UFO

"Me'n'mah cusin were out'n back yard smokin'n'passin' the jug at nearabouts 4 in the mornin' when he sez to me, son, look 'ere - you see dat or is it dis shine? I looks up and surenuff heres dis big lit ball in the air jest floatin and bobbin round. We gets the shotgun but couldn't hit it. Cusin hit the jug and it blowed up and the flames were big and the porch caught far and pret soon the hole house burnt. That was a UFO."

And that's what you might think when there's talk about UFOs. But wait.

I admit, I am fascinated and have been for years, though I never saw one. My mother did (no, it wasn't the one she came here on) in Naples, Italy, of all places. Yes, she was drinking but claims everybody on the rooftop restaurant saw it too when she pointed and let on.

The implication is so staggering - not that there's life somewhere else but intelligent life - WAY MORE ADVANCED is what grabs me. It changes everything if benign and changes everything if hostile. What would religion become? What could we learn? So if there are visitors I want to know for sure and then more than that.

I watch all the shows I can record. Terri hates them. I admit many are repetitive. So she watches Fashion Police when I'm not around and I watch UFOs In Our Skies or whatever when she's away from the screen.

I remain a healthy skeptic. I think most of the sightings are anything BUT extraterrestrial craft. Birds, balloons, debris, planes, stars, shuttlecocks, hallucinations, contrails, video artifacts, hoaxes, inversions, Jupiter - you name it.

But I have a friend who saw something in the night sky she couldn't explain, and she's straight as an arrow. We had a neighbor who reluctantly told us of what you'd call a (very) close encounter (only feet away from the silent craft.) His wife corroborates. While co-producing a UFO radio special, I interviewed several folks who seemed VERY normal except for what they had seen. And spoke to several of the notable 'cases' out there too. They all seemed genuine. The stories creepy.

There are reports from pilots who have seen lights or discs or cigar shaped (and we're talking real big dukers - huge flying things) that did impossible maneuvers. Some were tracked on radar. Some not.

There are some good websites - one with particularly interesting pictures. The best of these look faked but some don't. Some go back to multiple witnesses - say - in the 50s, before digital manipulation. President Jimmy Carter reported one officially.

One of the Astronauts, Gordon Cooper, says he not only saw a silver disk land in bright daylight, and the detail he was with filmed it (this before he was an astronaut, but was in the military). The military took the film away. Nobody has seen it since.

The retired air force colonel, who once lectured the United Nations on the reality of UFOs, still holds an "unshakable" belief in extraterrestrial intelligence, thanks largely to personal experience.

"On one occasion, I saw some strange vehicles that we assumed were UFOs," he told Art Bell.

In the encounter, which took place over Germany in the early 1950s, Cooper saw "flights of fighters flying by in the same sort of formation we flew, moving east to west." The U.S. Air Force base scrambled its own pilots, including Cooper, who remembers the objects as looking "just like saucers -- they were metallic looking, but we couldn't really get close enough to see more than that. You couldn't see any wings on them."

At the time, Cooper entertained the possibility that the craft might be a new Soviet design, but "looking back now," he suspects "it was some kind of extraterrestrial vehicle."

He also stood by his belief that he saw a UFO land at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1957. Although Cooper had been filming the base with a camera crew at the time, the film, which he handed over to a high-ranking officer from Washington, has never emerged.

I just want to KNOW.