If we had to pick one person to see an Unidentified Flying Object, it would be The Lincoln County News sports editor Paula Roberts.
She is not prone to hype or hyberbole, and she is just as likely as the next Yankee to dismiss a blizzard that dumps 18-inches of snow and shuts down the state for two days as nothing “but a little snow.”
So when she came into the office last fall saying she saw a UFO, it was something. She even had a picture of it, which was something more.
We were intrigued enough to put The Lincoln County News Special Projects Director Greg Latimer on it.
Latimer is a veteran investigator with a particular zest for the unknown and unusual. Among his other enterprises, Latimer and his wife, Sally Lobkowicz, operate Mysterious Destinations, a travel agency specializing in booking trips for people to go and explore mysterious destinations for themselves.
Latimer’s thorough investigation took several months to complete, due to a variety of factors but he ultimately turned in his story last week and we present the results to you here.
We think the story is interesting for what it is and what it is not. The experts consulted agree what Roberts saw was most likely an airplane. However, as Latimer reports, a check of the records belay that possibility.
The fact is we don’t know what it was, which makes it by definition, an unidentified flying object. People see unidentified things in the sky all the time. We frequently field phone calls from local residents who have seen something they can’t explain.
When it comes to the unusual or paranormal, almost everything can be explained away, except when they can’t. UFO sightings almost always boil down to a plane, or a planet, or a satellite, or something, but there is always a small percentage that defy explanation. That’s where this one sits.
As a group who trade in facts, we rather relish the fact of this ambiguity.
Granted, it would have been nice if this particular object had done something suitably flying-saucer like, but we don’t have that. What we do have is a reliable witness, a photograph, and no satisfactory explanation.
This doesn’t prove UFO crackpots are right. It simply proves that sometimes there are things you can’t explain.
