Monday, January 16,1989
The Battalion
Page 13
ightings attract
T
R
C E
PINE BUSH, N.Y. (AP) —Clouds
quickly fill the night sky, obscuring a
nearly full moon. It’s not a good
night to find whatever’s out there.
K Still, a half-dozen people who’ve
fcrked their cars on the shoulder of
a country road in New York’s Hud-
pm Valley crane their necks to scan
sky. This is supposedly a prime
ayea for spotting UFO activity, but
Re only things visible on this cool
autumn evening are airplanes bank-
Bginto nearby airports.
Peter Gersten waits suspiciously,
he silver-bearded lawyer believes
|99 percent of supposed UFO sight-
ings are easily explainable, despite
ffie vanity license plates on his
Porsche that read UFOSREAL. He’s
devoted hundreds of hours to wrest-
UFO documents from the gov-
■nment in court.
k Most UFO watchers are more pa
tient than the federal government.
Ihe U.S. Air Force canceled its sur
veillance program, Project
■uebook, on Dec. 17, 1969, almost
five months after the Apollo 11 as-
Bonauts landed on the moon. Dr.
Bdward U. Condon of the Univer
sity of Colorado recommended that
Be program come to an end after
yfears of unconvincing research.
|!; But UFO searchers persist. Victo-
ri.i Lacas waits expectantly. She’s
mad because most people abducted
bi aliens are unwilling victims, and
sme’d be more than happy to submit
herself to experiments.
I Linda Doern waits calmly. Linda
and her husband, Peter, both real es-
Bte appraisers, admit to being fas
cinated by psychic and other unex
plained phenomena. An evening in
Pine Bush, she jokes, “beats watch-
Bg television.”
I Ellen Crystall waits excitedly. The
Rlf-described UFO photographer is
thr guardian of the field, where she
claims to have seen aliens and doz
ens of unexplained lights. She’s
driven to this field from her New
Brsey home hundreds of times since
1981 in the hope of making contact
ay
B“You missed it, Ellen,” Gersten
tells Crystall when her car pulls up a
Blf-hour later than expected. “The
Bother ship was here. There used to
be several more of us wailing.”
Crystall dismisses the joke and
checks the sky. It doesn’t bode well,
fflhe aliens, whom she suspects are
Bidding an underground base in the
Budson Valley, don’t seen’ to like
clouds or rain, she says.
Whatever the reason, strange
sightings seem commonplace in the
Hudson Valley. Hundreds of people
— not just those who go out looking
for them — have seen things in the
sky that can’t be explained, says
Philip Imbrogno, author of “Night
Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO
Sightings.”
These sightings caused a sensa
tion in 1983 and 1984 in this area of
New York City suburbs and farm
land, stretching into western Con
necticut. Reports have been less fre
quent since then, but still steady,
Imbrogno says.
Most, if not all, can be easily ex
plained, says Jeff Lehman, spokes
man for the nearby Stewart Interna
tional Airport. He says a group of
pilots, whose identities are not
known, enjoy fooling UFO fanatics
by flying in close formation many
evenings. It’s not illegal, but it’s an
noying, he says.
“I don’t see scaring people with
aircraft as a game,” he says.
Crystall believes. She says she saw
something unusual at the cornfield
off Searsville Road, 20 miles from
Middletown, soon after she was first
taken there by a magazine writer.
Gazing over a distant treeline
while alone at the field one night,
she spotted what appeared to be a
craft drifting slowly to the ground.
After seeing something flutter, al
most like a moth, she shined a spot
light into a wooded area. She says
she saw a 3-and-a-half foot creature
with a beige body and huge yellow
eyes staring back at her.
“This thing had a worried look on
its face and it totally threw me off,”
Crystall says. “I was panic-stricken. I
could not utter a sound.”
The blonde music student claims
to have taken 800 photographs of
UFOs. She says she holds no
grudges against people who don’t
share her beliefs but confides, “I try
to avoid them.”
At a restaurant 20 minutes from
Searsville Road, Crystall’s friends
passed the time waiting for dusk to
turn to darkness. Ignoring quizzical
looks from a waitress, they discussed
landmarks in UFO history with the
sort of insider’s lingo that renders
the conversation meaningless to any
one else.
Gersten, who has set up a hot line
telephone number for UFO fanatics
to keep up on the gossip, says he en
joys the mystery and glamour of
UFOs.
“It seems like we’re prisoners on
this planet and we’ve lost the ability
to explore,” says Gersten, who fixes
companions with a penetrating
UFO watchers
stare. Most people accept that UFOs
exist, he says, “because we simply
can’t be the only people in the uni
verse.”
But he dismisses most reports of
unexplained lights in the Hudson
Valley. Most sightings are probably
conventional airplanes, he says, add
ing that he has offered a reward for
the mysterious group of pilots to
come forward and identify them
selves.
Gersten belongs in the “govern
ment conspiracy” camp of UFO fol
lowers, believing that secret military
technology is being' tested in the
skies.
“Imagine a civilization 10,000
years more advanced than us,” the
New York City lawyer says. “Do you
think they’d come here in space
ships?”
Yes, Lacas says, because they want
to investigate the inhabitants of
Earth. The legal assistant and
flower-child holdover is fascinated
by the current UFO furor over ab
ductions, during w.hich people are
supposedly “beamed up” by aliens
Lacas calls herself an “abduction
volunteer.”
“I want to bring trinkets to trade,”
she says, fingering some jewelry,
“because I want to make friends
when I go on board.”
For the Doerns, all aspects of the
paranormal are fascinating. There’s
a lot more going on in the world
than meets the naked eye, Linda
says, but she understands why most
people look at UFOs and psychic
phenomena with abundant skepti
cism.
“There are a lot of strange people
involved in it,” she says. “I think it
discredits it for a lot of people. It
turns a lot of people off. I think you
have to look beyond them and not
let it deter you.”
After the drive to Searsville Road,
some participants note the “eerie
strangeness” they feel while gazing
at the sky. But when it’s apparent
most of the lights in the sky are ei
ther stars or airplanes, conversations
drift to baseball and photography.
One of Crystall’s companions
points the flash of her camera at
some shrubbery, hoping others no
tice the particles in the air she sees
during the brief burst of light. What
she claims is “angel dust” looks sus
piciously like pollen.
It was the only unusual sighting of
the night. As the hour grew late, the
search for warmth became par
amount and the evening ended in
disappointment.
‘Bran Man’ claims
oat bran experiments
made him a believer
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) —
The man responsible for the cur
rent oat bran craze, Dr. James
Anderson of Lexington, prefers a
bowl of old-fashioned oatmeal ev
ery morning — because it has
more texture than the instant
types.
He battles a cholesterol prob
lem (an inherited tendency from
his mother’s side), so he usually
lunches on two oat-bran muffins,
V-8 juice and an orange.
“If I’m ever served a slab of
prime rib, I really cannot enjoy it
anymore, ” he says.
Anderson is professor of medi
cine and clinical nutrition at the
University of Kentucky College
of Medicine and chief of the en
docrine-metabolic section of the
Veterans Administration Medical
Center in Lexington.
He was treating diabetics and
noticed that their blood choles
terol levels had dropped 60
points by following a healthy eat
ing plan.
Anderson had been aware of
Dutch studies more than 20 years
earlier that showed oatmeal low
ering cholesterol levels, but it
took five bowls of oatmeal a day
to be effective.
“We felt that was too intense,
even for oatmeal gourmets like
me,” he says.
He called Quaker in 1977 to
ask about oat bran, the outer
layer of the whole grain.
“Back then, wheat bran was all
the rage,” he says. “Quaker told
me that there was no such thing
as oat bran, but I was persistent
and called a second time.” Ander
son was finally sent 100 pounds
ofbran.
Anderson’s cholesterol count
was 280 at the time, so he decided
to test oat bran on himself and
dropped his blood cholesterol
level to an acceptable 175 after
five weeks.
“That made a believer out of
me,” he says.
New book tells of aftermath of divorce
Associated Press
Every year, more than 2 million
Americans in some degree of des
peration seek a “second chance” in
life through divorce.
But a new look at this phenome
non finds that things are not nec
essarily better the second time
around and the chances of success
are more elusive than was thought.
Judith Wallerstein, a psychologist
at the University of California and
founder of the Center for the Family
in Transition, has studied in depth
60 families for more than 10 years.
Her findings are to be published
next month in a book, “Second
Chances — Men, Women and Chil
dren a Decade After Divorce,” writ
ten in collaboration with science
writer Sandra Blakeslee.
The sub-sub title is even more
provocative: “Who Wins, Who Loses
— And Why.”
Society often forgets to think
much about the approximately one
million children a year who are in
volved in divorce, most of whom
sense a loss of protection and fear of
the future.
Furthermore, the study shows,
the aftershocks of divorce echo
through the personal lives of all con
cerned at least a decade later.
Among the findings that
Wallerstein discovered as “new, sci
entific and unexpected,” was “that in
most instances one person was much
better off.”
“One person is very important in
life,” she says. “But the other mem
ber was, on balance, either in the
same place or not doing too well.
You’re looking at a much greater di
vergence after divorce, and that’s
entirely new.”
Who gets the major benefit of
“the second chance” boils down to
who wanted the divorce, whether
male or female.
Wallerstein says she is not against
divorce.
“Divorce is much more than the
coup de grace of a stressful mar
riage,” she writes. “It is a new begin
ning that offers people second
chances.
“It is no more and no less than an
opportunity to rebuild lives. And
there’s the rub.”
The book tells of the pitfalls, the
expectations, the denial, and the
quiet dramas through the voices of
those involved.
Wallerstein has obviously won the
trust and the understanding of these
people with whom she has been in
volved these many years.
“In the book there are three ma
jor families we built on,” she says. “I
think those people started off equal.
We ask, ‘Why did you get mar
ried?’ Almost all of them tell us they
married for love. They thought they
were equal.
“They weren’t shotgun marriages
because someone got pregnant, al
though some of them were. By and
large they knew each other . . .
“In some of the marriages that we
see, there never was a marriage,
however one defines marriages in
terms of love, intimacy, friendship.
There was unhappiness, loneliness
or violence — whatever — from the
start.
“But in a whole group of these
marriages, there was at some point a
real marriage, and then it didn’t en
dure for a whole lot of different rea
sons.”
In investigating the aftermath of
divorce she found that each partici
pant has a different view, even the
children, although they are almost
unanimous in thinking that the di
vorce was a good thing for their par
ents.
“You’re in a mine field of moral
issues, because the children feel they
are worse off,” Wallerstein says.
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