“There’s not a lot of collaboration between groups,” says Puckett, who runs his own reporting website,, though he has worked with Oregon MUFON on a number of investigations. Some think this insularity has had a negative effect. In an e-mail, prior to our interview, Bowden noted his concern: “They have operatives placed in many news organizations for the dual purpose of intercepting specific news items and for introducing propaganda.” Interviews with members are granted, but only with reassurances that the purpose is not to poke fun-or worse. Case files are available online, but the names of witnesses and investigators are changed to pseudonyms. To wit: Monthly meetings are open to the public, but recording and photographs are typically prohibited. When the military terminated the group in 1969, its work was left to volunteer groups like MUFON, which have become exceptionally image-conscious as a result of media and other groups painting them as kooks. MUFON’s academic approach follows a long lineage of scientific exploration of UFOs dating back to the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a group of soldiers and scientists who began tracking and investigating “flying saucers” in 1952. What we’re trying to do is study UFOs in a scholarly way-as academics would if they bothered to look into it. We have to get to the original source of the photograph in order for it to be considered evidence.” “Photographs by themselves are useless,” Bowden says. If, in the end, nothing makes sense, the case is declared a UFO. Drawing on astronomy, weather reports, and FAA flight logs, all possible earthly explanations are tested and discarded until they land on one that fits: planets, military aircraft, birds, atmospheric effects, flyovers of the International Space Station. Then, the investigation begins in earnest. When a report is filed, MUFON investigators interview witnesses, collect any photographic evidence (employing a strict, police-department-style chain of custody), and document even the most innocuous information they can about the sighting, from wind speeds to light levels. To that end, MUFON has developed an elaborate protocol for investigating UFO reports, all of it laid out in a 250-page investigator’s manual. “What we’re trying to do is study UFOs in a scholarly way-as academics would if they bothered to look into it,” says Rowell, who hopes to donate his personal library of 1,500 UFO-related books to a university after his death. Allen Hynek, as one of the country’s best civilian UFO groups. And Bowden was an investigator from 1976 to 1988 for the now-defunct Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, a group of sober-minded scientists hailed by the air force scientific adviser on UFOs, J. William Puckett, an investigator, is a former EPA and National Weather Service meteorologist. Like Bowden, many of MUFON’s top members have scientific or technical backgrounds: Keith Rowell, the group’s assistant director (and resident human encyclopedia), is a retired technical writer. (Some members believe UFOs come from another dimension.) But logic and science are at the core of MUFON’s beliefs. I am not crazy.īowden’s pragmatism might seem somewhat surprising in a group that includes its fair share of eccentrics. “It means that there’s a problem that has not been solved, and in order to solve it we need more data.” “It means there’s something flying around that is not one of our aircraft, and somebody saw it,” says Bowden, a computer programmer for a financial firm who has been studying UFOs since his college years in Illinois in the 1960s. And, according to the Oregon MUFON chapter director, Tom Bowden, even those “unidentified” flying objects don’t necessarily mean we need to put together a welcoming committee. In fact, MUFON classified fewer than half of those 100 reports as “unidentified” (including Corbin’s flashing object), ruling everything else out as hoaxes, airplanes, weather balloons, or simply lacking enough evidence for thorough investigation. But these guys aren’t some goofy Big Gulp–fueled pack of X-Files-ites, pointing to every passing satellite as proof of extraterrestrials. With the government, NASA, and even the SETI Institute (which takes its name from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) officially not interested, MUFON fielded some 100 reports of UFOs last year alone.
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