History of UFOs Coloring Pages
The darkest night I've ever seen was on the Canadian tundra on a cool fall evening. There wasn't a light anywhere except the Milky Way and the faintly glowing coals of our campfire. I'd stayed up to watch a meteor shower and I only saw three meteors... or were they? Then the northern lights came out... of nowhere and in full force.
Sitting under the Milky Way it's hard not to wonder if there's more out there than just us. And when the stars shoot across the horizon and the sky starts to dance... well, who knows. Maybe somebody a million billion light years away is staring up at their own sky right now, thinking the same thing. Maybe it's a silicon lifeform or a thousand year old intelligence or an iceworm or an interstellar jellyfish or something we don't even have a word for.
I don't know the answer. I do know that people have been asking these questions under dark skies for thousands of years...
What was that?
People have been looking up and asking that for as long as there have been people. A meteor streaks across the sky. Two bright spots appear on either side of the sun on a freezing morning. (Those are called sun dogs). The northern lights ripple green and pink over a field of snow. Some people say that every one of them has an explanation now: dust from a comet, ice crystals floating in the air, charged particles from the sun meeting our sky.
When you actually see something that fills you with awe, that's the beginning of... knowledge I guess. You just know you saw something... different... and you wonder what it was and maybe you set out to figure it out. There are still things I've seen in the far north on a cold winter night that I've yet to find a name for.
How did they do that?
I stayed overnight at Machu Picchu so I could climb up early the next morning and explore before the crowds arrived. If you hike the trail fast enough you get something close to a private tour of the whole place.
It's an incredible place. The stone blocks are enormously heavy and they fit together so seamlessly that there's no mortar at all. I'm not sure we could build it today.
The Great Pyramid in Egypt was the tallest building in the world for nearly 4,000 years. It's made of around 2.3 million stone blocks, and nobody left a note saying how they got them all up there.
In Mexico the Maya built El Castillo at Chichen Itza about a thousand years ago. It has 365 steps, one for every day of the year, and at the spring and autumn equinoxes the sun throws a shadow that looks like a snake sliding down the staircase.
In the Peruvian desert there are giant drawings of a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider that only make sense from the air. The Nazca people made them about 2,000 years ago by moving the dark stones off the ground to show the pale earth underneath.
On Easter Island nearly 900 stone statues stand looking out, and some are heavier than a school bus. The islanders say the statues walked to the places where they stand.
Today horses wander freely among them.
Nobody left an instruction manual. These places are either a testament to how much humans can accomplish when we set our minds to it or... a nod to something else.
Alien Intervention or Human Invention
Same places, two stories. Color the one you believe!
The flying saucer summer
On a clear afternoon in June 1947 a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington when he saw nine bright objects flashing across the sky. He said they moved like a saucer skipping across water. A reporter heard that and wrote "flying saucer" and the name stuck.
In the weeks that followed reports poured in from all over the country, and a lot of the people who wrote in described discs. Within a few years saucers were in movies, comics and newspaper cartoons.
The U.S. Air Force came up with a more careful name for all the things nobody could identify: Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs. It's a way of saying we saw something up there and we don't know what it was yet.
Roswell
A few weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting a rancher named Mac Brazel found a field full of strange scraps on his land near Roswell, New Mexico: tinfoil, rubber strips, tape and thin sticks. The Army air base nearby announced that it had recovered a flying disc, and the newspapers ran it as a headline. The very next day the Army said it was a weather balloon.
Years later the Air Force explained the rest. The scraps came from a secret balloon project called Project Mogul, which sent tall strings of balloons carrying microphones high into the sky to listen for faraway sounds.
The story stuck anyway. People kept telling it, books and movies picked it up, and every summer the town of Roswell throws a festival with alien costumes, parades and a museum.
A secret balloon, a surprised rancher and a headline that travelled fast ended up creating a story that's still going today.
That's the official explanation anyways... an out of control rumour with innocent origins...
Of course, some people believe the official explanation is a cover up for some sort of US military contact with alien life!
What do you think?