Sunday, February 27, 2000
UFO talk draws crowd
By JASON GIBBS
Staff Writer
Donald Burleson was lying on a cot on his grandmother’s
back porch in Breckenridge when the 5-year-old saw a bright light
with a metallic sheen shoot across the sky. The year was 1947
but time, he says, has not dimmed his recollection of the event.
He says those few seconds remain one of the most vivid memories
of his life.
Now a Ph.D, Burleson is the director of technology at Eastern
New Mexico University in Roswell and the lead investigator of
the National UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M. On
Saturday afternoon, he addressed a crowd of 120 or more Abilenians
in the Grace ballroom. It was the fourth of five lectures offered
as part of the Grace’s “Space 2000” series.
“Once you have seen one, you can’t doubt the fact
that they are real,” said Burleson, who describes himself
as “a UFO skeptic who has seen a UFO.”
The apparent discrepancy in that statement, he says, reflects
the guarded skepticism that everyone involved in scientific inquiry
into extraterrestrial phenomena has to practice.
“Most incidents we hear about are pure nonsense,”
he said of the flood of false reports he must sift through to
find the handful that may be true.
“It’s hard for the field to maintain an aura of seriousness,”
he added.
But some genuine accounts do eventually arise out of the hundreds
he hears of each year. Those, he says, keep him in pursuit of
knowledge about celestial visitors.
And when the seemingly authentic incidents include any type
of photographic accounts such as still pictures, 16-mm film or
home movies, he is truly in his element.
He specializes in enhancing images through the use of computers
to see what could not be seen years ago. A photo from the 1950s,
he says, can yield telling information when enlarged and manipulated
with new software. The new information has helped discount some
images that had previously been thought to show UFOs, and has
shown that other images the military said were no more than birds
or other common objects were actually “structures” that
could not be explained.
And, he adds, private institutions such as the Roswell UFO
Museum and Research Center must continue the work without assistance
from the military, who more often than not, make their task harder.
Since the crash of a “flying disc” near Roswell in
1947, Burleson said the government has gone to extraordinary lengths
to make the public believe that some of these sightings can be
explained away. When confronted with photos of what Burleson believes
to be true UFOs, military research laboratories have offered explanations
which usually involve migrating birds.
In one such incident, Burleson said, the Air Force explanation
was less than credible — to say the least.
“They told us it was a flock of ducks with ‘very
luminescent butts,’” he said.
In another, videotaped incident in which a group of lights
was captured on film moving at a high rate of speed, Burleson
said the government report attributed the lights to a flock of
seagulls.
“Do these people think other people think? Even a seagull
shot out of a cannon can’t fly 3,000 miles per hour,”
he said.
Most of those attending the lecture seemed to agree with Burleson.
Donna Mullins, who has been interested in UFO research for
about 20 years, said, “I think something is going on even
though I’m not sure what it is.
“But I do believe the government knows more about the
whole thing than they are telling us,” she added.
Shawna Mitchel, who remembers watching the night skies in Hondo,
N.M., with her father when she was a child, says she has never
seen a UFO. But she does not discount their existence entirely.
“To me, it seems really narrow-minded for people to think
we are the only life in the universe,” she said.
As that attitude becomes more prevalent in American society,
Burleson says, more pressure is being exerted on the government
to disclose what they know about UFOs.
“Our government has been less than forthright. I’d
like to think some day they would come forward but I’m not
holding my breath,” he said.
Despite the lack of access to truthful information Burleson
said the military keeps from the public, he believes humans will
eventually understand what those lights in the sky really are.
“We are going to find out anyway because we have the ability
to and humans are curious,” he said.
“And,” he added, “because we have a right to
know.”
Jason Gibbs can be reached at 676-6734 or gibbsj@abinews.com.
Copyright ©2000,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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