MUFON on the California suicide

The Heaven's Gate mass suicide may have sparked new interest in UFOs in the major press, but the UFO-research community doesn't think much of the attention. For starters, says Ray Fowler, MUFON's national director of investigations, the spaceship trailing Comet Hale-Bopp -- the vessel that was supposed to take the cultists on their final ride -- wasn't a UFO at all, and it was nowhere near the comet. "It was a star," Fowler says, adding that it was in the same line of sight as Hale-Bopp, but light-years and light-years away.

Though Fowler tried explaining that fact on the Internet, the explanation obviously didn't take; he sees the spaceship notion as part of the traditional hysteria surrounding a comet's appearance, updated for the space age.

Sandy Black says she doesn't even read articles about Heaven's Gate. (The press, she says, closed in on the story "like sharks to a bloody steak.") "That bunch of nuts in California has nothing to do with serious UFO research," she says.

Fowler says he figures that the suicide story "hurts legitimate scientific UFO research" and makes it easier for the government to downplay and suppress its own UFO information. And, he says, the story continues a trend in coverage that keeps "legitimate sightings" by sober-eyed witnesses such as airline pilots out of the news. "It's only the fantastic that usually gets in the newspapers," he says.

-- Tom Scocca