UFOs Invade Denver
In November, an unusual video of mysterious dark objects moving very quickly and erratically over the skies of Denver, Colo., caused a national stir. An anonymous UFO buff showed KDVR Fox News reporter Heidi Hemmat home videos he had taken from an open field during the past summer of "strange objects ... nobody can explain."
The UFOs, it was claimed, seemed to be taking off and flying over the Mile High City at around Noon on many different occasions. The TV report featured an aviation expert named Steve Cowell who stated categorically that in his opinion the objects he saw in the video were not airplanes, helicopters, nor birds. Many people favored the flying saucer theory, though none were able to explain why no one in Denver had noticed the extraterrestrial spacecraft that repeatedly flew over their city at midday. Skeptics noted that the objects caught on film moved a lot like insects flying in the air, and that the cameraman probably simply recorded bugs. With no further evidence of aliens, the buzz about the Denver UFO finally faded away. [UFO Quiz: What's Really Out There]
Denver wasn't the only city to have its skies lit up with alleged UFOs. A single week in December saw strange illuminated objects hovering in the sky above San Francisco and Brooklyn, N.Y. The dancing lights, it seems, were likely the usual UFO fare: some sort of floating object with a light. "It looks to me like it could have been balloons, carrying lights," Bing Quock, assistant director of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, told CBS San Francisco, of the San Francisco lights. Another idea: Chinese floating lanterns, which have spurred at least one other, now-debunked, UFO sighting.
A foursome of lights above Lebanon, Mo., in May, shown in a shaky night-vision video, also sparked a UFO report. While the videographer Jim Barnhill was sure the sight was of extraterrestrial origin, it seemed to have all the makings of an Earthly aircraft: blinking strobe lights characteristic of known aircraft; and a flight altitude, pattern and speed characteristic of known aircraft.
It would have been nice if Bigfoot had been proven or aliens had made their presence known (and not nice if an eagle had snatched a baby or the world ended). But there's always next year...
Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" science magazine and author of six books including Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
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Add CommentSilly season again. I was a teenager in the first flying saucer era, post WWII. Like so many sci-fi fans I was a believer until one night, at age 22, flying low in a Navy light plane up the California coast, we caught up with and passed a whole squadron of distinct saucers in V-formation moving through the sky just above us. The pilot laughed and said there was a new shopping mall below, advertising itself after dusk with a bank of huge lights pointed into the sky, reflecting off an inversion layer in the lower atmosphere. I was a Naval officer stationed at a Naval Air Station and had only days earlier seen the "saucer" of a reflected high altitude weather balloon. After that week I took the alien-invader debunkers seriously and gradually became skeptical of the other fictions peddled by Cold War hysterics, wannabee saints and naive anarchists, until I'd managed to clear my mind of attic junk and make room for reality. But, in general, the True Believer tendency has increased among Americans. It's been swallowed and regurgitated by New Agers, "Rapture" Fundamentalists, Faux "News", Ayn Rand Libertarians, etc., on their website soapboxes. Isn't it more rational to face and actively protest probable realities? I don't want my grandchildren to inherit today's massive pollution, unaddressed global climate change, spread of firearms, bigotry, and all the other short-sighted, blind-faith partisanships that have played into the hands of multinational oligarchs--and which, in the U.S., have resulted in wars for greed and the gradual demolition of unions, jobs, Constitutional and human rights, public services, civilized discourse and culture. It's willful denial of reality that creates a "1984".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust the name "Bigfoot" is a hint that such an animal may be real, as those animals seem living in high latitudes, snow may be present for a long part of their year, and big feet help as snowshoeing. Local legends speak about the danger for women of being kidnapped for sexual purposes by these living things, and legends most times contain actual facts. Weindigo will be the next confirmed being, or this is just for Ghostbusters?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the most nonstory of the year was the near constant articles of pending apocalypse due to man-made global warming(AGW). Scientific American is guilty of this as well as many other literary venues!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am *not* studying for my Ph.D.! I'm reading Scientific American Magazine. There *IS* a difference.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe drawing connected to this article, showing an artist's view of Bigfoot, looks very close to the famous "Minnesota's man in an ice block", purportedly seen again in 1968. A TV program by a California based team specializing in searching for the truth inside misterious facts, published images, captured in Siberian Woods, of footprints on snow by something walking on two legs like us, but with a foot size more than twice ours'. These people showed also images of a DNA research lab having studied the genes in a hair sample coming from an Asian lamasery, that the monks say is hair from Yeti, the woman in lab said the DNA in this hair doesn't match any known anthropoid, and that they have no idea on to what the DNA belongs. Capturing or killing one of these beings would be criminal and exterminating an species, and taking into account how ethnic human groups have behaved against other tribes as of today, for sure these living things, (terrible things too?), have learned since hundreds of thousand of years, that coming close to humans is extremely dangerous, they just won't show, and nobody has an estimate of how many of them may exist, if any.
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