David Clarke is a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University who believes that UFOs are a worthy subject for academic study.

Thursday, 26 June 2008-UFOs are laughed off because of the lunatic fringe who are attracted to the subject and because the media cannot bring themselves to take the subject seriously. But it's a serious subject. The lack of respect in the media feeds back into popular culture, so that if you're an academic looking for funding you're not going to get yourself involved in UFOs and their study because it's career suicide.

I've tried to apply for funding to study this subject and it's taboo. Nobody's interested in it because it's got this image. It's a real shame, because there's massive amounts of interesting material, but we're too close to the material in time. It's perfectly acceptable for historians to study witchcraft mania in the Middle Ages, but because this is happening here and now, and these are people we can go and speak to, it's a little too close. When you begin to talk to someone about UFOs, they start to question your own motives for being involved.

If you look at the discussion there's been in the media as a result of the release of the government's UFO files, you can't get away from the question: are they alien visitors? It's tired. There's a lot more of interest to academia in these papers than this business about whether or not there are aliens. There are two or three hundred sightings reported to the Ministry of Defence each year, and that is only the people who report things to the MoD. Extrapolate that across the world and you are talking about hundreds of thousands of sightings across the world every year.

People used to come up to the astronomer Carl Sagan after lectures and ask: "Do you believe?" He was struck by the question. Not, is there evidence? But, do you believe? It's a matter of faith to a lot of people and UFOs can become a substitute for religion. What they like is the mystery, they don't want a solution. In 1956, an American sociologist joined a flying saucer cult, predicting the end of the world. Obviously this didn't come to pass, but rather than the people who followed this cult saying what a load of rubbish, they went on to strengthen their belief.

So there is a massive amount of material for sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists to study. And the Ministry of Defence itself has come to the conclusion that UFOs do exist, but are not spaceships. So these are reports of some kind of natural phenomenon we do not understand, which could be studied by atmospheric physicists. It's a pity no one takes it seriously.

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By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times

Article Launched: 06/20/2008 01:31:13 AM PDT

STEPHENVILLE, Texas - Constable Lee Roy Gaitan saw the brilliant red orbs hovering in the sky and hollered for his family to come out. It's probably an airplane, said his wife, Wendy, who didn't budge from the couch. Only 8-year-old Ryan went to the front yard.

That's a UFO, the boy said.

Gaitan, a stocky, 44-year-old lawman who has spent 16 years patrolling the Texas scrubland, debated whether to tell anybody about it.

"People would say, 'hey, this guy is nuts. He's crazy,' " Gaitan said of his sighting Jan. 8. In the morning, there were no unusual police reports, but the next day, the Stephenville Empire-Tribune came out with a front-page story: "Possible UFO Sighting - Four area residents witness mysterious objects."

Soon, scores more said they had seen the same thing. Stephenville, a ranch town 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, became home to the biggest mass UFO sighting since the 1997 Lights Over Phoenix, in which thousands of people reported seeing a boomerang-shaped object in the sky.

The witnesses

Stephenville is the largest town in Erath County (population 34,000), the heart of Texas dairy country. On a cold January night in nearby Selden, Steve Allen, 50, and a few friends standing around a fire saw a set of brilliant white lights that were quicker and quieter than anything they had ever seen.

The lights stopped near Stephenville, reconfigured to form an arch "shaped like the top of a football," Allen said, and realigned themselves into two vertical lines of randomly flashing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.

Ten minutes later, the group saw the lights coming from the opposite direction. Trailing them closely, Allen was certain, were two military jets followed by two massive red orbs.

The next morning, Allen contacted Empire-Tribune reporter Angelia Joiner. She knew nothing about UFOs, but Allen sounded like a sensible man.

Allen "seemed very intelligent," said Joiner, a 47-year-old former school teacher who had been a reporter for 18 months. Allen's friends confirmed the account.

Still, it was a strange story, and Joiner's bosses were concerned. Managing editor Sara Vanden Berge said she was so anxious that she cried the next morning when she saw "UFO" in the headline.

Then the television crews started showing up. First came the local reporters, then people from "Good Morning America," NPR and CNN.

"Do you believe alien beings are out there?" CNN's Larry King asked, looking into the camera. "Do you believe they've come to Earth?"

Before long, local people started wearing "Alien Capital of the World" T-shirts.

Gaitan couldn't stop talking about an event he had initially been hesitant to mention. He took media calls came from all over the world, logging more than 100 interviews by mid-February.

Not a weather balloon

A logical explanation for the lights was the military; a portion of Erath County falls under a fly zone used in training exercises. When Joiner checked, however, the 301st Fighter Wing stationed near Forth Worth said no aircraft were near Stephenville on Jan. 8, when the lights were first observed.

Two weeks after the sighting, a break came in the case. Correcting its earlier statement, the Air Force said 10 F-16s were on a training mission over Erath County when the lights were initially spotted.

The town splintered into believers and skeptics.

Joiner doubted the weird pattern of lights reported by Allen and others could be explained by military aircraft. Allen wasn't buying it, either. "Our military wishes it had what we saw," he said.

Gaitan reasoned from the presence of the F-16s that he probably had seen a military experiment the Air Force couldn't fully disclose. "We're in the middle of a war right now," he said.

Gaitan nonetheless found himself repeatedly scanning the sky for another glimpse of the lights. One February morning at dawn, while driving the highway west of Stephenville, Gaitan spotted a mysterious ball of light shining through a field of leafless trees. As winter turned to spring, the inconclusiveness of the cosmic news began to fade into the daily grind of terrestrial events. The town started looking forward to graduation at the high school, and the first award of college scholarships funded by T-shirt sales.

Some were changed.

Joiner, frustrated with juggling her duties as education writer, quit the paper and signed on as a special correspondent for the Jerry Pippin radio show, which regularly reports on unexplained phenomena.

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