Despite the burgeoning use of camcorders, evidence of alien vessels and visitation has not been documented, in startling verisimilitude, on tape. In fact, I know of no video ever submitted to anyUFO organization or news outlet that really provides even a whiff of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial craft. Nonetheless, the hundreds of UFO home videos that have been produced and

Amateur videographers thought rolls of burning toilet paper were UFOs

submitted to the media and UFOlogists for analysis do provide some concrete "proof" of what many UFOs are.

What they are primarily, are IFOs, or identified flying objects. "Right off the bat," notes Sainio, "you can eliminate about 60 percent of the videos as yet another good shot of the planet Venus. Or you look at others and say, how could people not recognize an airplane? By the time you're done with that, 85 to 90 percent of them are easily recognizable."

The San Diego area UFO video was a little tougher for Sainio to decipher, but it too ultimately was identifiable. "That turned out to be a case of third party fraud," he explains. "Some local teenage boys were inflating garment bags with candles and these things would go drifting off. But they had also tied toilet paper to the bags in such a way that when the candles burned down, the paper ignited and fell off, producing a fairly spectacular display. It even fooled me for awhile."

Sainio has looked at more UFO videos than he cares to remember. Of these, about 50 he calls "memorable," but less than a handful of them still puzzle him. Four tapes, he says, show evidence of anomalous acceleration. The best of these, taken in March of 1993, shows something accelerating atabout 500g. That's enough to crush any living thing, human or otherwise, to a pulp. When a manned space vehicle leaves the Earth's atmosphere, the gravity pull of 6 g is considered the maximum tolerable for the human body. But even these curious videos do not show a clearly anomalous object shape,or provide any clues to just what the objects are. "Until I can make out Pleiadian Star Command on the side of it," says Sainio, "or the`Vietnamese Air Force, I really can't say where they come from."

Nor have any videos yet shown an abduction episode or credible humanoid entity, though there have been submissions of alleged ETs videos. "I got one just yesterday," says Sainio. "It was taken at a country music concert and the person was panning around with his camcorder and sure enough at one point there appears to be a human shape out there. But from what I can tell, it is a human. And from the stance he's in, I suspect he was urinating."