PRINTUFO conference comes to Columbia
Alien abductees will give their testimony
Erica Mendez
The Missouri MUFON conference will feature lectures from people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
August 12, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Check back on Sunday for our coverage of this unique conference.
No funny green people are coming to the Missouri Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, conference in Columbia, but speakers plan to talk about them. The lecturers also have experience with strange cattle mutilations, mysterious orange fireballs and abductions. If these things sound crazy, they might be. Even these “UFO-ologists,” dedicated to studying the possibility of alien life, aren’t sure exactly what’s going on. All they know is what they’ve documented.
Where: Days Inn Conference Center; 1900 I-70 Drive SW
When: August 14-15
Cost: $45
Call: 816-833-1602
“The sightings go in waves,” says Debbie Ziegelmeyer, Missouri Mutual UFO Network state director. “Lately, a lot have been in and around the K.C. and Independence area.”
This isn’t the typical business conference. Anyone interested is encouraged to come, says Margie Kay, assistant state director for Missouri MUFON. She says about 100 people have signed up. The conference, which Kay chose to hold in Columbia because of its central location, will feature lectures from Joe Palermo, who says he saw Bigfoot in St. Louis; an alleged alien abductee named Travis Walton; and keynote speaker Chuck Zukowski, an amateur “UFO archaeologist” who looks for evidence of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO visits.
However, not everyone involved automatically believed that aliens exist.
“I was a skeptic,” says Barb Becker, the Missouri Investigators Group state director.
This changed when she and her friends decided to drive one night to a place where strange lights had been reported. There Becker says she saw her first UFO. These are vehicles that can’t be explained.
“It was very low, very stealthy and soundless,” Becker says. “It was the size of a mid-size car and had three windows.”
Mutual UFO Network is relatively small in Missouri, but then again, it is kind of a niche interest. The organization includes about 60 members in Missouri and 17 investigators assigned to follow up on UFO reports sent in by witnesses from around the state.
Both Ziegelmeyer and Kay joined the organization because of personal UFO sightings. Kay says she had her first encounter when she was 16 months old. She describes the aliens as unemotional, “thin and lanky” and wearing tight suits and boots.
“They took me aboard the craft through a beam of light that came in through the apartment we were living in at the time,” Kay says. “They did some medical experiments or observations and then took me back.”
She says she remembered more of what happened years later when hypnosis called her back to her past.
“At the time, all I knew was that I was afraid of a blueish white light that came into the room,” she says. “I screamed, and my parents came into the room. I had a bloody nose, and there was blood all over.”
But it didn’t end there. After her encounter, she remembers feeling as if there was something in her nose. “It possibly could have been an implant,” she says. Kay later went in for an emergency surgery to find an implant in her navel that “physically tried to come out.” Because the doctor “forgot to save it, and threw it away” she never saw it. Although this might be hard to believe, she strongly believes it happened.
“Everything you think about is different; everything you know is different,” she says. “They can do anything to humans, and we can’t do anything about it. Some (aliens) seem to be benevolent.”
These medical experiments seem far from benevolent, but they piqued her interest and got her started with Mutual UFO Network, with which she helps perform investigations and does UFO research. This conference will be a platform for her and others like her to share their work.
“There’s a lot more out there besides human beings,” Kay says. “They’re here on the earth. We’re not alone.”
