A Coast Guard Coverup
"I like your silence, it the more shows off your wonder."
~The Winter's Tale, Act V Scene I

I’m not what anyone would, by any stretch of the imagination, call a “good person.” I curse more often than I say “thank you,” I eat pork rinds by the barrelful, and I find a certain perverse joy in arguing about whether or not Bigfoot is real. On the other hand, I’ve never attempted to confront a traumatized family with tales of alien abduction, so I guess I’m behaving myself a bit more than the UFO community

Let me back up. It had begun as a routine day for the Coast Guardsmen of sector Houston/Galveston. Around 4:45 p.m., or as the French would say, 1645, they got a call that a family of three, including an 11 year-old boy, needed rescuing from an intracostal waterway. With commendable speed and valiant effort, a Coast Guard crew was dispatched in a helicopter and retrieved the wayward souls. More or less a normal day for them, I suppose.

Alas, it was not to last, because of a single sentence in their later press release. The Coast Guard made the mistake of saying that the family “…was disoriented and complained that their bodies felt like they were slowing down. When asked, they could not remember their birthdays or weight.” And that’s what set the UFO community upon them.

I found this press release on the UFO Area website, under the headline “TEXAS FAM ILY EXPERIENCES MISSING TIME.” My first, instant thought after reading the Coast Guard press release was that perhaps I had forgotten how to read; I see no mention of missing time. The family seems to have been having some physical issues, but that’s all.

But let’s not dwell on that. What was the first reaction of “a reader in Texas” interested in UFOs? He called the Coast Guard and asked for information. They said that the rescue had taken place, and that anyone interested could watch the helicopter footage down at the air base. However, they refused to hand over the names of the people that had been rescued, and instantly the internet was abuzz: the Coast Guard is engaged in a conspiracy of silence to impede investigators of the paranormal.

I know that you expect a certain high standard of impartiality from me, but let me take a moment to editorialize: a family is rescued from certain death by a Coast Guard helicopter, and the government refuses to give their name and contact information to some people that suspect the family has been abducted by space monsters based on a single, vague sentence? That’s not a cover up. That’s the government being reasonable people. How would you feel if you were rescued from the high seas, and the Coast Guard gave your name and phone number to anyone who came out of the woodwork and wanted a chat? UFO enthusiasts, take a step back from your paranoia for just a moment and think about the difference between reasonable and unreasonable requests. And by the way: if the Coast Guard was interested in covering up the antics of space monsters, why release a press statement that would get you guys interested in the first place?

(For the record, I don’t believe the UFO enthusiasts took the Coast Guard up on their reasonable compromise of viewing the rescue footage. It’s all or nothing with them.)

The author of the article on UFOarea’s website makes on concession to reason, however, when he states:
“The above mentioned rescue mission could be considered as a standard daily operation performed by the Coast Guard and there might be a perfectly natural explanation for the family's traumatic experiences.”

I’d like to mention that if I am ever stranded in a life and death situation and the guy on the radio asks me my weight, he’s going to end up writing “send a helicopter, you asshole” down on his clipboard.

Anyway, the author then pulls out of his steep nose-dive into reason and sails back into lunacy by stating:
“However, the missing time factor in this case makes this incident unusual. If one of the family members was in a state of shock, it would explain a temporarily loss of memory. Yet in this case, the entire family was disoriented, 'complained that their bodies felt like they were slowing down'…symptons [sic] are usually associated with UFO encounters or delibarete [sic] extraction of memory.”

I still don’t see where the “missing time factor” is. The entire case that this is an incident involving space aliens seems to revolve around the fact that whoever was on the radio to the Coast Guard didn’t know his family’s ages or weight.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t know exactly what happens when a person goes into shock. According to the internet, it can cause problems to the respiratory system, leading to hyperventilation; it can cause nervous system distress, leading to a drop in various pressures and eventually the patient can lapse into a coma; and one should seek medical attention when one feels an “altered state of consciousness.”

From that brief description, it seems to me that there are any number of shock symptoms that could be described as “feeling like your body is slowing down.” But instead of taking my word for it, put this whole shebang to a simple logical test: which is more likely? That a family, at the hard mercy of savage nature, their demise imminent, suffered from confusion or shock and therefore misspoke on the radio with their saviors, who, after rescuing them, didn’t want to be responsible for their being harassed by UFO fanatics? Or that the Coast Guard is engaged in a massive cover-up program to keep the public from learning about some poor family’s horrible space monster abductions, yet somehow managed to release information germane to the incident in a press release?
UFO enthusiasts, to consider this a case of alien abduction is to grasp at straws. You can do better.

Be seeing you.