I am not a UFO person. I’ve seen a lot of really crazy reporting of UFOs over the years, primarily from UFOlogists who aren’t trained in journalism. But this account caught my eye, because it was presented credibly in the Chicago Tribune on New Year’s day. A follow-up column about the story today colors in a few more details.

What I appreciate is the reporter’s fairness. He doesn’t know what the people saw, or didn’t see. But he doesn’t automatically assume they’re all tin-foil hat wearers, or that the government’s explanation is necessarily the best explanation. It’s the coverage, not the event, that is historic.

John Hilkevitch is the Chicago Tribune’s transportation reporter. As he wrote in an editorial today:

Covering UFOs seemed to be stretching the definition of my job, transportation reporting. I looked at the clock on the newsroom wall and decided to give [the head of a local UFO group] Mr. Davenport two minutes. But he was onto something.

…In our first of many phone conversations, Davenport assured me that highly credible individuals spotted a flying saucerlike object Nov. 7, and that it hovered over a major site on my Tribune beat: O’Hare International Airport.

So I interviewed the witnesses and tracked down some additional observers–pilots, ramp workers, mechanics and management officials at United Airlines.

They were all dead serious about what they saw, and the accounts–whether made from the tarmac or from 25 feet up in the cockpit of a Boeing 777–were consistent.

In his original story, which ran as an “opinion” piece, Hilkevitch wrote:

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O’Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

I have no idea what they saw. I have always found it curious that, when presented with unexplainable phenomena, people feel the need to nail down what happened, rather than allow the possibility that some things will not be satisfactorily explained.

The Government’s media assets have successfully created linguistic connections between “UFO” and “kook,” between “conspiracy theorist” and “nut,” so that when you hear one you automatically think of the other. While I have indeed met many UFO believers and conspiracy theorists who really do fit the definition of kooks and nuts, this reporter presents a credible case that several United employees saw something that sounds more like a UFO than what the government assures us, without having done any investigation, must have been “weather phenomena.”

I talked to a former CIA agent several years ago who used to fly some of their top secret aircraft. He told me his circle of flyboys were big believers in UFOs, because they knew they were already flying the most secret planes, but they would occasionally see things they could not explain with any of the technology they were familiar with.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying these people saw a ship of extraterrestrial origin. I think there are a number of possible explanations, including a sighting of a ship that may have been wholly terrestrial in origin. Just because the CIA pilots don’t know about such ships doesn’t mean some other branch of the government, or some foreign government, doesn’t have such ships.

In addition, there was a strange report I ran across in government documents where Allen Dulles, a longtime head of the CIA, found that — more interesting than UFOs themselves were people’s reactions to them. He felt that subject was worthy of study for use in further controlling the populace. So I never assume that just because a bunch of people are reported as having seen a UFO that, in fact, a UFO was spotted.

But I don’t automatically assume one wasn’t, either.

I really don’t know what to think. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it for myself. But I find it incredibly refreshing to see a reporter not automatically repeat the government’s dismissal of the sighting as simply “weather phenomena” as if it was unassailable fact.

That, to me, is what makes this event truly historic. If more journalists took that tack, not just about UFOs, but about all reports that contradict what the government says, we might have an explosion of actual “reporting,” as opposed to the usual “repeating” of government denials that are all too often accepted as fact.

One government has decided that openness on this subject, not secrecy, is in their best interests:

The French space agency plans to publish its archive of UFO sightings and other phenomena online but keep the names of those who reported them off the site to protect them from the pestering of space fanatics.

Jacques Arnould, an official at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), said the French database of about 1,600 incidents would go live in late January or mid-February.

Maybe we are entering into a time of glasnost re the subject of UFOs. If so, it’s about time.