Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here UFOs | Paranormal | Area 51 People | Places | Random Top 100 | What's New Catalog | New Books Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Our Bookstore is OPEN Mothership -> Here

From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@sympatico.ca>
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2000 18:31:39 -0400
Fwd Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2000 18:31:39 -0400
Subject: UpDate: MUFON UFO Museum To Open In Denver



From: UFO UpDates - Toronto

Source: westword.com

http://www.westword.com/issues/2000-08-03/news2.html

Tuesday August 8, 2000


The Truth Is Almost Out Here
A UFO museum may blast off in Denver.

By Karen Bowers

In the world of Ufology, it's tough to be taken seriously.

"There'll be a sighting somewhere, and it'll be a fantastic
sighting," says Mike Curta, state director of the Colorado
Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). "Five hundred people
saw it, and there'll be an interview with a doctor, and they'll
talk to the local fire chief, and they'll always put in a woman
in a muumuu with curlers in her hair and missing three-quarters
of her teeth, and she'll say how she's been abducted 27 times
and that the last time they let her pilot the craft to Jupiter
and back. And that blows the credibility. It seems like a losing
battle."

But establishing credibility and rapport -- particularly with
the FAA, the Air Force and NORAD -- is high on the agenda for
Curta and for MUFON's recently appointed international director,
John Schuessler, who hopes that moving the group's headquarters
from tiny Seguin, Texas, to the Denver area will help.

A founding member of MUFON, Schuessler is a mechanical engineer
and the former director of engineering for McDonnell Douglas in
Houston. He was responsible for designing the life-support
systems on the Gemini spacecraft, and he worked on the space
shuttle program and on the design of the not-yet-completed
international space station before his retirement two years ago.
He's about as far from a muumuu-clad space abductee as one can
imagine.

Schuessler, who now lives in Littleton, became interested in
UFOs in the mid-'60s while working on the Gemini Missions, which
used two-man capsules to test long-duration flights, docking
techniques and space walking. "I heard reports from astronauts
who'd seen things, and they didn't know what they were --
cylindrical-shaped things passing by the spacecraft at some
distance. There was something up there that we didn't put up
there that they didn't understand. It was really tough to build
spacecraft in those days, and if they'd seen something...it
really pushed my interest. So I began looking into it, and the
more I looked, the more I found."

In 1969, Schuessler -- who was based in St. Louis at the time --
teamed up with other UFO enthusiasts to form what was then
called the Midwest UFO Network. The first di-rector was a
chemistry professor at Wisconsin State University in Oshkosh. He
was followed by Walt Andrus, who worked as a consumer-products
manager for Motorola. Under their leadership, MUFON grew to
include a magazine, Skylook, and as many as 5,000 members. (Its
roster is now down to 3,000, Andrus says, a fact he attributes
to competition from the Internet and other magazines.)

Since the beginning, MUFON members have devoted themselves to
the scientific research of UFO phenomena. They sponsor
international symposiums presided over by scientists, engineers
and university professors. They teach their members how to
document sightings and how to investigate sighting reports, and
they're aided in their investigations by a board whose members
represent 45 areas of science and technology.

Andrus, who is 79, took over as director in 1970 and moved MUFON
headquarters to Seguin five years later; the group opened the
MUFON museum there in 1994 in a strip-mall storefront.

With 500 square feet of memorabilia, the museum's collection
includes photos of UFOs and other phenomena such as crop
circles; an art exhibit of drawings and paintings of aliens
created by people who say they've seen the visitors; life-sized
alien models; and assorted space debris from the days of the
U.S./U.S.S.R. space race. The museum also contains a library of
UFO- and space-related books, as well as a catalogue of
sightings reports.

And it could all be in the Denver area as soon as next month.

The museum hasn't been a big draw in Seguin, says Andrus, in
part because of the town's location --about twenty miles
northeast of San Antonio -- and because it's usually closed
during the school year.

Andrus, who stepped down as international director earlier this
month, developed his interest in UFOs in 1948 when he spotted
four unidentified objects flying over downtown Phoenix. It's a
story he relates with precision, fit for the pages of MUFON's
own Field Investigator's Manual. "It was one in the afternoon,"
he says. "A perfectly blue sky. A typical August day in Phoenix
-- 117 degrees. There were four objects flying in formation.
They looked like silver balloons. I saw the first one in the
northeast sky. It moved slowly west. It was a dull aluminum
color and didn't reflect the sunlight. The first one simply
disappeared, like someone had stuck a pin in the balloon. Then
the second disappeared, then the third, and eventually the
straggler disappeared."

Unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately -- the vast majority of
sightings MUFON investigates aren't considered UFOs. "We get
somewhere between 50,000 to 80,000 reports from some kind of
official organization every year," Curta says. "It might be a
police department, or SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence] folks in North Carolina. Of those reports, 90
percent can be explained as normal, everyday -- a planet, an
airplane, a meteorite. Just slightly over 1 percent are found to
be hoaxes. The other 8 or 9 percent go unexplained. Those are
the ones we take a serious interest in."

Colorado is considered a hotbed of UFO activity. "Generally we
get, I would say, a call a week out of the San Luis Valley.
Cattle mutilations, too," Curta says. "They dropped off the last
couple years, but we've had more in the last couple weeks than
in the last year all together. Why, nobody seems to know. The
San Luis Valley is just a strange place, anyway. The newspaper
in Salida had an article in 1894 about a bunch of town residents
who saw a cigar-shaped object hanging over the city. We still
get a lot of that today."

The sightings that can be classified as UFOs are dissected by as
many volunteer/ experts as MUFON can round up. Copies of the
photos are sent to MUFON headquarters and may appear in the
museum. The organization also maintains a UFO hotline and
distributes "What to Do If You See a UFO" lists. ("The number
one thing to remember is REMAIN CALM!" one reads.) Its Web site
contains detailed UFO-sighting report forms asking for
information such as environmental factors, terrain and
elevation, and providing space for sketches.

"I'm very much a skeptic and a cynic," Curta says. "I take it
all with a grain of salt. No doubt there is something going on,
but what it is, I wouldn't venture to guess."

John Schuessler has never even seen a UFO. "I'm not a sighter,"
he says. "I keep going where people see things, and I never get
there in time."

For now, though, he's watching the real estate ads, not the sky,
trying to find office/display space for the headquarters and
museum. He's hoping to find something in southwest Denver,
preferably with a storefront so MUFON can show off some of the
museum's artifacts. With luck, the museum, which will be free
and open to the public, will be unveiled by the end of the year.
(For updates, check MUFON's Colorado Web site at comufon.org )

©2000 New Times, Inc.