National Guard and UFOs

During most of my military service, I was assigned to the 524th Batallion of the 38th Division of the National Guard in Bloomington, Indiana. Because I was a survey and recon specialist, I got to interact with men and women who were part of other battalions who told me about what was going on in their areas of service. Every summer we spent two weeks in summer camp doing military exercises. Since we were an artillery unit, we were always receiving new techniques and new materials. There were interesting stories related to the National Guard and UFOs.

The 38th Division of the National Guard spent their summer in camps in Grayling, Michigan and Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. Every summer we would hear about strange sightings near where we were drilling. People in these remote towns were not used to seeing Honest John Rockets fired high in the air. The flares we used gave sights that local people were unaccustomed to, but with small communities near the summer drills, not a lot of people were affected.

In 2017 however, there were more than 40 UFO sightings in and around Kokomo, Indiana. Bright lights were doing strange things, and even a string of lights sighted by several observers. On April 16, 2008, 911 dispatchers were inundated with 146 phone calls within a 15-minute time frame. That’s about 120 more than usual. Over 1000 people heard an incredibly loud explosion, and police started to search for a downed plane. This whole thing was reported on Discovery Channel’s “Investigation X” and History Channel’s “UFO Hunters.”

The National Guard has now revealed that the lights and sounds were from training exercises for National Guard aircraft stationed in Fort Wayne. The string of lights came from flares dropped several thousand feet above the ground. That is a technique used by jets to evade heat-seeking missiles. The sonic boom was just that, from jets training in the airspace known as Hilltop Military Operations Area. That area spans from West Lafayette to Logansport and includes parts of Howard and Tipton counties close to Kokomo and Bunker Hill Air Force Base just north of Kokomo.

There are several lessons here related to the National Guard and UFOs. One of them is NOT that there is no life in outer space. That question remains to be solved and has no biblical connections at all. What we do need to learn is that just because a story is on the Discovery channel or the History channel that does not automatically mean it is true. We need to remain open to new evidence and to how those discoveries relate to what the Bible actually says.
–John N. Clayton © 2019

Source: South Bend Tribune, January 5, 2019, page A-3.