Spaceships, encounters, abductions, conspiracies . . .

SPACING OUT Are we alone or is the truth alien?

BY MALCOLM MACKINNON

I'm standing out in the red-rock canyon boonies about 15 miles from Sedona, Arizona. It's midnight and the desert cold of mid-February is making me hunch my shoulders up around my ears.

Rob Meyer is tinkering with his camera. It's on a tripod and positioned skyward. Rob has been taking shots of the night skies over the canyons since October and the photos he's been coming up with are remarkable. The motion recorded on his film is puzzling. There's no sense to it. It's random and colorful and doesn't seem to correspond to any conventional aircraft flight pattern. Tonight, he's brought along a pair of night-vision binoculars to assist us in our task of spotting UFOs.

That's right. We're standing out in the middle of the night freezing our butts off looking for extraterrestrial spacecraft. Now how would you know in the first place where to start looking for UFOs?

Rob says he knows. He says he works with Pleiadian beings who tell him where to go, where to aim his camera and when to snap the shutter. Sometimes, he insists, he's awakened in the middle of the night and directed to a location.

I'll ignore this explanation for the time being. His photos are compelling enough to make me want to spend a few nights scanning the skies with him.

About 45 minutes go by. Rob directs my attention to some dots of light in the distance over the Secret Canyon mountain range. I'm using the night-vision binoculars, but I'm able make out the lights without them. They seems to be compressed and cylindrical. They linger lazily over the mountains, falling slowly, then climbing again--a slow-motion bounce across the distant horizon, not a helicopter's normal motion and certainly not a plane's. I'm stuck for an answer for what I'm seeing, but, truthfully, the lights are too far off and too difficult to discern to cause any great excitement.

For the people of Mexico City back on July 11, 1991, it was a different story. Early in the afternoon, the entire city took to the streets to witness a full solar eclipse that was predicted to last nearly seven minutes. Telescopes were trained on the sun and so were plenty of video camcorders.

Shortly after 1 PM, as all eyes were focused skyward, a shimmering, stationary object appeared. At first, witnesses thought it was merely a distant star, but it became larger and more luminous.

For 20 minutes the object remained visible to millions, hovering in silence. People swore that it was neither a balloon, an aircraft nor a star.

The sighting became the most documented ever. Seventeen different people came forward with videotaped evidence of the UFO sighting. None of these people knew each other and all were filming at the same time.

To add to the curiosity, while Mexico City gazed toward the heavens, residents of Pueblo, Mexico were witnessing the exact same phenomenon. The only hitch was that Pueblo is situated 132 kilometers to the southeast--about 82 miles away. Nonetheless, the videotaped evidence that experts examined from both cities indicated that the object seemed to be the same one--a floating craft which seemed to rotate on its own axis.

Whatever it was, there is no denying the fact that who or whatever decided to appear over Pueblo and Mexico City, the world's most populated metropolis, chose an ideal occasion to be noticed--when everyone was looking up.

Back at the canyon, we're still looking up, but my neck is beginning to ache, it's cold and there's nothing moving out there. We pack up and return over the bumpy back roads to the main highway. Rob is a former private investigator who specialized in domestic investigations and missing children cases for 10 years. He says he's been a UFO hound for the last 20.

These days his involvement is a little deeper. He lives out of his car, creates jewelry and dabbles in construction to make ends meet. He's out in the canyons at least four nights a week with his Minolta 800i camera and 600-mm telephoto lens. His gear is fully automated to respond to light and movement. "If it doesn't see it," Rob says, "it's not there."

Rob is one of 20 million people in this country who claim to have seen a UFO. A 1978 Gallup poll stated that 68 percent of the people surveyed believed that UFOs were real. The same poll indicated that people with higher levels of education were more likely to be UFO believers.

Jimmy Carter would certainly fit into that category. The former President and graduate of the US Naval Academy holds a PhD in nuclear physics. In October 1969, while serving as governor of Georgia, he and 10 other people observed a UFO for a full two minutes. The report Carter filed stated that "it was not a planet, a star, a meteor or an aircraft."

Gordon Cooper, one of the original Mercury astronauts, has also been upfront about his UFO experiences. As early as 1951 while serving as an Air Force fighter pilot, he observed formations of unidentifiable aircraft flying over the European countryside.

In a letter addressed to the United Nations in November 1978, Cooper wrote, "I believe that extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets which are a little more technically advanced than we are here on earth."

For Paul Kurtz, the chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP), that is a big leap of faith. "We still have no single case that provides hard evidence that what people see is extraterrestrial spacecraft directed by intelligence. I've seen things in the sky, everyone has. You're driving by, you see something in the sky. Maybe it's a bright light that moves while you move. You stop, it stops. It might be Venus or Mars on the horizon. Aircraft and helicopters that hover for a period of time may cause wonder, too. I've never seen one of these classic cases they talk about."

The growing belief in UFOs puzzles Kurtz. "This is a highly literate, scientific, technological society we're living in. That this type of thinking persists is surprising. Universities and colleges should be teaching critical thinking and logic and objective methods of ferreting out the true from the false. I think we're at the beginning of the end of the age of books and magazines--maybe of reading. It's a breakdown, in a very serious way, of cognitive thinking, of careful standards of logic. We're back to a kind of primitive mentality."

Astronomer Carl Sagan seems to think it might be a bit of narcissism on our part. Time and again, he has asked, "Why us?"

Why would our tiny little planet merit this kind of attention in a solar system of billions and billions of solar systems, in a galaxy of billions and billions of galaxies, in a universe that stretches billions and billions--you get the picture.

Kurtz believes that it's basically a religious phenomenon. "These extraterrestrial beings we hear about, they're supposed to be semidivine or more intelligent than us. Some consider them beneficent, others consider them to be malevolent. They're like angels from afar, in one sense. That's religious and people believe it with great intensity. If they have contact with them, they take part in the divine message--the divine light illuminating the earth. Go argue with a religion."

I had breakfast with Rob one morning following one of our UFO night-searches. He wasn't in a great mood. A couple of days earlier, he had hardly been able to contain his excitement when he confided that he'd just received information that a UFO had crashed up in Rifle, Colorado. That's about 10 hours north.

The UFO community in Sedona had been abuzz for a short time until confirmation calls to local papers and colleagues in Rifle revealed nothing and settled things down. I asked Rob how all of this had gotten started. Where had this information come from?

He shook his head disgustedly. "Apparently, somebody channeled it."

The New Age movement has always been fertile ground for the UFO movement. It fervently advocates a quasireligious, metaphysical belief system that promotes the idea of cosmic or universal consciousness, while encouraging occult communications with extraterrestrial avatars and ascended masters. The wholehearted acceptance of UFOs fits in nicely to such a belief system. Still, there is no hard, tangible evidence to substantiate alien visitation. Yet, sightings increase.

Norio Hayakawa is a skeptic of a different order. The former director of the Civilian Intelligence Network, an organization of civilian researchers who evaluate information on the covert operations of the government, points to the dark veil of secrecy that has surrounded the entire phenomenon since the beginning of the modern era of UFOlogy--the late 1940s.

He says, "Technology has advanced to the point where it is very easy to produce what looks like a genuine UFO. Even our conventional technology can partly dramatize a sighting. It is a waste of time to even study UFOs. It is, in fact, the official policy of the military to create confusion when it comes to sightings."

Hayakawa instead believes that an international cabal has succeeded in promoting belief in extraterrestrial intelligence through the media in order to condition the public for a huge paradigm shift scheduled to occur in either the fall of 1995 or 1996.

He believes that there is a "de facto secret government preparing to ingeniously stage a counterfeit extraterrestrial contact-landing and to simulate an extraterrestrial threat of invasion" in order to create global panic and install a multilevel mind control program and global defense mechanism. This event will be orchestrated to align with religious end-times scenarios and ancient prophecy. Hayakawa comes to his conclusions by virtue of his extensive study of Area 51 in Nevada and research into covert operations at secret facilities in Southern California.

In other words, those aren't UFOs we're seeing. They're government aircraft demonstrating technology we only dream about and engaging in maneuvers in preparation for the mother of all deceptions. The fact that this past April Area 51 expanded its borders to discourage any further observation of the activities convinces Hayakawa that the time left on our sovereignty clock is running out.

Obviously, belief in UFOs fosters theories that are even more extreme than Hayakawa. The most outlandish being the oft-repeated tale that President Dwight Eisenhower signed a formal treaty at Edwards Air Force Base in California with a race of aliens who are known now as the "Greys."

According to William Cooper, conspiratologist extraordinaire and author of Behold a Pale Horse, the treaty stated that the aliens would furnish us with advanced technology in return for being allowed to abduct humans for medical examinations. Bases were built underground for the use of the alien nation. Two additional bases were built for joint usage.

Apparently this pact has gone haywire. The Greys have been abducting too many humans and our weapons are no match for theirs. We're obliged to remain on friendly terms with them until we can develop weapons systems that might combat them.

From the time I arrived in Sedona, Rob has been asking if I want to hike into the canyons to see if we can find Sedona's secret government base. Finding a secret base in this area would be impossible at best. Despite the fact that the vast Arizona wilderness could swallow up just about anything, I'm fairly certain that a secret government base is probably well hidden.

I've heard a lot about the supposed existence of this installation. Many people say they've seen formations of ominous black helicopters disappearing into the canyons. Hikers have run into armed, black-uniformed sentries who have politely but firmly asked them to turn back. Ranchers talk about long caravans of white trucks with tinted windows that traverse the back roads in the middle of the night.

One night at a small get-together where members of the local UFO community were present, I was introduced to a rancher's wife with a story to tell.

She, her husband and two sons live on a beautiful horse ranch far back in Sedona's canyons. For the past two years, their ranch has been host to a series of light shows--red balls of light that soar out of the canyons and disappear, pulsing lights that change size, shape and color. She has plenty of videotape to document the sightings and wanders the ranch nightly snapping off photos with a