If you look at any subject from a traditional journalistic perspective, you’ll find that there is a rational, probing and methodical way to evaluate the key elements of a story; to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I emphasize the word story because we as humans focus on this when we read news. Everyone seems to like a good story, with interesting characters, and a series of events that tell a tale or relate a set of circumstances that might be of interest to another, either directly or in passing. Every set of circumstances has cause and effect elements which either point to an outcome, or indicate where a resolution must be occur, and in between ”beginning, middle, and end” we load the cavities of news stories with facts that “fill out” the story, communicating ideas to folks like you and I in our communities around the globe.

Now frankly, Ufology is an intangible thing in my opinion (yes, I know… it may seem contrary to begin asserting opinions into a conversation that just dealt with elements of news reporting and journalism etiquette, but bear with me). I’ve never seen how anything like UFOs, as freely as they seem to come and go, or as erratic as they tend to be regarding when and where they will appear, could be quantified objectively. This problem seems to have worsened with time to some degree also, since technology over the last several decades has only permitted hoaxing via photographs and consumer-level home videos to run rampant. True, one might suppose that the majority of the purported UFOs seen in photos and videos over the last decade aren’t truly any kind of unknown craft, and even if one were to rule out every hoax and every misidentification, we would have little evidence to go off of so far as trying to figure out what the remaining few actually might be.

Being as intangible a thing as I suggest, I certainly don’t say that UFOs are a subject unworthy of study. If anything, and perhaps thanks to the multitude of military reports being released these days after decades of silence, finally UFOs are beginning to see an increase in rational press. Still, with this rational press also comes a good bit of weirdness, too; those who would report on the sensational aspects of mainstream Ufology for the mere purposes of cashing in on shock value and attracting hits to their websites. I’ve reported on this sort of thing a bit recently, like something my friend Eileen at the Alien Casebook website pointed out to me that the story of Milton Torres, an American pilot stationed in Europe in the late 1950s, was ordered to launch a full salvo of 24 missiles at a massive aircraft-carrier-sized UFO over Norwich. The sensational story, sounding like something from Independence Day, is obviously a head turner, and because of this it made its way to the forefront of a series of stories released within a 4,500 page Ministry of Defense document earlier this week. Of course, what’s funny is that Torres’ story was actually released much earlier, dating back to August of 2008. Nonetheless, the story became the focus of the news involving the release of the MOD document.

Similar to my frustration over yesterday’s post, where I noted that a popular UFO allegedly photographed over Glasgow, Scotland in 2002 appeared with a