Free Real-Life X-Files by Joe Nickell

craft actually fire on a police helicopter? If not, what was the nature of a UFO that two officers reported attacked them over Louisville, Kentucky, in 1993? Is this the case that proves the reality of alien invaders?
    Flying Saucers
    The modern wave of UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private airplane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Arnold saw what he described as a chain of nine disclike objects, each flying with a motion like “a saucer skipped across water.” Whether Arnold saw a line of aircraft or mirages caused by temperature inversion or something else, the flying saucer phenomenon had taken flight. Once again reality followed fiction. Popular sciencefiction magazines like Amazing Stories had been publishing wild tales of extraterrestrial visitations, complete with imaginative covers illustrating strange, circular spaceships.
    UFO reports continue to be common. Most fall into two categories, the first being termed “daylight discs”—metallic, saucershaped objects. When properly investigated, these often turn out to be weather, research, and other balloons aircraft meteors kites, blimps, and hang gliders wind–borne objects of various kinds and other phenomena. Photographs of such discs often turn out to be lens flares (the result of interreflection between lens surfaces), lenticular (lens–shaped) clouds, and other causes, including, of course, deliberate hoaxing. Many faked UFO photos havebeen produced simply by tossing a model spaceship in the air or suspending it on a thread. One fake photo, offered by a Venezuelan airline pilot, was made by placing a metal button on an aerial photograph and then rephotographing the view (Nickell 1994,1995).
    The second type of UFO sighting consists of nighttime UFOs—so called “nocturnal lights”—which represent the most frequently reported UFO events. They are also the “least strange” ones, according to the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer and former consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s UFO research program, Project Blue Book (1952–1969). According to him, “An experienced investigator readily recognizes most of these for what they are: bright meteors, aircraft landing lights, balloons, planets, violently twinkling stars, searchlights, advertising lights on planes, refueling missions, etc. When one realizes the unfamiliarity of the general public with lights in the night sky of this variety, it is obvious why so many such UFO reports arise” (Hynek 1972,41–42). (Note that balloons appear in both categories. They were extensively used in the past and were frequently reported as strange craft. A balloon can achieve high altitudes and, if caught in jet–stream winds, can reach speeds of more than two hundred miles an hour. Or it can stop and seem to hover, or move erratically, or execute sharp turns, depending on the winds. It can even appear to change its shape and color. Depending on how sunlight strikes the plastic covering, the balloon can appear to be white, metallic, red, glowing, and so on. In fact, so often have balloons of one type or another been reported as UFOs that, when lost, these chameleons of the sky have often been traced by following the reports of saucer sightings [Nickell 1989,21].)
    Most UFO researchers—proponents and skeptics alike—agree that the majority of UFO reports can be explained. The controversy is over a small residue—say two percent—of unsolved cases. Proponents often act as if these cases offer proof of extraterrestrial visitation, but to suggest so is to be guilty of the logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam (that is, “arguing from ignorance”). Skeptics observe that what is unexplained is not necessarily unexplainable , and they suspect that if the truth were known, such cases would fall not into the category of alien craft but into the realm of mundane explanations. But what about the attack on a patrolling police helicopter?
    Close