Time Magazine, in a rather late-in-the-game and not-at-all-close-to-being-a-timely article, reinforces that more than two-week-old private plane theory out of China.

China continues to insist that it was likely a defiant illegally flying billionaire pilot that caused airport officials to shut down Xiaoshan Airport on July 7th.

Time Magazine, in partnership with CNN (who were also quick to call the July 7th incident a hoax), published this semi-informative and not-at-all timely article on Monday.

After today, perhaps it is time to finally let this China UFO incident go. It depends on any additional future explanations that are likely come out of China that make absolutely no sense to most people.

None of these articles from the mainstream media care to question why experienced airport officials would shut down an airport over a commonly spotted private plane, which they initially labeled a UFO.

This is what we want to know. This is the one piece of information they keep avoiding:

What exactly happened in and around that airport that caused all this fuss in the first place?

Note that ‘UFO’ does not automatically mean that aliens from outer space were involved. It simply means that the object is unidentified. Despite the supposition that it was a private plane, it still remains a ‘UFO’, like it or not.

Missile, rocket, plane, meteorite, fairy, Chupacabra, or whatever it was , it is a still a UFO until it is absolutely identified as something concrete.

After the July 7th incident, airport officials were not able to explain what it was that caused them to order the shut down of the airport. UFO experts from Shanghai and Beijing stepped in after a while and surmised that the object was a private plane.

There’s a problem, though. The experts have not yet positively identified that alleged plane, nor have they found the alleged person who piloted that alleged plane.

The key word used in all of these explanations is the word: likely. This overused word is highlighted below in the following blurb from Time’s article:

“But when amateur pictures of the craft were splashed across Chinese newspapers the following morning, experts quickly determined that Hangzhou was not under threat of an imminent alien invasion. Rather, the flying object was identified as most likely being another example of an increasingly common nuisance in China’s airspace: off-the-grid, short-hop flights by local private-plane owners.”

Read the rest of the article on Time’s website here.

Although I am still very curious about this, as well as the never-mentioned-again UFO sighting in Chongqing (that took place a week after the Xiaoshan Airport shutdown), I will likely let this go after today. It simply depends on any additional information that China is likely (or not likely) to release in the future.

When discussing UFO conspiracy theories, the most interesting common side effect of UFO sightings are the sudden appearance of menacing men dressed in black suits. They are said to appear out of nowhere to harass or threaten UFO witnesses, in order to keep them quiet.

Tim Green Beckley with alien friend in Sedona, AZ

Tonight, an expert on this very subject will join George Noory on Coast to Coast AM.  “Mr. UFO”, AKA Timothy Green Beckley, will share stories from his latest book: Curse of the Men In Black: Return of the UFO Terrorists.

One strange incident detailed in Beckley’s book took place right here in Tucson, Arizona.

Longtime Tucson residents may recall a story in the Arizona Daily Star from 1979 that involved one of their own newspaper delivery boys.

On February 19, 1979, ten-year-old Warren Weisman was delivering the Arizona Daily Star at approximately 6:00 am. He reported: “I was on Winstel Blvd when I saw this ‘falling star’ come from the sky. It was traveling at a great speed and landed about a block away. It smashed the back of a white Volkswagen, throwing off its right rear wheel, rolled off the car and knocked over a mailbox on a post nearby.”

The curious boy went to investigate the object, but was deterred by a a man who appeared suddenly in a brown car. The man told the boy to go deliver the rest of the papers. Within moments, a Pima County Sheriff’s car pulled up alongside the brown car. The newspaper boy left the scene to get his mother because he was afraid that the man with the brown car would pull a gun.

When the boy returned with his mother twenty minutes later, the white Volkswagen, and the object, were already gone. Another eyewitness later stated that the car and object were picked up by a 7-up truck, rather than a tow truck, which is rather strange. Must have been a shortage of tow trucks on that day.

It remains a mystery whether the terrified ten-year-old actually encountered an MIB on that early February morning. The UFO group APRO made an investigation of the incident, but no known report was ever filed. All that remains of this story is the article deep in the archives of the Arizona Daily Star, and Beckley’s retelling of the tale in his book.

This is not the only Arizona tale chronicled in Beckley’s book. Mr. UFO says that Arizona is a “hot bed” for UFO and MIB encounters.

Beckley should know. He has been active in the study of the paranormal from an early age He has sighted three UFOs in his lifetime. As a teenager, he created one of the first UFO periodicals, which he merged later with Jim Moseley’s Saucer News. As one of the original “UFO journalists”, he has interviewed scores of persons, including a one time girlfriend of Beatle John Lennon, who reportedly witnessed a UFO in Manhattan.

Possible photo of an MIB

Beckley currently writes for UFO Magazine and Conspiracy Journal. He does have some theories about who – or what – Men in Black could be, which does include one far-out theory:

“I think the MIBs are some sort of mind controlled zombies. Earthlings who have been taken over — or like in a seance room materializations. A few may be government workers but only a handful. Also, hardly ever civilians pretending to be government workers. The Air Force put out a memo back in the 60s proclaiming that they were not behind such menacing episodes.”

One such one of the most menacing episodes is also described in his latest book. Beckley explains: “It involved a female researcher from New Zealand who was molested by invisible hands when she started pinpointing the location of where UFOs might have bases. Upon the materialization of this being, his body was hideous – very round, hairy, smelly and the top half was that of a man and the bottom of an animal. Other members of the group had the standard MIB types appear to them and warn them to abandon their research. One member was pushed down a flight of stairs in a department store…no one was there.”

These stories of Men in Black do tend to stir up a bit of paranoia, even within the minds of normally skeptical people. Personally, since writing about UFOs, and recently communicating with Mr. UFO about his book and upcoming radio spot, strange visitors in the form of Census takers have appeared at my doorstep. Normally, this would not be unusual, but why the government keeps sending hoards of Census takers to a ghost town in the mountains, where there are probably five households in the entire area, is totally beyond my comprehension.

When my concern over the census takers was posed to Mr. UFO, he replied: “Absolutely, Men in Black have been known to pose as Census takers.”

Nice.

If those who appear on my doorstep aren’t Men in Black, it’s an equally horrific notion that taxpayer money is being spent on so many Census takers milling about, in and around a remote ghost town.

Tonight, listeners can call in to share their own MIB experiences or pose their own questions to Mr. UFO. Don’t be shy about calling in. It should be a very interesting show tonight.

Check the Coast to Coast AM website for airing time and affiliate radio stations in your area.

On August 15, 1977, Dr. Jerry R. Ehman worked late into the night on a SETI project at The Big Ear Radio Observatory at Ohio State University. Something unusual happened at 11:16 pm (EDT) on that night that Dr. Ehman and many others couldn’t explain, and still can’t.

A strong narrowband radio signal was received, from someone or something.

Wow! Signal/ Courtesy www.bigear.org

When Dr. Ehman sat down to analyze the data a few days later, he circled the signal on the printed computer readout with a red pen. To the left of that, he marked the significance of that signal with just three letters and an exclamation point: Wow!

The Wow! notation meant to relay that the signal was potentially non-terrestrial and non-solar system in origin. The signal closely matched what SETI expected to receive from extraterrestrial intelligence and caused quite a buzz around the world.

The signal was dubbed the Wow! signal in honor of that short notation Dr. Ehman made.

Disappointingly, 33 years later, that signal has not been received again.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the event, in 2007, Dr. Ehman wrote a special report on the Wow! signal (updated in May 2010). Housed on the Big Ear website, Dr. Ehman wrote about many possibilities that could explain that signal. Yet, the one explanation that intrigues most of us has to do with the extraterrestrial possibilities:

Thus, since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. The fact that we saw the signal in only one beam could be due to an ETI sending a beacon signal in our direction and then sending it in another direction that we couldn’t detect. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to “draw vast conclusions from ‘half-vast’ data”. – Dr. Jerry Ehman, in the The Big Ear Wow! Signal 30th Anniversary Report