- EDMONTON -- The two men didn't
want their names used for fear of ridicule, but they had a story to tell.
-
- It haunts their dreams and has forever changed the way
they look into the night sky, said the men, who came, as did about two
dozen others, to the first conference of the Alberta UFO Study Group on
Saturday afternoon.
-
- Around 2 a.m. on April 29, 1997, the two men were driving
between Valleyview and Grande Prairie when a bright red light approached
them from above, one of the men recalled.
-
- The wind around them picked up, they fell unconscious,
and awoke in a space ship, he said. "I remember I was fighting them
and I kicked one between the legs, but they didn't have no testicles,"
one of the men said.
-
- He said he looked at his friend, who had some sort of
golden apparatus in his mouth.
-
- "Then they probed me," he said, with tears
beginning to well in his eyes.
-
- "I remember it as clear as yesterday."
-
- He said he blacked out and when he regained consciousness
he was back in his car, speeding down the same highway in the wrong direction.
It took them more than six hours to make a 45-minute trip.
-
- Physically, the former bull rider said he felt as sore
as if he'd competed in a rodeo the night before.
-
- "I was quiet for two or three weeks, then I started
to remember it," he said. "I still have dreams."
-
- The men came to the rented room at University of Alberta
Conference Centre, as others did, with an intense or personal interest
in unexplained phenomena. They gathered to share experiences, philosophies,
conspiracy theories, even skepticism, at the day-long event organized by
Jim Moroney, a health and safety inspector with his own life-changing story
to tell.
-
- The executive director of the Alberta Municipal Health
and Safety Association says he was driving from Edmonton to Ontario several
years ago when he stopped his car near Winnipeg.
-
- Moroney discounts theories that he might have temporarily
fallen asleep on his feet. He maintains he was completely awake and standing
next to his car to get some fresh air when a UFO appeared -- a big bright
object that hovered above him for six or seven seconds before disappearing.
-
- "It was probably about 20 feet above me," he
said. " I still get shaky talking about it, but the air underneath
it was dead."
-
- He's uncomfortable recounting the story in public. "It
would be silly to say that I wouldn't be nervous some people would be prejudiced
against me because of my ideas on these phenomena," he said.
-
- But like others at the conference, he believes there
needs to be serious study into unexplained stories shared by so many people
around the globe.
-
- "We have to invite skepticism into this because
it is only through challenging this through scientific means and really
being honest about these challenges, that we'll filter out a body of evidence
that is irrefutable one way or the other."
-
- Former pilot Ken Burgess, who investigates UFO sightings
for the group, isn't about to speculate about the strange object he saw
above a plane he was flying. He's angered by tales of little green men,
because they damage serious inquiry into the subject. But he knows he saw
what he saw.
-
- He has talked to people who have reported all kinds of
objects in Alberta's skies. Some sightings have been as recent as last
month -- giant flying black triangles above St. Albert.
-
- "I just take the information and try to track it
down," he said. "Did they pick it up on radar or did anyone else
see it?"
-
- The conference also heard from Fern Belzil, one of the
world's top authorities in cattle mutilation. In the past eight years,
the 80-year-old rancher from St. Paul has investigated more than 100 cases,
the last ones just a few weeks ago.
-
- Since the mad-cow crisis, farmers have generally kept
quiet when their cattle or other animals are found with lips, tongues,
udders, genitals, noses, eyes and rectums removed with surgical precision.
-
- Showing slide after slide of mutilations, he insists
he can instantly see differences between inexplainable injuries and those
caused by predators or maggots.
-
- Belzil is not certain what is happening to the animals.
-
- "A lot of arrows point towards aliens," he
said. "But we have no proof."
-
- © The Edmonton Journal 2004
-
- http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/story
.html?id=92c37edb-1db9-4df0-acb5-3a5a4bba1c00
|
