The video evidence for UFOs has been disappointing, especially since videos might provide strong evidence for any legitimate alien ship.

Even Philip J. Klass, the field's number one skeptic, will admit to that. One huge selling point for Klass is that videos are so much more difficult to hoax than still photos. The usual tricks of photography, like double exposures and negative sandwiches, can't be done on video, though given enough skill, money, luck, and patience just about anything else can be done on video these days. Still, video has a kind of built-in honesty meter. The creation of a fake image must be accompanied by a fake soundtrack. Cries of "Hold that fishing pole steady" would be a dead give-away.

This illustration depicts an alleged UFO over Mexico City. The video evidence for an actual UFO, it turns out, merely captured the glowing visage of Venus.

That's not to say that videos are the perfect form of evidence. The picture quality, or resolution, and color of video is inferior to still photographs, but videos do provide a record of an object's motion and speed. Perhaps the best thing about videos is that they are essentially free, meaning that people will shoot nearly anything--and they do. And unlike still photography, videos lack the "shame factor." You don't have to hand your film over to some clerk who is going to smirk at you and say, "Gee, what's this? Have you had aliens visiting you?"

Home videos are actually good enough to serve in scientific investigations. In fact, a precedent has already been set for using amateur videos in scientific analysis. When a meteor streaked over West Virginia on the night of Oct. 9, 1992 and 40 seconds later crashed into a parked car in Peekskill, New York, 14 videotapes were taken of the object's trajectory. Using these tapes, scientists calculated the meteor's path, its ablation characteristics, orbit, etc., and published their findings in the Feb. 17, 1994 issue of the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

Actually, one notable UFO episode has already been caught on tape by more than a dozen videographers. During the total solar eclipse of July 11, 1991 at least 18 videos were taken of a small, bright, silvery object which hung motionless in the sky over Mexico City and nearby Puebla. Mexican TV journalist Jaime Maussan called it "the most important collection of videotapes ever assembled in history." But UFO investigator and journalist Antonio Huneeus discovered otherwise. "It was the Queen of the IFOs," says Huneeus. "Venus was precisely at that spot in the sky where the video cameras had taped the so-called UFO during the eclipse."