Alien Notions

Alien beings descend on Earth in miles-wide spacecraft this week as “Independence Day” hits theaters nationwide, but Alvin Lawson is figuring on business as usual.

No flood of calls as there was in the 1970s.

No hysteria.

Just the current one or two calls a week to his UFO hotline--a telephone answering machine in his Garden Grove home.

Lawson, a retired Cal State Long Beach professor of English, has been studying UFOs in Southern California for nearly 25 years.

The movie “Independence Day,” with its dark vision of visitors from outer space--they obliterate Los Angeles, Washington and New York--will no doubt leave moviegoers compelled to cast a wary eye skyward.

But if experience is any indicator, they won’t be reporting more unidentified flying objects out there than usual.

“A movie like ‘E.T.’ was a grand movie, but after that came out, people weren’t crowding onto my phone line to report things,” says Lawson of the 1982 film.

It is not media coverage that precedes UFO sightings, studies--including one by the U.S. Air Force--have found. “Whenever there is a big surge in reports,” Lawson says, “it’s been around a series of sightings or after a major sighting.”

The Mutual UFO Network, one of several private organizations that keep track of such information, receives about 300 reports a year of UFO sightings nationwide that cannot be explained. The network estimates that about 10 of the unexplainable reports a year are based on sightings in the skies over Southern California.

Over the years, the region has had its share of “significant” sightings. What are considered some of the best UFO photos ever taken were snapped with a Polaroid camera in 1965 by an Orange County road maintenance inspector from his truck in Irvine. In the ‘70s, a Marine pilot saw mysterious balls of light following his and another observational plane over San Diego County; an observer on the ground also saw the lights, and the occurrence remains unexplained.

Lawson started his hotline in 1973, during the last great wave of nationwide UFO sightings in which thousands of people across America reported seeing unidentified flying objects. That first year he received more than 400 sighting reports--the easily explained and prank calls included--from throughout Southern California.

Now, his UFO Report Center of Orange County is listed in only one local phone book; Lawson is retired and no longer investigates reports. But the current low number of calls to his UFO hotline is not what’s important, he says.

“The interesting thing is it hasn’t gone away.”

Indeed, nearly 50 years after the press coined the term “flying saucers” to describe the nine disc-shaped objects that civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing streaking through the sky over the state of Washington in 1947, UFOs continue to maintain a firm grip on the public’s imagination.

If anything, it’s stronger than ever.

UFOs have survived jokes, scientific ridicule, a spate of bad B-movies in the ‘50s (think “I Married a Monster From Outer Space”) and tabloid newspaper stories that are so far out that even UFO fanatics ignore them.

As one longtime UFO researcher says, “This is a mine field, and nut cases are attracted to this.”

The Air Force initiated Project Blue Book in 1952, a program in which it investigated about 12,000 UFO reports.

In the late ‘60s, the Air Force commissioned a team of University of Colorado scientists to conduct an independent study of the UFO reports. Team leader Edward U. Condon concluded that further study of UFOs was not justified and agreed with the Air Force that UFOs did not threaten national security.

Many in the UFO research community were critical of his conclusions, saying they did not reflect what the report actually said--that the phenomenon appeared genuine and that more than 30% of the investigated cases could not be explained.

Still, Condon’s report led to the cancellation in 1969 of Project Blue Book. When asked this week if there has been any change in the military’s stance on UFOs, an Air Force spokesman said, “We just have no position on them at this time.”

But UFO investigations have continued in the private sector, with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a 5,000-member international organization based in Seguin, Texas; the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies; and a host of smaller groups looking into alleged sightings.

The 200-member Los Angeles MUFON chapter has its own UFO hotline: (818) 450-MUFON. The Orange County chapter, with 80 members, also has a hotline, (714) 520-4UFO. Both groups meet monthly to listen to guest lectures by UFO researchers.

Today, some 300 academics in the United States are studying UFOs, as are thousands of laypeople, according to UFO researcher David M. Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. For the past 18 years, Jacobs has taught a class at Temple called “UFOs and American Society.”

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Over the past five decades, at least 1,000 books--ranging from vanity publications to those from major publishing houses--have been written on the subject in the United States. Magazines and journals include the Journal of UFO Studies, International UFO Reporter and scores of smaller ones. UFO buffs now have web sites on the Internet to share information. And TV’s “Sightings,” “The X-Files,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Paranormal Borderline” explore the subject, as do occasional documentaries.

In a humorous vein, “3rd Rock From the Sun,” a farce about aliens sent to Earth to study human behavior, was one of NBC’s biggest hits last season. And this fall NBC will launch “Dark Skies,” an hourlong thriller that, according to the network, is a “chilling alternative version of how the landmark American events of the last two generations can be connected to a stealth-like extraterrestrial invasion--and government cover-up--that engulfs the lives of a terrified young couple.”

Charges of government cover-ups are common refrains among UFO researchers and buffs.

The most famous alleged cover-up concerns a crash on July 3, 1947, in Roswell, N.M. Pieces of what residents believed was a UFO were spirited away by the Air Force. The Air Force first described the wreckage as a weather balloon; in just the past year, it has updated its explanation, calling the object a large balloon with equipment designed to measure seismic waves that would indicate Soviet nuclear blasts.

In the Nevada desert, a top-secret Air Force installation--known as Area 51--has become a mecca for UFO buffs who gather at its edge. (The surrounding desert is so famous for UFO sightings that the state transportation board, bowing to requests from an assemblyman and some locals, recently renamed Nevada 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway.)

Then there are the advances in technology and rocketry, putting men on the moon and the former government-sponsored and now privately operated Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, which is searching for signals from outer space.

All of this, says Lawson, feeds the belief that UFOs are visitors from space.

“This indicates a hunger--it’s a hunger for contact, for communication with something larger than humanity,” says Lawson, who calls himself an “informed skeptic” of UFOs. “I think there is very little reasoning going on, because the belief need is so high. The need to believe. It’s a religious kind of impulse, I think.”

Says Jacobs, a Los Angeles native who has written three books on UFOs: “I think that there’s an intrinsic interest in life in outer space. Humankind has wondered about this basically since they realized those are stars out there and there might be other planets.

“The question of are we alone is an extremely important question for us. As we discover more about the UFO phenomenon and discover more potential planets in space, it becomes apparent there might be billions of planets not that far away from us. The possibility of life in outer space becomes very, very likely.”

There have been millions of UFO reports worldwide over the years, Jacobs says. “It’s a global phenomenon,” he says. “The U.S. has no corner on UFO sightings.”

About 90% of the UFOs reported to the Mutual UFO Network are ultimately identified: They’re spent rockets, planets, stars, balloons and conventional aircraft.

“It’s because nine out of 10 UFOs can be explained that UFOs have such a public stigma,” says Jan Harzan of the Orange County MUFO chapter.

When you discount the 90% that can be explained, and figure that 1% or 2% of the reports are hoaxes, Harzan says, “you start to find things that are unexplainable being reported by very credible witnesses.”

A UFO researcher in San Francisco has compiled more than 3,500 UFO reports from airline pilots, Harzan says. Even former President Jimmy Carter and astronaut Gordon Cooper have reported seeing UFOs.

Harzan, a computer company sales executive, says he saw a UFO as a boy in the field behind his home in Thousand Oaks.

“You could say these people were hallucinating,” he says, “but does a hallucination break a tree limb or shut a person’s car off? The question becomes: What is it?”

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That question is what keeps MUFON members such as Don Roth of Garden Grove searching for answers.

Roth, an interior designer for commercial aircraft at McDonnell Douglas, says his interest in UFOs began after he had a sighting in 1987 while living in Huntington Beach.

He was, he recalls, out on his rear deck barbecuing when he glanced into the evening sky and saw a saucer-shaped silver disk in the distance. The object, he says, appeared to be accompanied by a little red ball of light.

“It was just bouncing all over the place around this saucer as it traversed the sky,” recalls Roth, 49, who says the sighting lasted several minutes.

“I was dumbfounded,” he says. “I frankly am very strongly of the opinion that it’s rather naive of us to think we are the only intelligent life forms. It’s a big universe out there.”

Bob Wood of Newport Beach, MUFO’s national research director, says various surveys have shown that a majority of people, including scientists, are willing to accept the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

But most scientists, Wood says, a retired McDonnell Douglas research and development manager, cannot bring themselves to accept the idea that aliens are visiting Earth.

“Our scientists have made one huge assumption, and that is that it’s not possible to travel faster than the speed of light. That’s almost an axiom in modern science. What they should really be saying is, ‘We don’t know how to do it.’ ”

But, he says, “if you just take away that one assumption . . . you’d expect them to be visiting us all the time. And, in fact, that’s what’s been reported by the public over the years.”

Saying you’ve seen a UFO is one thing; saying you’ve been abducted by space aliens is another.

Jacobs of Temple University and Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry John E. Mack are two of the best-known researchers involved in that highly controversial aspect of UFOs.

Alleged abductees typically claim they were taken on board alien spacecraft for reproductive purposes. When they return, Jacobs says, they have little or no memory of the experience although they know they’ve been missing for several hours and that something has happened to them.

Within the past 14 years, a dozen or more therapy and support groups for people who say they’ve been abducted by space aliens have sprung up around the country, including in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Over the past 10 years Jacobs has done hypnotic regressions with 110 people who claim to have been abducted.

Jacobs says his academic colleagues say there are a wide range of psychological and psychiatric explanations for these tales.

“But what they don’t know is that none of these explanations fit the data,” he says. “What you have is a large number of people saying the same things in terms of abductions, reporting the same phenomena, not knowing the other person’s report.”

As Jacobs sees it, “the UFO phenomenon is the abduction phenomenon. They are one and the same: The reason there is a UFO phenomenon is for the purpose of abducting people. You can’t divide them.”

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Lawson conducted his own series of hypnotic regressions in the ‘70s with Anaheim medical doctor W.C. McCall. Lawson has his own theory on alien abductions: They are involuntary fantasies of people reliving the memories of their birth experiences.

His theory, he concedes, was not well received in the UFO research community.

“Some of the leading lights in ‘ufology’ opposed me bitterly, to the extent of trying to keep my work from being published,” he says, adding that among some local and regional researchers, “I’m a pariah.”

Longtime UFO watchers such as Lawson have learned to weather all manner of alien visions, from Hollywood’s latest menacing visitors and their enormous spacecraft sent forth from an even larger mother ship, to the gentle, candy-eating E.T.

And, just as there are dramatic differences of opinion on alien life among the makers of movies and TV shows, there are important differences among UFO watchers.

But there’s one thing those who study UFOs have no trouble agreeing on:

“We’re involved with a phenomenon that won’t go away,” Jacobs says. “It’s consistent, and it’s persistent. We’re going to be in for the long haul with this phenomenon. No matter how many people play ostrich, it’s not going to go away.”