UFO buffs space out at San Jose expo

Article Last Updated: 09/04/2007 04:13:13 AM PDT

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 — although some at the expo would say I probably had been abducted at some point and received sinus-cavity implants which triggered my

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 — and Mom would be, too — 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 — or maybe it was late — 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.