UFO Tracker Shuts Down
LONDON, April 23, 2001 -- -- The British Flying Saucer Bureau is closing after chronicling UFO activities for nearly 50years — because of a sharp decline in the number of reported sightings.
The group, which once had 1,500 members worldwide, used to receive at least 30 reports a week of sightings of unidentified flying objects, but they had now virtually dried up, the Times newspaper reported on Monday.
"I am just as enthusiastic about flying saucers as I always was, but the problem is that we are in the middle of a long, long trough," Denis Plunkett, 70, who founded the bureau in 1953 with his late father, Edgar, told the Times.
"There's only so many times you can pick over old bones. There just aren't enough new sightings," he said.
Plunkett, a retired civil servant, believed there may be a rational explanation for the decline in sightings. Perhaps alien visitors had completed a survey of the earth, he said.
He acknowledged, however, that the greatest threat to amateur alien-watchers who once congregated in pubs to discuss grainy black and white photographs came from cyberspace.
"Rather than trekking out to some draughty hall to see my old slides, it is a lot easier for people to plonk themselves down in front of a computer screen in the comfort of their own home," he said.
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