Tag Archives | MUFON

John Schwartz reminds us to look up occasionally, in the New York Times:

How did you celebrate World U.F.O. Day?

You didn’t?

Dang. Nobody seems to remember any more that July 2, 1947 was the day of the Roswell crash in the New Mexico desert (a spacecraft from another world, say some; a test balloon, says the government) that became the touchstone for those who believe aliens have come to Earth.

And they certainly don’t remember that World U.F.O. Day is celebrated by some on June 24, to commemorate the first widely reported U.F.O. sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who claimed to see what he would call “flying saucers” over Mount Rainier the same year.

From those days, our cultural love affair with little green men has gone through the stages of many passionate relationships — the fear and hopefulness of “The Day The Earth Stood Still” in 1951; the quirky cuddliness of Ray Walston as “My Favorite Martian” in the ’60s.

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The Buffalo News profiles a local professor who wants to make UFO research respectable:

Philip Haseley has never had any encounters with UFOs or extraterrestrials, but he knows dozens of people who say they have.

“It happens to millions of people [around the world],” he said. “It’s about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study. It’s important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated.”

Haseley is doing his part. He is as serious about unidentified flying objects as anyone in the region. The Niagara County Community College anthropology professor has brought several speakers on the subject to the college in recent years and is head of the Western New York Mutual UFO Network, a group interested in UFO research.

Like the national organization, the Western New York group researches reported UFO sightings.

Generally, about 30 to 50 claims of UFOs are reported monthly across the state, Haseley said, including two or three in this region.

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