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From: aa440@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Dale Wedge)
To: orphillips@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Re: NY TIMES Editorial Re: Soviet UFO Reports
Reply-To: aa440@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Dale Wedge)
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In a previous article, xx044 (UFOlogy SIG) says:

>
>       The normally "anti-UFO reality" New York Times, of 
>Saturday October 14, 1989, contains the following editorial 
>concerning the recent UFO reports in Tass:
>
>
>                      THE VORONEZH VISITORS
>
>       Tass, the Soviet press agency, has reported the landing 
>of an extraterrestrial vehicle in the city of Voronezh.  The 
>creatures who emerged were nine feet tall, with little knobby 
>heads and three eyes.  They had a small robot in tow and went 
>for a "short promenade about the park," Tass reports.
>       While some Americans have harbored reservations about 
>Tass reports in past years, this is one they can embrace with 
>more enthusiasm.  The United States has its own share of UFO 
>watchers, but the extraterrestrials they describe have been 
>decidedly uncouth.  The aliens who visit America tend to kidnap 
>their hosts, in some cases erasing from memory many salient 
>details of an otherwise unforgettable experience.
>       The Voronezh visitors, in welcome contrast, were 
>peacable.  They didn't interfere in current political 
>arrangements. They didn't lecture, proselytize, or find fault 
>with local mores.  One can overlook their failure to seek an 
>introduction to the mayor.  Behaving in a perfectly normal 
>manner for sightseers on strange planets, they just walked 
>around the park, leaving behind two pieces of deep-red rocks of 
>a kind that, according to a geologist quoted by Tass, "cannot be 
>found on Earth."
>       There are any number of solemn explanations for Tass's 
>remarkable report.  Some argue that the long suppression of 
>religion in the Soviet Union has given Russians a particular 
>fondness for the supernatural.
>       Others suggest that Soviet reporters and editors have 
>only recently begun to develop the skeptical armor that Western 
>journalists acquire after being fooled a few dozen times.  That 
>may also explain why even the hard-boiled Government officials 
>who oversee Tass found the Voronezh report sufficiently 
>plausible to print.
>       These explanations miss the point.  If extraterrestrial 
>visitors have to land somewhere, why not in Voronezh?  
>Skepticism can be taken too far.  These very columns, in 1920, 
>poured scourn on the idea of a certain Robert Goddard that 
>rockets could fly in the vacuum of space.  Mr Goddard, the 
>editorial regretted, "only seems to lack the knowledge ladled 
>out daily in high schools."
>       As surely as rockets can never fly in space, Tass has 
>broken the story of the Century.
>
>-- 
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>-- 
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