New UFOs pimped out with techno babble
Aaron Sakulich
Issue date: 11/3/06 Section: Sci-Tech
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Sometimes I lose faith. Not in any sort of religious context, but faith in mankind. This isn't unexpected; if you read the emails I get with some regularity from UFO enthusiasts, you'd turn into Tyler Durden's evil imaginary friend. And Tyler was already someone's evil imaginary friend, so that says a lot. But every once in a while I tilt the other way and begin to think that logic and reason are beginning to turn the tide against irrational thought, the occult, and other such lunacy. That's why I'm following a certain trend with some enthusiasm: people who get abducted with space aliens are more and more often claiming that the little monsters come not from beyond the stars, but rather, they are demons and devils fresh from the bible.
At the end of the 19th century, people reported spotting UFOs that looked sort of like super-blimps. The idea at the time was that airships had been invented by some backwoods tinkerer, who for some reason was often named Wilson. The craft had propellers, wings, huge bladders filled with gas, gears, or any number of other perfectly human accoutrements. The reports of "encounters" with these UFOs are fairly benign; occasions such as a young man reporting that a 'martian ship' had crashed in a forest (it was a hoax) were very much the minority.
In the 1950s flying saucers acted very strange. They usually looked like rockets, and did things such as trail smoke or sparks. Some of them even had propellers. And not just some on the fringe: no less than J. Allen Hynek held a 1952 case from Kansas that involved a flying saucer sporting an array of tiny propellers in the highest regards.
Many of the people who spotted them assumed that they were new Air Force vehicles or, much more sinisterly, secret Soviet superweapons. That, of course, led the government to attempt to silence UFO sightings so as to not give the Reds any sort of advantage, which conspiracists have been citing for decades as proof that the government is in league with monsters from space.
At the end of the 19th century, people reported spotting UFOs that looked sort of like super-blimps. The idea at the time was that airships had been invented by some backwoods tinkerer, who for some reason was often named Wilson. The craft had propellers, wings, huge bladders filled with gas, gears, or any number of other perfectly human accoutrements. The reports of "encounters" with these UFOs are fairly benign; occasions such as a young man reporting that a 'martian ship' had crashed in a forest (it was a hoax) were very much the minority.
In the 1950s flying saucers acted very strange. They usually looked like rockets, and did things such as trail smoke or sparks. Some of them even had propellers. And not just some on the fringe: no less than J. Allen Hynek held a 1952 case from Kansas that involved a flying saucer sporting an array of tiny propellers in the highest regards.
Many of the people who spotted them assumed that they were new Air Force vehicles or, much more sinisterly, secret Soviet superweapons. That, of course, led the government to attempt to silence UFO sightings so as to not give the Reds any sort of advantage, which conspiracists have been citing for decades as proof that the government is in league with monsters from space.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
GLENN FLANAGAN
posted 11/03/06 @ 9:17 PM EST
Everyone should rest assured that UFOs and their ultimate reason for interacting with us is good and that there is nothing to fear. Science, for sure, has been good for mankind. (Continued…)
D. Wood
posted 11/05/06 @ 2:13 PM EST
Well, Aaron, regardless of what UFOs are and where they come from and how they propel themselves, they definitely exist. That's just about all that can be said about them since everything else is theory and conjecture. (Continued…)
Edward Biebel
posted 11/11/06 @ 5:00 PM EST
Aaron, you problem is that because UFOs seem to imitate existing technology that you believe they are projections of the witnesses own mental state. That could be, but it could also be camoflage for what they really are. (Continued…)
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