KEBABBLE Close encounters of the Turkish
kind By Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - The alleged sighting of
an unidentified flying object (UFO) has excited
the Turkish media with pictures appearing in both
sensationalistic tabloids and more serious
broadsheet papers last week.
The UFO was
spotted in the Karakopru area of Sanliurfa
province towards 4am on Wednesday. Filmed by an
amateur videographer, the strangely glowing
hexagonal ball of light hovered in the sky
emitting red, green and white
lights and moved both fast and erratically. After
15 minutes it disappeared without a trace.
As of yet no official explanation has been
offered as to what it might be, although Internet
comments vary between lauding a genuine sighting
of a "green fireball" phenomenon and skeptics who
claim the object is just a star filmed under
magnification or others who believe that it was an
American spy plane monitoring Turkey's border with
Syria.
It was Turkey's third major
sighting in 2007. One was in Konya in March (a
series of sightings that lasted off and on for a
week) and another in Istanbul on January 4 when
people saw a spinning circle with glowing white
lights in the sky. And the head of the Turkish
Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center Haktan
Akdogan claimed in August that in the past few
months the number of sightings in Turkey has been
increasing.
The largest concentration of
sightings and perhaps the best documented occurred
between 2001 and 2002. This spate seem to have
been triggered by an extraordinary report on June
7, 2001 when 10 rural guardsmen from the village
of Dondurmaz in Adiyaman province claimed to have
seen a bright light in the shape of a large
circular "tray" the size of a house glowing in the
sky. They watched as it flew off in the direction
of Ulubai mountain and then winked out of sight.
When the men reported to their commander
their statements were taken seriously and the
governor of Adiyaman province, Halil Iaik, had
them separated and individually questioned. Not
only did their accounts tally up but when asked to
draw pictures of what they had seen all the
sketches were uncannily similar. Iaik felt the
event was serious enough to send a report with the
details to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and
also informed Haktan Akdogan at the Sirius
organization.
By June 13 in the same year,
Sabah newspaper was leading with the headline
"Everyone searching for UFOs" in a story that
detailed how in Usak locals had stoned an alien,
in Gaziantep the police had videoed a UFO and that
people all over the country were phoning in
reports of strange occurrences to their local
jandarma (constabulary).
The
reports continued in a slightly hysterical
atmosphere well into 2002 and included an event in
Gebze on May 31, 2002 where a UFO was reported
circling with projecting lights for over an hour.
This was followed by Aksam newspaper printing the
story on June 1, 2002 of Saffet Sap, an electronic
technician from Beykoz, who managed to video a
flying object like a black bug with seven or eight
legs. Later in the year on November 9 the Hurriyet
newspaper ran the account of four commercial
pilots from different planes who had all seen UFOs
in the same patch of sky on the same day at the
same time.
Haktan Akdogan of Sirius seems
to be a recurring figure in Turkish UFO lore
commenting freely on each event and insisting on
the importance of Turkey to alien life. His
motives however may not just be scientific, he is
also the owner of the Istanbul UFO museum that
opened in 2002 (commercially riding on the back of
these multiple UFO events) and any extra interest
in aliens will also encourage customers to his
museum. He also runs the museum as a fairly
successful franchise with three others in Turkey
(Istanbul, Denizli and Goreme in Cappadocia) and
his website www.siriusufo.org advertises for
further partners to open other UFO museums.
It is his intention to open UFO museums
all over Turkey to "further the knowledge of the
Turkish people and to attract tourists". His
organization provides all the necessary materials
and installations so each museum is a de facto
copy of the first. Whether they are lucrative or
not is not mentioned but when the Goreme museum
opened in 2006 Hurriyet newspaper reported that
they had 5,000 visitors in one month alone.
Apparently it was especially popular with the
Japanese.
Whether extraterrestrials exist
or not is much debated but recent advances in
science make the chances seem more likely. Animals
known as extremophiles thrive in earth
environments previously thought not to have been
able to sustain life. From microbes found living
without oxygen in volcanic fissures 3.2 kilometers
down in ocean trenches to "water bears" (aka
tardigrades) that can survive temperatures
from nearly 17-degrees Celsius to 150.5-degrees
Celsius and even live in a vacuum like that found
in space. These minute organisms have upended the
understanding of what is needed for life to
survive and flourish.
Previously
scientists has worked on the assumption that both
oxygen and liquid water were key factors in
sustaining life but now it seems that these are
only important to certain types of life. The "rare
earth" theory is falling out of favor to be
replaced with the idea that life is adaptable and
that the question that needs to be asked is, "What
kind of environment other than our own might
sustain living things?"
The chances of
intelligent life with the technology to
communicate is slimmer, though it is conceivable
that it is possible that such worlds have come and
gone. If life of this sort exists now they, like
us would have the technology to recognize that
earth is an "interesting" planet and worth
investigating. So why aren't they here? Some would
say they are and the report of flying objects
above Karakopru on Tuesday was a clear indication
of just that.
Fazile Zahir is of
Turkish descent, born and brought up in London.
She moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been
writing full time since then.
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