"It looked like an oldfashioned zeppelin," recalled Levi. He pushed the throttles to burners and initiated pursuit.

"When I approached the object and asked the pilot to identify himself, the object suddenly ascended at supersonic speed and vanished off aircraft radar."

While government officials are taking the UFO report very seriously, they are investigating whether the UFO may have been some new and highly advanced military aircraft being tested by one of their Arab neighbors. 

Latin American UFO researchers reported that a family of Guatemalan tourists saw two small humanoid creatures--with distinctly alien characteristics--traveling in the back seat of a military Jeep that sped by them when they realized they´d been spotted.

About the size of nine- or ten-year-old children, the beings had large oblong heads and prominent eyes, the frightened eye witnesses disclosed after returning home.

A man in military uniform accompanied the two "aliens" and appeared to be carrying two small space suits equipped with some sort of breathing apparatus similar to scuba gear.

"When the soldier realized the tourists were watching, he shone a bright spotlight on them and they drove away as fast as they could," says Ricardo Belinguer, of the Guatemalan Extraterres trial Life Federation.

"They claim they were followed for more than 20 miles before eluding their pursuers.

"When they got home, they contacted us immediately and provided us with a very detailed description of what they saw."

As every UFO student knows, an alien spacecraft was supposed to have crashed near Roswell Army Field in 1947. Many believe the government has perpetrated an elaborate coverup ever since.  This latest sighting rekindles those suspicions.

"This is convincing new evidence that the earlier reports were true and that the aliens who survived the crash are still alive or there have been subsequent visits by search parties," says Belinguer.

"The fact the army personnel chased these tourists indicates that the American government is still trying to cover up the events of 1947."

"But there also is new information.  The presence of the tanks tells me that the aliens can't long survive breathing the Earth's atmosphere and must be accompanied by supplies of lifesustaining gasses native to their own planet," Belinguer said.

"We have made our findings known to the American Embassy, but we have received no reply."

As they tell it, an object of human dimension glowing with a with golden light moved slowly up into the sky from the surrounding hills and then suddenly shot  heavenward. Some are calling it a UFO.

And they have plenty of company. Over the last monh reports have come from at least 12 different Chinese cities.  What's more, UFO researchers in Beijing are investigating claims of an alien abduction.

Even thought the Communist Party runs a very restrictive regime, China  boasts a government approved UFO Research Association (membership 50,000).  Also, China has a 400,000-circulation bimonthly magazine devoted to UFO research. The conservative state-run media report UFO sightings. UFO buffs here say many respected scientists and even some in the military are their allies, giving their research credibility.

The Chinese have been avid astronomers for thousands of years, having recorded some of  the most spectacular celestial events known, like supernova and comets. They have always given these events supernatural or religious significance. And, though China has used  the West's Gregorian calendar for nearly a thousand years now, the traditional lunar calendar calls for the Year of the Dragon, signifying cataclysmic changes in the offing. Naturally, many think the increase in UFO sightings is related.

``It was so beautiful, sort of yellow,'' villager Wang Cunqiao said in an AP report. ``It was like someone flying up to heaven.''

``Some say it was caused by an earthquake. Some say it was a UFO. Some say it was a ray of Buddha. I'm telling everyone to call it an auspicious sign,'' said Chen Jianwen, village secretary for the officially atheistic Communist Party.

Officially, the events in Pusalu, Beijing, Shanghai and 10 other Chinese cities in December are UFOs. The implication is that the objects were airplanes mistaken for extraterrestrial visitors. But UFO researchers reject the idea that the sightings could have been airplane contrails or the like.

One executive of a shipping company who helps manage the China UFO Research Resource Center said that if the Chinese Air Force didn't give chase--and apparently they didn't, at least in this latest incident--then it was in all likelihood the testing of a new aircraft by the military. But died-in-the-wool UFO students say that is just the kind of excuse you'd expect from the authorities.

Based in a dinky Beijing apartment complex, the Resource Center is China's version of Project Bluebook, the U. S. Air Force's effort to collect and investigate claims of UFO sightings. In all, the Resource Center has 140 boxes of newspaper clippings and eyewitness accounts of sightings, including one that reports the military scrambled fighters in 1998 in a vain attempt to intercept a UFO.

At least three other officers from the Lebanon, Shiloh and Dupo police departments also said they saw something in the sky early Wednesday (January 5, 2000). Like Stevens, who is from Highland, Missouri, they all described the object as a "UFO."

And all their descriptions sounded the same: arrowhead shaped, with dimmer lights studding its surface. Three brighter lights illuminated its tail, as the craft, if such it was, made its way northeasttosouthwest across the Metro East area about 4 a.m.

The owner of a miniature golf course was the first to report the UFO with a call to the Highland police. But since he was driving to Lebanon,  Highland police contacted Lebanon authorities.

At first, the officers there laughed at the dispatcher, thinking it was all just a hoax. But  then the dispatcher himself spotted the object heading toward Shiloh, where an officer there spotted it, too.

Officer Stevens, who was sitting in his patrol car in Millstadt listening to the radio, heard the talk about a UFO and decided to investigate. He drove to the north end of town, where he scanned the sky but saw only airplane lights. Until he looked west.

 "Wow!" he thought, jumping out of his car. "This thing's huge!"

Stevens said it moved slowly "like a blimp," about 1,000 feet (300 meters) off the ground. He estimates the craft was about two stories high ( perhaps 20 feet ) and about three times as long.  Though it had three large lights in the what he took to be the tail, dimmer lights sprinkled the entire surface, in what he described as a "starfield camouflage."

As the object headed toward Dupo,  Stevens grabbed his Polaroid and snapped a quick picture before radioing dispatch. He was surprised to hear that the officers in Dupo had seen the same thing. 

Unfortunately--as is the case with far too many of these "sightings"--the photo came out a bit fuzzy, and the image only shows the three bright lights. However, Stevens, after making an unofficial police report, sketched a likeness of what he saw.

"It's been driving me nuts since I've seen it," he said, "I haven't been able to sleep for the last day and a half."

A UFO?

That's the story repeated over the years by the likes of such UFO gurus as Allen Hynek and Jacques Valley. Trouble is, it just isn't true.

"No, somebody made a lot of money selling … lies on that one," Cooper, the sixth American in space, told Art Bell on his syndicated "Coast to Coast" radio show back in early September. "It was totally untrue, sorry to say."

But nonetheless, Cooper, one of the original "Mercury Seven" pilots, one of the guys with the "right stuff," according  to Tom Wolf in his book of the same name, has an "unshakable" belief in extraterrestrial life, including UFOs. And his conviction is based on personal experience.

"On one occasion, I saw some strange vehicles that we assumed were UFOs," he told Bell. Notice he used a very precise word: "vehicles."

The retired U. S. Air Force Colonel was a fighter pilot stationed in Germany in the early 1950s. One day, Cooper saw "flights of fighters flying by in the same sort of formation we flew, moving east to west." Cooper and his squadron mates were scrambled to go take a look; these objects represented a very real threat during these tense early days of the Cold War. Cooper told Bell he remembers the objects looking "just like saucers -- they were metallic looking, but we couldn't really get close enough to see more than that. You couldn't see any wings on them."

After returning to base, Cooper and the others speculated the craft might have been a new Soviet design, something that could entirely outclass them, something that would spell the end of Western air superiority, but "looking back now," he suspects "it was some kind of extraterrestrial vehicle."

Only a couple of years later, in 1957, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Cooper swears he saw yet another UFO. At the time he was working with a film crew, which managed to get the episode on film. But a high-ranking officer from the Pentagon ordered the film confiscated before it was made public. Nothing has been seen of the film since.

Fast forward to his Gemini 5 mission. Cooper is in low-earth orbit. He has a camera again, and he's busily snapping pictures. But on his return, the authorities once again confiscate his film. What's going on? Well, it wasn't, as you may have heard from various reports of UFOlogists over the years, that the pictures were of the first alien spacecraft shadowing  his capsule.

"I found out fairly recently that one of the reasons it got confiscated was I had inadvertently … overflown Area 51," while taking test photos, he said. Area 51 is the top-secret Nevada military base where it is rumored that captured UFO technology is being tested.

Bell asked Cooper directly what he thought about the famous Martian "face," the shadowy picture taken by the latest Mars probe that many claim to be evidence of previous Martian civilization. The former astronaut reflected for a moment but said only: "That's one of the reasons you need to send a manned mission to Mars, to study the stuff more closely."