Last Wednesday night I attended the monthly meeting of the UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis. The group gathers in a big room in the St. Louis County Library on Lindbergh Boulevard.
I think a library is a good spot for a UFO study group to meet. A library, especially one made of good ol' reliable brick without any saucer-like designs, has a certain gravitas that rubs off on whatever group happens to meet there.
I had never been to a UFO Study Group before. I have never seen a UFO. I have never been abducted. I have never been probed.
So what do I believe?
I believe there have been documented aircraft sightings over the years that are difficult to explain as top secret, experimental military aircraft.
The turnout Wednesday was sparse. There were 13 of us.
Joe Palermo, 53, of Chesterfield, is president of the group. He works in the field of video production. When he was 14 he spotted a UFO near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. It was circular with a red porthole.
"I told my mother and she didn't believe me," he says.
That event sparked a life-long interest in the paranormal and what he calls "ufology" — as in UFO-ology.
In recent years, Palermo says, military aircraft have advanced so much that it makes it more probable that UFOs have been man-made military craft.
Spencer Wolling, 88, of Webster Groves, has been a group member for 30 years. He has never seen a UFO but is convinced they're not man-made. One possibility, he says, is that UFOs are piloted by humans who have mastered time travel.
Kelley Ross, who authors the group's newsletter, hands me a copy of the February edition of The UFO Enigma. It includes a story from a Kansas City TV station about a cow that was killed and mutilated by an unknown person for unknown reasons.
The newsletter also has a cartoon-like space alien holding a "Be Mine" Valentine's Day candy heart.
I ask Ray Kosulandich, 64, of South County, to repeat what I think he might have just said.
He believes the world will end Dec. 21 of this year. He bases this on the Mayan calendar.
Palermo interrupts: not everyone in the UFO group agrees with that assessment.
The main attractions tonight are two movies by Darryl Barker, who is not in attendance.
In the first, a resident of Highland, Ill., and police officers from several departments in the Metro East — St. Clair County, Lebanon, Shiloh, Millstadt and Dupo — are interviewed about a UFO they spotted in the early morning hours of Jan. 5, 2000.
The officers, who are named in the movie, say the object moved unlike any aircraft they had ever seen. They say it moved silently at a phenomenal speed and that it hovered silently. The movie includes actual radio transmissions from that morning.
In the second movie, several people discuss their own, unrelated UFO sightings. Some mention how difficult it is to speak publicly because of possible ridicule.
Six people raise a hand when I ask how many have seen a UFO.
Sandy Mosbacher of Cahokia, Ill., who is in her 60s, tells me she has the paranormal ability to have a vision in her mind and then, when she snaps a picture, that vision appears in the photo even when it was not physically present.
"When the barometric pressure changes I will see things," she tells me.
Sometimes she sees things, but they're in another dimension.
Ken Clayton, 54, is an independent TV producer. He lives in Herculaneum.
Clayton has not seen a UFO but has heard accounts from those who have, as well as accounts from those who say they've been abducted by aliens. He says that what he has heard is eerily similar to his dreams.
"Maybe my dreams are not dreams," he says.
Again, I ask Kosulandich to repeat what I think he might have just said.
He tells me aliens implanted a monitoring device in his father. He tells me that when he was a boy of 12 he was visited by a metallic orb. He told his father about the orb and his father then took him to visit an alien spacecraft.
"You people call them aliens," Kosulandich explains. "We called them 'star people.'"
In the spaceship, he says, the star people directed him and his father to different rooms. Kosulandich says he was covered by a sticky yellow blanket.
"They were scraping me and taking semen from me," he says.
The only questions I can think to ask are definitely inappropriate.
"Whether you believe that or not, that is up to you," he tells me.
Kosulandich was scheduled to speak about his contacts with star people at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 6. The event was to be in Webster Groves at the Sunset Lanes bowling alley.
POKIN AROUND Steve Pokin is a columnist for the Suburban Journals. He can be reached at spokin@yourjournal.com or by phone at 314-744-5704. His column is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PokinAround.
