UFOs are no joke, group says
by Daphne Benoit
Tue Nov 13, 12:02 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - UFOs may be fodder for comedians but there was no
joking Monday when a group of former pilots recounted seeing strange
phenomena in the sky and demanded the US government reopen an
investigation into unidentified flying objects.


Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs --
including a transparent flying disc and a triangular craft with
mysterious markings -- as they insisted their questions needed to be
taken seriously more than 30 years after the US file was closed.

"We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs
can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife
Symington, former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he
saw a UFO in 1997.

"Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that
it shut down in 1969," Symington told a news conference.

"We believe that for reasons of both national security and flight
safety, every country should make an effort to identify any object in
its airspace," said a statement from the 19 former pilots and
government officials from around the world.

The subject of UFOs came up in a recent debate among US presidential
candidates, with Democrat Dennis Kucinich saying he once saw a UFO --
making him the object of ridicule and jokes by late night television
comedians.

Skeptics say UFO sightings are merely aircraft, satellites or meteors
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

But the retired pilots spoke to a sympathetic audience of UFO
"believers" who heard them recall their encounters with seemingly
other-worldly objects appearing out of the sky.

"Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing," said
James Penniston, a retired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing
and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in
Woodbridge.

He said he saw an inexplicable triangular craft in a clearing in the
woods with "blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior."

The UFO was "warm to the touch and felt like metal," Penniston said.
One side of the craft had pictorial symbols and "the largest symbol
was a triangle, which was centered in the middle of the others," he
said.

Then after 45 minutes the light from the object "began to intensify"
and it then "shot off at an unbelievable speed" before 80 Air Force
personnel, he said. "In my logbook, I wrote 'speed: impossible.'"

Rodrigo Bravo from Chile's air force said UFOs needed to be studied
but lamented that the media often belittle the sightings.

"Sadly the UFO subject has been contaminated with false information,
out of touch with reality, provided by unqualified people to the
media," Bravo said.

"One of our most important civil aviation cases occurred in 1988,
showing that unidentified flying objects can be a danger for air
operations," he said.

"A Boeing 737 pilot on a final approach to the runway at the Puerto
Montt airport suddenly encountered a large white light surrounded by
green and red."

The pilot took a sharp turn to avoid a collision, according to Bravo.

The panel included a former Iranian fighter pilot, Parviz Jafari, who
said in 1976 he tried in vain to fire from his jet at an "object which
was flashing with intense red, green, orange and blue light" over
Tehran.

But when he approached, "my weapons jammed and my radio communications garbled."

A former Air France captain, Jean-Charles Duboc, said in 1994 he and
his crew saw "a huge flying disc" near Paris with a diameter of about
300 meters (1,000 feet) that left no sign on radar.

The disc "became transparent and disappeared in about 10 to 20
seconds," Duboc said.

The former pilot said like other major airlines Air France was mindful
of its image and it was difficult to raise the subject of UFOs.

A former official with the Federal Aviation Administration, John
Callahan, said government agencies discourage inquiries into UFOs.

"'Who believes in UFOs?' is the kind of attitude of the FAA all the
time," he said.

"However, when I asked the CIA person: 'What do you think it was,' he
responded 'a UFO.'"

When Callahan suggested the government tell Americans about a UFO, the
CIA official allegedly told him: "'No way, if we were to t

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

Click here to listen

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team's home page, http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/ .

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Iowa