Unidentified Flying Objects

For Renny Rogers, it was strange enough that military jets were flying low over his home in Waldorf, Md., in the middle of the night. It was what he thinks he saw when he headed outside to look early Friday that floored him. "It was this object, this light-blue object, traveling at a phenomenal rate of speed," Rogers said. "This Air Force jet was right behind it, chasing it, but the object was just leaving him in the dust. I told my neighbor, 'I think those jets are chasing a UFO.'

An Air Force spokesman said the bright, fiery light in the sky before dawn Sunday that startled viewers from the Equator to three Western states was a Soviet rocket body burning up on re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. At the North American Aerospace Defense Command near Colorado Springs, Colo., Maj. Bob Perry said the center, which tracks objects in space from launch time, was aware of the rocket body and its trail of debris and burning particles as the rocket fell about 2:40 a.m.

Astronomical calculations show that a Japan Air Lines pilot who says that he saw an unidentified flying object over Alaska in November probably was looking at Jupiter, and possibly Mars. "This is not the first time that an experienced pilot has mistaken a bright celestial body for a UFO, nor will it be the last," said Philip J. Klass, a longtime investigator of reported UFO sightings.

A huge fireball was spotted over northwestern Oregon and southern Washington Wednesday afternoon, and one expert said it probably was an unusually large meteor. A motorcyclist traveling on a coastal highway reported the sighting to the U.S. Coast Guard about 1:30 p.m. Later, dozens of witnesses called in reports to radio stations from the coast to south-central Washington.

In August 1967, two children outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and a smell of sulfur. The alleged extraterrestrial sighting is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half a century that the country's space agency opened to the public.

A correspondent of the Tass news agency who wrote that an unidentified flying object had landed in the city of Voronezh said Tuesday he did not see the landing and interviewed "about 10" youngsters as the source of his report. The report by correspondent Vladimir Lebedev, transmitted by the official Tass agency on Monday, said tiny-headed aliens up to 13-feet tall terrified the residents of Voronezh when they and a robot escort took nighttime strolls through a park after landing in their UFO.

Weary of conspiracy theories, Hollywood embellishments and public suspicion that for 50 years the Pentagon has covered up discovery of a crashed UFO near Roswell, N.M., the Air Force on Thursday released what it touted as a definitive, conclusive, this-time-we-mean-it, fini report denying the incident.