From: | skindrud@rosebud.berkeley.edu |
Title: | ISRAEL IS HOT SPOT FOR UFO SIGHTINGS |
Source: | The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) |
Date: | April 01, 1996 |
LEVEL 1 - 6 OF 113 STORIES
Copyright 1996 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
The Plain Dealer
March 31, 1996 Sunday, FINAL / ALL
SECTION: LIVING; Pg. 1F
LENGTH: 1233 words
HEADLINE: ISRAEL IS HOT SPOT FOR UFO SIGHTINGS
BYLINE: By DANIEL BRYNBERG; JERUSALEM REPORT
BODY:
On Sunday, Jan. 8, 1995, Herzl Ksantini was relaxing at home with a buddy in a small farming community in central Israel. "It was an ordinary evening on our moshav [village]," he says, "until suddenly, at 9 p.m., the house began to
shake. It was like an earth tremor."
Ksantini opened the front door to investigate and came "face-to-face with a
three-meter monster." His friend tried to peek out through a window in the kids' bedroom, but was thrown to the ground. Half a minute later, the "monster" was
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 gone.
The 42-year-old Ksantini, married and a successful businessman, speaks calmly and convincingly of a "mud-colored monster, with long legs and no arms," and
recalls lights shining from its head. He makes no claim that it was
extraterrestrial. "All I know is that it was too big to be a man," he told the
Jerusalem Report on the anniversary of his encounter, "and it wasn't a horse,
camel, or any other known animal."
Ksantini and his friend sat frozen with fear for 20 minutes. They then called the moshav security head, who in turn phoned the Border Police. By early the
next morning about 30 officers were scouring the area. They found no aliens -
but did find "deep footprints" which were tracked for some 8 kilometers. While
skeptics claimed these were camel tracks, Israel's small but enthusiastic UFO community swooped down on the sleepy moshav of Yatzitz and proclaimed it the
site of the latest visitation.
Over the last decade, hundreds of Israelis claim to have had close encounters with alien beings. Their experiences range from mere sightings of UFOs or
their "crop circle" landing sites, to actual communication - with several
claimed abductions.
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 American-born Beit Shemesh resident Barry Chamish, a self-professed
ufologist, says "Israel is recognized as an international UFO hot spot - with an unsurpassed quantity and quality of evidence."
In January 1995, a crew from Paramount TV's "Sightings" program came to
Israel to film an episode - and ended up with enough material for three, two of which have aired to a global audience estimated at 60 million. Ufologists are at a loss to explain the lack of sightings in Israel's near neighbors - it is as if the aliens, unlike most earthlings, are aware of Israel's borders.
One explanation offered is the Divine. Israeli ufology divides into the
majority rationalist and minority mystic camps. The mystics have no doubt as to the reason for the prevalence of sightings in the Holy Land: The angels of the
Bible are returning. Mystics have constructed elaborate theories based on
biblical and cabalistic texts to support their contention that the "miracles" of the Bible - such as the pillars of cloud and fire that guided the Israelites
through the wilderness are actually descriptions of alien encounters.
Most recently, ufologist Hadassah Arbel has proffered a theory linking
Kadimah, a moshav in central Israel where a number of encounters have been
reported, with Kedmah, a biblical word for eastward, associated with the coming of the messiah. Rationalists counter by pointing out that, with minimal
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 effort, almost any biblical passage can be interpreted as an encounter
narrative.
Nachman Ben-Yehuda, associate professor of sociology at the Hebrew
University, first looked at the UFO phenomenon when studying in the United
States. He explains the recent spate of sightings as manifestations of
"diminishing security tensions." Accordingly, he sees Israel becoming "more and more like West Europe and America, witnessing more science fiction, more cults. People are becoming more aware of themselves and their experiences."
Not all the action has been in the last decade: Claims of Israeli UFO
sightings date back to the 1950s. Avi Greif, head of the Israel Center for UFO Research (a ragtag association of amateurs), says that "considering the size of the country, the number of encounters, particularly of the second and third
kind, is remarkable."
World attention has been sharply focused on Israel by a recent flurry of
extraterrestrial activity - what Israeli enthusiasts refer to as a "holy
trinity" of "well-documented" encounters.
The most recent was Ksantini's "monster." Before that, between March and June 1993, five women claim to have had one-on-one encounters with aliens in
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 Kadimah - and each has furnished similar descriptions of a "2.5-meter [7-foot]
tall, bald, gray alien being, with an oval-shaped face, glittering eyes and a
small dotlike nose."
All five Kadimah incidents were marked by "crop circles," taken to indicate
spacecraft landings, in back gardens.
The other encounter in the "trinity" occurred in September 1976, when a
series of sightings, over Haifa's Shikmonah beach, culminated in a spectacular
explosion that scorched the sand in the shape of a spaceship.
Tens of thousands of residents came to see the unique "alien signature." Avi Greif says the site was unusually magnetic and contained extremely high
concentrations of zinc.
Other local encounters of note include the Nov. 6, 1991, "visitation of a
giant" to the home of Beit She'an police officer Yitzhak Mordechai, which
resulted in a six-hour chase involving 300 soldiers in jeeps all the way to the Jordanian border.
The being is said to have stopped at the border fence, and then disappeared.
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 On the night of Jan. 24, 1992, a UFO was sighted along the length of the
country, from the Galilee to Eilat, triggering hundreds of calls to emergency
lines.
Operators are briefed in handling such emergencies; Rachel Holzman, of the
Israel Center for UFO Research, has given several lectures to the operators on Israel's 100 police emergency line.
Tel Aviv University astronomer Elia Leibowitz is skeptical about the new rash of sightings. "I'm sure they see something," he says.
"The question is the meaning people give to what they see."
To most mainstream scientists, ufology remains a pseudo-science. Nachman
Ben-Yehuda warns that "Ufology s simply plagued with fraudulent reports,
forgeries, unreliable witnesses - you have to shed a lot of rubbish to get even a kernel of evidence."
But he recognizes that "you don't have to be a crackpot to believe in
UFOs. " He points to DNA code-cracker and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick's last
book, "Life Itself," which argues that DNA was brought to earth by a rocket from another world.
The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996 Indeed, there is a growing academic respectability being given to UFO
studies.
And the U.S. government is now conducting the biggest-ever search for
extraterrestrial life through the 5-year-old global META (Megachannel
Extraterrestrial Assay) program, simultaneously scanning over 1 million
frequencies for any signs of intelligent communications - so far with no
results.
Ben-Yehuda, who has specialized in the sociology of "deviant science," sees
an irony in the fact that respected government agencies and scientists spend
billions of dollars searching the distant horizons of space, while people who
claim to have been visited in the back garden are ridiculed.
Still, UFO enthusiasts are used to being disbelieved by a skeptical, often mocking public.
Undaunted, Israel's amateur UFO
researchers will doubtlessly continue to
spend their weekends trampling through gardens photographing "crop circles,"
collecting residue and silica, and dreaming of locating a large landing site in the Galilee which has become tantalizingly known as "The Mother Lode." The Plain Dealer, March 31, 1996