Unidentified Flying Objects

The first time Natra was taken aboard a starship, she says, she was only 6 and told nobody about it because they would have thought her crazy. Now she talks freely about having traveled at the speed of light. Natra, who would not give her last name, took part in a demonstration in front of the White House to demand that President Clinton make "full disclosure of government UFO secrets and an open, public inquiry into the phenomena." Forty-five people marched in a circle, carrying signs.

It frosts Alvin Lawson's glasses a bit when he sees the racks of UFO books on store shelves or reads about some new Little Green Men expert's $200,000 book contract. He has his own UFO book, the result of about 10 years of work.

Public relations executive Karen Morgan says since she was a child she has been periodically abducted by skinny beings with oversized bald heads and big eyes who appear by her side in a glow of light. Patti Layne, a high school teacher, says that while on an overnight camping trip when she was 15, she was lifted off the ground by a beam of light and taken aboard an unidentified flying object.

It glowed. It blinked. It swooped down to Earth and back up again, lighting up the sky as well as 911 emergency switchboards throughout the Irvine area Monday night. "Some people saw a disc. Some people saw a diamond-shaped object," said Lt. Robert Rivas of the Orange County Sheriff's Department, which received about 50 calls about "UFO sightings" between 7:30 and 9 p.m.

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.

They're coming! They're coming! They're . . . here! For whatever the reason, Hollywood is abuzz about Outer Space Chic. Alien invader movies--which blasted off in the '50s, slumped in the '60s, and enjoyed a brief revival during the Steven Spielberg Regime (1977-1982)--are back again. Something is definitely in the air: Morton Downey Jr. recently revealed that he was once visited--perhaps even briefly abducted--by alien visitors (the New York Post headline: "Spaced Out With Mort!").

U.S. officials worried during the Cold War that the Soviets might try to disrupt America's air defense system or the government itself by orchestrating mass UFO sightings, says a historian who scrutinized CIA documents of the period. Such concern prompted the Air Force and others to play down the UFO issue during the 1950s and to concoct false cover stories to explain sightings of alleged "flying saucers" that were super-secret U.S.

A blimp flying over the city caused police switchboards to light up Wednesday night with residents calling to report a UFO, or unidentified flying object. Tustin police reported between 50 and 70 calls within a couple of hours starting about 8:30 p.m., officials said. Callers said they sighted the object from Cowan Heights all the way to Yorba Linda. The object was apparently a Fuji blimp with interior lighting, police said. But some callers were not convinced. "It's hard to describe.

Dozens of startled residents in southern San Diego County called police to report a UFO, which turned out to be a blimp on its maiden advertising voyage. Brightly lit in the night sky to attract attention, the blimp did exactly that Friday night. Police in Chula Vista, National City and San Diego say they got a number of calls from residents worried about an invasion from outer space. "People think they are seeing UFOs and it's weird," a Chula Vista police dispatcher said.

The green flash seen by observers throughout the Southland on Thursday evening was almost certainly a meteor, astronomers said Friday, but scientists have no idea where--or even whether--it reached the ground. That it was observed over such a broad area--from San Francisco to Arizona and Mexico--indicates that it was at a very high altitude, said astronomical observer Tony Cook of the Griffith Observatory.