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Top 10 Alien Sightings

By Patrick J. Kiger
Editor Amanda Arnold

Apparently, the pageantry surrounding the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was so entertaining even extraterrestrials couldn't resist checking it out. At least that was the scoop from The Sun, a British tabloid. It ran stills lifted from a two-and-a-half minute video clip shot by a visiting tourist that showed a blurry blob the paper characterized as a "shimmering white object" hovering in the cloudless sky over Westminster Abbey on the morning before the wedding. "It changed shape, but stayed there for at least 30 minutes," the tourist explained in an Internet posting. "Then I lost sight of it."

Skeptics might explain the ambiguous images as lens distortion, vapor trails from an aircraft, or perhaps just wishful thinking. But to believers in UFOs, the sighting provided yet another chapter in the vast annals of possible sightings of alien visitors. The National UFO Reporting Center, which makes its headquarters in a former underground nuclear bunker in Harrington, Wash., posts an estimated 5,000 new sightings annually to its online database, and maintains records on as many as 70,000 potential glimpses of extraterrestrial visitors, going back to the 1950s, according to Seattle Weekly. But UFO believers say that reported sightings go back as far as ancient times, when the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel described seeing fiery wheels touch down on land, apparently piloted by strange creatures with animal faces.

Evaluating the credibility of UFO sightings is a daunting task, since the absence of a clear-cut explanation for an incident doesn't automatically prove that an object is of alien origin, and there's often a paucity of physical evidence or data from scientific instruments available to bolster witnesses' visual observations. But as any student of physics will tell you, there's no such evidence to prove quantum mechanics either, and yet scientists nevertheless seem confident that it's real. With that in mind, here are 10 of the most interesting, provocative, influential possible alien sightings on record. Draw from them whatever conclusions you like.