Erol Erkmen, chairman of Turkey UFO & Paranormal Events Research Organization [TUVPO], answered the following questions during a TV program on Oct 29. Transcript is as received and unedited. G-fs

Question - There is a high increase of UFO sightings in summer nights, what's the reason for this?

E.E. - That's right ! There's a high decrease of UFO sightings in winter. It's certainly the result of brilliant summer nights which cause optical beam propagations. The reason of optical mistakes is various light sources on the sky. There's no optical mistakes in winter because these sources are blocked by clouds.

Question - If a UFO has seen on the sky of a city, don't other districts also have to report it? But it doesn't be that way. E.E. - I'll try to explain this with an example.There's a crowded group in a somewhat large hall, everyone see the light source on the ceiling. But in a hall not lightened, if only a few person in some aspects see the light, we can call it "optical mistake" with 99% ratio. Similar profiles occur in summer nights too. Heated air rises up from ground and air wave illustrates and shows bigger the planet and star lights just like a magnifying glass. Only a few people in some regions can see this event.This diagnosis is just one of the few possible explanations.

Question - As we understood, most of the UFOs are result of the optical events, well, isn't there any real event? I mean any of extraterrestrial objects?

E.E. - Yes, we can say most of them. It's too hard to distinguish the real ones. Some of them are related to earth and just not totally known phenomenons yet (eg: re-entry plasma) and some reports are not including real informations, I mean it's impossible to reach the original sources.There's two reasons for this, some of them are fake, or lost their originalities because of to change hands many times. But the original video or film neded for a serious analysis. I can summarize like that, it's really hard to discover the traces of foreign worlds in thousands of reports, voiced or filmed documents. Besides, they're too few and findings in a numerous true events show us that these are just unidentified flying objects, namely they may be belong to outer space. But still there's no proof,because they do nothing to contact us.

Question - We hear that a lot of people or groups are receiving messages from extraterrestrial creatures, for example there's Sheldon Niddle or similar groups.

E.E - This subject is concerning to psychologist's work. If there's life on a few nearby planets and they want to contact earth people, I mean if they aware of our existence, why do they choose a random person from a random city? Everybody can easily make up the existence of such contact, you have to want proofs about this. Such groups are mostly dangerous. We hear about most of them by media. (eg: heavens gate)

Question - Last, I want to ask that what's your belief, are we ready to meet an extraterrestrial life?

E.E - I personally believe that there's a lot of earth-like planets. I claim that by a logic. I think some of them may visit our world. And I think a great part of history books are wrong or missing.The time period we live is very little but I think such close-contact events occurred in the past time periods of our world. I believe there absolutely will be an official contact in the next period of time. We're ready to welcome foreigners, if only they have a good intention but I don't think there's a law system about extraterrestrials.

• Thanks Erol Erkman of TUVPO:
admin@tuvpo.com - Oct 31.01