I think the Concord-UFO footage is from the 1970s. However, it won't have been on the news anyway: you didn't miss it because you weren't tuned into the news. 🙂 Judy, these kinds of things (sightings, encounters) are happening all the time, but rarely make the mainstream media because they just don't fit in to the prevailing worldview. Some reports get through, we know, but newspaper editors and the TV networks don't themselves want to get ridiculed, or don't believe in the phenomenon.
So there are many layers of filtering which filter out UFO experiences getting into mainstream news. I forget off-hand the precide region and country, but in the 1990s a part of the northern coast, and inland jungle, of South America was being over-flown by bright UFOs all night, every night. This went on for some time. It was a remote area inhabited by people living primitively. Something like narrow electric bolts sometimes "shot" and injured the village populations - so much so that people would hide in the trees at night (to no avail). There are hints that at least one person was killed. The military of the nation moved in, but were unable to do anything but monitor events.
Yep, this all sounds ridiculous. But it's detailed in one of Jacques Vallees books, I believe in Confrontations - A Scientist's Search For Alien Contact. I don't possess the book, and while it probably recounts that these events were indeed reported in the local media, they just don't make it to the global media through the filtering process. Give that story to the Telegraph or Times and almost any editor would just laugh. But Vallee went there and found it was actually taking place. In other words, it can take footwork and personal testimony.
V
Against the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis
Mentioning Vallee, whom many including myself consider to be the world's foremost ufologist (he also contributed to the development of the internet among many other things), reminded me that he doesn't support the view that UFOs come from outer space - that they are "space visitors" BTW. And I agree with him.
He's written in a journal paper:
Scientific opinion has generally followed public opinion in the belief that unidentified flying objects either do not exist (the "natural phenomena hypothesis") or, if they do, must represent evidence of a visitation by some advanced race of space travellers (the extraterrestrial hypothesis or "ETH"). It is the view of the author that research on UFOs need not be restricted to these two alternatives. On the contrary, the accumulated data base exhibits several patterns tending to indicate that UFOs are real, represent a previously unrecognized phenomenon, and that the facts do not support the common concept of "space visitors." Five specific arguments articulated here contradict the ETH:
1.unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth;
2.the humanoid body structure of the alleged "aliens" is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel;
3.the reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race;
4.the extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded human history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon; and
5.the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives.
V
Bit of detail on the Churchill UFO cover-up
We previously heard that Churchill and Eisenhower decided to cover up a UFO incident involving bombers returning from a bombing raid. Out of the blue I just got this link. Essentially it's very scanty info on a UFO which persisted in "following a boy scout home". But the point is that several pilots from different aspects also saw it. This, too, was in WWII, before the term UFO had been coined. And Churchill wanted it covered up, we read.
http://paranormal-mysteries.co.uk/?p=435
As Jacques Vallee has researched and written about, UFOs did not even begin in the 20th century, but reports of them can be found right back through all recorded history, called by various other names and explained in ways associated with the culture encountering them. They are not in any way a modern or sudden phenomenon.
V
2 Orbs over Sydney, Australia 2 days ago (Sept 10, 2010). With talking you'll find either frustrating or very funny, but it adds authenticity.
V