Д Area: META_UFO ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД
Msg#: 3124 Date: 08-06-96 09:34
From: Julie Presson Read: Yes Replied: No
To: All Mark:
Subj: Interesting news piece
ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД
Hi Everyone,

This is a news piece that was given to us about a UFO report and
what has happened to the man who video taped the UFO. Interesting
story, I guess it goes to show who some of the "UFO & ET experts"
really are....and who they got the title. ;-)

This is nto to say the report is bogus, but you have to admit
the after affects and the obvious marketing value in this country
of people who have had encounters and filmed them is apparent. I
have to wonder how long it took the promotor of the UFO Congress
to contact this man to make money off him???

Enjoy,
Julie

Salida hails a fairly close UFO encounter

By Patrick O'Driscoil
Denver Post Staff Writer

SALIDA -- Don't expect to see "Independence Day" invading one
of this town's two movie theaters for another three or four weeks yet.
This is a box-office backwater to the folks who make slam-bang summer
mega-blockbuster thrillers like "ID4," in which space aliens light up
Earth like a box of fireworks. On the other hand, when you have already
been visited by spacecraft, perhaps Hollywood's science-fiction heavens
can wait.
He-hum. Salida already had its own fairly close encounter with
other-worldly phenomena last summer. On Aug. 27, 1995, local restaurant
owner Tim Edwards caught a lab certified UFO on his camcorder -- in broad
daylight, no less. Faster than warp speed, life around this central Colorado
mountain town -- population 5,292 -- got a tad extraterrestrial. While locals
watched the skies and debated the authenticity of the Unidentified Flying
Object on Edwards' backyard video, the episode became front-page news. The
Mountain Mail, Salida's daily newspaper, later ranked it No. 3 on its list
of 1995's top stories. Within 24 hours of Edwards' video encounter, Denver
television news crews star-trekked south to interview the ordinary guy
operator of the Patio Pancake Place.
Then came a crew from "Sightings," syndicated TV's purveyor of all
things paranormal. Meanwhile, word of the Salida event beamed through
cyberspace as plugged-in believers downloaded details from UFO homepages
on the Internet. "Ufologists" suggested Salida was a "stargate," an
intergalactic vortex for alien comings and goings. After all, the town's
nameiis Spanish for "gateway" or "exit."
Colorado Central Magazine, an irreverent local monthly, couldn't resist
publishing an "exclusive picture" of a crude flying saucer on the Salida
skyline, above a billboard with an arrow and the words, "ATTENTION UFO
PILOTS: THIS IS SALIDA -- CRESTONE IS THAT WAY," referring to the San Luis
Valley town that's become a hangout for New Age cultists. Inevitably,
Salida's Ii Vicino brew pub tapped in with a new "Alien Ale." Ads showed the
classic 1950s movie spaceman Klaatu and his robot-side kick Gort over a
caption explaining, "We're here for the beer." Just as inevitably, the
cosmic hubbub has died down. Now, some of the local scuttlebutt suggests
that maybe Edwards concocted the whole thing just to get attention. "I've
had a few people look at me kind of weird. I'm sure they probably talk
behind my back," he said recently. But in this town, there's a lot more
believers than there was."
Edwards, 43, was a guy who liked to party hearty. But after the UFO
sighting, he tapered way off. He took on the faraway look and sound of a
true believer -- not unlike the spaced out Richard Dreyfus character in
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (minus the living-room mountain of
mud and garbage).
"The first three weeks I was an emotional wreck," Edwards recalled.
"Everything else seemed so trivial. ... My family couldn't understand my
obsession with it."

16 HOURS of UFO FOOTAGE--- Edwards' living room has a big TV
set, two VCRs and a shelf where his 16 hours of UFO footage share
space with daughter Brandy's videos of Pinocchio, Casper and the Muppets.
On-screen, the home-video UFO image is weird: a gyrating, pulsating cigar
of light, darting and hovering in the southern sky, beyond the roof edge
of Edwards' house. The audio track is weirder: mundane background noises
of a summer Sunday -- guns popping from a nearby shooting range, a freight
train wailing as it passed, an unseen plane droning as it landed at the
little airport west of the house.
"Dad, Can a spaceship grow bigger like that?" 6 year-old Brandy - who
first saw the UFO -- is heard asking off camera as the picture jiggles and
zooms in and out.
"If ain't no kind of aircraft, I'll tell you that," Edwards' voice says
later. There ain't no little airplane that moves five miles in two seconds."
Subsequent reports claimed that 21 people in 13 other Colorado locations saw
the same phenomenon within 48 hours of Edwards' sighting. So did in five
other states. Within a month, an Arizona-based laboratory that specializes
in studying UFO footage confirmed what believers had hoped - that what
Edwards taped was not of this world. Village Labs estimated the UF0 was
a mile long, 60,000 feet or more up in the sky, darting and dancing at
10,000 mph.
I am 100 percent convinced that this is a craft from another world,"
said Village Labs' Jim Dilettoso. UFO debunkers are 100 percent convinced
the cigar-shaped apparition is intergalactic hooey.
"To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," said
Larry Sarner of Loveland, a member of Front Range Skeptics, unofficial
party-poopers of UFO mania. Sarner said Edwards' encounter
"seemed to be such a run-of-the-mill case" that his group has paid it scant
attention. "It's remarkable how in 'these cases you get such poor evidence"
grainy, jittery, out-of-focus footage. "He spent an hour with a camera in
his hand and had only six minutes' worth? Uh -- typical."
About a month after the first sighting, Edwards said he taped more
celestial oddities near the "solar corona" -- inverted V-shaped "craft,"
small white globes shooting from the sun, "angel hair" formations.
Invariably, the footage invites wide debate and interpretation. Debunkers
dismiss the images as only spiderwebs, flying insects and windblown tufts
from cottonwood trees. UFO fans consider them yet more proof.
The Village Labs verdict sent Edwards off on a fresh round of interviews
last fall. In November, his down-to-earth manner -- and his video -- made
him the star of the fifth annual convention of the International UFO Congress.
It was held -- where else? -- in the Nevada desert near the infamous
"Area 51," the remote, super-secret U.S. military base that gets star billing
in the "Independence Day" story; line. Edwards drove out for a look himself
along two-lane Nevada 375, which tourism-minded state officials officially
renamed "Extraterrestrial Highway."
Edwards thinks the general public "has been so. tranquilized into
believing that we're the only ones in the universe." He suggested that
recurring mass-media images of UFOs from a recent spate of space alien
themed TV commercials to movies 'like "Independence Day" -- are part of
"a major conditioning process" to prepare earthlings for definitive news
that somebody else really is out there, and coming to see us.
"Everything's coming together at warp speed; 1996-97 will be the year
the government admits we are not alone," he said. "There's something very
major going on up there."
At the Patio Pancake Place, a glass-encased "UFO. REALITY: UPDATE"
bulletin board shares the front-door breezeway with the pay phone and stacks
of tourist brochures. Inside, Edwards will sell you a thick packet of news
clippings, press releases and other papers about UFOs.
Very 'stressful, emotional'But otherwise, he has "backed out a bit"
from heavy involvement in the cause. "It's been a very stressful and
emotional period," he explained.
But he remains "100 percent convinced" that what he saw and videotaped
is from out of this world. When "Independence Day" finally hits town,
"I'11 have to go see it for sure," he said.
But Edwards added that he can't imagine so violent a scenario - evil
spaceships, like the movie's 15 mile-wide flying manhole covers, bombing
the world's major cities to smithereens -- when alien visitors finally
make open and public appearances on Earth.
"These beings are so advanced, they don't need to take over our planet.
I believe hostility is their last intention," he said. "The extraterrestrials
don't scare me at all. I've been more scared talking to the press."

________________________________ END _________________________________________

... "META_UFO to Bridge the Gap on Fidonet"...

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 [NR]
-!- Platinum Xpress/386/Wildcat! v1.1
! Origin: The Learning Place BBS : 505-334-0199 (1:15/31)