Unidentified Flying Objects

"That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast." Peter Davenport has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick. It is Davenport's door, which opens into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear missile complex here in the desert of eastern Washington.

Saucers, bathtubs, hubcaps, stars; Russian space ships, men from Mars? Bananas, headlights, silver spoons; Hallucinations or weather balloons? --Unknown author * Close encounters of the strangest kind are, of course, a fact of life in Los Angeles. So, it comes as no surprise that the area was an epicenter for one of the late 20th century's genuinely eccentric preoccupations: unidentified flying objects.

An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the government to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports of flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings. "Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns . . . which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters," they said in a statement.

Outer Space Chic has landed in a big way: The unheralded "Alien Nation," an extraterrestrial-earthling buddy picture, won the box-office crown in its first week of release earlier this month--and has become a modest hit, making about $20 million in three weeks of release. Director John Carpenter also returns, this time with "They Live," an outer-space invasion thriller opening Thursday that portrays the Reagan Revolution as an alien plot against the United States.

Alien beings descend on Earth in miles-wide spacecraft this week as "Independence Day" hits theaters, but Alvin Lawson is figuring on business as usual. No flood of calls like there was back in the 1970s. No hysteria. Just the current one or two calls a week to his UFO hotline, a telephone answering machine in his Garden Grove home. Lawson, a retired Cal State Long Beach English professor, has been studying UFOs in Southern California for nearly 25 years.

Patty Wolfer, a soft-spoken computer operator for a Torrance law firm, does not usually tell strangers about her rides aboard spaceships from other planets. But this weekend, in the ballroom of a hotel in Inglewood, she made an exception. "Sometimes it's at night," she said quietly, "and I'll just be taken. . . . I saw or was in this place and my energy was all different. And as I turned around, I saw all the panels of the spaceship.

Alien beings descend on Earth in miles-wide spacecraft this week as "Independence Day" hits theaters nationwide, but Alvin Lawson is figuring on business as usual. No flood of calls as there was in the 1970s. No hysteria. Just the current one or two calls a week to his UFO hotline--a telephone answering machine in his Garden Grove home. Lawson, a retired Cal State Long Beach professor of English, has been studying UFOs in Southern California for nearly 25 years.

While gamblers in warm, dry Las Vegas casinos plunk coins intoslot machines, two men stand vigil in the icy rain about 120 miles to the north, scanning the sky. Jackpot. "Look at that!" yells Sean David Morton, pointing to a tiny, distant light. "It's bobbing up and down, making figure eights and weaving motions. It's zipping through the sky at an amazing speed." Sean David Morton has spotted an extraterrestrial craft. Yup, a flying saucer, he says.

As a hotbed of flying saucer sightings, this small town long ago earned its dot on the map--perhaps even the intergalactic map. Nearby are five major military bases, including one where explosives are tested, and the skies overhead are often chockablock with blinking lights and fiery flashes. Reports of UFOs--Unidentified Flying Objects--are as common here as powdery white beaches and tourists with third-degree sunburns.

Presidential candidates have flip-flopped on taxes, abortion, gun control and the war. But rarely has one flip-flopped on flying saucers. Until now. In September, a spokeswoman for Dennis J. Kucinich dismissed a report emanating from a Washington conference about UFOs that the Ohio congressman had a close encounter with one. "If you have a serious question, just ask me," Kucinich staffer Natalie Laber instructed a Washington Post reporter who inquired about Kucinich's knowledge of UFOs.

Second in a series of occasional Web Scout mysteries, in which we investigate some of the questions haunting the Web entertainment world. In this installment, we get to the bottom of the UFO videos currently raging on YouTube. -- Though the island in the Caribbean shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic was spared a direct hit from Hurricane Dean this week, it may be that other, stranger entities made landfall there.

For folks who truly believe a UFO and its crew of bug-eyed aliens came crashing down here 60 years ago, rest assured: There's evidence you're not alone. At least 35,000 people have descended on Roswell this weekend for the 2007 Amazing Roswell UFO Festival -- filling every hotel room and nearly doubling the southeastern New Mexico town's population for a few days.

In August 1967, two children outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and a smell of sulfur. The alleged extraterrestrial sighting is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half a century that the country's space agency opened to the public.

Hopes, or fears, that the Earth has been visited by alien life forms have been dismissed in an official report by British defense specialists. The Ministry of Defense confirmed a secret study completed in December 2000 had found no evidence that "flying saucers" or other objects were anything other than natural phenomena.

THE desert is a place where it is said that time bends, aging slows and the laws of gravity don't necessarily apply. And not just poolside in Palm Springs. Past scrubby fields of Joshua trees down a dusty road in Landers, a gleaming white dome rises abruptly from the jagged, putty-colored horizon, a curious testament to one man's intergalactic vision: the Integratron.

In a tent full of flying saucerphiles, a startling announcement suddenly emanates from the doorway: "There's something in the sky!" The reaction is instantaneous. Telling UFO buffs there's something in the sky is like shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The saucer believers stampede outside into the sunny desert, scanning the heavens for an alien craft. Some see it, some don't.

It was a close encounter of the Communist kind. Towering, tiny-headed humanoids from outer space landed in the Soviet city of Voronezh and emerged from their spacecraft for a promenade around the park, spreading fear among residents. At least that's what the official Tass news agency said Monday.

Move over, Roswell. South Orange County is recording its own share of UFO sightings. Several residents have reported sightings to the Orange County Sheriff's Department in recent months. And word has even reached a Canadian UFO researcher who has posted information about the incidents on his website. In one case, witnesses reported seeing glowing disks zigzagging through trees and hovering above the Aliso Viejo Town Center at night.

Shortly after her cattle business went bust, Judy Messoline looked to the heavens for salvation. She had never thought much of flying saucers but knew that her San Luis Valley ranch sat in a region renowned for bizarre, unexplained phenomena. So Messoline erected what she believes is the world's first UFO watchtower. "I opened it as a tourist trap," she acknowledged. But it became bigger than that.