| A New Day for UFO Research
By Patrick Huyghe
special to SPACE.com
posted: 12:43 pm ET
15 March 2000
|
The Air Force did it, albeit
reluctantly, for about two decades. A few private UFO organizations tried
it, too -- and promptly lost their shirts.
Now the National Institute
for Discovery Science (NIDS) is doing it -- fielding a rapid response team
to investigate promising UFO reports. The question is: will they succeed
where others have failed?
NIDS was founded
in 1995 by Las Vegas real-estate tycoon Robert
Bigelow to investigate UFO sightings, animal mutilations and other
anomalous phenomena.
Through its first four years
of operation, during which Bigelow hired a staff of scientists to run the
institute, NIDS was largely silent about its work and cagey in its public
statements.
Few people were even aware
of its existence and those who were, primarily UFOlogists, regarded the
fledging institute in the desert with suspicion.
All that has now changed.
See something? Call the
experts
"About a year ago we decided
it was time to start reaching out so that people could come to us with
reports," notes biochemist Colm Kelleher, who runs the day-to-day research
operations of the institute.
Four months ago the institute
actually began mass mailing a NIDS brochure and sticker promoting its 24-hour
hotline (702-798-1700) and web address
to police departments and radio and television stations.
"These are the people who
get called about UFO sightings, but they are not trained to investigate
these things and are not even interested most of the time," Kelleher said.
"We were hoping to persuade these people to call us and we would do the
rest."
The plan worked. NIDS has
been getting about 100 calls a month, but until the morning of January
5 when a call came in from a police officer in Illinois just east of St.
Louis, no hotline UFO report had been deemed worthy of an all-out NIDS
investigation.
This one was. Craig Stevens
of the Milstadt Police Department called NIDS about two hours after his
UFO sighting at 4:28 that morning. Stevens had been monitoring radio traffic
when he heard that the Highland police department had a report of a large
object flying in the air.
So he drove to the north
end of town where he observed a very large object shaped like a fat arrowhead
flying slowly at an altitude of 500 to 1000 ft. Police officers in Shiloh
and Dupo also witnessed the object, as did a police officer in Lebanon.
The low-flying, triangular
object was described as being between 200-600 feet long and 40-60 feet
thick with bright white lights angled downward at the corners and a red
light near the center.
Agents of NIDS arrive
on the scene
After numerous follow-up
phone calls, NIDS decided to deploy their two full-time investigators,
former FBI agents, to Illinois.
Why FBI? "We like guys with
a lot of forensic background," says Kelleher, "because in the mutilation
area and in the tiny percent of cases where alleged landings occur, you
really need people who can secure the scene and handle the evidence properly
so that we can stand behind it."
The NIDS investigators arrived
in Illinois two days after the initial sighting, spending almost four days
interviewing eyewitnesses, taking photographs and seeking a possible explanation
from a local Boeing facility, nearby Scott Air Force base, and the FAA.
NIDS immediately put the
transcripts of the interviews on their web site in the hope of unearthing
other witnesses who might have seen the object. Such openness in their
investigation stands in stark contrast to similar efforts by the Air Force
decades ago.
But their efforts to find
a prosaic explanation for the sightings failed.
Ticking off the explanations
The FAA had not seen anything
on radar. Scott Air Force Base officials said they didn't know anything
about the object and there were no stealth B-2s in the area at the time.
NIDS even considered the
possibility that the UFO might have been a secret blimp that resembled
a small experimental model built and patented 30 years earlier by a New
Jersey company called Aereon, but that design, according Aereon's CEO,
never went past the proof of principle stage.
NIDS' eight eyewitness reports
suggest that the object came down from Lake Michigan just north of Chicago
at 10:00 p.m. on January 4 and headed southwest, appearing 6 hours later
in Highland, before finally disappearing outside Dupo just before 7 a.m.
"That's about 9 hours in
the air," notes Kelleher. "That's a long time."
"On the other hand, according
to at least one police officer, the object would literally jump across
the sky in a matter of seconds. The other weird thing is, if it's trying
to be stealthy, what's it doing so low with these unbelievably bright,
blinding lights?"
Physicist Bruce Maccabee,
like many UFO believers, gave NIDS a thumbs up for "their quick response
and excellent work in interviewing witnesses on the scene. I also congratulate
them for publishing their results on their web site."
Klass unimpressed
Not so for UFO skeptic Phil
Klass.
"By curious coincidence,"
he writes in the March issue of his Skeptics UFO Newsletter, "a
very bright planet Venus was just rising in the southeast on Jan. 5 at
the time of the Illinois UFO sightings."
Klass accuses NIDS of not
even considering the possibility that the UFO might have been Venus.
"Although I have not personally
met [the NIDS investigators]," Klass told me in an email interview, "I
suspect they are quite competent to investigate 'cattle mutilations,' but
believe they are ill-trained to investigate UFO reports."
But according to NIDS astrophysicist
Eric Davis, they did consider, then rejected, stars or planets as possible
explanations for this case.
In fact, Davis told Michael
Lindemann of CNI News that Venus was below the horizon when the UFO was
first sighted near Highland at approximately 4 a.m.
Venus actually did not rise
until 4:25 that morning and would have been difficult to see initially
because of the surrounding trees, rolling hills and structures in the area.
"Bigelow is in this long
term"
"But we still can't rule
out the military," concludes Kelleher. And there, rather typically for
a UFO sighting, the matter rests.
Whether NIDS will ultimately
succeed where the Air Force and so many others have failed over the past
40 years is another question entirely.
"We have an ability to go
to the wall, if necessary, on the analysis front," explains Kelleher. "We
have the resources to pull out all the stops, our science advisory board
has the ability to open doors, and Bigelow is in this long term."
"He's been into this ever
since his family members had a sighting when he was a kid. He's been putting
money into this for quite a while. Plus we have a full time staff not doing
anything else. We are not a volunteer group doing it on our own time or
funds. I think NIDS has a lot of potential."
Stay tuned.
What do you think? Send your
comments to the editor.
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