Leslie Kean – Ash Clifton, Writer

Author’s Note: There has a been a lot of really cool UFO news lately (especially this article), so I thought I would re-share an old post I wrote some years ago regarding a fine book on the subject. Enjoy!

From 1989 to 1992 I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. This was around the same time that Fife Symington was elected governor of that fine state. I don’t remember having any opinion of Symington at the time, except that he seemed a man very much in the mold of Arizona politicians: a conservative, folksy cowboy.

So it was probably not that big of a surprise when, six years later, Symington handled an unusual political crisis in what many saw as a callous, flippant way. The crisis in question was a UFO—literally, an unidentified flying object—that was spotted by hundreds of people in the Phoenix area on the night of March 13th, 1997. The incident, which has since become known as The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident, resulted in dozens of 911 calls and hundreds of letters being written to the governor. Eventually, Symington was forced to hold a press conference about the event, in which he essentially laughed-off the whole affair. (One of his aides came to conference dressed as a green alien. Hilarity ensued.)

Recently I was watching an episode on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Answers with Joe. The episode was about UFOs, which made it was automatically a winner for me. Specifically, it focused on a few UFO videos that even a smart skeptic like Joe finds compelling. I enjoyed the episode so much, in fact, that I wanted to respond to it, and especially the last part, in which Joe enumerates some very rational arguments against the idea that UFOs are aliens. This is the so-called Extraterrestrial Hypothesis—the school of thought that believes UFOs are real and explicable as alien spacecraft.

(For the rest of this post, I’m going to use UFOs and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis interchangeably. And, yeah—I believe UFOs are alien craft.)

Obviously, I have some deep feelings about the subject, although I’m not sure why, exactly. I can’t claim any special knowledge about UFOs. But like millions of other Americans, I have seen a UFO. It happened one night on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, when my son and I were having dinner at a little joint on shore. We were sitting outside, and somewhere the course of the meal we saw a strange light in the sky. It shone a powerful beam of light in our direction, then disappeared, then reappeared again. This went on for nearly an hour.

And, of course, it was totally silent.

Tag: Leslie Kean

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