Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 6, 1993 TAG: 9307060047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAFAEL ALVAREZ THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
He says: "It's not like this is a `Star Trek' convention featuring the Attack of the Pear People vs. the Great Unwashed."
Yet that's what many people think when believers in unidentified flying objects, aliens from other planets and flying-saucer abductions get together to picket the White House for the "Right to Know" about out-of-this-world phenomena.
About 50 people from around the country marched in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in brutal heat and humidity Monday to persuade the United States government to release 20,000 pages of documents they claim proves the existence of UFOs.
One of the placards read: "Stop the Cosmic Watergate!"
"Depending on what poll you use, maybe 50 or 60 percent of the American public has some belief in UFOs, but they don't talk about it because of the stigma," said Regimente, 44, a construction manager who has pursued the subject as a hobby for about four years.
Monday's protest was the second in as many years for "Operation Right to Know," a Washington group devoted to ending government secrecy about extraterrestrials, including the alleged U.S. Army retrieval in 1947 of a crashed flying saucer and dead aliens in Roswell, N.M.
Larry W. Bryant, a "Right to Know" supporter, has a suit pending in U.S. District Court in Washington against the secretary of the Army and Walter Reed Medical Center for the release of autopsies done on alien bodies believed to have been recovered from the desert outside of Roswell on July 5, 1947.
"If the government would at least acknowledge the truth of Roswell, it would move ufology out of the nut-case category and into the legitimate scientific realm," said Regimente, who spent the weekend at a UFO seminar in Richmond, Va., that attracted scientists and academics, as well as those who say they have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard space ships for observation.
Mindy Gerber, 35, a registered nurse from East Windsor, N.J., braves the ridicule.
"I'm an abductee, it's been going on throughout my life and will continue to go on," said Gerber, who said she has no conscious recall of the abductions but vaguely remembers the experiences through hypnosis.
"The aliens study certain people the way we might study animals in the wild," Gerber said. "It's all kind of gray to me, I'm not very clear what I've learned except that there's a lot of stuff going on that we just don't know about."
by CNB