SUBJECT: NY TIMES ON TASS REPORT, RE: UFOs                   FILE: UFO1404



   New York Times, Thursday, October 12, 1989
   __________________________________________


                    TASS'S THRILL: JOKING OVER UFO REPORT
                               By Eleanor Blau


   The  report  by  the  Soviet  press  agency Tass that lanky, three-eyed
   creatures took a stroll through a Soviet park  last  month  has  caused
   such reverberations in the United States that they have bounced back to
   Tass itself.

   The agency reported Tuesday that major American television networks and
   newspapers,  which  it  said typically avoid stories about unidentified
   flying objects, "played up the space adventure, frequently  poking  fun
   and  suggesting  that  the beings from outer space might be a result of
   overzealous glasnost."

   The Tass report, written by an American working for the agency, did not
   sound resentful. It quoted Edwin Diamond  a  New  York  Magazine  media
   critic  who  criticized what he called the story's shallowness, saying,
   "What did the Academy of Science think? Where are the pictures?"

   Ant it quoted Yervant  Turzian  of  the  Cornell  University  Astronomy
   Department, who said fellow academics regarded the story as a joke.

   DRAWING OF CREATURE IS BROADCAST

   "Given the physical parameters of the universe, the possibility of life
   on  other  planets  is  high,"  he told Tass. "But the vast majority of
   these reports can be explained by such logical phenomena  as  unconven-
   tional aircraft in the sky or artificial satellites."

   On  the  other hand, Tass found that "A Current Affair," the syndicated
   news and entertainment show, was taking the report seriously enough  to
   plan  on sending a film crew to Voronezh. That is where Tass originally
   reported that three children had said they saw  aliens  emerge  from  a
   ball, wearing silvery overalls.

   Last  night,  Soviet  television  viewers  saw  a picture of one of the
   creatures on the main nightly news program, "Vremya," in the form of  a
   scribbled  drawing  by  one  of the children. It showed a smiling stick
   figure inside a glowing two-legged sphere.

   Vremya sounded more skeptical than the original  Tass  report,  but  it
   offered  without comment an interview with Vasya Surin, one of the pur-
   ported witnesses.

   "HE DIDN'T HAVE A HEAD"

   "We were scared," says Vasya, who appeared to be about 11. "It  hovered
   over  this  tree. Then the door opened and a tall person of about three
   meters looked out. He didn't have a head, or shoulders either. He  just
   had  a  kind of hump. There he had three eyes, two on each side and one
   in the middle."

   Vasya said the alien had two holes instead of a  nose,  and  could  not
   turn its head, so it had to swivel its middle eye.

   But "Vremya" cast some doubt on the reports of the sighting, noting for
   instance,  that  there  were  no  adult  witnesses, even though a large
   apartment house overlooked the site.

   Since the first UFO sightings  in  the  1940's,  spaceships  have  been
   described  as  sausages, cigars, balls, bananas, crescents, round straw
   hats, eggs, mushrooms, disks  and,  especially,  saucers.  But  in  the
   1980's  "Saucers  are out; boomerangs are in," said Jim Speiser, a com-
   puter expert in Scottsdale, Ariz. He founded a  national  UFO  computer
   network  in  1986 because he thought there should be an exchange of in-
   formation instead of disputes among people who reacted variously to UFO
   stories, "from skeptics to wild-eyed gee-whiz believers."

   In a telephone interview, Mr.  Speiser  said  of  the  reported  Soviet
   sighting: "I think Tass is exploring its new freedom and is not used to
   self-censorship. I don't disbelieve, but we have much better stories in
   this country."

   Also  surprised  - but only because he thinks the media ignores UFO re-
   ports - is Tim Beckley of Inner Light Publications. He edits  UFO  Uni-
   verse,  a  glossy  magazine that prints 100,000 copies six times a year
   and distributes them internationally.

   Mr. Beckley said that he is a journalist, not a scientist, and that  he
   is  almost as puzzled about UFOs now as he was when he saw his first in
   1957, as a 10-year-old in New Brunswick, NJ. "Its kind of a cosmic game
   those entities seem to be playing with us," he said.



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