How the Mainstream Press..

On November 26, 2002, North American Aerospace Defense Command began receiving reports of a contrail of unknown origin in the air over the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Fighter jets were scrambled from several bases to intercept the unknown that was heading northwest toward the U.S., but reportedly, nothing was spotted. Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and later over Indiana.

This fascinating report received scant attention in the U.S. press, which is unusual considering the zeal for "national security" that has been rampant since 9/11. The thought is disturbing that an unknown aircraft could fly with impunity over the United States and receive only a few paragraphs in local papers. What could possibly explain this odd lack of curiosity by the national media?

Actually, the failure of the press to respond to this story is no surprise considering that the mainstream press has developed the attitude that UFO reports are strictly for the tabloids. This position has become so pervasive that when some editors and journalists have attempted serious, well researched, UFO investigations, they found themselves isolated by their peers.

The popular misconception is that UFOs are seen only by the uneducated, the mentally ill, or hoaxers seeking personal gain. Because of this, many think that any reporter interested in handling such a story must also be so inclined. Heaven help a journalist who has had a personal UFO experience and attempts to report on it. He may face severe questions concerning his credibility as a journalist.

There had been some hope within the UFO community that the subject of UFOs would be given fair treatment when ABC ran the special Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs - Seeing Is Believing on February 24 2005. However, the program had little to do with objectively reporting on the UFO phenomenon and instead dealt more with debunking the extraterrestrial hypothesis, treating the subject as if this was the only explanation for UFOs. For those who have been active over the years in UFO research, the ABC show was just more of the same when it comes to the media's mind-set towards the phenomena.

According to the current attitude with the news media, there has never been anything mysterious about UFO sightings; they can all be easily explained away with glib, uninformed blanket statements. However, this has not always been the case. In the late 1940's the mainstream press regularly covered UFO reports. At that time UFOs were a relatively unknown phenomenon and had not been tainted by the "lunatic fringe" that would surface in the 1950's and 60's. By then, most media outlets had become discouraged by the lack of progress in explaining UFOs and little, if any, verifiable evidence.

By the time the seventies had rolled around, UFO stories were permanently consigned to the back pages next to the horoscope column. Except for local, small town papers, the news media rarely reports UFO sightings. When they do, the subject is presented as a "feature story," not to be taken seriously. In large metropolitan newspapers, the occasional UFO report that does gets printed is usually restricted to the paper's entertainment section.

There has been one recent exception to this trend and that was the November 7, 2006 sighting of a UFO over O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Although it was not until January 1, 2007 that the Chicago Tribune decided to run a report about the O'Hare incident, when the story did finally hit the Tribune's pages, the story was intelligently written with none of the condescending attitude or editorializing that usually accompanies UFO reports.