Fox News affiliate Fox5 DC ran a story several days ago about a man capturing video of a blue UFO over Centreville, VA.
I didn’t report the sighting for several reasons, including the fact that it looked like a hobby craft.
Yes, in fact, it was.
After posting the identification of the former UFO of Centreville, I received a comment and some emails telling me that it was a cover up, adding that the same UFO was spotted over Boston, MA a few days ago.
No, it wasn’t.
The Boston blue light UFO was first run by Weekly World News, a tabloid. The publication also runs satirical stories like The Onion. The Boston UFO photos published by Weekly World News are so obviously Photoshopped that I am stunned that a few bloggers ran with the story. The writer of this particular post even said: “The Defense Department and Homeland Security confirmed to WWN that the UFO was spotted over Boston, but declined to make any further comments.”
No, they didn’t.
I’m even more stunned that more than a few readers believed it. It’s likely due to the fact that some bloggers rewrote and posted the story without naming the source. Although there are some seemingly serious reactions to the story in the comments section of the Weekly World News story itself.
The online news source often takes mainstream media stories and gives them a new spin. In this case, the Boston UFO story was inspired by the Centreville UFO story.
Anyway, for those who never noticed or are too young to remember, Weekly World News used to sit in the tabloid rack in grocery store checkout lines. They stopped printing it on paper, but they continue to post their outlandish stories online. They run headlines like: “Blue UFO Over Boston,” “How to Sell Your Soul to the Devil,” and “Megan Fox Is a Man.” Weekly World News is nothing but tabloid entertainment. Yet, some people think that it’s real news and that it’s the only reliable news source for UFOs out there.
Yes. seriously, they do.
This tabloid was printed by American Media, Inc., which also publishes the National Enquirer and the Globe. There are folks who believe anything they read. The UFOs in El Paso weren’t skydivers and the New York UFOs were not balloons, according to an astonishing number of people out there.
Another story not touched by myself and many other bloggers out there, was the Knotts Berry Farm UFO. It looked like a reflection, but that didn’t stop NBC LA from running the photo and submitting the photo to the FAA for analysis. The guy who took the photo of an amusement park ride even said that he didn’t notice the “object” until he looked at the photo later.
Fox5 DC and NBC LA published photos/videos and eyewitness accounts without thinking things through, unfortunately. If either of them submitted the “evidence” to an expert prior to posting (and it didn’t even have to be a UFO expert), they could have focused on more important news items of the day.
But, why should they? Fox5 DC stated that they received more than 600,000 page views on their story.
Yes, they did.
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Copyright © 2010 Cherlyn Gardner Strong
Read more of Cherlyn’s posts as a contributor for Paranormal Utopia, or at Cherlyn’s Paranormal Old Pueblo website
