The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is especially true in the field of UFO investigation. Eyewitness reports can include good data and confirmation between sightings, especially when corroborating reports from unrelated people match up. A good picture or video is a thousand times better since it can provide definitive proof that something unusual was seen. But there is a vast difference between just any film of lights in the sky and good visual imagery of an unidentified flying object. Here is some common sense advice to make your sighting an important and useful contribution to the study of the UFO phenomena.

Few videos, short of blatant hoaxes, do more to diminish the serious investigation of UFO than the ubiquitous jumpy, jerky film of "lights" in the sky. These videos are virtually meaningless for serious investigation. Make sure you stabilize your camera, whether it is a video camera, camera phone, film or digital camera. A tripod is the best. Make sure that you have one with you at all times. If this does prove impossible, then set your camera on a flat, stable surface like a window ledge or car hood. At the very least, lean against a wall or tree to help provide the greatest possible stability so your focus, especially auto-focus, can hold the object clearly in the center of the frame.

Make sure to include various landmarks and visual references on the film so there is something known to relate the unknown object with. Whether you include trees, hills, or buildings make sure to include such things in your video from time to time to be used for aids in determining speed, size, altitude, or other facets of the object's behavior.

Provide an intelligent narrative with your video. Excited screams and exclamations detract from the seriousness of the overall sighting and leave a poor impression of the witness. Provide useful information. Wind direction, weather conditions, direction you are pointing the camera in are all useful data. Describe any sensations you are experiencing, especially unusual things that may provide clues about the nature or effect of the object on its surroundings. Mention what the landmarks or features are that you are filming to give physical reference to the object. The calmer and more informative you can be for your video's audience, the greater value it will be for investigators.

It is important to be consistent as well as willing to persist with the efforts to provide good film proof of UFO's. Since sighting often take place in waves and provide repeat appearances, going back to a place where previous UFO reports have been made is not a waste of time. Use your time waiting for a sighting wisely. Film a bit of the terrain under normal conditions. Make notes of the geography and do sketches and draw maps of the area under observation. This serves the purpose of keeping you alert and focused for any sighting you may experience. It also provides more detailed facts about the area that can be referenced later rather than try to remember everything during the excitement of an encounter. If you are hunting in a group, each individual's experiences can be later compared to give a more complete and detailed description of the totality of the event.

Take a clue from the Boy Scout motto and always be prepared. Make sure you have your equipment with you and maintain it with film and a full battery charge. The only thing sadder than 30 seconds of fuzzy, jumping lights all by themselves is having nothing at all to show because you had to look away and hunt for film as a UFO hovers over your head.

The vast majority of UFO reports have been reasonably concluded as misidentification of naturally occurring phenomena. That still leaves thousands of sightings that have left only mystery and inconclusive results in their wake. Some have even presented enough evidence that former skeptics have come to reassess their beliefs. One such incident heavily affected J. Allen Hynek, scientific advisor for the United States Air Force's UFO investigations, and began his change of attitude about the potential reality of some non-terrestrial cause to the sightings that poured in to their investigators. Police Sergeant Lonnie Zamora near Socorro, New Mexico experienced the alien encounter on April 24, 1964.

Officer Zamora was chasing a speeding vehicle south of Socorro in the late afternoon of that day. He "heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to southwest some distance away - possibly a 1/2 mile or a mile." Abandoning the speeder he went to investigate, as he knew a local dynamite shack was in that direction and was afraid it may have exploded. With the weather fine and only a few clouds scattered about the sky he recalled seeing a long, funnel shaped, bluish-orange flame that lasted about as long as the roaring sound he heard. He said it dropped from a high pitch to a lower one and then stopped as he approached the gravel road leading up to the shack.

Reaching the top of the rise, he saw what, at first, he mistook for an overturned white car about 150 to 200 yards away with two figures standing beside it. Turning his patrol car towards this sight, intending to offer assistance, he noted one of the figures give a start and they disappeared from his view. He said there was nothing extraordinary about them except that they were maybe the size of children or small adults.

Radioing in to his dispatcher he informed them he would be outside his vehicle checking on the "car" in the arroyo. As he exited his vehicle heard a a very loud roar begin, starting at low frequency and raising higher then a flame appeared under the object he could now see was NOT an automobile. He described the object as being white, not aluminum or chrome, and of an egg shaped oval, very smooth with no apparent windows or doors. He noted some sort of red lettering on the side and what seemed to be an "insignia" about 2x2-1/2 foot square. While the roar began while the object was on the ground, it began to slowly rise straight up into the air on the pillar of flame.

He began running, attempting to get away from the roar which he admits frightened him. When it ceased, he looked up and saw the object, now silent and flameless moving away from him, clearing the 8' shack by several feet. He regained his patrol car and radioed to the dispatcher to see if they could spot the object as it began to lift higher into the sky, soon passing over Six Mile Canyon Mountain, still silent and flameless.

He was soon joined by the dispatcher, Nep lopez, and Sergeant M.S. Chavez who helped him investigate the sight where the object had rested. There was brush burning in several places and they noted tracks left by what must have been "legs" on the object. The four indentations in the ground were deep, cutting into the subsoil to expose a deeper moisture level. The moist soil indicated that the marks were freshly made. There were also three other circular marks that only extended to about an eighth of an inch in depth. Some of the smoldering brush, while still smoking, was also cool to the touch.

As independent corroboration for Officer Zamora's story were several other sightings of the flying egg-shaped object reported round that time by others in various locations in the area, including two separate groups of tourists and an unidentified person who called the television station in Albuquerque. Other people reported hearing the roar of the object and one gas station attendant who reported in flying over his station at a very low altitude.

Several years later a former University of Arizona radiation biology doctoral student stated to UFO researcher James McDonald, who was also an atmospheric physicist, that she had been sent to collect and analyze soil and plant samples from the site. While the finished report she turned in has never resurfaced, she stated that the sand was fused, the plants were unusually dried out and that there were two undetermined "organic substances" included in the samples.

The official Air Force conclusion was blatantly riddled with errors and easily exposed misinformation. The claims that there were no other witnesses than Officer Zamora and that there was no indication of soil disturbance were easily debunked by the numerous reports as well as photographic evidence of the depressions left by the craft. This obvious falsification of the data at hand proved the insincerity and lack of integrity provided by the "official" military investigators, leading them to be increasingly held in suspicion and paving the way for their own scientific advisor to begin looking more closely and seriously at the sightings he was given to debunk.

With the increased prevalence of UFO reports from around the world a person stands a chance of seeing some unusual object in the skies just about anywhere they happen to be. There are however some places that seem to draw anomalous sightings like flies to sugar. If you are tired of waiting in your own back yard for that mysterious sighting, you may want to book passage to some of the "UFO hotspots" where strange lights and objects seem to congregate.

North America has a number of these places where multiple sightings are common. Upper New York near Niagara Falls gets more than its share of unidentifiable lights in the sky. To the West, Mount Adams, Washington is host to so many unexplainable light shows that James Gilliland, founder of Enlightened Contact with Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ECETI) has a ranch at the mountain's base where he hosts UFO seekers who are rarely disappointed. Mount Adams is also where pilot Kenneth Arnold saw the craft that first inspired the term "flying saucer" in 1947.

Mexico City, Mexico and the surrounding countryside seem to attract a number of different types of UFO. In April 2005 thousands of citizens of the city witnessed what was first a few silvery orbs floating in the sky only to be stunned as well over a hundred of these mysterious objects appeared and maneuvered through the sky. The event provided great film footage as the event was in full daylight just as so many UFO sightings in Mexico City occur.

Wiltshire, England is an area that contains not only the monolithic Stonehenge but also wide fields that continue to erupt in crop circles. For over 50 years the citizens have become almost used to the strange lights in the sky and deep booming sounds coming down from above. UFO hunters even hold an annual sky watch at Cradle Hill and are frequent observers at nearby Cley Hill.

Since the early 1990's the number of shiny metallic looking spheres appearing around San Clemente, Chile, prompted the local tourism board to dub the area the "UFO Trail" in 2008. While the terrain is rough, serious UFO hunters often travel to nearby El Enlandrillado for a chance to catch the aerial shows.

ET has not forgotten Australia either. Wycliffe Well, Northern Territory, is as well known for UFO activity as the area around Roswell, New Mexico. The Falkirk Triangle in Scotland has spent the last twenty years being presented with multiple unidentified lights and craft. Thousands of residents have reported these oft-occurring events with the small town of Bonnybridge topping the list with an average of 300 sightings a year. Falkirk was responsible for over 6,000 pages of report data recently released to the public by the Ministry of Defense.

These are not the only places for long-term multiple sightings. From the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico to Sochi, Russia, to Ladakh in the Himalayan Mountains some areas of our Earth seem to hold an especial fondness for whatever or whoever pilots these mysterious craft.

Official and government agencies of UFO study have run the gambit from absolute denial to releasing sighting reports to finally disbanding their study groups. You would think that with such powerful militaries studying the phenomena of unidentified craft in our skies they would have actually found something out but according to their own conclusions they are still clueless. There is a movement growing to turn over the study, if not full investigations, to a new set of seekers.

College students are for the most part, young, bright, and able to see without the constraint society has put on people as they grow accustomed to the status quo. The Niagara County Community College of New York, a state run school, has suggested that since their area of the country averages over fifty sighting reports a month (that's nearly two per day) that the subject should be allowed as a serious elective study course at the college. Philip Haseley, an anthropology professor at the school, feels it is a "serious area of study" and should be included as a mainstream topic. "(A sighting) happens to millions of people (around the world)," he said. "It's about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study. It's important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated."

Just because Professor Haseley is also the head of the Western New York Mutual UFO Network does not diminish the validity of his call for serious study of the phenomena of UFO's by college students. His group of investigators already use the best possible scientific manner in their field investigations, including radar, meteorology, and astronomy to gather their evidence of aerial anomalies. Who better than the intelligent, knowledge seeking students of the College to analyze this data and use their fresh new insights into attempting to piece this puzzle into a scholarly conclusion.

More colleges and universities might lend their support to gaining the extra resources and minds of their young people to examine their own area's sightings. There were over four hundred sighting reports taken by the British Ministry of Defense last year alone, before they decided to quit bothering themselves with unknown objects intruding into their airspace. If the world governments and military already know what these objects are, they should come clean with that knowledge rather than try to sweep it under the rug. If they are still stumped for an explanation, why not let the youth that will make up the next generation of leaders get involved in research that has the collegiate oversight to assure good, useable data in dealing with what has become a worldwide epidemic of UFO sightings and encounters.

With the topic becoming a serious collegiate course, the era of offhand ridicule of witnesses can come to an end. By allowing serious study and investigation at the university level, there should be less hesitation on the part of witnesses to share their experience. With luck, this more serious approach should improve the process of winnowing out hoaxes and give greater credence to those events that can be labeled as real even if they are as yet unexplained.

The reports of strange objects in the skies of our planet have been coming in for centuries. Few people anymore really doubt there is something going on but finding open and honest answers has not been at all easy to discover. Despite the many reasons we have been given to question the actions and motives of our governing agencies, people still want to believe that ultimately their leaders have their best interests at heart. In the case of unidentified flying objects and the possibility of alien contact this trust has been woefully betrayed.

One of the first big attempts at official government investigation was undertaken in the middle of the 20th century by the United States Air Force. Beginning with "Project Sign", that ended in 1948, it was officially determined that these objects were neither US or Russian in manufacture but failed to give even a hypothetical guess as to where they were from. "Project Grudge" quickly followed but was initiated as a purely debunking effort to convince the masses that they were "crazy" or "delusional" if they insisted on seeing an alien connection. This extremely cavalier attitude even angered senior military officials to the point that "Project Blue Book" was formed in an attempt to regain some sense of factual understanding of the phenomena of UFO's.

After years of investigation into nearly 13,000 UFO reports, 701 of which were never found to have even the most flimsy natural explanation, the Project was closed and the final statement issued was that "the phenomena poses no threat to national security." This was not an answer to the question but circumvention around the facts. A popular hypothesis for this is that they were quite aware of what these things were and the possibility that "deals" were in place that the common citizen was not privy to. It may not be a matter of "national security" but that still leaves the question of what it may mean to "personal security" if they are in fact alien in origin.

Other world governments have recently begun to be somewhat more forthcoming with the information they have compiled over the years about sighting made by their citizens. Beginning in 1989 the Belgian government and Air Force began an, at the time, unprecedented openness policy about the severe increase in UFO sightings happening in their country. Rather that trying to pacify the populous with pat stories of "misidentification" of mundane things, they admitted their ignorance of the cause and origins and welcomed input and information from their citizens. While a definitive conclusion was never made, the Belgian government acknowledged the phenomena and did not treat their citizens as if they were ignorant children incapable of dealing with the mystery.

May of 2008 also saw the British government and Ministry of Defense releasing thousands of pages of reports on UFO and alien sightings in their country. These reports are filled with observations from very reliable and trustworthy people including police, pilots, air traffic controllers, military personnel, and government officials themselves. It was their hope that with the release of this information, enough people could study and correlate the data to the point some idea of what is happening in our skies could be developed. We can but hope that with this new openness on the part of some of the world's governments a satisfactory answer can be gleaned before an alien craft makes a public landing and tells us what they are up to themselves.