Editorial Board at Purdue Student Paper Wonders

...Why no one investigated whatever it was that was over O'Hare International Airport.

Government fails to look into O’Hare UFO
By Editorial Board
Publication Date: 01/23/07

Earth was visited by aliens in November. Or at least it's possible. Many employees of O'Hare Airport in Chicago have come forward and described a round gray object hovering just below cloud level around 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 7. But since then, there has not been a single probe by the FAA or the government.

It is understandable that every alien spacecraft sighting is not investigated. Simply poking around the Internet for 10 seconds looking for information on UFOs will reveal an astonishing amount of sightings. But there is something different about the O'Hare case. In this instance, many employees and a few pilots have come forward and presented United Airlines (where most of the employees worked) and the FAA with accounts of an object hovering over Terminal C. Six of these individuals have spoken with the media under the condition of anonymity. These individuals, although viewing the aircraft from different vantage points, all describe roughly the same account of the visit, including the object suddenly bursting through the cloud cover and leaving a hole behind.

Both the amount of witnesses and their credibility is extremely high. That is what sets the O'Hare sighting apart from most other sightings. These employees are well-trained mechanics, managers and pilots whose main motivation for reporting the sighting was the safety of airline passengers. But even after such a large amount of people risked their livelihoods and reputations to report a UFO, nobody has taken them seriously.

United refuses to acknowledge that any incident ever occurred, saying there is no record of the event. The FAA has chosen not to investigate, chalking everything up to a weather phenomenon. Why?

By ignoring the statements of a multitude of incredible witnesses, the organizations hope the issue will just go away. It probably will. But this is not a viable course of action. There should be an investigation about the sighting, if for no other reason than the fact that objects flying over restricted airspace could cause accidents killing hundreds of people. Maybe it wasn't a UFO, but the public deserves to know their plane isn't going to be blindsided upon runway approach by a weather balloon. And maybe, during the investigation, we find out what visited O'Hare. The truth is out there.