The Aliens Are Coming Part One

(Back in 1996, I wrote the following for a British magazine. However, my editor thought I was nuts for doing the article and was busy getting rid of all of the American writers from the staff. So the piece never saw the light of day. Though some of the information is outdated, I feel the need to present it. Call me stubborn.
-WK)

Man-eating reptiles from another planet are preparing to invade the earth. Or at least that is the hot buzz on one of the numerous computer bulletin boards devoted to UFOs. But the rude diners from the Draco star system have better get in line. By some accounts, our world is one of the busiest stops on the intergalactic superhighway. Simply everyone who is anyone is landing here these days.
"We have visitors on this planet," insists Peter B. Davenport, the executive director of the National Center for UFO Reporting in Seattle, Washington. "There is very little remaining doubt."
The center maintains a 24-hour telephone hot line for UFO reports from all corners of North America and has accumulated thousands of eye witnessed statements.
"I think we are observing," adds John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies, "something we cannot explain or understand coming from a place we cannot imagine for reasons that are beyond our imagination."
Which is to say: It's a mystery. But long before such movies and TV shows as Independence Day, The X-Files and Dark Skies renewed public interest in low flying things that go bump in the night, the UFO mystery was deeply entrenching itself into the global sub-conscious.
Since the end of World War II, strange lights and bizarre flying crafts have been spotted on every continent. Though often dismissed as misobservations of such natural phenomena as St. Elmo's Fire and nocturnal geese, UFOs have also resulted in a variety of well documented reports from surprisingly reliable sources. Consider:
The North American Air Defense Command have actually tracked fast-moving objects that were whizzing in and out of the upper atmosphere and that were not behaving in a manner resembling either a satellite or a meteor.
Both a pilot and his Cessna plane vanished off the coast of Australia when he encountered an object that was tracked, and then lost, on radar. The pilot's last radio message was that he was being followed by something that was not an aircraft.
In a recent interview, ex-astronaut Gordon Cooper revealed that he and several other jet pilots once encountered a mysterious saucer-shaped ship in the desert near Edwards Air Force base.
But such provable (or at least plausible) allegations pale next to the nebulous twilight realm of myth and folklore that has evolved around the UFO mystery. Legends abound, from tales about massive underground alien bases to terrifying accounts of abductions. In some stories, the government is secretly in league with the critters as they willingly surrender the planet in a fool-hardy pursuit of advance technology.
Either way, everyone agrees that the U.S. government is keeping something secret. Even the government goes along with this since they have repeatedly denied access to a large volume of material on the subject. The Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have all spent years actively gathering information on UFOs. But the small sampling of documents which have been released are more laundered than the expletives deleted from the Watergate tapes of Richard Nixon.
"The government didn't tell the full truth," admits Joe Nickell while discussing a few of the more infamous cases in UFO mythology. Nickell is a research fellow for The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He is an expert on the subject of forgery and his work has been crucial in the debunking of the original Majestic-12 documents.
"We pretty well know," he continues, "that whenever there is secrecy, what happens is that it is a breeding ground just as damp, moist places may be a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible creatures. This type of breeding ground produces rumors, speculations, fantasies. People come out of the woodwork: pathological liars and raconteurs, the kind of people who like to sit back and spin some tall tales."
If some Ufologists are guilty of believing anything, then Nickell could be accused of disbelieving in everything. Aside from his work for CSICoP, Nickell is also a member of the Council for Media Integrity and is a vocal critic of such shows as The X-Files and Dark Skies. In the Council's viewpoint, fun is fun but the current crop of media induced paranoia may be steering people into a new Dark Age.
"We are becoming two nations," Nickell warns. "One that is scientifically literate...and another that is not educated or informed in that way."
For the Council, a program like The X-Files gives false credence to old hoaxes while using pseudo-scientific babble to confuse the viewer into accepting various conspiracy theories that flies in the face of any well-balanced, rational thinking.