No kidding, but I believe I just saw a flying saucer

Despite ridicule, more people are reporting UFO sightings

By LANA BERKOWITZ
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Would you laugh if I said I had seen a UFO?

A pilot, county constable and business owners were listed as the witnesses for the recent UFO sighting in Stephenville. These credible, upstanding people reported seeing a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. The size has been estimated as a mile long and half-a-mile wide.

When you report something like that, people are going to talk.

However, Ken Cherry, Texas state director of the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network, said the reports coming out of Stephenville indicate people are becoming more comfortable admitting they've seen a UFO.

"In terms of the number of witnesses, this is an unusual event," Cherry said.

He noted that the Stephenville area is the heart of the Bible Belt, and MUFON held its fact-finding forum Saturday in Dublin, which is a dry county. "These people are church-going, sober hard-working individuals and probably the last thing in the world that they think about is sitting down and watching an episode of Star Trek or some sci-fi program, yet they've managed to find us," Cherry said. "I'd say a very small percentage of people who see things actually report (it), and yet we've just received a flood of reports.

"Scores and scores of people have seen it, and they are pretty vocal about it. They don't mind talking to me about it at length."

Jim Sparks, author of The Keepers: An Alien Message for the Human Race (Granite Publishing, $24), said when you see a UFO, you believe. Plus, people are more apt to come forward when there are several witnesses.

Sparks' alien abduction experiences began in 1988 while he was living in Sugar Land, and he knew he faced ridicule when he told his story.

"I can't blame people. A lot of people are just plain scared," he said.

It's human nature to fear rejection, Sparks said, and he said a culture of government disinformation labels anyone who claims to see a UFO to be a liar or crazy.

Gail Brittain of Pasadena is president of the Houston UFO Club, which was organized to support abductees. She said she doesn't worry about ridicule.

"To hell with them. I don't care what people think about me. I know what my world is like. I'm sane," Brittain said. "There are so many kooks, but our club isn't kooky."

John Greenewald Jr., author of Beyond UFO Secrecy (The Black Vault, $34) said there are UFO sightings all the time, and he wonders if the media has discovered that UFO news draws big numbers to their Web sites, which in turn leads to more coverage of reports.

Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State (Hampton Roads Publishing, $18.95), is not convinced that UFO reports are getting more mainstream acceptance.

"I think people in general are afraid of ridicule very much to this day," Dolan said. "Think about how Dennis Kucinich has handled the UFO thing. He got outed by Shirley MacLaine (in her book Sage-Ing While Age-Ing) and would not talk about it at all until he was pressed against the wall.

"And poor Bill Richardson got reamed by (MSNBC's) Chris Matthews on television when he came out. Matthews really, really tore him to pieces."

When NBC News' Tim Russert asked the Ohio representative during October's Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia about the sighting, Kucinich said, "It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It's, like, it's unidentified. I saw something." Afterward Internet buzz went crazy calling Kucinich crazy.

Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico and a former Democratic presidential candidate, told Matthews that he promotes Roswell, N.M., as a UFO tourist attraction. He said he hasn't seen a UFO, but he wants the federal government to declassify all the information about the infamous 1947 Roswell crash.

There always will be ridicule, said Dolan, who hasn't seen a UFO but has received some jabs since he was bitten by the UFO bug about 15 years ago. "Fortunately for me that's really never been an issue that's affected me. I'm pretty secure in what I'm about, and if people want to laugh, they can laugh."

Dolan said he has interviewed 500 to 700 witnesses. "All I can do is ask people to be as explicit as they can be. In most of these cases they don't seem like they are hoaxing. They seem like they are rational," he said. "So you're really left with a situation where a really rational, clear-thinking person is describing something that is not supposed to exist. That's what the UFO mystery is.

"What I'm more interested in is the amazing, well-plugged-in people that I have had the privilege to meet as a result of this research.

"They may not be shouting their interest in this topic from the rooftop, but at a private level they are very deeply interested, and some of them claim to have been briefed on the topic," Dolan said. "The thing is, if it is a topic of national security implications, then you would assume that people are not just going to start blabbing around."