'A real phenomenon' (Southtown Star, 3-30-2008)

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

'A real phenomenon'

BY Jason Freeman

It's out of focus at first, and the cameraman is so overcome with excitement that the picture's constantly bouncing motion momentarily detracts from the three eerily silent red objects sauntering across the night sky.

If you didn't experience the alleged mass UFO sightings above Tinley Park on Aug. 21 and Oct. 31, 2004, the video captured by Crestwood resident T.J. Japcon is the next best thing, said Sam Maranto, State Director for the Illinois Mutual UFO Network.

"When you analyze (the footage) at 1/30th of a second, what you'll notice is there are actual patterns of intensity ... and (the lights) are rotating counterclockwise," he said. "You'll also notice that (you can hear) crickets in the background, yet you can't hear the object (generating the lights), although it was relatively close (to the camera)."

Maranto joined fellow UFO researchers and authors to talk about the "Tinley Lights" sightings and others like it during a UFO symposium held Saturday at the Tinley Park Convention Center.

The event, which was organized by MUFON and the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, featured lectures on the history of UFO research as well as in-depth case reports from the legendary 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, incident to the more recent mass sightings in Tinley and Rockford.

"What I like to work on most is mass sightings," said Maranto, who showed portions of Japcon's UFO footage during his lecture. "When you have a mass sighting, you have a cross section of the community at large ... you'll get people of a higher status in the community coming forward because they know they cannot be discounted as being crazy because other people have reported seeing (what they have)."

In many of the cases where video footage of alleged UFOs are captured by multiple people, Maranto says he is bombarded with explanations from skeptics that range from road flares tied to balloons to digital fakery to mass hallucination.

"Mass hallucinations cannot be photographed, and the videos aren't computer-generated fakes," he said. "Everybody who tapes this stuff isn't going to have time to make computer-generated images that all look exactly the same. It's moronic. There's a point where skepticism goes and falls off the face of logic and becomes idiotic."

Symposium attendee Guy Richards, of Rockford, said he would love to someday use his bachelor's degrees in engineering and physics to study UFOs.

"UFOs are a real phenomenon," he said. "Whether or not they're alien spacecraft is an open question. I classify myself as a skeptic who comes from a scientific background, and I'm interested in doing some serious scientific study of the phenomena.

"I think it's a shame that it's not being studied by people with technical training who have an open mind who will do it in a methodical and scientific manner," he added.