Hot UFO news: Vatican scientist says belief in God and aliens is OK + Britain releases files on UFO sightings

Britain's National Archives will make available more than 1,000 pages of formerly secret documents on UFOs, including this sketch made by a police officer in 1984.
May 13, 2008
LONDON - The men were air traffic controllers. Experienced, calm professionals. Nobody was drinking. But they were so worried about losing their jobs that they demanded their names be kept off the official report.
No one, they knew, would believe their claim an unidentified flying object landed at the airport they were overseeing in the east of England, touched down briefly, then took off again at tremendous speed. Yet that's what they reported happened at 4 p.m. on April 19, 1984. The incident is one of hundreds of reported sightings contained in more than 1,000 pages of formerly secret UFO documents being released Wednesday by Britain's National Archives. It is one of the few that was never explained.
The air traffic controllers' "Report of Unusual Aerial Phenomenon" was filed from an unspecified small airport near the eastern coast of England.

The men, each with more than eight years on the job, described how they were helping guide a small plane to a landing on runway 22 when they were distracted by a brightly lit object approaching a different runway without clearance.
Everyone became aware that the object was unidentified," their report said. "SATCO (code name for a controller with 14 years experience) reports that the object came in 'at speed,' made a touch and go on runway 27, then departed at 'terrific speed' in a 'near vertical' climb.
The incident is one of the more credible in the newly public files because it was reported by air traffic controllers, said David Clarke, a UFO expert who worked with the National Archives on the document release.
"They were absolutely astonished," he said. "It was a bright, circular object, flashing different colors, and after it touched down it disappeared at fantastic speed. The report comes from very qualified people, and it's one of the few that remained unexplained."

No report of alien activity
But while there are some unexplained cases in the papers, there is no reported instance in which the Ministry of Defense found any evidence of alien activity or alien spacecraft, said Clarke, who nonetheless expects conspiracy theories about a UFO cover-up by the British defense establishment to persist.
"The Ministry of Defense doesn't have any evidence that our defenses were breached by alien craft," Clarke said. "They never found one, no bits of one. That's all we can say."
Clarke said the released documents, dealing with the late 1970s and early 1980s, are the first batch in a series that will be made public in the next few years.
The National Archives is releasing the files because of numerous freedom of information requests seeking information about the government's UFO reports. Officials said that names of many individuals had been blacked out to protect their privacy and that the entire files had been reviewed to make sure their release did not compromise national security.
Cold War concern
Ministry of Defense officials indicate in the files that UFO reports were only investigated to make sure no enemy aircraft had illegally entered British airspace. This was crucial during the Cold War when Russian planes posed a threat.
Officials said they did not try to solve UFO riddles once an enemy attack had been ruled out.
The vast majority of UFO reports come from members of the public who see strange things in the sky and jump to the conclusion that a UFO is involved even though there are logical explanations for what they observe, experts said.
"The most common things are aircraft lights, bright stars and planets, satellites, meteors, airships and things like that," said Nick Pope, another UFO expert who helped the Ministry of Defense investigate the phenomenon.

Vatican scientist says belief in God and aliens is OK

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican's chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of "extraterrestrial brothers" perhaps more evolved than humans.
"In my opinion this possibility (of life on other planets) exists," said Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, a 45-year-old Jesuit priest who is head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict.
"How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview in its Tuesday-Wednesday edition, explaining that the large number of galaxies with their own planets made this possible.Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: "Certainly, in a universe this big you can't exclude this hypothesis".
In the interview headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother," he said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God."Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits on God's creative freedom," he said.
"Why can't we speak of a 'brother extraterrestrial'? It would still be part of creation," he said. Funes, who runs the observatory which is based south of Rome and in Arizona, held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the "lost sheep" of the universe.
"There could be (other beings) who remained in full friendship with their creator," he said.

THE "BIG BANG"?

Christians have sometimes been at odds with scientists over whether the Bible should be read literally and issues such as creationism versus evolution have been hotly debated for decades.
The Inquisition condemned astronomer Galileo in the 17th century for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church did not rehabilitate him until 1992.
Funes said dialogue between faith and science could be improved if scientists learned more about the Bible and the Church kept more up to date with scientific progress.
Funes, an Argentine, said he believed as an astronomer that the most likely explanation for the start of the universe was "the big bang", the theory that it sprang into existence from dense matter billions of years ago.
But he said this was not in conflict with faith in God as a creator. "God is the creator. There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident ...," he said.
"As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us," he said.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella, editing by Richard Balmforth)