UFO-spotters tell tales of the extra-terrestrial 05 October 2005

LIMA: One minute Jonathan Reed was hiking with his golden retriever in a forest in Seattle. The next, his pet was being torn apart by a "gray" - an alien being with an elongated head, smelling of rotting fruit.


A scene from a sci-fi film? No, maintains Reed, a former child-developmental psychologist who says he took the alien home and lived with it for nine days in which it communicated via telepathy and was able to pull thoughts from his mind.

Reed and others - including Uruguayan Rafael Ulloa who says aliens in spaceships spirited away people from New York's twin towers in the September 11, 2001, attacks - gather in Lima this week for a world extra-terrestrial congress.

Peru has long been a mecca for mystics and there have been abundant reports of flying saucers, especially over the southern town of Chilca. Some locals reckon aliens imbued mud springs there with special curative and fertility powers.

The congress, organized by the Alfa y Omega group that believes a fleet of UFOs will fly to Earth at the end of the world and Christ could use one for his second coming, during its October 6-9 run will pore over photos and grainy films of bright flashes and spooky shapes they say point to alien life forms.

Retired US air force Lt. Col Donald Ware, 69, told a news conference on Tuesday his first contact with aliens was in 1953, when he saw seven spacecraft flying over Washington, DC.

He spotted no signs of extra-terrestrial life during his service, but said he had seen alien craft eight times since retiring in 1982.

Seeing isn't always believing. Wendelle Stevens, a retired US Air Force colonel, said he believed in aliens after having investigated 100 cases, despite never having seen any himself.

Stevens, thought to have the largest archive of photographs of alleged UFOs in the world, says he worked from 1947-49 in Alaska with B-29 planes fitted with special scientific instruments to "detect the visitors."

His work there began the year the US military is believed by some to have hushed up two purported crashes of alien spacecraft within a month. The Air Force denies the stories.

Stevens, who said he did not believe in aliens before his work, said it was his job to debrief the crews of the B-29s and recounted how "the radio frequency spectrum went completely haywire ... and the temperature in the airplane increased. (The crew) looked out and there's a disc next door," he said.

He said the crew shot photographs with four different types of camera, but the military suppressed the pictures. No Air Force spokespersons could immediately comment on his remarks.

One of the most unusual testimonies comes from Reed on his 1996 experience with the alien he came to call Freddie.

Reed, who says he has a bracelet belonging to the extra-terrestrial, said Freddie had skin "almost like that of a pig." It breathed and had red blood, but did not speak. Tests showed he had 46 chromosomes, like humans, but nine were different and resembled those of dolphins and sea turtles, Reed added.

Aliens enthusiasts and UFO spotters are used to raised eyebrows, ridicule and worse. Reed says he was shot after his alien encounter and blames a "government faction which doesn't want this information out".

But his close encounter with the alien with slanting eyes and a slit mouth "proved to me we are living in a much bigger universe," he said.


SD