They were looking forward to a quiet Saturday night -- just the two of them together, watching movies back at the apartment they shared in the basement of her mother's house.

The conversation between the two had fallen to silence. The familiarity of the road, the music on the radio and the tranquilizing hiss of the car heater cranked on high had lulled them into a quiet comfort.

Then: "Jesus!" he exclaimed. "What's that?"

Jenny Laplante noticed them just at that moment, too. "It's a plane," the 17-year-old high school student thought, "and it's about to crash."

But as they drove closer, the details became clearer: two lights morphed to four white lights -- translucent, like light spilling through a distant window. Smaller blue lights were set between the white.

There was no way, they thought, that it was an airplane: it wasn't the right shape and it moved too slowly.

Craning his neck to follow it as it approached, Mr. Robichaud also noticed white lights on bottom. He quickly pulled into the nearest driveway and

Though there are reputable UFO organizations that do their best to screen out false reports it is not always an easy job. Even when an organization suspects a hoax they may be reluctant to say so unless they are absolutely sure. In theory a libel lawsuit could be filed and the accusers must be prepared to prove their case.

Hamilton, along with the other "leading citizens," were part of a local liar's club and regularly practiced out doing each other with tale tales. Hamilton's cigar airship story was so good that it was put in the newspaper as a joke. The members of the club had no idea at the time just how effective this lie would be at fooling thousands of people around the world. It was only in 1977 when Jerry Clark, in FATE magazine, published the results of Robert Schadewald's work on the "calfnapping" story, that the truth came out.

Though only a tiny minority of UFO reports turn out to be hoaxes they challenge the credibility of all sightings. They can also call into question the professionalism of UFO enthusiast organizations. A number of years ago English physicist David Simpson decided to see how effective UFO investigators would be a spotting a hoax. While a group of UFO spotters were on a neighboring hill he used a purple light, a horn and bogus faked photographs to generate a "close encounter of the first kind." The hoax was not detected at all and the photographs declared to be, "genuine beyond all doubt."

This is a section of the same article that the whole population of Inkerman, New Brunswick, read in disbelief the morning of January 13, 2002. Unidentified flying objects, commonly known as UFOs, are one of the most controversial mysteries known to mankind. From ancient to present times, unidentified objects have been seen in the sky by millions of people. The question is, of course, what is it that we are seeing in our skies? Are they foreign spacecrafts from distant planets, merely Air Force experiments, or only our imagination? Many people believe that extraterrestrial life is existent and far more advanced then us. Many believe that aliens are jus

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