Statistiche
Thursday, July 14, 2022
The Hudson Valley UFOs: How the Media Reacted to a 1980s UFO Flap ( The Debrief )
Back during the Summer of the Saucers in 1947 and for more than a decade after, UFOs were a serious topic in the media. The subject received plenty of coverage as both the public and the government seemed to grapple with what it was that people were seeing in the skies.
But by the time Project Blue Book ended in 1969, the tone in America’s newspapers and newsreels seemed to change considerably. Many journalists openly mocked people who talked about little green men and flying saucers. This no doubt pleased the federal government, and many researchers suspect that this was happening by design.
That wasn’t always the case, though. There were some events that generated considerable public attention and were reported on by the press in a mostly sober fashion. One of these was the series of sightings in upstate New York that came to be known as the Hudson Valley flap. While there had already been scattered sightings reported in the area a couple of hours north of New York City, the real burst of activity seemed to begin on New Year’s Eve of 1982. A retired police officer reported seeing a huge “v-shaped” object with multiple colored lights gliding almost silently over his property.
He wouldn’t be the last person to report such an event. Many others followed, and by March 23rd of 1983, the local newspaper in Port Chester, New York was running a front-page feature describing crowds of people claiming to have seen the triangular object. The witnesses who were interviewed included an on-duty police officer named Kevin Soravilla, who testified that he had seen the object twice in a 45-minute period after his department had received more than 100 calls. He described the object the same way the others had, saying that he had seen it stop in midair and “turn perpendicular” before reversing course and heading away from view. At no point in the article was there any suggestion of people making up stories or misidentifying something.
Artistic Rendition of the USS Gyatt “UFO Encounter” in 1964. (Image Credit: Dave Beaty of the Nimitz Encounters)
By November of that year, the local newspapers were not just covering the sightings themselves, but also the people who were flocking to the valley to investigate this activity. On November 11th, the Journal News in White Plains, New York, ran a two-column story featuring interviews with UFO investigators. One ufologist from Connecticut who was a member of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy told a reporter that more aliens would probably visit the Earth if humans weren’t so hostile toward them. A second investigator accused the federal government of having crashed “flying discs” and alien bodies, insisting that they were covering up the information to keep it from the public.
The paper even included comments from J. Allen Hynek, who described how and why he left in his capacity as a science advisor to Project Blue Book. Hynek also said that researchers were “fighting a publicity war” with the military because military officials sought to ridicule anyone who reported a sighting.
The sightings were still going on well into the following year, and journalists had spread out to explore other possible explanations not involving extraterrestrials. On June 28th of 1984, the Poughkeepsie Journal posted a feature in which they spoke to witnesses who were accusing stunt pilots with small aircraft of flying over the region in a close, v-shaped formation to trick people into thinking they were seeing something otherworldly. They even spoke to a police officer who claimed to have followed the planes back to a local airport and spoken to one of the pilots who admitted to pulling off the hoax. However, the pilots were never named. The paper also made a point of including rebuttals from other witnesses who pointed out that they could easily identify a group of planes flying in formation and added that no set of pilots could account for the numerous sightings that had been reported. There was once again no suggestion that the subject was some sort of joke.In August of that year, the same newspaper covered the first-ever UFO convention to take place in the region. It was attended by more than 500 people and reporters showed up to cover the event. Hynek was the keynote speaker and he described the ongoing flap as “a real mystery.” He and another speaker also threw cold water on the idea that a small group of Cessna airplanes could be responsible for everything that had been happening. Sightings of the massive triangular object eventually trailed off and ended, but the belief in unidentifiable objects flying over the Hudson Valley did not. A restaurant named the Cup and Saucer soon opened in Pine Bush, New York, with a large flying saucer prominently featured on the sign over their door. A museum dedicated to UFOs and the paranormal opened in the same town and remains in operation to this day. And whenever they hold a public event or parade, reporters show up to cover the action and they’re still not making fun of the people who attend (except for a few of the people wearing more outlandish alien costumes, of course). The nation’s other, larger newspapers spent much of the past five decades ignoring or even mocking stories involving UFOs. That all changed with the release of the New York Times bombshell article in December of 2017. Now it seems as though every outlet in the country is talking about it and covering the actions that Congress is taking. But out in a backwater section of upstate New York, there are some newspapers that beat them to the punch by forty years.
Jazz Shaw
Putin and the UFO Sightings ( WSJ )
The debate over UAP may herald not alien visitors but destabilizing new weapons systems.
Now we know that the UFOs are not secret Russian systems, commented any number of bloggers and analysts, after Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine failed to produce evidence of advanced capabilities.
We know no such thing. True, the so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, as the U.S. military calls them, likely aren’t Russian. The most credible alleged sightings have been by U.S. military pilots in training missions in airspace reserved for U.S. military training operations. If the objects are real and the product of any government, they’re likely ours.
But such technology would be destabilizingly risky and likely would not be revealed by any power that had it. If the mysterious sightings are what they seem—impossibly speedy, impossibly maneuverable small flying objects—they would immediately upset the nuclear balance. The presumably unmanned systems could be used to destroy nuclear forces quickly and thoroughly on the ground, without resorting to nuclear weapons.
In invading Ukraine, Russia has bitten off a lot of strategic risk. It would bite off a lot more if it revealed transformative military capabilities. China and India would be as deeply alarmed as the U.S. and NATO, likely washing away whatever ambivalence now keeps them quasi-neutral in Russia’s war.
For those who haven’t noticed, the UFO question emerged with new urgency after the Pentagon’s 2017 publication of pilot videos of unexplained encounters. Last year, an unclassified report by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence threw up its hands saying it couldn’t resolve the mystery. In May the Pentagon’s chief spokesman called follow-up House hearings “very important.” Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan told an interviewer that the evidence suggests a “type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
The DNI report cited 80 cases between 2004 and 2021 in which unexplained aerial phenomena were detected by multiple types of military sensor, including the human eyeball. The ostensible conclusion of our intelligence community: “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects.”
In a previous column, I suggested why, for space-time reasons, they are unlikely to be alien spacecraft. An alternate view can be found in a new book by ex-banker Mark Gober, who rests his case mainly on the credibility of numerous credentialed people who believe or suspect they’ve seen evidence of alien encounters.
But anyone coming to this debate should also be tweaked by the recent and seemingly unrelated words of Russian dissident Yulia Latynina, who on these pages last week called for a “new arms race,” including “precision weapons that can take out Russia’s nuclear silos—and let Mr. Putin know that [we] aren’t afraid to use them.”
For the U.S., revealing such capabilities would be no less a strategic pickle than it would be for the Kremlin. These weapons, if they exist, would have to be tested somewhere—most likely on an existing testing range.
Between a feature and a bug would be the inevitability of their being observed by trained personnel using military-grade instruments. The DNI report somewhat ironically allows that secret government programs may indeed explain the sightings. Left out is the possibility that the UFO show is being orchestrated to test the waters for revealing such capabilities, or to gaslight U.S. rivals—or maybe being tested aren’t super-maneuverable military drones, but the ability to spoof human eyeballs and sensors into seeing them, which is also consistent with known or suspected U.S. government research interests.
Mass hysteria is still a possibility too, sparked by everyday phenomena whose explanation, if known, would be “boring,” as Sen. Marco Rubio once put it.
The documented military sightings, after all, are a tiny subset of unexplained claims that are always surfacing around the world and have for centuries, so far amounting to nothing. For somebody writing this particular column, a can of worms is the long association of UFOlogy with nuclear-weapons dread. A large and surprisingly developed lore concerns the testimony of U.S. military personnel who profess that alien visitors have used other-worldly technology to deactivate our nuclear weapons. The so-called Rendlesham Forest incident is only the most well-aired of these episodes.
Other nations’ intelligence agencies are certainly paying attention to our UFO debate, if not publicizing their own “conclusions.”
Vladimir Putin, the coldblooded ex-KGB agent, has reasons of his own for occasionally touting Russian superweapons that don’t exist or exist only on the drawing board. His nuclear threats don’t emerge in a vacuum. When the archives are opened, we may find he’s been seeking to counter what he fears are U.S. mind games to put Russia’s government in doubt about the possible existence of unrevealed Pentagon super-capabilities.
Holman W.Jenkins, Jr.
Did Jimmy Carter spot a UFO near Columbus in 1969? Here’s what happened. ( Aol. )
Seven years before his presidency, former President Jimmy Carter saw what he called, “the darndest thing I’ve ever seen.”
The incident took place in Leary, Georgia, just a stone’s throw south of Columbus. It was October 1969, the year before he was elected governor. At around 7:30 p.m., while waiting to give a speech at a Lion’s Club meeting, Carter says he saw an unidentified flying object.
Carter was not alone. About a dozen others reported seeing the UFO with “very bright changing colors and about the size of the moon,” according to History.com. He reported the object started out blue and then turned red and was “luminous, not solid.”
The incident made a lasting impression; Carter was still talking about it years later at a 1973 Southern Governors Conference. He retrospectively filed two official reports when word of the incident reached the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Kensington, Maryland, according to the Washington Post. He listed his occupation as “governor” and his address as the “state capitol, Atlanta.”
The first was a handwritten report in July 1973 to the International UFO Bureau after they sent him a form to complete. He responded to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Kensington, Maryland, when the group sent him a similar form three months later.
Carter said, “the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance.
“It returned, then departed,” Carter added. “It came close... maybe 300 to 1,000 yards... moved away, came close and then moved away.”
When Carter ran for president in 1976, he emphasized honesty and ridding the government of the secrecy that led to Watergate, “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.”
When it came to the UFO sighting, Carter backpedaled a bit. He told a campaign reporter that he had seen a light in the sky he could not identify, but did not call it a UFO.
“I have no idea what it was,” he said. “I think it was a light beckoning me to run in the California primary.”
Mona Moore