MUFON of Ohio

The Mutual UFO Network of Ohio

COMMENTS ABOUT NIGHTLINE UFO STORY
Broadcast on ABC July 16, 1996

by John S. Waddell, Ph.D.

From the Ohio UFO Notebook, Summer 1997

I don't think people in the mainstream media really understand why reasonable people would take the UFO phenomenon seriously, thus they are unable to communicate this in their reports. An ABC Nightline segment has come closer than just about anything I've seen, however. Ted Koppel could easily have accepted the Air Force "explanation" and dismissed the footage taken by a powerful telescope high on a mountain top in Maui, Hawaii on December 1,1993. Even if the event turns out to be a natural phenomenon, it is significant that Koppel was willing to wait for the actual evidence to come in.

They did not really tackle the issue of nearby alien contact, however. For example, they provided no evidence why reasonable people might actually believe more than a balloon landed near Roswell. I'm certain if ABC had been investigating an airline crash, they would have arranged to have a technical report on the supposed wreckage. They also would have interviewed experts and witnesses to the event, instead of a rancher who had no particular expertise and was not a witness to anything connected with the actual event. There was simply no meat in this report.

On the other hand, they were willing to seriously address the issue of our not being the only reasoning species in the universe. They did interview experts in this segment. And from a practical, psychological viewpoint, I think this was plenty to chew on for the average viewer.

I was disappointed that the two live guests (Professor Paul Davies, University of Adelaide and Professor Lionel Tiger, Rutgers University) were dinosaurs. Professor Tiger clearly hasn't learned much new in this area for some time. I was astonished that he said only a fringe group takes UFOs seriously, since a number of polls indicate almost half of Americans believe UFOs are "real", i.e. non-human, non-random.

I agree with the argument Professors Davies and Tiger put forth, that humans have a need to reach out to something larger than ourselves, and that this includes a need to connect with other intelligent species in the universe. While this certainly can lead to some false-positives and misperceptions, it can also be used as an argument that this need is borne of something real. After all, humans have a need for air and water, because these are substances from which we are created. We don't have a random need for these things. Likewise, it can be posited that we have a need to connect to a higher power, because it is also the substance from which we were created.

People hungered for - and suffered for the lack of - vitamin C, for example, long before we understood what it was or could tease it out of nature. Both "All That Is", and our sentient brethren continue to fall into that opaque category, but our desire for such contact is certainly not ipso facto evidence that they don't exist.

Interestingly, the dinosaurs' equating interest in religion with interest in UFOs, may actually have resulted in legitimizing UFOs, rather than ridiculing such interest. Most people will be much quicker to dismiss these nay-sayers than to dismiss their religious beliefs, IMO.

©1997 Mid-Ohio Research Associates, Inc.


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