The Wall Street Journal sussed out two people who saw the UFO with Dennis Kucinich back in the day, and got them to talk about it. Excerpt:
The day was strange from the start. For hours, Mr. Kucinich, Mr. Costanzo and his companion noticed a high-pitched sound. "There was a sense that something extraordinary was happening all day," says the girlfriend. She and Mr. Costanzo say that none of the three consumed alcohol or took drugs.As they sat down to a dinner, Mr. Kucinich spotted a light in the distance, to the left of Mount Rainier. Mr. Costanzo thought it was a helicopter.
But Mr. Kucinich walked outside to the deck to look through the telescope that he had bought Ms. MacLaine as a house gift. After a few minutes, Mr. Kucinich summoned the other two: "Guys, come on out here and look at this."
Now, I just love making fun of Dennis Kucinich, but I'm not at all prepared to say that nothing happened that night, or that they were just hallucinating. I've never seen a UFO, but friends of mine, people I know to be stable, solid folks, have seen them. In one more recent case, a woman who reads this blog saw something strange and utterly inexplicable as she was out driving with her husband -- an large object that was hovering silently over a field. Her husband saw it too.
Many years ago, when I was a child, a couple of my parents' neighbors, lifelong friends, burst into our house late at night, absolutely terrified. They had been out for an evening drive down a country lane, and found their car suddenly sitting in the middle of a very bright light. They sped up, but the light followed them. They told my mom and dad that it was some kind of aircraft hovering above the trees, following them. When they made it back to the main highway, the aircraft shot off into the air at an astonishing speed. The couple sped to our house, too afraid to go back to their own. My folks say that whatever our neighbors saw that night, it left those people absolutely stone-cold terrified, at least when they showed up at the door.
I have no idea what to think about UFOs, and truth to tell, I rarely do. But I don't believe they're a hallucination. What do you think?
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There is no "cognitive dissonance" involved in that distinction. Belief in the supernatural is simply not the same thing as belief in alleged natural phenomena that are empirically false.
Empirically false? If we take the alien example and couch it in "what if's" (like all good apologetics do), then the ability to demonstrate them would approach nil. We're going to be able to prove/disprove it about as easily as the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, and even that is in dispute.
and if you don't mind Simon, I took the liberty of mad-libbing your post
To assert that God incarnated and visited the earth (while appearing only to a handful of individuals and leaving no generally verifiable traces of His existence to anyone else at all) is akin to claiming that the earth is flat. Those claims are preposterous. The fact that they are preposterous does not require one to accept agnostic materialism or to deny the possibility of miraculous phenomena.
Father Seraphim Rose wrote a book with a chapter about UFO's and concluded from bpth patristic and psychological evidence that they are modern version of demons. I used to think maybe there were benevolent ones (what have they done that's good?)and evil ones, but even before reading Fr. Rose's book, whose name I forget at the moment, I'd begun to feel they were negative forces.
I"m not able to get into detail at the moment, but if you're interested, check out Fr. Rose's book. Yeah, he can be gloomy sometimes but I think he's onto something with UFOs.
"Aside from the implausibility of the government successfully maintaining such a cover up (and lucky for the U.S. government that those bumbling aliens keep landing here and haven't managed to visit any other countries on earth!), what I've never understood is this: Why would the government feel any need to cover such a thing up?"
Simon - for the same reason the government has to keep the fact of Elvis's immortality covered up?
Just guessing. But what fun is a conspiracy without a cover-up?
Or maybe it springs from a hope that the government really is fully competent... at something.
You know, for a cover-up, it seems to be a very very bad one. I mean, everyone knows what's going on, even if they don't believe it.
I'm reminded of an episode of Kim Possible where they discover the secret of Area 51 was that...they had aliens and alien technology there and were doing research on them.
Kim: But that means all the rumors are true.
Gen. Simms: Every last one of them. We've implemented a double-negative cover story. We make sure only to leak out information that is one-hundred percent accurate.
Ron: But then it's not really secret!
Gen. Simms: That's exactly what we want you to believe.
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