I guess my question has always been, how come the majority of astronomers - those who have training at observing and understanding sky phenomenon - rarely ever report the kind of sightings that your average person who happens to look up every once in a while seems to see with amazing regularity.

Though I do not have the exact issue date handy, there was an article in an Omni magazine from the early 1980s about an "experiment" where someone reported a fake UFO sighting on a radio program. Within hours the radio station had hundreds of calls from people who claimed to see just what he saw - which was actually nothing, please note - right up to several callers claiming to have been adbucted by the UFO "crew".

I do not have an "issue" with people who report seeing stange objects in the sky - indeed, I am glad to know that people are doing something with their lives besides watching television or heavy drinking - or issues with the people themselves. What I do ask is that such claims are followed up with serious investigations from a number of sources and not just to conclude that the object was an alien starship.

It's like the story of the boy who cried wolf. Some day we may have a report of what turns out to be a real alien ship, but the science community, having been long turned off to so many claims of alien contact by unreliable witnesses, will ignore the historic event.