From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates.nul>
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:18:37 -0400
Archived: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:18:37 -0400
Subject: UFO Buffs Space Out At San Jose Expo




Source: Inside The Bay Area.Com - Oakland, California, USA

http://www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_6796733

09/04/2007

UFO Buffs Space Out At San Jose Expo
[no writer's byline]

It seemed only minutes had passed in the meeting room, but who
knows how much time had truly elapsed. Hours? Days? A lifetime
in a parallel universe, much like the time Capt. Picard is
unconscious on the Enterprise for only a moment, but lives a
whole other life with a wife and son and even learns how to play
a really catchy, yet haunting, tune on the flute?

I didn't come away with any new musical skills, but I was indeed
altered by my experience recently at the ninth annual Bay Area
UFO Expo at the Doubletree Hotel by the San Jose airport. Good
location. At least we'd be able to identify most of those
objects flying by.

This was no sci-fi convention. Nobody dressed as Mr. Spock or
Boba Fett. OK, so some Star Trek audio tapes were for sale. But
there was mostly no 'fi' in this 'sci'. For the nearly 2,000 in
attendance during the weekend-long series of lectures and
workshops and even a cocktail party with Gary Busey, this was
serious stuff, probing topics of recent UFO sightings, time
travel, government cover-ups and why the heck Gary Busey was
there.

Now, these folks are often called UFO 'buffs'. But I think that
word should be reserved for movie buffs, PEZ-dispenser buffs or
even Buffy The Vampire Slayer buffs.

See, I get a little defensive when people make light of people
who believe in UFOs. My interest =97 although some at the expo
would say I probably had been abducted at some point and
received sinus-cavity implants which triggered my curiosity =97
was actually passed down from my late mother, a MUFON member for
several years. That's the Mutual UFO Network, dedicated to the
scientific study of UFOs, which hosted the expo.

My mom =97 a highly educated, tack-sharp woman =97 would scour the
monthly newsletter. And a couple of times, just for a fun road
trip, she and I would go out to the site of a past sighting. I
don't know what we thought we'd see. Crop circles? A mutilated
cow? Maybe a slippery-fingered ET had dropped his cell phone?

One time we drove up to the remote Gold Rush town of Georgetown,
tucked in the thick pines not far from Auburn, where someone had
reported a UFO weeks before. It was nightfall. We wandered
around, bought some salami and cheese at a little market where
the clerk gave us a funny look for asking about flying saucers.
Hmm. Was she hiding something? We pulled over on a side road to
eat our snacks and look up at the sea of stars and feel all wild
and adventurous because of our grand mission.

All was quiet but for typical summer cricket conversation, when
we saw a light. Headlights from an approaching car, shining on a
stand of trees? Salami was dropped. Breath was held. But no car
came by. No sound of a motor. No sound at all.

Did we start taking notes? Did we make careful observations to
report back to MUFON headquarters? Did we remain calm and
prepare for abduction?

Heck no! We freaked! I started the car and drove off so fast we
made the speed of light look like an idiot. We did check the
clock to make sure we hadn't lost any time, then giggled at
ourselves all the way home. Hey, we loved Close Encounters Of
The Third Kind, but we were happy to remain Second-Kind
citizens.

I do believe more is out there than just us. I mean, any
civilization that could come up with Underdog: The Movie, can
not be the sole vessel of intelligence in an infinite universe.

So there I was at the expo. I'm a little dismayed =97 and Mom
would be, too =97 that UFO research is now lumped together with
Big Foot (doesn't everyone know he's a Wookiee, anyway?), aura
readings and people selling crystals. Not that such stuff is
nuts, but we always preferred the nuts-and-bolts UFO-crash,
government-hiding-alien-bodies, blacking-out-words-on-
confidential-documents kind of thing.

So I skipped the Psychic Sasquatch lecture, and the stuff about
reptilians. I sat in on the time travel workshop, but it dragged
on, so I left early =97 or maybe it was late =97 then stepped into
the next meeting room to hear about "Mexico's Roswell."

Nor-Cal MUFON director Ruben Uriarte told of the Chihuahua
incident. Not unidentified rat-like beings who appear to have
had too much caffeine, but the Aug. 25, 1974, UFO crash in
Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert that involved radar tracking an
unknown object flying at 2,000 miles an hour which hit a small
plane and then the ground, and a Mexican recovery team finding
the wreckage of a polished-steel disc, but all the recovery
workers mysteriously died and...

Yeah, that's the stuff. May it live long and prosper.



Listen to 'Strange Days... Indeed' - The PodCast

See:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/program/