Gathering Draws Hundreds Hungry For UFO Evidence

Motto Is To 'Lift The Lid On UFO Secrecy'

Mike Hooker

(CBS4) DENVER If you tell a group of people you believe in UFOs you might get some funny looks, but not at a gathering at the Marriott Denver Tech Center this weekend.

More than 500 people are in the city for the annual International UFO Symposium, hosted by the Mutual UFO Network. The motto of the event is "lifting the lid on UFO secrecy."

UFO investigators, or UFOlogists, say they're not prone to believe every flying saucer story they hear. Still, they say the photos and reported sightings are hard to ignore: they could possibly be secret military inventions or alien visitors.

Investigator Sam Maranto told CBS4 at the symposium that he's had six personal UFO encounters.

"I'm more than convinced," Maranto said. "I've had my own sightings. There is something going on. What exactly, specifically? I can't say."

Kathleen Marden's aunt and uncle, Betty and Barney Hill, said they were abducted by aliens in 1961. Marden studied hypnosis tapes of their story and became convinced.

"There was that 'Aha!' moment," Marden said.

James Carrion, the president of the 2,500 member Mutual UFO Network, says he has studied the evidence surrounding the possibility of UFOs with scientific skepticism.

"(I) went to the body of evidence and thought, 'Whoa!' There is absolutely something here. This is a real phenomenon. We don't know what it is, but it's absolutely real."

Carrion's organization, nicknamed MUFON, investigates reports of UFOs from across the country. They say they get about 200 reports each month. Ten to 15 percent of those reports turn out to be something unidentifiable, he said.

"It would be much easier to think that we were really not being visited and that people were not really being abducted. It would make the earth a much easier place to deal with, but I thing the fact is we are being visited," Kathleen Marden said.

Richard Dolan, a historian and speaker at the conference, said he's seen hundreds of government documents that show "some serious stuff going down at nuclear missile bases."

Dolan says there's plenty of records that indicate mysterious objects have come in and disabled US nuclear missiles.

"When you have a government telling you over and over that there's nothing going on, some people are predisposed to believe that. Others are not so predisposed to believe."