Were Residents’ sightings of Rockford lights extraterrestrial?

 By Mike DuPre'

Gazette Staff

    Whatever else they might have been, the orange lights that Jeff Coan and his family saw over Rockford, Ill., the night of Feb. 11 constitute a "close encounter of the first kind."

What makes the Coans' experience more than an interesting, perhaps embellished, story is     Jeff Coan the 7]/2-minute videotape that 16-year-old Joel Coan shot of the five lights as they seemingly flew in formation and in maneuvers around each other.

    The Coans live in Beloit. That Friday night, 5-year-old Hannah wanted to eat at Chuck E Cheese's pizzeria in Rockford, so her dad and mom, Jeff and Lori, packed up the family, and her older brother, Joel, brought along his new video camera.

After the Coans left the restaurant about 9:15 p.m., they were driving on State Street and saw the lights.

    "Traffic was busy," Coan, 40, recalled. "We all saw 'em at some time. They were all flying so strangely, and they were so brightly orange. They were not that high, no more than a couple of thousand feet."

    The Coans were not the only folks who saw the lights.

    Rockford media reported several sightings on Feb. 11, 12 and 16. Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, said Monday that his private organization had received as many as two dozen calls reporting the Rockford sightings.

    Furthermore, similar events were observed on or near the days in question in Florida, Arizona, Oregon and Texas, he said.

    Observers' reports of the sightings Feb. 11 and 12 already are posted on the center's Web site, ufocenter.com, Davenport said, and he expected to have the observations from Feb. 16, posted within a couple of days.

"Everybody was looking at the same objects at the same time,'' Davenport said of the Rockford sightings.

    Although he has not seen the Coans' video, Davenport believes the lights that people saw over Rockford were not conventional aircraft because they were not lighted, as conventional airplanes are--red light on left wing, green light on right wing.

    And Davenport doesn't think the lights were on experimental military aircraft because he doesn't think the military would risk an observation of a new top-secret aircraft or risk an easily detectable accident with a new piece of equipment over a densely populated area such as northern Illinois.

    The Rockford Police Department reported "no involvement" when a shift commander was asked if the department received any reports of sightings or if any officers saw the lights.

    "We didn't take any reports on it," a shift commander at the Winnebago County Sheriff's Department said when asked the same questions.

         Deputies heard scuttlebutt about sightings, but it wasn't from other deputies talking about what they saw, the shift commander said.

        The Rockford Police Department's statements of no involvement'' and "no reports" concern Karla Soeprasetyo, a resident of Rockford's northeast side.

 On Feb. 16, Soeprasetyo's four children--ages 9, 12, 13, and 15-were going to bed about 9:30 p.m. when they called their mother to look at the lights in the sky.

    Soeprasetyo, 34, and her children saw two sets of orange lights: first one of five, then a diamond shaped formation of four.

    "After the first one faded away, the second came in," she said.

    Soeprasetyo is concerned about police saying they had no reports of sightings because she called the police to report hers.

    "The children were upset, so I called the local police," said Soeprasetyo, who also shot videotape of the lights. "I talked to the police department, but they didn't know what they were. I told the kids they were weather balloons. I didn't know what to say to my kids.

    "Being of sound mind and body, I can say there was something in the sky."

    Earl Wilson, operations supervisor of the Rockford Airport control tower, said he was not aware of radar confirmation of the phenomena reported by residents.

    But, he added, "We see a lot of stuff that isn't airplanes."

     Most aircraft carry radio transponders that enhance their radar images and report information, Wilson said.

    If an aircraft does not have such a transponder or if the object is something else, such as flock of birds, it shows up only as a "pinprick of light," Wilson said. "Those pinpricks are scattered all over: birds, radio towers, cars sometimes, planes without transponders.''

    A Gazette reporter watched Coan's video but was unable to view Soeprasetyo's.

    Most of the Coan video shows five small white lights with four of them seemingly in tandem as two pairs. The lights seem to perform maneuvers, flying around each other, lining up and hovering. At one point, Joel Coan was able to zoom in, and two of the lights appear as orange balls.

    To Coan, the lights appeared to "fly in intelligent formation."

    Soeprasetyo thought that each set of lights, which she and her family saw for several minutes, was attached to a large object.

    "This was big, huge," she said. "The lights were bright orange and connected."

    Coan and Soeprasetyo maintain they are not fans of "The X-Flies," a TV show that often portrays encounters with extraterrestrial life and government cover-ups of such encounters. While Coan is a fan of other science fiction, Soeprasetyo Janet.

    "I saw something," Soeprasetyo said. "I haven't thought about it being (extraterrestrial). This could very well be a UFO. With what the police said and all, I thought it could be military. There was something there."

    Coan believes that Earth is not the universe's sole home for intelligent life.

    "Whether that's what we saw, I don't know," he said. "It could be military, maybe other countries."

    Davenport operates the National UFO Reporting Center as a "labor of love," he said. Asked why, he replied: "We are quite sure that something extraordinary is going on, and the government doesn't want us to know about it....

    "Investigators all over are reporting the same phenomena. The number of reports certainly is on the increase."

    Asked if he believes the phenomena are extraterrestrial, Davenport said:

    "Absolutely. Based on a number of things: The quantity of sightings from seemingly credible people is strongly convincing. These people are seeing things that by all external measurements should not be there."

Motorist Reports UFO on I-35
Times Review
Johnson County's Daily Newspaper
Vol. 84 No. 108 Cleburne, Texas
Wednesday, May 11, 1994

Motorist reports UFO on I-35
By Flava Goodman

For several years reports of UFO sightings have occurred in and around Johnson County and with the growing popularity of TV shows on the subject of paranormal sightings and government cover-ups officials
must carefully consider each report, several arealaw enforcement officials said.

In late April the Johnson County Sheriff's Department received a 9-1-1 call at 9:30 p.m. from a motorist traveling south on Interstate 35, towards Alvarado. Using a mobile phone, the motorist, who wished to remain anonymous, reported a UFO hovering over I-35. The motorist reported the flying object was saucer shaped, with red, blue, and green lights flashing all around the outside edge. The UFO hovered for a short time, then moved south towards Grandview, following the interstate. The motorist said the UFO moved at such a fast speed, it was impossible to follow.

The Alvarado Police Department was dispatched to search for the UFO,APD officers tried to maintain as much of a radio "blackout" as possible to keep spectators from going to the area of the search. At this point, the sheriff's department asked the Grandview police to join in the pursuit of the possible UFO. GPD Officers Mike Cooley and Brett Baker joined the pursuit at CR 916 and I-35, by the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. They searched for about 20 minutes but were unable to locate the UFO.

Reports of sightings occurred were received from Hill and McClellan Counties. Baker said, "That all things are possible in this day and age. It's possible that the UFO reported was a helicopter, or some other type of
aircraft. It's just strange the search went all the way down to Waco."

The Sheriff's office refused to release any other information.

http://ufo-pi.homepage.com/

Alien notion: Unidentified object in Illinois grabs imaginations

By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times

Last Updated: Jan. 18, 2000

Millstadt, Ill. - It drifted ever so slowly over grain fields and railroad tracks and modest houses, silent and stealthy in the dead of night.

It was immense: as long as a football field. Two stories tall. Triangular, like an arrowhead. Bright lights winked from its rear. Red lights shimmered from its belly.

And no one has any idea what in - or out of - the world it was.

Four police officers on patrol in four rural towns all saw it. So did at least one civilian. Each witness independently described the object the same way. Each was baffled.

Southwestern Illinois, it seems, has a genuine UFO mystery to chew on.

Was the government testing some top-secret, slow-moving, lit-to-the-max mega-blimp? Was nearby Scott Air Force Base trying a quirky new weapon? Did four police officers hallucinate simultaneously? Or were extraterrestrials scoping out the heartland with a 4 a.m. fly-by on Jan. 5?

"It's going to be a long while before we determine what went on that night," said Colm Kelleher, who studies UFOs at the National Institute for Discovery Science in Las Vegas.

Folks here don't seem too taken with the mystery. They tend to be pragmatic sorts; they worry about their jobs and their farms and the weather, not giant flying arrowheads. Some think it was an alien craft. Others nod knowingly: secret military project. Either way, it doesn't much affect them.

But the sightings have electrified UFO researchers nationwide.

A team of Las Vegas investigators led by a former FBI agent spent several days interviewing witnesses here. And at the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, director Peter Davenport calls the case "a UFOlogist's dream" because the officers make "excellent to unimpeachable" witnesses.

Based on his interviews so far, Davenport says the UFO "clearly does not appear to be compatible with any conventional terrestrial aircraft that we know of."

The catch is "that we know of."

Even big-time UFO buffs have to admit that it's possible the mystery craft was a top-secret, man-made experiment. The Stealth bomber, for instance, was test-flown for eight years before the Pentagon officially unveiled it. During that time, local UFO societies got dozens of reports of black delta-shaped ships zooming overhead, said Forest Crawford, an Illinois UFO researcher.

"If it was up to me, I'd like (this latest sighting) to be a giant alien craft," Crawford said, "because those are more fun to investigate." He thinks it most likely, however, will turn out to be some sort of stealth blimp.

Not that the government is about to 'fess up, if in fact it was involved.

A spokesman for Scott Air Force Base says personnel there know nothing about the UFO. (Then again, if it was a classified military project, "I can't imagine that we would know," Lt. Col. Allan Dahncke said. "If we did, it wouldn't be so secret.")

The Federal Aviation Administration is similarly clueless: Air traffic controllers "didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, didn't catch anything on radar," spokeswoman Liz Cory said.

But those who saw the UFO are sure it was for real.

It floated along about 1,000 feet overhead, emitting a low-level buzz and following a southwesterly course for 20 minutes or more.

Millstadt police Officer Craig Stevens tried to take a photo but captured just three bright lights on film.

Excited and sleepless, Stevens has spent days combing the Internet for clues about the object. (That, and fending off callers who offer to examine him for alien implants.)

He now says he's "almost 98% sure" that the craft was man-made. "There is that slight possibility, though," he added, "that it may be from elsewhere."

That prospect pushes Davenport to keep investigating. "Until you have one of these objects on a laboratory table and are talking to the occupants, you can't say definitively what it is."

  Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Jan. 19, 2000.

“Panels of experts” are nothing new in Washington, but when a panel of experts says UFOs are real, it tends to raise a few eyebrows. Today at the National Press Club, representatives from the Disclosure Project gathered to demand Congressional hearings to settle the UFO question. 


The Disclosure Project is study conducted by the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a group consisting mainly of former government and military personnel. They want answers to what is perhaps mankind’s oldest question: Is there someone or something out there besides us? 

Yes, say experts from the Disclosure Project, and furthermore, they say they have evidence to prove it. 

“[Aliens] have circled around this planet. Some have been on this planet. They clearly want to communicate in peace," says Dr. Carol Rosin. 

They insist that this isn't about alien abduction, or about people being taken up into a spacecraft. This is a close encounter, they say, that hits a lot closer to home. 

The Disclosure Project claims to have hundreds of unimpeachable interviews with government and military insiders that prove that aliens are watching, and are worried about our military capabilities, particularly nuclear weapons. 

Dr. Steven Greer says, "I think what they are saying to us is that they don't want us going out into space with these weapons of mass destruction and I think they would be positively stopped." 

Robert Salas, a retired Air Force Captain and FAA (news - web sites) engineer, believes he saw aliens stop a missile from entering outer space. He was stationed as a launch officer at a missile silo in Montana in 1967 when what he thinks was a UFO suddenly appeared. "I reported it to my commander,” he says, “but as I was reporting it, our missiles started shutting down, so I'm convinced there was a direct relationship between the UFO and the missile shutdown." 

The panel also claims that the United States government has long been in possession of alien spacecraft and bodies, and has learned to understand alien technology that could be used to help the public. 

"Our problems out in California with electric could be a thing of the past if we use their technology," says John Callahan. 

But the government says that the wreckage they refer to, recovered in the desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, came from a weather balloon, and the “alien bodies” were really crash test dummies. 

The Disclosure Project, of course, maintains that story is part of a massive cover-up. 

But at this point, the prospect of the United States Congress opening hearings on the subject is, at best, unlikely.

 ABC 7 WJLA-TV

According to management of ConnectLive.com, which was airing the webcast of the Disclosure Project press conference, they were hit with sophisticated jamming. They had never experienced anything like it in the hundreds of webcasts they had conducted. It was not hacking and it was not the result of not enough bandwidth capabilities. Approximately 250,000 connections were made to view the live webcast - a record for that site.

As a result of the jamming the webcast was down for about 10 to 15% of the time. They received hundreds of queries as to what the problem was. 

This was ConnectLive's May 9th message about the jamming:
"If you are having trouble connecting, do not fear... it will be archived in its entirety for the next 6 months. The archive will be placed online this afternoon. There have been a number of sophisticated attempts to jam the signal, however, we have very successfully managed to get around those attempts and thousands of people have watched the live broadcast. Please keep trying."

The press conference has been archived in its entirety, and will be available in the archive until Nov. 9th, 2001 at
http://www.connectlive.com/events/disclosureproject/

The video tape of the May 9th press conference is now available for order at the above web site as well.

Graham W. Birdsall (Editor UFO Magazine).

7th April 1954 - 19th September 2003

At 05:05 this morning (Friday) Graham W. Birdsall passed away. This came just two days after undergoing a seven hour operation following his recent brain haemorrhage. Graham never regained consciousness. 

His wife Christine and daughters were by his side.

Graham was this subjects pillar of strength, he brought serious UFO research into the public domain and delivered a vociferous message to enthusiasts and researchers around the globe.

His character, enthusiasm and his commitment to this subject will be very sadly missed.

http://www.ufomag.co.uk/

Astronaut: We've Had Visitors

-The sixth man to walk on the moon shares his unconventional views.-

By WAVENEY ANN MOORE, Times Staff Writer
Published February 18, 2004


ST. PETERSBURG - The aliens have landed.

Thus declared Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell on Saturday to more than 200 admirers.

"A few insiders know the truth . . . and are studying the bodies that have been discovered," said Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon.

Mitchell, who landed on the moon with Alan B. Shepard, said a "cabal" of insiders stopped briefing presidents about extraterrestrials after President Kennedy.

For those who might consider his statements farfetched, Mitchell, who has a doctorate in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted that 30 years ago it was accepted that man was alone in the universe. Few people believe that now, he said.

Besides aliens, Mitchell talked about being freed of prostate cancer during a healing ceremony and his epiphany while returning from the moon.

"I had an opportunity to be a tourist," he said, going on to speak about the sensation he felt as he watched the Earth, moon and sun.

Raised as a Southern Baptist, Mitchell said his feeling of interconnectedness could not be explained by traditional religion alone. He later founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

On its Web site, the California organization says it conducts and sponsors "leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness" and that it explores "phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models, while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor."

The site also states that IONS, as it is known by members, is not a spiritual sect, political action group or single-cause institute.

Saturday afternoon, dozens of people made their way through rain to hear Mitchell and IONS president James O'Dea speak at the Heritage Holiday Inn in downtown St. Petersburg.

Lisa Raphael, a member of IONS who describes herself as a transformational holistic healer, said she was pleased to hear Mitchell's comments.

"Personally, what was most delightful to me was that he was more open than he has ever been, very direct about knowing that there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe and most probably that they have been here," said Ms. Raphael.

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