- What kind of person sees UFOs?

Who looks up and sees mysterious lights, strange craft longer than a football field, things that move silently through the sky that flash out of view in an instant?

Who goes to UFO conventions and calls themselves believers?

Do you know?

Do you think you know?

A UFO witness may be your neighbor, or your friend, or a family member, like Lamar Todd.

Lamar Todd is a retired Memphis police officer.

He and his wife run an auction and appraisal business on Summer Avenue.

The auctions take place Thursdays and Saturdays.

Thursdays are a little quieter.

The regular bidders know Lamar Todd.

They don't all know that he is a UFO witness.

- [Lamar Todd] Two and a half, 32 and a half, 35.

35?

- [Man in red shirt] Yep.

[Lamar] 35, 37 and a half?

Sold, $35, buyer number 250, 250.

- He's seen a UFO on two separate occasions.

The first time was 1973.

It was the dead of night.

Todd was alone in his police car, cruising slowly with his headlights off, in order to observe possible suspicious activity in the neighborhood.

He thought the sudden bright light from above was a police helicopter that had spotted him.

- I got on the radio pretty quickly and asked the dispatcher to advise Air One that I'm north of Old Suwanee, see if they were checkin' that car.

The dispatcher came back and advised that Air One was not airborne.

I'm thinkin' now, "I don't know what's goin' on."

I stop, get out of the car, look around, and it is a circle of white light around the car.

You can see the edges of it on Suwanee, on the street, and on the sides.

Looked up, extremely bright light, which was similar to what the lights would be on Air One.

Got back in the car, closed the door, and when I did, the light went out.

In my mind, I still can't explain that one.

- [Voiceover] It's a strange story, but Lamar Todd is not alone.

Join me as we take a look at UFOs Over Memphis, A Close Encounter.

This first sighting was one Todd decided he was better off forgetting.

- They didn't take me up into the ship.

All I saw was that light.

I did not report it, other than askin' the dispatcher if Air One was in service, because, first of all, very few people would believe it to begin with, so keep your mouth shut and go on about your business.

- Fast forward to the early morning hours of May 17, 1977.

This time, Todd was not alone, he was with his partner, Jerry Jeter, on patrol in South Memphis, when they observed something out of this world.

- As we approached Norris, and just north of it, Jerry says, "What is that?"

I'm thinkin', "What are you talkin' about?"

He said, "There's somethin' above the power line."

I didn't see it, I'm drivin'.

He saw it, I didn't.

Went on north to North Parkway-- excuse me, South Parkway, turned around in the parkway, and soon as we came back south, I saw it.

It was right above the power lines, right above the power lines that go into Pine Hill Golf Course and Pine Hill Park.

Pulled off the exit ramp real quickly, got to the top.

We got out, stood and watched.

It was hoverin' above the lines pretty close.

It was hard to judge the distance to the lines and it, but it was triangular in shape had three lights on the sides, we could see that very well.

We watched it for about four or five minutes.

Jerry jumped into the van real quick, he was a sniper assigned, took out the rifle with the scope that he was assigned, to look at it closely with the scope.

As the rifle came out, it started to move off.

In a matter of a second, it took off north.

No wind noise, no motor noise, no rocket propulsion noise, nothin'.

It disappeared across the horizon, which was roughly 14 to 16 miles, in a matter of a second, second and a half.

I contacted the police dispatcher and I asked her to contact Memphis Ground to see if they had an unidentified in that area.

The response was, "Negative, it was not."

In a few minutes, the dispatcher asked me to give her a call, I called her.

She said she had several more reports of the same type, same description, that had come in from some of our officers at the north precinct.

There was three more up there, and a trooper in Brownsville, and a trooper in Alamo.

This is a matter of about the same time I'm puttin' it out, she ended up there too, so, very quickly.

- All told, five police officers reported the same observation, making this one of the best documented UFO cases of the 1970s.

The sighting received national, as well as, local attention.

Bob Pratt, an editor at the National Enquirer, who had reluctantly taken charge of the paper's UFO coverage and become a believer in the process, named the Memphis incident, the sighting of the year.

The five witnesses were given prize money totaling $7,500, with Todd and Jeter splitting the bulk of the award.

A former Milwaukee police officer, who currently lives in Southaven, Mississippi, Bridgett Sanders is a field investigator for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.

- Captain Lamar Todd's reports, or both of his sightings, they are the second sighting in 1977.

That one definitely stood out because it was seen by multiple parties in different areas across the city, so that's definitely where that one stands out the most, and it's not just Captain Todd that made this report.

Like I said, there were several other police officers that saw it, as well as citizens that saw this particular sighting, and it was reported on the news, as well as, your newspaper, during that year, so that's the way that that one stood out, and not only that, it hovered low.

Low enough where we don't normally get those reports where, "This craft is hovering low."

I think the only other report that I can remember, in recent times, that something was hovering pretty low was in Phoenix when that craft hovered low over the city and tens of thousands of people reported that particular sighting, so those are very unusual, but the first sighting with the lights, that would be one of the typical sightings.

We're talking in different cities, in different times, and when I say different times, I'm saying 1977, 1967, 2015, so these are in different periods of times that people are reporting these items, and probably someone that never even heard of Captain Todd in Memphis is reporting exactly what Captain Todd is seeing.

Someone halfway around the world that doesn't even speak English is describing exactly what Captain Todd saw.

- In 2015, the Tennessee and Mississippi chapters of MUFON held Memphis' first celebration of World UFO Day, on July 2nd, the anniversary of America's most famous UFO incident.

In 1947, near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, a large silvery object crashed in the desert.

Initially described as a flying disk, with witnesses claiming to have seen wreckage, and even bodies, it was soon being described by the US Government as a weather balloon.

The town's become the United States' premiere UFO shrine.

Pine Hill Park has yet to become a major destination for international UFO tourism, but Memphis' first celebration of World UFO Day may change all that.

- We knew that World UFO Day was gonna be coming up.

Normally, MUFON puts on a yearly event in Memphis, but it's never like a big conference, or anything like that, it's something small, just to get together all the people that's interested in the UFO phenomena, and bring in a guest speaker to talk to everyone.

So I said, "Why not let's just make a festival out of it?

"Roswell has a festival every year.

"We have a very specific event that happened in Memphis, "and that was with Captain Todd, and people should know about that event," so Memphis does have a staple with the UFO phenomena.

- Memphis isn't exactly a UFO hotspot, compared to Roswell or any number of other locations in the US with higher reported numbers of UFO sightings, but there is a history here that goes back way before the 1970s.

I asked author, Wayne Dowdy, archivist of the Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Public Library, what he could tell me about UFO sightings in the Bluff City.

- There were several sightings of UFOs throughout the 20th century, actually.

The first that we were able to find was in September of 1920, when a group of firefighters were at Engine House Number One at Union and Monroe, Front and Monroe I should say.

They saw, in the sky, a ball of light.

It was about 300 feet above the Mississippi River and it was slowly moving north, and they sat there and watched it until they can no longer see it.

At that time, it was thought as simply being a meteor.

The newspaper account actually says that it must've been a meteor from another planet, quote unquote, so there's no point of reference really for sort of a modern view of an unidentified flying object.

In the 21st century, we have all kinds of ideas about what something in the sky might be, but in 1920, science fiction is not a mainstream genre at this point, there's hardly any discussions of life on other planets.

There's a little bit, but not what it would become later, so these guys see this, and they're like, you know, "No big deal, it's just a streak in the sky," but in the 1950s, there's a second sighting in Memphis.

About a hundred people see flashes of light in the sky, but even though there's a lot of concern about the Cold War with the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, all of these things, a lot of anxiety in the 1950s about these kinds of things... but, at the same time, the news reports were, "Well, maybe it was a meteor, maybe it was men from Mars," quote unquote.

It gets a small notice in the newspaper and that's about it, but fast forward 20 years later, a little over 20 years, into the 1970s, and the country's a lot different.

There's still the anxiety about atomic weapons and the Cold War, but there's also a lot of concern about government conspiracy, perhaps.

The three major events of the 1960s and early 1970s, President Kennedy's assassination, for a lot of Americans, there's a new-found sort of suspicion of the government, and perhaps the government's covering something up, so when they start seeing lights in the sky, then they're thinking that perhaps there are aliens from another world who are visiting Earth, and the government is not telling us about it.

There are all these books that are being published in the 1970s.

There are films that are being made about aliens visiting the Earth, not only in terms of, and there's some of that in the '50s too about, you know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and that kind of thing, but you also have in the '70s, Star Trek, which is very popular.

Star Wars, that debuts just a couple of weeks after the 1977 sighting by the police officers, so not everyone sees it as an invasion.

Some see it as, "Perhaps you're gonna come and join with us and do good perhaps," but there was a time when people really thought that it was possible that aliens were visiting Earth through crafts that were flying in the sky.

'77 is the largest UFO sighting that we have in Memphis, and, arguably, the most detailed because other people had seen just a light in the sky, but with this, very descriptive of the officers that Officer Todd and Officer Jeter see, and they become sort of point men, and, in fact, I remember when this happened.

It was on the TV news as well, it was a big deal for a couple of days, so they were very specific, cuz, of course, they're trained to be observant and to make reports and everything, so they see this, and what's interesting is The Commercial Appeal's drawing of what they saw, so we get a visual representation.

The others, we don't have anything like that.

It's not a photograph, but, nevertheless, it's good to see, visually-represented, what they saw.

Memphians were very, very interested in this.

This was a big story.

The others, small stories, but this was a very big story in '77.

- What does it mean to be a believer?

To go through your daily life believing you have first-hand evidence of something most other people dismiss out-of-hand?

- A believer, to me, is someone that has undisputed belief that there is life outside of Earth.

What I mean by that is they believe that life exists on different planets, either planets from our solar system, obviously, we haven't found any life down on any planets in our solar system, but they may feel that life came from some of those planets, like Mars.

They feel like life once existed on Mars, that it was used as a way station, and they moved down to Earth.

Now, they also believe that there's life on different planets outside of our galaxy, on the several hundred billions of planets that there are in the universe.

- I'm not one of the kind that's gonna run around with a pyramid on my head and all that stuff.

I do believe in the fact that we are not alone.

In our galaxy and universe, there's gotta be more than just us here because, with our technologies now, we've done a lot of things.

We're lookin' to go to Mars, we're lookin' to do all this.

We've been to the moon.

I'm not sayin' that there are not other more intelligent lifeforms out there that are travelin' at the speed of light, when we're tryin' to get up to moped speed.

I am a believer, but I'm not one that's gonna be out poundin' the drum and tellin' everybody that Area 51 is a conspiracy and all that stuff, but I do believe.

- [Voiceover] I thought, "I should find out "what mainstream scientists think "about the UFO phenomena, "and what they could tell me about the bigger questions -- "Are we alone in the universe?

Are there other worlds out there with life on them?"

You might think that mainstream science and UFO believers would be at odds, and, in some ways, they are, but there may be more points of agreement than you might think.

- I'm Dave Mannes, I'm supervisor of The Sharpe Planetarium.

I have often been asked about whether there's life in space, or life on other planets.

Scientists are looking for that, and we're just now discovering that there are more planets out there around other stars, than we ever knew before, so, just by chance, there is a possibility, there's always a possibility, but, right now, we only know of one place, and that is planet Earth.

School children often ask about whether there are aliens, whether aliens have ever visited our planet, and whether they're on other planets.

That's definitely something we're all looking for.

and the next place we're gonna look for that is Mars, at least by going there.

Astronomers use telescopes and various instruments involving telescopes, and even radio telescopes, searching for possible transmissions from other worlds, if they seem intelligent, then that would be, certainly, a definite indication of life.

What I tell schoolchildren, usually, is that I'd have to shake hands with an alien to believe that they have visited planet Earth.

Now that we know about all those other planets around other stars, scientists are gonna start looking at those planets when they pass in between us and those stars, and as the light is affected by a planet's possible atmosphere, we can see the spectrums that are coming out, and, with that spectroscopy information, we can tell whether a planet, for example, has an atmosphere like Earth's atmosphere, one with carbon dioxide or oxygen in it.

Earth's atmosphere also has nitrogen, but life on Earth is, really, using carbon dioxide and oxygen, so if we find those elements in any concentration on some of those worlds, that happen to be in what's called the Goldilock Zone, around another star, that's a habitable zone, then, wow, we could've found something that indicates life, Earth-type life.

There's some little tantalizing things that are about Mars, such as methane outgassing.

It could be a natural thing, but we know that creatures on Earth give off methane as well.

Mars is not a very habitable place, but it's probably the most Earth-like world in our own solar system, so it's conceivable that there are little pockets, maybe underground, of areas that life may have adapted to.

There's the idea that maybe we didn't originate on planet Earth and that we were, and it's called the transpermia, that we actually were coming from microbes from another world that settled on Earth by meteorites blasted off of, maybe, Mars, so when we go to Mars, we may be going home (chuckles).

- Okay, so, on my quest to investigate the UFO phenomena, I sought out one of Memphis' leading experts on local history, and one of Memphis' leading experts on astronomy and science education.

Next, I thought I'd talk to Chris Davis.

- Part of your job as a reporter for an alternative news weekly is to listen to people with ideas that others might find kooky (laughs) because, sometimes, those people, they're on to something.

Not usually.

Oh, Mongo?

- [Voiceover] Mm-hm.

That guy is not from outer space.

Have you ever listened to him?

I mean, I'm thinkin' maybe Frayser, cuz he's got that James Rhode accent.

Billy Lee Riley, on the other hand, 1957, Flying Saucer Rock 'n Roll.

His band, Little Green Men, Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano.

I think it's gotta be more than a coincidence when you look at the global influence of Memphis music and you think that in this city you had Sun Records, Sam Phillips, you had Moon Records, Cordell Jackson.

You have Meteor Records, which I think is Roland James.

You have Galaxy Records, the Stax Record Shop, the Satellite.

You've got a lot of this cosmic energy.

You can't convince me that that was just the result of post-war modernism and the space race.

Memphis was probably the ultimate modern city.

So much of its architectural flourish is mid-century or very space-influenced.

Like I said, you got sun, you got moon, you got galaxy, you got satellite.

This is where the aliens would probably feel most comfortable, I'm convinced, but not because of Mongo.

Now, are you guys talkin' about the '77 cops?

- [Voiceover] Mm-hm, do you know anything about that incident?

- I don't know much about it other than it was a pair of, they were like tactical squad cops.

Was it over a golf course?

- [Voiceover] For World UFO Day in Memphis, MUFON organizers brought four speakers to Pine Hill Community Center.

Lamar Todd was featured, as well as local author, James Renford Powell.

Author and UFO expert, Peter Robbins, came from New York City, and, finally, Travis Walton was scheduled to appear.

Walton's dramatic 1975 abduction experience in Arizona's Sitgreaves National Forest, formed the basis for the 1993 movie, Fire In The Sky.

A new biographical film, Travis, is nearing completion.

Peter Robbins is one of the UFO experts who appears in the film.

- It was very important to us to have Peter Robbins come to this event.

For 25 years, he has been investigating the UFO phenomena.

He had an actual sighting himself, he and his sister, when they were much younger.

He also wrote a book called Left At East Gate.

That was about the Bentwaters incident that happened over in Europe, where there were some American soldiers that touched a craft and they received injuries from this craft in a forest.

- Roswell, of course, is a small city in New Mexico, well, not so small, 53,000 people, but it's best known worldwide as being associated with the crash of a truly anomalous object, seemingly under intelligent control, well out of the city, in the summer of 1947.

Many of us theorize that the reason that these unknowns were in the area was because, at that time, there was only one nuclear strikeforce in the entire world.

The Army Air Corps was still, I think two months away from becoming the Air Force.

The 509th Bomb Wing was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Field.

We now have an extensive history of UFO incursions, appearances, sightings in areas where there's nuclear activity, whether it's a military installation or a power plant.

Again, it's purely theoretical, but something went down there and a great deal of effort, officially, was expended in covering it up, minimizing it, and establishing a culture, quite literally, in which the media overwhelmingly, but decreasingly, over the decades, like now, wired up the subject of unknown objects from parts unknown with mental dysfunction, or mysticism, or wanting to feel special, or hoaxes, when, in fact, the reasons for it make no sense if one studies the news coverage at the time, but Roswell, indeed, is the seminal event that kicked off what we call the modern age of UFO sightings.

- In 1978, Robbins was a young research assistant who worked on the United Nations Secretary General's Report, for the establishment of a UN UFO department.

The special hearing on November 28, 1978, was undoubtedly a high point for serious UFO-ologers.

- I was, literally, a year or so into the field.

It had obsessed me for several years.

I made friends with a senior investigator.

A gentleman who was a former staff officer of the Hungarian military, who was in charge of photo analysis for the Hungarian army during World War Two, who emigrated to the states in the '50s.

Having a military background, he established a number of extraordinary contacts over the years, and was friendly with the secretary general at that time, as well as the one who preceded him.

The one who he was networking with was Kurt Waldheim.

This was before the embarrassment of Waldheim being revealed to have been an SS member during the war, but he had first introduced the idea in the '60s to U Thant, who took the idea very seriously.

Waldheim had asked Colman von Keviczky, my mentor, to write a paper on a theory that Colman took very seriously, that it was not out of the question, especially at that point in the Cold War.

If the Russians or the Americans saw an unknown coming into their air territory, that they might interpret it as a beginning of an enemy strike, and strike first, and it was very important to the United Nations.

Now, because of the ridicule factor, this was a very unpopular motion among the delegates, and, yet, the head of the nation of Grenada, a very small Caribbean country, sponsored the resolution, and it ended up being several remarkable days of hearings with some of the leading international authorities, scholars on the subject, speaking to them.

I had the experience of sitting in the gallery, watching this happen.

Many of the delegates refused to show up, using the excuse of a snowstorm that weekend in New York, but that was an excuse, they all lived in the area.

Watching their faces was fascinating to me, the resistance to this idea.

I think they would've rather had another war than go home and report to their host governments that the United Nations should take UFOs seriously.

The amendment passed, technically, but then was allowed to die in committee, and has never been revived, and it was simply for Study Committee to learn what we could about this phenomena and separate the truly anomalous, which may be an exceedingly small portion of unknowns that can be explained in conventional terms.

It was, for me, a fascinating window into the way that the power structures in the world regard this situation, which we know from a plethora of declassified documents that are not questioned, has been of extraordinary interest and importance to our government, since, at least, the summer of 1947.

The Russians as well, we now know, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and seeing a lot of their documents, which reflected our feelings at the time, a genuine concern that we were dealing with, they felt, something extraterrestrial, which, I think is almost a conservative explanation.

I do feel that certain UFOs are representative of off-Earth technology, but after more than 40 years of studying this, I'm humbled to say, "I don't know, I don't know, "and I'm sure I don't know, but, at least, "I can make better educated guesses, based on 40 years of study."

Not that I ascribe more or less credibility to people in certain professions, but law enforcement personnel are trained observers.

They're also trained to keep their heads, to a greater degree than a lot of civilians, in a crisis or a high-stress situation.

Many courageous police officers around the country, over the decades, have come forward, along with civilians, as witnesses to very legitimate UFO sightings.

In the case of this one, one of the things, for me, that distinguishes it, was the extraordinary size of the object encountered, and the very slow speed it was moving at.

This defies every law or concept of our understanding of physics.

Whatever these things are being powered by, may be purely beyond even theoretical for us, but it's a very important account.

It reminds me a bit of the one that was, I think, in 2008 or so, over Stephensville, Texas, where, also, a number of police officers were witnesses.

I almost hesitate to repeat their descriptions cuz they sound so impossible.

One officer described it as twice as large as an aircraft carrier.

Somebody else estimated its size at over half a mile across.

These things are impossible, and, yet, to dismiss them as exaggerations or the meanderings of a mind that is not very disciplined, is not appropriate.

We are dealing with a genuine unknown presence.

I am convinced that a lot of modern UFO sightings, not of that scale, are the result of black projects, craft that we, human beings, have in the air that are so extraordinarily advanced that, to a lay eye, it would appear to be something from another world.

- James Renford Powell is a local writer, and host of the local public access series, The Book Man Show.

He's also the founder of The Renford Institute for Applied Metaphysics, an online learning center.

Powell reads ancient stories, including the Old Testament, for clues to the origin of humanity, and the history of encounters with beings from the sky.

- James Renford Powell, he began to make the connections with the Bible, as well as the stories that were being told in ancient times about different sightings.

Once he began to put those two together, it became very clear to him that there was a connection between UFOs and what was actually written in the Bible.

He's spiritual, as well as, he's very knowledgeable.

I'm not sure of the exact count of books, but he's written several books, I'm sure it's over ten, on different things relating with metaphysics, the Bible, and the connection of UFOs in our ancient past.

- Well, I think, like a lot of people, I read Chariot of the Gods by von Daniken, and that was very interesting, but I lived overseas 20 years.

I was in Vietnam in 1966 with a mission program, Church of Christ Mission Program, and had a school there.

Then, after four and a half years in Vietnam, from '66 to '70, I moved to Hong Kong, and there was an incident where we were out in a rice paddy, early in the wee hours of the morning, walking over to another house, and what looked like a helicopter with bright lights on came up.

We stood there, it was a very clear night, and it turned to the right and then just disappeared, just a white light disappearing.

I joked about it at the time.

I told Diane, "That's probably a UFO."

It certainly was something that we couldn't identify, but the next day, it was all over the papers.

The Cathay Pacific pilots had seen it.

This would've been in the early '70s, '73, '74.

That was my only experience.

I'm not a UFOlogist and I didn't come to this subject from there.

I'm the author of the Renford books.

I have 15 books in print, and they're mostly either metaphysical or... different types of interpretation of different scriptures and different things, different religions, both from the Mahabharata, and the Sumerian texts.

This is where my interest came involved in what led to the publication of the book.

I came into this from the standpoint of witnesses.

We talk about witnesses here.

We talk about Captain Lamar Todd and his officers, what they saw, but when you study the ancient texts, whether Hebrew, Mahabharata, Indian texts, or Sumerian texts, you read things that sound more like a witness trying his best.

They have their problems with point of reference.

If you take, for instance, Elisha is going out with Elijah, in the Hebrew text, and he keeps tryin' to make Elisha go back.

He obviously has an appointment.

This is not something that he's just wandering around in the woods.

He has to be at a certain place, it's a pickup time, really, and Elisha keeps tryin' to follow, Elijah keeps tryin' to send Elisha back, he won't go.

Finally, Elisha describes a fiery chariot with fiery horses that comes down, picks up Elijah, and flies away.

What point of reference does this man have?

He's never seen anything but a chariot, and he's never seen a chariot that wasn't drawn by horses, and he's never seen electricity.

How else would you describe this fiery chariot that comes down, picks up Elijah, and flies away?

If we see an object today, that we don't recognize, we look and say, "That looks sort of like a helicopter, "but it's moving too fast and it's all lit up.

They must be doin', you know, some lights."

That's what I did when I saw that thing.

I thought it was a helicopter with a spotlight on it, was my first impression.

I have those points of reference to work with.

These guys didn't.

They never seen anything but fire and never seen anything but a chariot, so it's a very limited perspective and and that's what I'm talking about in these slides.

You have so many different incidences in the text.

You have, for instance, Yahweh's on top of the Mount Sinai with Moses.

He says, "I'm gonna come in three days in my glory."

"What do you mean, God?

"You're glory itself.

"What do you mean you're gonna come in three days in your glory?"

Glory, literally translated, I think you can find, from your Hebrew scholars, it means heavy things.

He's tellin' Moses, "I'm gonna come in my heavy thing."

He has a great deal of security around the bottom of the mountain.

He makes Moses go down and make sure that they can't even touch the mountain, and if they touch it, they would be stoned, or killed with arrows, and the bodies are to be left alone, not touched.

That's in the Bible.

Everything I'm telling you is straight out of there.

On the third day, he comes back and he tells Moses to go back down and check the perimeters of the mountain, and make sure that nobody's touched that mountain.

Then it describes him comin' in his heavy thing.

The scripture says that it made a loud, searing noise like many trumpets with thunder and lightning, and sat down on the mountain in smoke.

Whatever it was, sat down on the mountain in smoke, not clouds, in this case.

Many times, clouds is the cloak, but this case, he sat down on the mountain in smoke.

That's the scripture.

Later, he comes out of this heavy thing on something that's just described as tile work, like sapphire and, in some cases, the scripture says, crystalite.

That's a very shiny substance.

It could be any type of metal, it could be any kind of thing but that's what is described.

Then, the 72 elders are allowed to come up and the covenant is made, "I'll be your guide and you'll be my people."

Most of these things in the Hebrew texts, the stories of Babel, the stories of the deluge, Cain and Abel, all of these also are found in the Sumerian texts, which is the oldest writing known to man, even before the hieroglyphics.

Sanskrit has an argument about which is older but, basically, these are very, very old texts.

Some of these texts are just mind-bogglin' when you read them, I mean, how in the world did they come up with this?

If you go to the Mahabharata, they're talkin' about how to make planes and what the material should be made out of these vimana.

They called them the vimana, and what the pilot should eat, and what kind of cloaking device is it for?

How to do things that we know today as radar, and different things like this.

They're talkin' about it, four or five thousand years ago, in that text, so this is very interesting for me.

I'm not starting a church of UFOlogy or anything of that nature, nor trying to convince anybody.

It makes very little difference to me whether anybody believes what I think about it or not, but I can share what I've come to know over 35 years of working and studying in the area, and you can take it or leave it.

That's basically the way I feel about it.

- We're here at the Pine Hill Community Center for Memphis' first celebration of World UFO Day.

Let's go on inside and check out the activities.

The celebration of World UFO Day hit a few snags, with expected bad weather prompting the cancellation of the outdoor event.

Bad luck also prevented Travis Walton from making his flight.

- [Voiceover] Travis Walton wasn't able to make it to the plane, but you... - Figured it out.

Absolutely, I figured that out.

Basically, what we did is, we had him Skype in, and he's actually speaking now on Skype, to the audience, taking questions and showing his slides.

- [Voiceover] He definitely, you can tell, those people are sitting in there, lookin' at a computer screen, wrapped.

I wanted to talk to Peter but I was like, "No, he's watchin' that interview."

- That is just so wild and anything that can go wrong kind of did, but I think we bounced back very well.

- [Voiceover] You know who never showed up for World UFO Day?

The little green men.

As the stereotyped emblem of kooky UFO believers, the little green men don't get a lot of love these days, but the jokes are easily spotted.

There were comedians to warm up the crowd, a tough crowd, it must be said.

Any feedback on what's working, what's not working, in terms of UFO jokes?

- I think the premiere thing is to make sure everybody knows you're not making fun of them or their beliefs.

You don't want to disrespect why they're here, or why they're comin' together, or the types of things that they're into.

- Like we, here on Earth, we just rename a planet, but that's like a whole group of people that have to change.

Like the entire Correlle population is now the entire Kepler 256f population.

They have to get used to it.

They have to change their licenses.

Their entire lives are completely different, just because we shot somethin' in space and stared at them for a minute.

- [Voiceover] What drew most of the participants together was their desire to connect with other people who've had the same kinds of experiences.

- I'm a believer and I had to come just to see what it was all about and for listening to the guest speakers and what they had to say.

Also, I wanted to just make a testimony on what I saw.

- [Voiceover] You saw something in '75?

- 1975, same year that I graduated.

- [Voiceover] Can you tell me a little bit about that?

- I had woke up from a nap.

It was around 3:00 or 4:00 in the evenin', I woke up from a nap, gettin' ready to walk to the store.

I was walkin', it was on South Memphis, on Kerr Avenue, between like Woodward Street and Englewood Street, so I was walkin' and I'm seein' few cars pass by, as well as few people walkin' on the streets.

Then, all of a sudden, I'm lookin' up, I see a bright light, it's in the daytime, bright light hooverin' around me, just flyin' all around.

No noise, just the bright light movin' all around, in like a flyin' saucer kind of deal.

It was like, all of a sudden, I'm just the only person in the world, and that's what it was, an unidentified flyin' object.

Same thing that happened to me, other people is talkin' about.

- We had about 600 people to actually register for the festival, and, actually, more people walked up and paid today than the ones that actually registered for the festival, so I'm thinking that the rain kind of scared them off, but I think we probably have anywhere between 300-, 350 people that have come through today.

- You got four speakers from completely four different angles.

You've got a man who's been working in UFOlogy investigations for 30 years, plus?

- Forty.

- Then you've got Travis, who had encounter of the third kind.

I'm comin' out of left field, from totally different angle of research, into it.

Then, Todd is somebody who's sittin' there and lookin' at it, you know?

Here, a local guy.

- I've said a hundred meters.

Jimmy Carter tried to go to the metric system, and we don't like it, so it was a hundred yards long.

Length, about 75 yards wide.

If you look at the high-tension towers, it's gonna be hangin' over on both ends.

It's beyond those, and it's roughly 300 yards above us.

Red lights, green lights, and when it pulled off, them two big red lights.

Then, on the side, there was a glow.

I'm not sayin', I don't know if it was portholes, or a simple glow on the craft.

I don't know.

We didn't get a chance to look at it.

Jerry didn't get enough time to look at it to see if that light on the side was a glow from it or porthole lights or whatever, on it.

I tried to get Jerry.

Jerry Jeter, to my last knowledge, is in Phoenix, possibly.

He's either somewhere on this planet, or in this planet somewhere, but I don't know.

Now, there were three others.

John Birdsong, Eddie Barlett, and Michael Davidson.

Davidson and Birdsong are both dead.

Eddie Bartlett's still alive, I think.

Most of us are gettin' long in the tooth now, so we never know for sure.

I couldn't find Jerry, if I could've found Jerry, we'd both be here, but, yeah, we both accepted it, we both, later on, not rationalized it, but just discussed it and we accepted what it was.

That's exactly what it was.

- You know, police work is a macho culture.

I couldn't agree more with James.

If you're gonna have like a one-day conference, to have four of your presenters coming at it from completely different angles, especially if you're new to the subject, and this is an introduction for you, again, this part of the states, you've got a lot of people of faith, and I thought James' approach, to talking about the worlds' holy books, the Bible, of course, it was courageous and it was very respectful of people in the room.

Just that admonition to read X, Y, or Z passages in the Bible, as though it was a report.

I know I've already learned quite a bit from James, especially when people ask me questions about UFOs and the Bible, and things like that, just a way, in a very human, very respectful way to present the material.

We all learn from each other.

I'm proud to say I have an awful lot of friends in the field that I've made over the years, and a lot of colleagues that I'm not very friendly with, but it's also a great opportunity to connect with folks who have gone through their own little transformation, enough to say, "I'm gonna be in that room.

"I don't care, I hear people make fun of this subject, I'm curious."

- I've been hearing people tell their stories to other people, but because I've been runnin' around so much, I haven't had a chance to stand and listen to the stories, but from just earshot, I could hear the stories, and I think they're great.

- Some people come because they wanna know if somebody's gonna talk about something that matches their experience, and I've already had them come around and ask me about the orbs and the different things, because when they've had the experience, they don't ever forget it (laughs).

You just don't forget that.

- Captain Todd was a great example.

- After World UFO Day, things settled back down to normal.

Lamar and Helen Todd went back to work at Todd's Auction House.

Some days, the topic of UFOs may come up.

Most days, it won't.

- The flying pig has been our mascot symbol since we started because we talk about people gonna pay a lot of money for antiques when pigs fly, and they don't pay much for antiques anymore, no.

It's pretty well a bygone day.

- There are many phenomena, natural or man-made, that are not often seen, that may appear strange or mysterious to the observer, but most unidentified objects don't have to stay that way.

- Most of the ones I've had have been very, very simply explained, although, people didn't believe what I was telling them.

What they were seeing, generally, was FedEx planes, or meteors.

- People often see objects that are natural objects, and if they don't know what those objects are, they may be mysterious to people, such as, tonight we have, and this is June 30th, we have a conjunction of a couple of planets going on in the sky, two of the brightest planets that we have, Venus and Jupiter, and they're getting as close together as they just about ever get.

- I would say the 80% of the UFO stories that I get, turn out to be nothing more than aircraft.

- Based on her experience as a MUFON investigator, Sanders is largely in agreement that the majority of UFO sightings submitted to MUFON through its website at mufon.com, turn out to be fully explainable.

- I would say, let's say, out of ten cases, you're gonna be able to identify eight of those, then, those other two cases, will be very difficult to determine exactly what it is that the witness saw.

We talk to the police officers in the city, see if anything else has been reported.

We talk to other witnesses in the city to see if they, or, not other witnesses per se, but, let's say, if they have neighbors, we'll try and contact the neighbors, see if they saw anything during a certain period of time, but without disclosing who the witness is, we will just come out, talk to different people, talk to the airport, see if there was anything, the Meteor Society, we will contact them to see if there was anything.

Also, we check the weather, so we don't try to mislead people to think that what they saw was extraterrestrial, nor do we try to, debunk is the word that most people use, we're not trying to debunk what people are saying, we're, more so, trying to drill down to find out exactly what it is a person saw.

Because if you see somethin' weird and you have no clue what it is, you can't identify it.

You're like, "Okay, that's weird, what was that?

Can somebody help me try to figure that out?

", and that's what we are here to do, is to try and help people figure out what it is that they actually saw.

- Skepticism is a very healthy thing in life.

I have too many colleagues, who I like very much personally, but who are so enthralled, so caught up in the work, and also, like myself, based on a preponderance of evidence, the kind of evidence you can bring into a courtroom, that we are dealing with a very genuine phenomena.

However, it's incumbent on people like me to be especially skeptical in every new investigation I do.

I can't simply assume that this is what the witness has said or, perhaps, what the physical evidence may indicate.

My reputation moves forward or dies on public pronouncements I make on the subject.

At the other extreme, I guess you'd call it a segment of skeptics, who are not really skeptics, they're debunkers, they exhibit the intellectual arrogance to actually say, "We know this can't be.

"How do we know it can't be?

"It can't be, it can't be, therefore, it isn't.

"Therefore, we're here to explain to you, "you believer types, "that it was a meteorite or some anomalous weather condition or what have you."

- The strange thing, though, is how the jokes and the beliefs aren't as crisply separated as you might expect.

There are scrupulously respectful skeptics and irreverent believers, and a lot of people who, maybe, aren't sure exactly which category they fall into.

- Have I ever seen a UFO?

I think I have, yes.

I was home from college for the summer.

I was staying with my family.

As I'm walking from one house to the other, I happen to look up and I saw a large triangular dark spot in the sky, that seemed to be kind of illuminated from underneath.

It was more the silhouette of this thing in the sky and it was odd.

I couldn't figure out what in the world this would be, and this is out in the country, way out in the country.

I went on in to my grandparent's house and I thought, "I'm going to call my parents "because they should be aware that there's this thing that is hovering over their house."

Then I looked out the window and there wasn't anything there.

Was it a dream?

Maybe, it could be one of those vivid things that you remember.

It could be a cloud, but there was just a moment of, "What the hell is that?"

Yeah, so that's my, I don't know what I'm looking at in the sky story.

- So, is there life out there beyond our world?

Are there strange craft that come from other galaxies, other dimensions, even, other times?

What evidence would you need to make up your mind?

That's a question many of the people I've talked to have asked themselves.

Most are still looking for answers, and for new questions.

Where did life come from?

Are we alone here?

Will we find a way to travel to the stars?

Have others found a way to travel here to visit us?

Does Memphis' fame as a music destination attract tourists from outside our solar system?

Is it true that there are no stupid questions?

Perhaps not, but like the old saying goes, "If you don't ask, you'll never know."

[space-themed music]