Niagara radio host fans UFO interest

Niagara Falls Review - March 22, 1999

by Corey Larocque

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Rob McConnell, host of The X-Zone radio show on CKTB 610 AM, says most UFO sightings are later identified. It's the very small portion with no explanation that people have a right to wonder about. He gave a lecture at the psychic fair in St. Catharines Saturday.

NIAGARA FALLS - Five decades after the alleged UFO crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico, Monica Lewinsky is evidence that there could be no US government conspiracy to cover up that incident says Rob McConnell, host of The X-Zone radio show on a St. Catharines radio station.

UFO believers say events in 1947 near the United States nuclear facility in the New Mexico desert have never been adequately explained.

They believe a spaceship with three alien beings crashed, but the wreckage and alien corpses were recovered and concealed by the US government..

McConnell calls Roswell, :"the grandfather of cover-up conspiracy theories," but offers a simpler, more terrestrial interpretation.

Japanese balloon bombs.

After the Second World War, Japan tested lighter-than-air crafts that could carry bombs or crews of men.

A UFO crash site would be too big an issue to cover up. Someone would slip up McConnell says.

"If the president cannot have an affair between the Oval Office and the presidential washroom without the whole world knowing, how the hell can you hide a UFO with three dead aliens?"

Bomb balloons are the likely explanation for anything that was recovered at Roswell, McConnell says.

"If you were the US government, would you want it to be known that your air space had been violated a number of years after the Second World War ended?"

McConnell gave a lecture on UFOs during the First Star Psychic Fair held in St. Catharines over the weekend. Sitting behind a table decorated with plastic alien figures, and surrounded by tables of palmists, tarot card readers and astrologers, McConnell says his UFO exhibit fits in with other psychic fair exhibits because they all deal with mysterious subject matter.

'Unidentified' is the key word in Unidentified Flying Objects, says McConnell who describes himself as "a believer and a skeptic."

Ninety-eight per cent of UFO reports are later identified as test aircraft or weather balloons. The remaining 2 per cent are explained within 92 per cent accuracy. That leaves only a minuscule portion of reports that are "truly unidentified."

He reassured his audience, most of them who said they seen an unidentified flying object.

"If you had a sighting that nobody else did, it doesn't mean you didn't see it," McConnell says.

McConnell's interest in UFOs began in 1957 when he was a five-year-old boy leaving near the Dorval airport in Montreal. One night he saw a cigar-shaped object with portholes hovering in the air, but couldn't identify it.

"I knew I had seen the most wonderful thing in the world. I didn't know what it was. I still don't."

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