You be the judge. But remember: We are entering the realm of
"high strangeness."

It's Friday. You and the spouse jump in the RV and hit the road.
Ah, rural Arizona! Say goodbye to traffic and crowds; say hello to
pure skies, sweet silence -- oh, and the occasional secret
convention of UFO spotters.

It's true. They are out there.

"It was kind of spooky," radio talk-show czar Preston
Westmoreland said about the close encounter he and his wife had in a
remote canyon near Wickenburg.

They had made arrangements to camp near Robson's Arizona Mining
World, a mining museum and ghost town many miles from Anywhere. When
they pulled up at the end of a five-mile dirt road, they found a
lone man waving a flashlight.

Aha! Cue up the horror-movie music. Westmoreland should have
suspected something when the man asked: "Are you here for CSETI?" Or
when Westmoreland noticed the man's wife scanning the twilight skies
with binoculars.

Or when the man told of the group's huge generator-powered
lights and miles of cable. Or when he advised that the best way to
find UFOs is not to look straight up, but to scan low above the
horizon. Fact is, that's where they tend to hover.

Or surely when Westmoreland casually mentioned his line of work:
"Everybody just shut up."

Fact is, the Westmorelands had made contact. They'd stumbled
across a secret five-day session of the Center for the Study of
Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

"The rented the whole place," said owner Jeri Robson. "It was a
training session for people who might have opportunity to speak to
someone from a flying saucer."

Were they . . . strange? "Not at all," Robson said. "They were
very reasonable, very intelligent -- I mean, seemingly."

But they weren't happy with the media in their midst. By the
time the Westmorelands left the next day, there were about 80 people
there from all over. A "scientist-looking guy" pulled up in a cab.

Westmoreland was told the group included former federal
officials -- some of whom would not want to be identified. He did
note that some people wore badges with colored dots. "The higher up
they were (in the group), the more dots they had."

Bizarre? Ridiculous? Creepy?

Far from it, said Bobbie Ammons, executive assistant at the
center's headquarters in Asheville, N.C. The center, she said, is a
3-year-old international group of about 450 members -- and "growing
daily."

Its purpose: "To establish a peaceful diplomatic relationship
with extraterrestrials."

The group sends out teams to seek contact with UFOs through
"light, thought and tones -- one of which derived from what we
believe was a spacecraft recording."

In late January, she said, it almost worked. A team from the
center was approached near Mexico City by a huge triangular-shaped
craft. But it sped off as they were setting up the camera.

Such events, Ammons said, partake of "high strangeness -- when
things happen in your experience that are unexplainable."

Bunk? Hogwash? Of course! What kind of people believe in UFOs?

Surely not Westmoreland, "newstalkmeister" and private pilot?
"I've been interested in UFOs since my teens."

What about Jeri Robson, who sounds every bit the no-nonsense
rural Arizona woman? "I'm open minded. I tell you frankly we saw
something out here one night that I can't explain. And no one has
been able to."

Actually, Robson's first response was even more apt. Asked if
she believed in UFOs, she said: "Do you?"


Joe,
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