UFOs . . . Why?

Like many of you, I suppose, I’ve always wanted to believe there’s something to the UFO fascination. But my interest is waning. Skeptics say approximately 90 percent of UFO reports easily can be explained with rational, earthly analysis. Personally, I wonder if the modern-day statistic doesn’t approach 100 percent.

Biblical accounts of fantastic heavenly phenomena will hold my interest until I die and reach Gloryland, and I’ll never challenge scriptural reports that truly strange spectres were observed. Certain medieval accounts are rather compelling, too. So, even, are a few of the 20th-Century sightings that have been investigated since the stage-setting, as it were, 1947 assertion by business pilot Kenneth Arnold that he saw nine saucer-like disks flying over Washington State. Suggestions of weather balloons, spy planes, light reflections and hoaxes come up a little short in attempts to shrug off UFOs as a romantic fad altogether.

However, I suspect we ultimately will learn those unexplained appearances were rather less than fantastic, when the whole of history is revealed to us. To those absorbed in UFO lore, convinced that UFOs fly daily over one area of earth or another, I have to ask: Why? Why would they be playing some game around our particular orb in space (or any other orb, for that matter), what do they want, why shouldn’t they simply reveal themselves to all of us forthright, and why hasn’t any para-scientific team of UFO trackers with state-of-the-art technology yet captured a UFO for our most worthy news media to scrutinize? Hundreds of answers have been proposed . . . with no semblance of consensus. Again, why no consensus of explanations?

Weird things certainly occur, and I for one relish the mysteries they present to us (a prime raison d’etre for this blog). But there’s a great difference between Grade B flicks and Academy Award-winning films. What we’ve been fed by UFO clubs and authors for the past half century is an endless procession of Grade B garbage. Anymore, I believe I’d rather watch a movie (a good one).