Like many North Americans born in the mid- to late-20th century I share the pop culture fascination with UFO’s and other things unexplained. As a child I used to watch “In Search Of…” and often wondered about things like the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts and extraterrestrials. As an adult, shows like the X Files still held entertainment value.

I’m pretty much skeptical about all of it, but I like to keep an open mind. From my point of view, no one has provided sufficient proof either for or against any of those “mysteries”.

So when I came across an interesting thread this morning as I was checking my email, I took the opportunity to do a bit of fun internet digging about. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20051124/bs_prweb/prweb314382_1

At first, I found this thread amusing, then disconcerting and finally a tad worrisome.

My initial reaction was “This is B.S. ~ even ex-politicians can get weirder and weirder with age.” So, as I often do in cases of strange information winding up on my desktop, I sought to find other sources of information about it. In my mind, finding that this was just another internet hoax would be just a click away.

But then I found that the initial story about Paul Hellyer appeared to be true. Among other links I found was the article about Mr Hellyer published on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer#Peace_in_Space_and_UFO_advocacy

Having read that, I started searching about the reference to U.S. Army Colonel Philip J. Corso’s book “The Day After Roswell”. And this is where things get stranger and stranger as well as more worrisome.

The issue at hand is where lies the truth in an informationscape as large as the internet? Should a larger site such as Yahoo or Wikipedia, who present all this without much analysis automatically have more credibility than a very critical but more amateur-looking site such as http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/roswell020.html

Whom do we trust? Can the trust once put in huge media organizations (think New York Times or the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite) be displaced towards the internet?

Check this out…

http://www.heliomedia.com/download/video/2014.swf

As well as: In search of the Wikipedia prankster