U.F.O. ENTHUSIASTS and X-Files fans are in for a double treat this week with separate lectures on extraterrestrial life being held in both Nicosia and Limassol.
The first lecture is by well-known Greek Cypriot UFOlogist Andreas Achillides and will take place at the Higher Technical Institute in Nicosia.
Achillides will focus on the Roswell incident, the now famous tale of a US government’s alleged cover-up of a spaceship find in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
Video footage was released in the 1990s purporting to be pictures of an alien being examined by doctors. This will also be shown at the lecture, Achillides said. He said he will be presenting the results of his study into the tape.
Thursday’s lecture on UFOs will take place at Intercollege’s Limassol campus and is organised by the college’s Mystery Club, whose members have invited Canadian parapsychologist John Knowles to speak.
Knowles, whose first UFO lecture in Cyprus this is, will also speak about the American government’s continued reluctance to come clean on UFO issues.
“First of all I will give a rundown of historical events with particular attention to the debunking efforts of the authorities (US) who have tried to keep a lid on all sorts of evidence which exists on UFOs,” Knowles told The Sunday Mail.
Knowles has personal experience of close encounters of the first kind, having had two sightings in Rome in 1954 and another two 40 years later in Cyprus.
He said the American government is isolated in its attitude towards revealing the truth and that other countries, such as France, are more open about their findings.
“The problem for the American government is they have no control over these events and there is nothing they can do about them,” he said.
He said that in July 1952 UFOs buzzed the White House in Washington, D.C., and had even been tracked on radar but there was nothing the US government could do about it.
Knowles also mentioned the thousands of testimonies relating to abductions and other phenomena such as cattle mutilation in the western US states and in Canada.
“There have been tens of thousands of reports of various organs being extracted in procedures that are better than surgery,” he said.
At the lecture Knowles will also go through an analysis of a video tape taken from a space shuttle in 1991 which reportedly shows a genuine UFO.
Achillides said the last reported UFO sighting in Cyprus was in 1996; after an investigation, however, it turned out to be an IFO (Identified Flying Object) he said.
