People who believe in UFOs are in San Jose this weekend, trying to be sensible about the whole thing.
Flying saucers are a serious matter and believers are not kidding around. There is too much at stake, considering that some of the aliens are trying to take over the world by breeding human clones and others aliens are kidnapping innocent Maine fishermen who never did them any harm.
That's the word at the big UFO convention this weekend at the Double Tree hotel, where 600 believers have come for four days to talk about new flying saucer sightings and to get away from all the people who refuse to stop laughing.
It's not funny, said Mary Margaret Zimmer, a hypnotherapist from Miami who has personally hypnotized dozens of people abducted by aliens. Many of those unfortunate folks have had alien clones implanted in their bodies, she says.
"My job is to break through the trance that the aliens have put these people in," Zimmer said, very sweetly, over lunch on Friday in the hotel lobby. "I know people who have had implants from aliens. Gynecological implants. The aliens are trying to produce a hybrid race.
"They have an agenda, you know. They're not coming to Earth just to have a look around."
All these things can be proved, say the members of the Mutual UFO Network, and they brought the proof with them and displayed it on a large screen in a hotel meeting room.
The proof is unmistakable. There's a photograph of four white smudges that could very well be an alien spacecraft that flew over Belgium in 1989 and which surely proves the existence of four white smudges.
And there's the chart full of purple dots and black arrows that may indicate aliens flew over President Bush's Texas ranch in January. The dots and arrows on the chart are plain as day.
"I don't see how the government can ignore something like this," said Robert Powell, director of research for the group, pointing at the dots and arrows. "I'm trying to be as scientific as I can."
The attendees have paid $229 to attend meetings with titles such as "Flying disc creates hole in the cloud at O'Hare" and "Current UFO cases in Turkey" and "Abduction investigations."
At the convention gift store, members were snapping up tools of the trade, such as $18 "field investigator" T-shirts and $8 compasses. Field investigators are what the network calls its army of skygazers, who use the compasses to check which way the saucers flew after abducting fellow earthlings.
Jacquelyn Bockius, a member of the network who was selling the T-shirts and compasses, said she has seen just three UFOs in her life, which is a lot fewer than other members. She hasn't seen any in quite a while, she lamented.
"Now that I'm menopausal and not reproducing, they may not be interested in me any longer," she said.
Also for sale were laser pointers and flashlights, but Mutual UFO Network spokesman Alejandro Rojas said it may not be a good idea to shine a flashlight directly at a flying saucer. That's what the Maine fishermen did in 1976, he said, and it made the aliens mad enough that they abducted the fishermen, who haven't been heard from since.
"We don't recommend that you use the flashlight to initiate alien contact," Rojas said. "You could be in trouble."
