Science, vol.281, July 3, 1998, p.21
--------------------------------------------------------------
Scientific Community:


  Panel Says Some UFO Reports Worthy of Study


On January 1981, a man working in his yard in Trans-en-Provence,
France, claims to have heard a low whistling sound and turned to
see an ovoid object land in his garden. Thirty seconds later it
rose and departed in the direction of a nearby forest, leaving
a 2.4-meter diameter, ring-shaped imprint in the ground. The
police and the government's Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena
Study Group sampled the compacted soil and the damaged
vegetation. Four labs analyzed the samples but reached no
definitive conclusions as to what had happened.

  The case may sound like an 'X-Files' transcript, but it and
other UFO tales got a serious 4-day hearing by nine senior
physical scientists at a workshop late last year. In a report
released this week, the panel concluded that some of the UFO
events merited further scientific study (see
uww.jse.com/ufo_reports/Sturrock/toc.html). ''Our feeling was
[that] anything not explained is something science at some level
ought to be interested in,'' says Thomas Holzer, a geophysicist
at the National Center for Atmospberic Research in Boulder,
Colorado. Holzer was co-chair ofthe workshop, which was convened
by Laurence S. Rockefeller.

  For most scientists, the definitive word on UFOs came from a
1968 review sponsored by the U.S. Aur Force and led by physicist
Edward Condon. The Condon report concluded that ''further
extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the
expectation that science will be advanced thereby." But after
hearing reports from eight UFO investigators, the new panel
decided that although there was no convincing evidence that
extraterrestrial intelligence was involved in the incidents,
some events might represent novel atmospheric or other phenomena
that are worth looking into.

  Kendrick Frasier, editor of 'The Skeptical Inquirer', worries
that the report will unjustly legitimize UFO research. Some of
the scientists who organized the workshop have a record of
enthusiasm for these exotic topics, he says. One organizer,
Robert Jahn, a physicist at Princeton University, is well known
for his experiments with psychokinesis. Peter Sturrock, a
physicist at Stanford University who oversaw the effort, is
president of the Society for Scientific Exploration, whose
mission Sturrock describes as investigating topics such as
''parapsychology and strange monsters,'' which he feels are not
adequately covered by mainstream science.

  ''Let me be clear: There is no justification for a crash
program to look at unnatural phenomena,'' says panel member Jay
Melosh, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona,
Tucson. But panel co-chair Charles Tolbert, an astronomer at the
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, notes that ''meteorites
were once considered to be a stupid idea.... People said, 'Rocks
can't fall out of the sky'.'' Still, Tolbert says he doubts the
sky harbors any alien spacecraft.

  That level of skepticism doesn't satisfy Bob Park, a physicist
at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is writing a
book about what he considers pseudoscience. ''I think
[investigating UFO reports] is just a total waste of time,'' he
says. ''Calling in all the people who have seen strange things
just gets you a roomful of strange people.''
                                             - David Kestenbaum