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The main problem with an eyewitness account of any event is reliability. Whether someone witnesses a homicide, car wreck, plane crash, or whether someone catches his mate in bed with someone else and they scream, "It isn't what it looks like." or whether someone claims to see an extraterrestrial spacecraft with a bunch of ET's crawling all over it trying to repair a malfunction, reliability is the issue with personal testimony. It doesn't mean that a personal testimony is a false one. It does not mean that when the milkman takes the witness stand in a court of law and says he saw Mr. Jones throw his wife's mother from the third story bedroom that he is lying. Mr. Jones' mother-in-law could have fallen out the window and Mr. Jones was trying to catch her before falling. Perspective is everything.

Multiple variables can affect the reliability of an eyewitness account. Whether the testifier is man or woman, child or adult, different worldviews through which interpretations are made, emotions, stress, authority figures like police, or even the age of the person telling the story can affect reliability.

"A University of Virginia study suggests that eyewitness reliability is linked to the age of the eyewitness. According to the study, older eyewitnesses are more likely to be mistaken in recollecting details and are also more likely to be certain about their erroneous recollections." [http://apublicdefender.com/2007/02/22/eyewitness-reliability-diminishes-with-age/]

Someone giving testimony can be absolutely sincere and be sincerely wrong in what he says happened. This is just the nature of the beast when it comes to eyewitness testimony.

This does not mean that someone who sincerely reports something as having happened is lying or even necessarily wrong. It does mean that the reliability of the testimony has to be considered in light of a heck of a lot of circumstances that might affect what the person thinks he saw. The variables that surrounded the witnessing of an event have to be considered. This is only fair. You have to consider what the person says he or she saw and then you have to consider what else it could have been. I apply this principle to my own sightings and close encounters of the third kind.

In any group consisting of human beings, there is going to be a kooky-fringe contingency. Whether it's church, the Boy Scouts, The Lion's Club, or the UFO-Alien enthusiasts, you are going to have the nut cases that give the goal and effort of the group a bad reputation. I think that's why I hesitated all these years in writing about this subject. It certainly is a departure from my usual genre, travel writing.

What the UFO-Alien field of study needs is to weed out the kooky reports and stick to the quality events that do get reported. There are some, believe it or not. There are events of not only eyewitness accounts but also accounts that are of such quality that one simply cannot commit intellectual suicide in dismissing them out-of-hand.

A Quality Close Encounter of the Third Kind

Daytime, mass sightings are not only rare but are also not so easily explained away with the usual intelligence-insulting explanations such as Swamp Gas, Flocks of Geese, or Weather Balloons. In fact, the one I am going to recount is absolutely chilling and is one of the finest quality eyewitness accounts in the literature.

The most chilling event of a sighting of UFO's and its occupants came from Papua New Guinea in the spring of 1959. It is chilling, but nothing catastrophic happened. No one died. No one was abducted. No one had implants installed in his sinuses. No one got impregnated nor had an alien-human hybrid ripped from her womb. And yet, there were spacecrafts in such brilliant clarity with easily seen aliens on board. It is chilling because it involved contact between an Anglican missionary as well as scores of his parishioners and a spaceship full of friendly aliens. And, get this, they exchanged greetings. They waved at one another. I find this remarkable almost beyond the pale.

This daylight, mass sighting took place in the Anglican mission village at Boianai, Papua, New Guinea. The Australian Anglican church sent Father William Booth Gill to minister to the locals. This man was highly regarded by all who knew him. Gill was a devoted pastor and the thought of UFO's and Aliens was the farthest thing from the mind of this man of God. He was a skeptic about the subject. His life was to serve God in Papua New Guinea.

Gill's first sighting was of a fast-moving light that he saw on a local, unpopulated mountain peek. This caught his attention, Gill alleges, since the thing moved in an intelligently guided manner and faster than he thought possible. He thought nothing more about the event until his personal assistant had a sighting of a saucer-shaped flying craft a month or so later. Gill dismissed this as some natural event or phenomenon.

On June 26, 1959 at 6:45 P.M., he had another "light-in-the-sky" sighting. Word of this sighting not only spread rapidly through the village but brought a total of thirty-eight villagers into the mission to witness this event. In sworn statements by each individual, the mass stated that a large disc-shaped craft the length of five full moons lined up end-to-end hovered over the mission. They also could see human-like aliens outside the hovering craft. They were walking about on a kind of flight deck that surrounded the craft. The beings seemed to be working on the outside of this craft. After about 45 minutes, the beings disappeared into the craft and it flew off at 7:30 P.M.

Unable to tear themselves away from watching the sky, they saw smaller crafts flying about. The smaller craft appeared about 8:30 P.M. and afterwards, about twenty minutes later, the larger, original craft reappeared. This sighting would last for a total of four hours. Some sort of moving weather front brought in cloud cover that obscured the ships. Father Gill prepared a report which was signed by twenty-five of the Experiencers.

This once-in-a-lifetime sighting, incredible enough, was to be repeated the next evening.

The following evening at 6:00 P.M., the main spacecraft showed up again with its inhabitants. Support craft seemed to be accompanying it. Two of the creatures once again seemed to be making some sort of adjustments or repairs to the outside and center of the craft while a third was actually watching Father Gill and his parishioners. Having noticed the creature watching the church group and not knowing exactly what to do, Father Gill waved at the being. The being returned the gesture. Gill and his group then waved at all the little human-like beings that apparently were raised properly by their alien parents and waved back. This went on for some time. The humans would wave and the aliens would wave back. Assured that all was well, the humans went inside to have their church service. When they retuned outside at the end of the service, the ships were gone. This event would repeat itself a third time the next day and then no more sightings occurred.

Though the smaller ships, which appeared as lights, could be explained as some naturally occurring event, the main ship could not. It was visible and close enough to make out creatures returning friendly greetings. I think that Swamp Gas, Geese, or Weather Balloons could not exchange a greeting with humans.

What do you think?