Word: ufo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Benign Reminders. The Rev. Ted Peters, a Lutheran who teaches religion at Loyola University, New Orleans, has assiduously collected many supposed messages from space visitors reported by earthlings. In his recent book UFOs: God's Chariots? (John Knox; $7.95), Peters notes that most of these agree with the love-thy-neighbor teachings of the Bible (e.g., "Thou shalt not kill"). Whether UFOs exist or not, Peters argues, God may be using UFO "experiences" to communicate benign reminders to earthlings. Peters makes a more credible case when he suggests that people's UFO accounts reflect their sublimated religious longings...
Strange stuff. But then, as Presbyterian Jennings says, where UFO speculations are concerned, "the sky might as well be the limit." If the radio discs on earth ever do pick up coherent beep-beeps from another form of life, or the spaceships ever do land, however, the theologians may be forced to consider in systematic earnest the Psalmist's ancient question: "What is man that Thou art mindful...
DIED. Long John Nebel, 66, dean of all-night radio talk-show hosts whose early specialty was interviewing hypnotists, UFO freaks and sundry other pitchmen of the occult; of cancer; in Manhattan. An eighth-grade dropout with a quicksilver tongue, Long John (6 ft. 5 in.) worked as carnival huckster, mind reader and auctioneer before going on Manhattan's WOR in 1956. Indefatigable, he came to command 42 hours of air time a week on WNBC, more than any other host in radio history...
...Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Ill., normally gets 50 letters a day about sightings of "glowing lights" and such in the sky, but since mid-December the average has been nearly 800. At the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., calls from UFO sighters increased from fewer than half a dozen to as many as 18 a day during the past month. The obvious cause: fallout from the sci-fi smash Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...Northeast many of the reports have been triggered by glowing appearances of Jupiter, the largest and brightest planet in the region's night sky. Another spur to UFO sightings may have been the news that the Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get NASA to open a UFO investigation. Had Jimmy Carter fallen under the Close Encounters spell? Not at all. The White House, weary of having to deal with its own heavy load of UFO mail, was just trying to pass the buck...