Roswell, Other Famous UFO Claims Get a Fresh Look
A new National Geographic television series, 'Chasing UFOs', will explore the world's UFO hotspots.
For the series a team of scientists and investigators will take a look at some of the world's most well known UFO cases such as the Roswell Incident and the Phoenix Lights. In each episode the team will explore relevant incident sites, interview witnesses and use sophisticated equipment in an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery.
"I tried to help illustrate applying critical analysis to the range of alleged evidence," said geoscientist Ben McGee. "The difference between UFO believers and astronomers is on the one hand you have people who find the data to support their hypothesis, and on the other you have the guys who attack their own hypothesis — who know there's a huge range of possible other explanations."
Did a UFO really crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947? What was that mysterious triangle of lights that hundreds of people spotted over Phoenix, Ariz., last fall? Are alleged alien abductees telling the truth? For a new series on the National Geographic Channel called "Chasing UFOs," a team of investigators visited UFO hotspots around the world and interviewed witnesses in an attempt to address some of history's most famous purported evidence that aliens have visited Earth.
We caught up with Ben McGee, a geoscientist and the lead field researcher on the UFO-chasing team, as well as its only skeptic, to get a taste of what he and his team discovered.
"I tried to help illustrate applying critical analysis to the range of alleged evidence," McGee told Life's Little Mysteries."The difference between UFO believers and astronomers is on the one hand you have people who find the data to support their hypothesis, and on the other you have the guys who attack their own hypothesis — who know there's a huge range of possible other explanations."
Military action
At Roswell, McGee and his team conducted a "recon-style survey" of the area around the alleged UFO crash site, testing for radiation and geomagnetic activity. They got lucky.
"We were doing some perimeter sweeps with metal detectors and got a hit," he said — it was a button from an Air Force member's coat.
"That jived with some of the alleged 'witness testimony' that said there was Air Force personnel sweeping the area after the crash to clean up debris," McGee said. But it also jives with what has been the military's story all along: that they were actually recovering debris from a crashed high-altitude surveillance balloon at the site rather than a flying saucer and its occupants. "Just because the military was there doesn't mean an alien was there," he said.
Triangle over Phoenix
The UFO chasers made another stop in the Southwest, in Phoenix, and spoke to people who saw a bizarre triangle of green lights moving slowly across the evening sky last September. The lights were definitely real — they were seen by many and recorded on video — but were they a UFO?
No comments:
Post a Comment