Article/Document:

Stanford Scientists Say UFOs May Warrant a Second Look

Buck Wolf, ABCNEWS.com

original source |  fair use notice

Summary: Stanford Scientists Say UFOs May Warrant a Second Look. A panel of scientists is conducting the first independent UFO investigation in nearly 30 years.

June 29 — Calling Agents Mulder and Scully: We have an assignment for you.

In the first independent UFO investigation in nearly 30 years, a panel of international scientists is asking for a formal probe into unexplained phenomena.

Some of the evidence looks and sounds like it was lifted straight out of The X-Files—mysterious lights bursting across the night sky, witnesses with strange burns and eerie stories, radars going haywire.
The fraud factor might be pretty high, and the panel hasn’t yet jumped on the “I want to believe” bandwagon.
But the scientists want answers.
“It is a puzzle,” says Stanford University physicist and panel director Peter Sturrock. “The only way to get real answers is to get scientists involved in the problem.”

A Break With the Past

Today’s report is in contrast to the finding of a 1968 panel that found “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced.”
About the same time, the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency ended the Colorado Project, the last comprehensive government UFO probe.
“With modern technology, we can learn a lot more now than we could twenty or thirty years ago,” Sturrock said. Still, members of the panel pointed out that new technologies also make it easier to fabricate evidence.
One of the more intriguing photographs examined was taken on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, by a family visiting a park in October 1981. The photograph shows a daytime view of a mountain with a silvery oval-shaped object set against the blue sky.
The panel was impressed by prior analysis of the photograph that found the glow and brightness of the “disk” was consistent with a reflecting metal object.
In another case, a patrolman in Haines City, Fla., claimed to have seen a green light in his rear view mirror in 1992. The object reportedly followed his car moving from the right side of the vehicle to the front and back several times.
Delgado said the object was about 15 feet long and hovered about 10 feet off the ground. He called his dispatch for backup and pulled off the road, where his engine, lights and radio all went dead.

Not Exactly Close Encounters

Panel member Tom Holzer, a physicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the study stopped well short of making any conclusions that Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial craft.
“You can never rule anything out, but we didn’t see any evidence for that,” he said.
The truth is out there, as they say in The X-Files, and modern scientific sleuthing might help us find it—exciting or not.

Read more articles on this topic:

Sturrock Panel