UFO`S IN THE NEWS
UFOs brought to earth with a bump
IT is official. UFOs do not exist, aliens have never visited Earth and all flying saucer sightings are now referred by the military to private organisations, the American Defence Department said yesterday.
The announcement was prompted by the suicide of 39 members of the Heaven`s Gate cult in California, who killed themselves because they believed that their souls would be transported to eternal life on a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. "We cannot substantiate the existence of UFOs and we are not harbouring remains of UFOs," said Ken Bacon, department spokesman.
Convinced that there was no extra-terrestrial threat, the Pentagon has long since stopped recording of UFO sightings, Mr Bacon said. But enormous public interest in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life has been fuelled by television programmes such as The X-Files and hundreds of Internet sites addressing the topic.
Of 12,618 reported UFO sightings investigated by the US Air Force between 1947 and 1969, none "represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of our scientific knowledge," Mr Bacon said.
No UFO reported, investigated or evaluated posed a threat to America and there was no evidence that the UFOs were extra-terrestrial vehicles, he added. Most sightings of supposed UFOs could be explained either by weather conditions, such as lightning or unusual cloud formations, or by aircraft movements, he said.
Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent ---- Thursday 3 April 1997
Mystery of airliner's near miss with 'UFO'
AIR investigators are baffled by an apparent near-miss between an Aer Lingus jet and an unidentified flying object.
The BAe 146, bound for Stansted from Dublin, took evasive action after both pilots saw what they described as a red aircraft with blue and white stripes heading towards them as they flew over Hertfordshire. The jet passed 100ft above the interloper two seconds later.
The crew reported the incident to air traffic control and suggested that what they had seen might have been a military aircraft, such as a Red Arrows Hawk. But inquiries, involving searches of radar recordings and radio transcripts, failed to find another aircraft.
Investigators established that no Red Arrows aircraft flew that day, and checks on all military or civil Hawks revealed that the last one to be airborne had landed four hours earlier. Inquiries into the whereabouts of Gnat aircraft, which are similar to Hawks, also revealed no flights.
The possibility that an unregistered ex-military aircraft had taken off from a private airstrip was ruled out as "inconceivable" because radar in the area would make detection a certainty.
The Civil Aviation Authority group set up to examine the incident said yesterday that there was no doubt that the pilots "saw something and agreed in some detail in their descriptions".
Group members speculated that the object could have been a model aircraft, an advertising balloon, or even plastic sheeting. But the lack of radar evidence "meant that members could feel reasonably certain that what had been seen was not an aeroplane". Similarly, the degree of risk to the jet from the incident, which occurred last June, was "impossible to assess".
Aer Lingus said its pilots had reported the event because they were trained to do so. The airline predicted that the incident was "likely to remain a mystery".
Paul Marston, Transport Correspondent -----Friday 13 June 1997
