97 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
97 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
![]() |
SUBJECT: NY TIMES ON TASS REPORT, RE: UFOs FILE: UFO1404
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
New York Times, Thursday, October 12, 1989
|
||
|
__________________________________________
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
TASS'S THRILL: JOKING OVER UFO REPORT
|
||
|
By Eleanor Blau
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
The report by the Soviet press agency Tass that lanky, three-eyed
|
||
|
creatures took a stroll through a Soviet park last month has caused
|
||
|
such reverberations in the United States that they have bounced back to
|
||
|
Tass itself.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The agency reported Tuesday that major American television networks and
|
||
|
newspapers, which it said typically avoid stories about unidentified
|
||
|
flying objects, "played up the space adventure, frequently poking fun
|
||
|
and suggesting that the beings from outer space might be a result of
|
||
|
overzealous glasnost."
|
||
|
|
||
|
The Tass report, written by an American working for the agency, did not
|
||
|
sound resentful. It quoted Edwin Diamond a New York Magazine media
|
||
|
critic who criticized what he called the story's shallowness, saying,
|
||
|
"What did the Academy of Science think? Where are the pictures?"
|
||
|
|
||
|
Ant it quoted Yervant Turzian of the Cornell University Astronomy
|
||
|
Department, who said fellow academics regarded the story as a joke.
|
||
|
|
||
|
DRAWING OF CREATURE IS BROADCAST
|
||
|
|
||
|
"Given the physical parameters of the universe, the possibility of life
|
||
|
on other planets is high," he told Tass. "But the vast majority of
|
||
|
these reports can be explained by such logical phenomena as unconven-
|
||
|
tional aircraft in the sky or artificial satellites."
|
||
|
|
||
|
On the other hand, Tass found that "A Current Affair," the syndicated
|
||
|
news and entertainment show, was taking the report seriously enough to
|
||
|
plan on sending a film crew to Voronezh. That is where Tass originally
|
||
|
reported that three children had said they saw aliens emerge from a
|
||
|
ball, wearing silvery overalls.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Last night, Soviet television viewers saw a picture of one of the
|
||
|
creatures on the main nightly news program, "Vremya," in the form of a
|
||
|
scribbled drawing by one of the children. It showed a smiling stick
|
||
|
figure inside a glowing two-legged sphere.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Vremya sounded more skeptical than the original Tass report, but it
|
||
|
offered without comment an interview with Vasya Surin, one of the pur-
|
||
|
ported witnesses.
|
||
|
|
||
|
"HE DIDN'T HAVE A HEAD"
|
||
|
|
||
|
"We were scared," says Vasya, who appeared to be about 11. "It hovered
|
||
|
over this tree. Then the door opened and a tall person of about three
|
||
|
meters looked out. He didn't have a head, or shoulders either. He just
|
||
|
had a kind of hump. There he had three eyes, two on each side and one
|
||
|
in the middle."
|
||
|
|
||
|
Vasya said the alien had two holes instead of a nose, and could not
|
||
|
turn its head, so it had to swivel its middle eye.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But "Vremya" cast some doubt on the reports of the sighting, noting for
|
||
|
instance, that there were no adult witnesses, even though a large
|
||
|
apartment house overlooked the site.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Since the first UFO sightings in the 1940's, spaceships have been
|
||
|
described as sausages, cigars, balls, bananas, crescents, round straw
|
||
|
hats, eggs, mushrooms, disks and, especially, saucers. But in the
|
||
|
1980's "Saucers are out; boomerangs are in," said Jim Speiser, a com-
|
||
|
puter expert in Scottsdale, Ariz. He founded a national UFO computer
|
||
|
network in 1986 because he thought there should be an exchange of in-
|
||
|
formation instead of disputes among people who reacted variously to UFO
|
||
|
stories, "from skeptics to wild-eyed gee-whiz believers."
|
||
|
|
||
|
In a telephone interview, Mr. Speiser said of the reported Soviet
|
||
|
sighting: "I think Tass is exploring its new freedom and is not used to
|
||
|
self-censorship. I don't disbelieve, but we have much better stories in
|
||
|
this country."
|
||
|
|
||
|
Also surprised - but only because he thinks the media ignores UFO re-
|
||
|
ports - is Tim Beckley of Inner Light Publications. He edits UFO Uni-
|
||
|
verse, a glossy magazine that prints 100,000 copies six times a year
|
||
|
and distributes them internationally.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Mr. Beckley said that he is a journalist, not a scientist, and that he
|
||
|
is almost as puzzled about UFOs now as he was when he saw his first in
|
||
|
1957, as a 10-year-old in New Brunswick, NJ. "Its kind of a cosmic game
|
||
|
those entities seem to be playing with us," he said.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
**********************************************
|
||
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
||
|
**********************************************
|