast and disappear so fast that people's eyes
were unable to follow it, and they didn't know which way it had gone. Now, could
that be of man's manufacture? I doubt it.
Why is there so little debate on this subject?
People think that UFOs are strange. But in my opinion, the reaction of the
American press to the UFO phenomenon is stranger still. They're not interested
in what I consider to be the greatest scientific question of man's existence of
all times: are we alone in this galaxy or are we not? From my vantage point, the
clear answer to that is that we're not. And it appears that these objects visit
our planet on a regular basis.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16472286/site/newsweek/
© 2007 MSNBC.com
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