Stories about Stephenville’s UFO sighting made international news.
Skeptics may dismiss it all as a waste of time, but coverage carried an invisible postscript, a universal human motto: We want to know.
We can’t help it. We’re born that way.
Thinking, wondering and questioning come naturally as we face everything from calamity to just sitting around and musing. It’s a condition that creates a need for (among other things) the news industry.
And it’s a flexible condition. Sometimes we know that we don’t want to know. For instance, some readers say they know enough about Britney Spears. And as Bob Seger sings in one of his soulful biker anthems, Against the Wind: “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
To what degree is acquisition of knowledge inevitable or strictly an individual’s decision and responsibility?
Problems arise when authorities decide what we will and will not know. That’s a well-worn tool of power. Some of the greatest human tragedies occur at the hands of those who choke intellectual freedom.
Those are the aliens among us. They are human, and they are found in every society, imposing darkness and suffocating minds.
They come in many forms, from cult leaders to abusive institutions. Much of the legitimate news is filled with accounts of their stranglehold on governments, the poor, the weak and the gullible.
Stephenville’s UFO stirs such rumination about respecting the public’s curiosity.
Some readers and others scoffed about worldwide interest in the UFO. The Star-Telegram found the curiosity perfectly natural and compelling and, because of that, equally natural as a development worth covering.
I remember a time in my career, long ago at a newspaper far away, when I heard that a woman had called the city editor to report a gigantic UFO hovering above a shopping mall adjacent to a freeway and drawing crowds of spectators.
A call to police had verified the incident, but not a word of coverage resulted, because the tough city editor dismissed UFOs as nonsense and had “real” news on his mind.
Can we say “missed opportunity”? That could have been as much of a “talk story,” as journalists call developments that compel the public’s attention, as the Stephenville dispatches.
These days, newspapers can’t afford to ignore the public’s curiosity.
Star-Telegram readers enjoyed the Stephenville coverage. Many posted comments on the paper’s Web site, Star-Telegram.com.
A youngster shared her story: “Me & my mom were driving home from Roanoke and as we were passing Alliance, I swear we saw some kind of UFO! It had white lights all around the bottom, and one blinking red light. … All it did was go straight up really high. … Then it came straight down and landed in a big open field. … Cuh-reepy!”
Another raised the evolution-creationism issue: “Doesn’t our planet itself teach us that life forms spring from and adapt to the environments around them? … if you are a creationist, how dare you assume that God, with his limitless power, is only capable of creating and managing life on one planet”?
Time travel was at work, one reader speculated: “They are not aliens … they are humans from the 23rd century.”
And, of course, there was the realist: “We will probably never know the truth, especially if we must rely on our government to tell us the truth.”
So many angles to explore in this and every story. So many thoughts to share.
Unrequited curiosity’s a powerful human engine. Let it work. Maybe that’s the UFO’s message to Earth.
