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Seen a UFO? Seattle reporting center wants to know
The Associated Press, July 27, 2002
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_072702WABufowebsite.30e8270b.html
SEATTLE — In Freehold, N.J., a woman reports seeing an enormous craft “right out of ET” hover in the night sky for several minutes before it glides away over a wooded area.
A Michigan woman writes of being trailed in her car for two hours, from Kalamazoo to Muskegon, by a flying object covered in colored lights.
Near Yuma, Ariz., a group of boaters on the Colorado River reports seeing three bright, disc-shaped objects that are joined by two others before all streak off to the north.
Proof that we are not alone?
Almost certainly, says Peter Davenport, a former biotech executive and self-described “alien hunter” who has posted those and 1,124 other sightings already this year on the Web site of the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center: www.ufocenter.com.
“The evidence suggests to me that they are here on a daily basis,” said Davenport, 54, who has run the 28-year-old center since 1994.
Davenport acknowledges there’s no smoking-gun proof that aliens are among us—no seized flying saucers or unearthly skeletons on display. But he says evidence, from UFO sightings to investigations by fellow “UFOlogists” into reported close encounters, animal mutilations and possible alien artifacts, is mounting.
[...]
Whether or not Davenport is proved right, the center’s Web site is clear proof of one thing—thousands of ordinary people want to believe.
[...]
The Internet has helped create a virtual community of UFO spotters, Davenport said. It also has led to a boom in reports for the center, since spotters can easily find it on the Web and no longer need to pay long-distance charges to make a hotline report.
However, some UFO skeptics are unimpressed by the high volume.
Barry Beyerstein, a brain researcher at Simon Fraser University in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, believes that even those giving the most meticulous UFO descriptions are probably just fooling themselves.
[...]
Beyerstein, who serves on the executive council of the highly skeptical Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims for the Paranormal, noted some incidents cited by researchers where witnesses gave wildly inaccurate descriptions of hoax UFOs.
Other scientists are more open to extraterrestrial possibilities.
“I think there’s some pretty good evidence that something is going on,” said Bernard Haisch, an astronomer and director of the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco.
“I know most of my colleagues are pretty dismissive of the topic, but the more you learn about it, the less dismissive you can be,” he said.
Haisch, who edits a leading astronomy journal and has published more than 100 mainstream scientific articles, has created a Web site aimed at presenting an objective look at UFO issues: www.ufoskeptic.org.
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