Ruben Uriarte was a young boy growing up in northern California in the 1950s when he saw something strange up in the sky.
“I thought it was a balloon, but it was so perfectly round, and it just remained motionless,” he recalled on Saturday at the Bay Area UFO Expo in San Jose, California, where the 56-year-old hospital-management consultant was hardly the only one who believes the truth is out there.
Organisers billed the annual two-day event as the largest gathering of UFO buffs in the country. For “experiencers” like conference co-host Uriarte, along with more than 1 000 other attendees, this weekend’s expo offered a rare chance to meet fellow flying-saucer fans far away from the “ridicule factor” that follows them through a sceptical world.
“By coming, they’re meeting a lot of other people who’ve had a similar experience,” Uriarte said.
Hundreds packed hotel ballrooms to hear speakers hold forth on a range of topics from the scientific fringe.
Paul Stonehill, a self-described researcher on Asian and Eastern European paranormal phenomena, described Soviet submarine crew encounters with silvery, intelligent beings deep in the ocean. China, Stonehill said, is the world’s emerging hot spot for UFO sightings.
Dr Jesse Marcel Jnr, a practising ear, nose and throat specialist from Montana, told a rapt audience of the day in 1947 when his father, an army intelligence officer, purportedly returned to the family home in Roswell, New Mexico. His dad, Marcel said, was first on the scene of history’s most famous flying-saucer crash, and he brought some of the wreckage home to show his son.
Not long after, the United States government forced his father to assist in a cover-up, Marcel said, and continues to demand silence from witnesses today. “I wish they’d come out and shout to the hills what they saw,” he said.
Suppression by the government — or anyone else — was far from evident on Saturday, as vendors hawked shelves of books and DVDs exposing the alleged details of “secret” conspiracies through the ages.
Straight-faced accounts of telepathic communication with Bigfoot and the surgical removal of suspected extraterrestrial implants shared table space with kitschy soaps and candles shaped like the iconic little green man.
Sheila Smith (64), a hospital lab technician from Petaluma, has been coming to the event since it began nine years ago. She believes that stories of encounters with UFOs are likely true, but doubts the saucers themselves were built by aliens.
Instead, Smith said, the spacecraft probably use technology developed by an advanced North American civilisation more than 13 000 years ago before a giant meteor or comet wiped out nearly every trace.
Her friends laugh at her, Smith said, but she enjoys the UFO expo because she always digs up more evidence to support her theories. “I find proof for everything I stand for,” she said.
According to organisers, the internet has had much the same effect on UFO research as it has on mainstream scientific inquiry. The medium has brought like-minded thinkers together and enabled the sharing of information with unprecedented efficiency, Uriarte said.
And he denied that the web has also helped create a false sense of consistency among descriptions of UFO encounters by making it easier to falsely rehash the widely distributed stories of others. “We try to weed that out,” he said.
Proof did not matter so much to Stefanie Johnson (33), of Napa, who said she came to the expo out of curiosity and a feeling that UFOs are “a possibility”. A “clear-thinking” friend saw a UFO while on his paper route as a teenager, Johnson said before heading into a ballroom for a psychic reading.
“Some of it sounds like it really could be happening,” she said.
Not so, said Johnson’s boyfriend, who was too embarrassed to give his name, calling UFO believers “total wackos”. Johnson said she brought him hoping to broaden his “narrow mind”.
“I’m not narrow-minded,” he said. “But I’m sceptical of things that can’t be proven — and that includes religion and UFOs.”
The Bay Area UFO Expo continues through Sunday. — Sapa-AP
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Bay Area UFO Expo