UFOs in the daily Press:

Childhood stories turn into serious UFO study

DAVENPORT, Iowa (UPI) -- When Michael K. Schultz was a child, he listened with wide-eyed wonder as his father told him a story about flying saucers from outer space.

His father, Murray, had not paid much attention when a man named Kenneth Arnold reported he saw a group of UFOs soaring over some mountain in Washington state on June 24, 1947.

But on a fall day, just a few months later, the elder Schutz witnessed a similar event. He told his son he was aboard a commercial airplane somewhere over the Washington-Oregon area when the pilot suddenly spoke over the intercom.

"I'm sure all of you heard about the flying saucer things Kenneth Arnold reported." The pilot excitedly told his passengers: "We seem to have them out there again today."

Schutz glanced out of the window and there - in broad daylight - he saw a half dozen disc-shaped spacecraft flying just above the mountain peaks. Schutz could hardly believe his eyes, but he and about 100 other people on the plane claimed to have watched the flying saucers for several minutes before they disappeared from sight.

The event made Schutz a believer. And the story altered the life of his son, now a 35-year old assistant professor of sociology at St. Ambrose College in Davenport.

"It is a probability the UFOs were the same ones Kenneth Arnold saw," said Schutz, now a resected authority on sociological aspects of the subject. "My father's story never varied. He said he could envision it as plain after 25 years as the day he saw it. That's very common among UFO sightings. They make quite an impression on people."

His father's story haunted him as he read science fiction books as a teen-ager and closely followed UFO cases throughout college. In his first year of graduate work at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., he wrote a paper about a national UFO group and began attending their meetings.

Schutz later wrote a comparative analysis on four UFO organizations for his dissertation. He remains one of four scholars in the world whose Ph.D. dissertation was related to the subject.

Although Schutz believes there is solid evidence to prove aliens have visited Earth, he angrily calls some UFO sightings and theories "a crock."

"The waters are extremely muddy." the bearded brunette explained, shaking his head. "Some are simply honest errors, but there are quite a few people who are out to make a lot of money from questionable UFO sightings. The sad part is people take it as truth."

Schutz, who recently authored two entries for a new text entitled "The Encyclopedia of UFOs," said about 80-90 percent of the sightings are explainable. But is it the remaining cases - several hundreds - that keep people like Schutz interested.

"If you cut out the garbage and get to what's real, there is something to be left," he said firmly. "We are talking about things people have had a heck of a good look at - not just a light in the sky." When you talk about broad daylight sightings and close approach sightings, you end up with something you [ought] to have to show respect for."

Schutz said he believes the most credible sighting - the Trindade case - happened in Jan 16, 1958, on an island off the coast of Brazil. Brazilian Navy scientists, officers and photographers were on a marine research expedition when they saw a UFO approaching their ship. No one has successfully refuted the sighting because of the caliber of the witnesses and four photographs of the space capsule, he said.

Such widely publicized reports have sparked not only scientific investigations, Schutz said, but also UFO religious cults which believe they can communicate with beings from the heavens and "platform societies" which provide a platform for outside speakers to talk on the subject.

But why do extraterrestrial beings trek across space to visit Earth? Schutz said they were only curious. They want to see how Earth people live.