SUBJECT: NY TIMES ON TASS REPORT, RE: UFOs                   FILE: UFO1404    
    
    
    
    New York Times, Thursday, October 12, 1989
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                     TASS'S THRILL: JOKING OVER UFO REPORT
                                By Eleanor Blau


    The  report  by  the  Soviet  press  agency Tass that lanky, three-eyed
    creatures took a stroll through a Soviet park  last  month  has  caused
    such reverberations in the United States that they have bounced back to
    Tass itself.

    The agency reported Tuesday that major American television networks and
    newspapers,  which  it  said typically avoid stories about unidentified
    flying objects, "played up the space adventure, frequently  poking  fun
    and  suggesting  that  the beings from outer space might be a result of
    overzealous glasnost."

    The Tass report, written by an American working for the agency, did not
    sound resentful. It quoted Edwin Diamond  a  New  York  Magazine  media
    critic  who  criticized what he called the story's shallowness, saying,
    "What did the Academy of Science think? Where are the pictures?"

    Ant it quoted Yervant  Turzian  of  the  Cornell  University  Astronomy
    Department, who said fellow academics regarded the story as a joke.

    DRAWING OF CREATURE IS BROADCAST

    "Given the physical parameters of the universe, the possibility of life
    on  other  planets  is  high,"  he told Tass. "But the vast majority of
    these reports can be explained by such logical phenomena  as  unconven-
    tional aircraft in the sky or artificial satellites."

    On  the  other hand, Tass found that "A Current Affair," the syndicated
    news and entertainment show, was taking the report seriously enough  to
    plan  on sending a film crew to Voronezh. That is where Tass originally
    reported that three children had said they saw  aliens  emerge  from  a
    ball, wearing silvery overalls.

    Last  night,  Soviet  television  viewers  saw  a picture of one of the
    creatures on the main nightly news program, "Vremya," in the form of  a
    scribbled  drawing  by  one  of the children. It showed a smiling stick
    figure inside a glowing two-legged sphere.

    Vremya sounded more skeptical than the original  Tass  report,  but  it
    offered  without comment an interview with Vasya Surin, one of the pur-
    ported witnesses.

    "HE DIDN'T HAVE A HEAD"

    "We were scared," says Vasya, who appeared to be about 11. "It  hovered
    over  this  tree. Then the door opened and a tall person of about three
    meters looked out. He didn't have a head, or shoulders either. He  just
    had  a  kind of hump. There he had three eyes, two on each side and one
    in the middle."

    Vasya said the alien had two holes instead of a  nose,  and  could  not
    turn its head, so it had to swivel its middle eye.

    But "Vremya" cast some doubt on the reports of the sighting, noting for
    instance,  that  there  were  no  adult  witnesses, even though a large
    apartment house overlooked the site.

    Since the first UFO sightings  in  the  1940's,  spaceships  have  been
    described  as  sausages, cigars, balls, bananas, crescents, round straw
    hats, eggs, mushrooms, disks  and,  especially,  saucers.  But  in  the
    1980's  "Saucers  are out; boomerangs are in," said Jim Speiser, a com-
    puter expert in Scottsdale, Ariz. He founded a  national  UFO  computer
    network  in  1986 because he thought there should be an exchange of in-
    formation instead of disputes among people who reacted variously to UFO
    stories, "from skeptics to wild-eyed gee-whiz believers."

    In a telephone interview, Mr.  Speiser  said  of  the  reported  Soviet
    sighting: "I think Tass is exploring its new freedom and is not used to
    self-censorship. I don't disbelieve, but we have much better stories in
    this country."

    Also  surprised  - but only because he thinks the media ignores UFO re-
    ports - is Tim Beckley of Inner Light Publications. He edits  UFO  Uni-
    verse,  a  glossy  magazine that prints 100,000 copies six times a year
    and distributes them internationally.

    Mr. Beckley said that he is a journalist, not a scientist, and that  he
    is  almost as puzzled about UFOs now as he was when he saw his first in
    1957, as a 10-year-old in New Brunswick, NJ. "Its kind of a cosmic game
    those entities seem to be playing with us," he said.


              
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