MUFON Sacrifices Alien Spaceship for Credibility

I last discussed MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) here. Unfortunately, they didn't take me up on my suggestion of expanding their base by deleting "FLYING" from "UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS". Still, I got to have faith:

And my faith has been restored with this report:

Investigators: Most Texas UFO reports can be explained
FORT WORTH — Most of the 300 reported UFO sightings in Texas dairy country earlier this year were probably planets, cloud formations or stars, according to a group that investigates unidentified flying objects.

But some cases still remain a mystery, said Kenneth Cherry, Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network, which examined the January and February phenomenon in Stephenville and Dublin, about 75 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

"The bottom line is: We really do believe something did occur down there," Cherry said Monday. "That doesn't mean we know what it was, who it belongs to or where it came from. But the large number of witnesses in a small populated area is significant in and of itself."

To their credit, MUFON had a wonderful opportunity to exploit this to its fullest unidentified potential, but they chose to step back and let (gasp) rational thinking prevail. By interviewing hundreds of witnesses, retrieving radar information with FOIA requests, checking aircraft positions and astronomical charts, they were able to explain away many of the reported sightings. More importantly, those they couldn't explain weren't used as evidence for alien spaceships or military conspiracies. Rather, they said they simply didn't know what they were. More than truthful, that's scientific.

There's nothing wrong in saying "I don't know".