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Your Paracast Newsletter — April 14, 2019


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
April 14, 2019

www.theparacast.com

Atmospheric Scientist William Puckett Explores Amazing UFO Sightings on The Paracast

The Paracast
is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.

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This Week's Episode: Gene and Randall focus on hard science and nuts and bolts UFO research with atmospheric scientist and researcher William Puckett. William worked as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service for three years and the Environmental Protection Agency for 27 years. He has also been a consultant for the “UFO Hunters” series on the History Channel and also appeared on two of the episodes. He is also a research associate with NARCAP, a Director of Montana’s branch of MUFON, and continues his work as an independent investigator and reporting on his “UFOs Northwest” site. William has also performed both meteorological and radar analysis for the November 7, 2006 UFO Incident at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.

J. Randall Murphy's Ufology Society International: Ufology Society International (USI) - Explore the UFO Phenomenon

William Puckett's Blog: UFO Reporting Center, Latest UFO Sightings & News.

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on April 14: In which Gene and Randall continue a discussion that began on the April 14, 2019 episode of The Paracast, which featured atmospheric scientist and UFO researcher William Puckett. During this session, he covers his research into the January, 2008 UFO flap in Stephenville, TX, near the George W. Bush ranch, which involved both visual and radar sightings. William also talks about other sightings and possible Men In Black reports.

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel

No, the UFOs Haven’t Left Us
By Gene Steinberg

They say when you get older, you long for the “good old days,” but those days may not have been so exciting in retrospect. But it’s easy to gloss over the less enjoyable things and concentrate on the things you liked.

Now when I think of my life as a teen, it really wasn’t much fun. Overweight and, shy, I read a lot rather than get involved in sports and other activities. A large portion of my reading diet was fed by sci-fi and UFO books.

Things got better as I grew older. I binged dieted, and lost a good 40 or 50 pounds by the time I reached 18; I’ve never gained that weight back. I also realized my dream as a writer and broadcaster.

When it came to UFOs, I did live through the “golden era,” when it seemed as if there were lots of books and lots of talk about the subject. But press coverage was mostly derisive, meant as filler when nothing “important” was going on. Well, that was probably more true of the newspapers of record, such as The New York Times. Local papers focused on local events. Unfortunately, many of them are no longer being published, or have been swallowed up by large chains and gone digital.

UFO sightings often come in waves, called flaps when things begin to get interesting.

In the early 1970s, I was working at a radio station in suburban Philadelphia, covering the local news beat. On the side, I was one of the publishers and editors of Caveat Emptor, an eclectic UFO/paranormal magazine. In some ways, I picked up where Saucer News left off after Jim Moseley sold it to his friend Gray Barker, which began its inevitable decline.

While I featured coverage of the latest UFO cases, there didn’t seem to be much around, although that was not quite true on the local level. So, in 1973, when I received a wire service report about sightings in southeast Pennsylvania, not far from my home and the station’s main studio, things began to get interesting.

I read those reports during my morning newscasts, and management said nothing about it. So long as I covered the important government and school board meetings, and somehow duplicated most of the coverage of daily newspapers with ten times the staff, they were happy.

So I did my thing.

Now I think many of you realize that a UFO flap is mostly a “publicity flap.” One key sighting receives coverage, which attracts others to nightly skywatches, or to report sightings they had kept to themselves. Soon things begin to get interesting again until it all dies down.

Even though it has been theorized that there really aren’t many UFO cases anymore — that maybe our “visitors” have left us — that isn’t true. There’s a fairly consistent number of sighings reported by such organizations as MUFON; also by Canadian UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski.

But when The New York Times changed its tune, more or less, and published reports about that Pentagon UFO Study, it almost seemed as of the flying saucers were back in earnest. Alas, as with other stories that begin with a flurry of interest, it mostly died down after awhile. There are far too many “important” events to fill newscasts and the declining pages of daily newspapers.

So again it’s thought that maybe the UFOs have gone elsewhere, that the remaining cases all or mostly have conventional explanations.

When The Paracast began in 2006, I suspected most of our UFO coverage would be historical, that there just weren’t all that many current reports worthy of discussion. In a sense, I felt that I might have returned to the 1970s, when I stared to publish a magazine about subjects that, at first, weren’t that interesting anymore.

But there was no dearth of potential guests for the show, and it wasn’t because we wanted to live in the past, although I’ve heard that criticism from time to time. Many of our well-known guests were selected because they had a lot of experience covering the subject, and could provide a more thorough perspective.

Besides, it’s not as if there were no more sightings.

Things began to get interesting again when, on November 7, 2006, a UFO was reported in the vicinity of O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. We presented several episodes covering the event, and it was a sure thing that the UFOs never left us.

Other sightings merely buttressed that view.

In January 2008, UFOs were reported in Stephenville, TX, not terribly distant from the ranch owned by then-President George W. Bush. These cases included both radar and visual sightings, and when I heard atmospheric scientist and researcher William Puckett talk about them on the April 14, 2019 episode of After The Paracast, our premium show for Paracast+ members, I once again felt we had returned to the golden age.

There is that curious question about whether a falling tree makes a sound when there’s nobody around to hear it. But when it comes to UFOs, it does seem as if they are always around, somewhere.

Or maybe it does require that a witness be present after all, that otherwise there will be nothing to be seen. I suppose one way to prove that theory is to finally get those networks of UFO detectors up and running.

As regular listeners know, our former co-host, Christopher O’Brien, is evidently still busy working on his San Luis Valley camera project. I haven’t had an update as to whether it’s fully operational. Last I heard, it was still in the testing stage.

Other plans to create such networks seem to have fallen astray.

On our November 15, 2015 episode, we featured Dr. Mark Rodeghier of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and journalist/author Leslie Kean. They talked about UFODATA, a proposal to create a worldwide network of surveillance stations to gather evidence of possible UFO activity.

I haven’t heard much about the project lately, and when I checked their site, sure enough the last update, number six, was posted a year ago.

Now I do hope the project hasn’t died, that it’s just taking longer than expected to get it off the ground. But I still wonder if, when such networks are finally established, they will not detect much or any paranormal activity.

As I wrote above, maybe all or most such events require a witness to set things in motion. Unless or until those promised networks of UFO detectors are in operation, that question may never be answered.

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