Democratic US presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich may have been
ridiculed for saying he had seen a UFO, but for some former
military pilots and other observers, unidentified flying objects
are no laughing matter.
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government
officials called on the US government to reopen its generation-old
UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given
continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other
strange sightings.
"Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory
to ignore radar returns...which cannot be associated with
performances of existing aircraft and helicopters," they said in a
statement released at a news conference.
The panelists from seven countries, including former senior
military officers, said they had each seen a UFO or conducted an
official investigation into UFO phenomena.
The subject of UFOs grabbed the spotlight in the US presidential
race last month when Kucinich, a member of Congress from Ohio, said
during a televised debate with other Democratic candidates that he
had seen one.
Former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter are both reported
to have claimed UFO sightings.
Most turn out to be misidentified aircraft, satellites or
meteors.
A panelist who once worked for Britain's Ministry of Defense
said five percent of incidents cannot be explained.
But the sightings are often dismissed by authorities without proper
investigations, UFO activists say.
"It's a question of who you going to believe: your lying eyes or
the government?" remarked John Callahan, a former Federal Aviation
Administration investigator, who said the CIA in 1987 tried to hush
up the sighting of a huge lighted ball four times the size of a
jumbo jet in Alaska.
The panel, organized by a group dedicated to winning credibility
for the study of UFOs, urged Washington to resume UFO
investigations through the US Air Force or NASA.
"It would certainly, I think, take a lot of angst out of this
issue," said former Arizona Governor Fife Symington, who said he
was among hundreds who saw a delta-shaped craft with enormous
lights silently traverse the sky near Phoenix in 1997.
The Air Force investigated 12,618 UFO reports from 1947 to 1969 in
what was known as Project Blue Book.
Investigators concluded that the incidents posed no threat and
there was no evidence of space aliens or a super technology in
operation.
"Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred
that would support a resumption of UFO investigations," the Air
Force said on its website.
