Inhuman Interest Stories

Above: just one of many news stories about the UFO sightings in Stephenville, TX

UPDATE: Advena Avis in Turkey appears to have reached some conclusions similar to what you are about to read.

ORIGINAL POST

A UFO blew up in the skies above a Vietnamese island last week. The Vietnam News Agency reported that “The explosion happened at about 8 km (5 miles) above the ground, and perhaps it was a plane, but authorities could not identify whether it was a civil or military aircraft.”

The same agency reported that residents of Phu Quoc island found what looked like gray, metallic debris. One piece was nearly 5 feet long.

Residents in the Cambodian village of Kampot, near Phu Quoc, told of hearing a loud explosion and finding pieces of metal near the ocean.

Authorities on Phu Quoc proper got in touch with air services in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, but none of those agencies reported any accidents.

An official with Cambodia’s Air Force initially said he’d heard about a foreign plane going down near Kampot. He later retracted the claim.

All of this leads your host to ask: What is up with all the UFO stories this year?

I love it when stories of the strange and paranormal go mainstream. My imagination goes to work, and in general I learn that humans still haven’t fully fallen prey to the soul-sucking cynicism that I often fight in my real-world life and work.

Because one of my inhuman interests is stories about the unexplained, I have for years lamented the lack of paranormal themed coverage in the mainstream press. Since I’m kind of part of the mainstream press in real life, I understand the lack — but people love this stuff, so for a long time I wondered at the dearth of UFO stories in the news.

Then 2008 dawns, and right away, we have the Stephenville UFOs. The sightings in Stephenville, TX were subject to some serious reportage, garnering air-time on many semi-respectable cable news outlets. A website has been created about the Stephenville lights: http://stephenvillelights.com/.

These sightings tended to follow a trajectory familiar to anyone who has ever read about UFO sightings in America. There were reports from the public, regular folks doing their jobs, including local cops. Most people reported the archetypal “strange lights” in the sky, but some sightings were pretty specific. One report given to the Texas branch of MUFON told of seeing a “large, gray craft” in broad daylight. It was silent and said to be moving at a high rate of speed.

The military didn’t help where the Stephenville lights were concerned. At first, military spokespersons said they had no aircraft in the area on the night of the first major sighting, in mid-January. Then, days later, the military retracted the report: they had, after all, had some planes flying in formation near Stephenville.

However, Stephenville is not far from Dubya’s western White House in Crawford, TX. This has given skeptics of the Stephenville events some grist for their mills — if there are unknown military aircraft in the area guarding the no-fly zone around Crawford, it’s no wonder the military is evasive about the situation. They don’t want to telegraph to anyone the measures taken to protect the president and his family.

I recall other UFO stories in the news after the first flurry of reports about Stephenville, but let’s skip ahead to May, and this announcement from the Vatican: “Vatican says aliens could exist.” Quoting from the article:

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world.

The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.

Go figure. The biggest authority for the largest Christian denomination in the world can’t rule out the possibility that there is other life elsewhere in the Universe. Besides being good evidence that the Vatican understands that God is greater than we can ever know (and therefore fully capable of seeding the Universe with life where ever She damn well pleases), this is striking for its timing. I had to wonder, after reading about the Vatican’s word on this subject, why they came out now.

Then late last week, there was Stan Romanek’s dog-and-pony show in Denver. I linked the snarky Wired post about Romanek’s alleged video of an alien at his window, made in 2003, because the attitude in the blog post (titled, “Banana Squash Nerf Ball Alien Unveiled in New Video”) mirrors my own view of Romanek’s claims — he’s full of shit. One quick web search tells you, for instance, that Romanek is a freaking graphic artist, among other things. Not to mention the thoroughly unconvincing nature of the still image he and his buddy Jeff Peckman gave the media at their press conference.

The point in lumping Romanek in with these other strange tales is this: he got some serious national media exposure. Romanek’s claim wasn’t isolated to George Noory’s Coast to Coast and its insomniac hordes; this story was covered by MSNBC, CNN, The Rocky Mountain News and others.

Is the mainstream media simply bored with the regular news? Do they finally recognize that there is a public appetite for UFO stories, after years of pointedly ignoring them? Or is most of it really just ‘let’s point and laugh at the freaks who believe this crap?’

In spite of being a “mainstream” journalist (who is actually much less long-winded) in real-life, I can’t really answer those questions. I can say that on the one hand, this new resurgence of the strange is heartening. For a guy like me it means I may be able to one day get a story about UFOs or whatever in print for pay, rather than just blogging about it. Yes, I would like to be able to do that.

On the other hand, I do have a paranoid streak. After all, that favorite year of end-timers who missed their desired apocalyptic orgy at the turn of the millenium, 2012, is only 3.5 years away, now. If one believes all that stuff about the apocalyptic Mayan prophecies regarding 2012, then one might think that at the very least, some kind of change is in the offing.

Because Wikipedia is right on this score — the original meaning of the word apocalypse is “lifting of the veil.” What if 2012 doesn’t mark the end of civilization, but the lifting of a great veil over human consciousness? What if the Vatican’s announcement in early May and the seeming resurgence of mainstream news coverage of UFO stories are all of a piece, and we are being prepared for something?

What if I need a new tinfoil hat?

Enough with the questions for now. There’s a Man in Black at the door.