file under not sure

I'm not sure what to make of this story. There's enough of a conspiracy theory buff inside me to want to read all sorts of interesting possibilities into it, but given the scarcity of information, one can only assume and hope.

Are we alone on our bright blue jewel of a planet, hurtling through space never to meet other intelligent species from other planets? Do we have some first contact with an alien race to look forward to? I want to believe that we are not alone, whether or not that alien species involves sexy green women waiting to make it with a slightly pudgy overacting ship's captain.

In November of '06, several employees at O'Hare airport in Chicago spied a UFO. What they claim to have seen was a metallic disc that hovered over the airport for several minutes before taking off. They also claimed that, rather than move through the clouds as would be expected, it left a large doughnut shaped hole in the clouds.

I heard this story on NPR and had to immediately go and find what information I could. Sadly, there isn't much more to learn. I'll provide a list of links to what I did find for those inclined to read up on this instance.

Links to the story at NPR, National UFO Reporting Center (scroll down to December 12,) Washington Post, sighting report from NUFORC as well as another report concerning a similar sighting in the UK.

Part of me has absolutely no doubt that we will eventually meet our interstellar neighbors. Perhaps they won't be as exotic as Star Trek and its lesser cousin Star Wars would have us believe, but considering the varied environments that have proven able to support life, we can only imagine what those lifeforms will look like. Evolution and random planetary environments will certainly manifest themselves differently based on planetary environments, so we have only our imagination to inform us.

A more cynical part of me thinks that we just might be alone, that we will never meet and make sweet love to hot aliens chics. That part seems pretty damn closed minded to assume that the happenstance that put us here couldn't just as easily have put someone else somewhere else. So I'm left believing that there is intelligent life out there, and with our luck as humans, we've probably already pissed them off.