KEY POINTS:
I suppose it's what I get for staying up late channel-surfing. I ended up watching Larry King Live on CNN, where the aging host devoted an hour of prime time viewing (US prime-time) to the UFO sightings earlier this month in Stephenville, Texas.
Enough people saw the lights over Stephenville on the 8th of January to suggest there was something unidentified in the air and yes, quite possibly flying. Since then the debate over what the lights were has been fierce.
Larry's show last night ran like a bad mockumentary as he ping-ponged between UFO witnesses, UFO sceptics and those who believe the US Government has been covering up the existence of UFOs for years.
This is sort of how the conversation ran:
"It was a city in the air. It flew south behind our house. We hear tens of thousands of people saw it," said Erin Watson, a witness of the 1997, still-unexplained "Phoenix lights".
"People see lights in the sky. The key here is interpretation of those lights," countered retired US air force pilot James McGaha who said the Phoenix sightings were actually of military flares.
"It's the biggest story of the millennium...ignored for over sixty years," said Stanton Friedman, the physicist and UFO researcher.
"The president of the United States does not speak for six billion earthlings," he added, quite bizarrely.
"But we've never met any of these aliens. Nothing has ever come forward," Larry himself chipped in.
And so it went on for an hour with no discernable conclusion or revelatory details emerging, except maybe an explanation of the magneto-aerodynamic control system which allows the UFOs to fly through the air at high-speed without making any noise.
This sort of stuff rarely bubbles over into mainstream TV viewing these days, though the number of UFO sightings since the 9/11 attacks is apparently up considerably. The internet is a different story - it's a treasure trove of UFO speculation, shaky video clips of "authentic" UFO sightings (why can no one hold the camera still on these things, ever?).
There's the Out of the Blue UFO conspiracy documentary narrated by Peter Coyote which Larry plugged on the show, and is available on YouTube.
Here's a selection of the "best" UFO videos culled from archives around the world.
There's even a good deal of internet real estate devoted to New Zealand UFO sightings, particularly the infamous 1978 sighting of the lights over Kaikoura. Here's the YouTube video of the 1978 ABC News report, the report on the sighting from Ufocasebook.com and New Zealand's own Wikipedia entry devoted to UFO sightings.
Then there's this essay at Ufocusnz.org.nz titled: "A human upgrade program orchestrated by extraterrestrial contact: the evidence and implications". Try reading that with a straight face.
UFOs have been documented and dissected ad infinitum on the internet and technology is only making the source material, the photos and the videos, available to a wider audience.
But there's still nothing out there that makes me think there might, just might, be visitors from outer space doing fly-pasts in flying saucers. But it is the last big question facing humanity - are we alone? That's why I wasted an hour watching Larry King. I want to know.
Meanwhile, the conjecture will continue buzzing away with the internet its chief forum.
