- REEDS SPRING, Mo. -- Bob
White is convinced his story deserves a grand stage, that his most-prized
possession should be displayed before a national audience.
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- It should draw tourists from all over the country, he
figures, and be a major attraction for people who want to see an artifact
that White swears was retrieved from a UFO in 1985.
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- Instead, White's find is in tiny Reeds Spring in southwest
Missouri, secured in a locked display case at the back of a converted video
rental store. Here at the Museum of the Unexplained, a small, fledgling
operation that during a recent morning went more than three hours without
a customer.
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- White can't figure it out.
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- All he wants to do is find some believers. He wants people
to quit snickering and looking at him like he's crazy. He wants them to
listen to his story, to take a hard look at his metallic artifact, to give
him a chance.
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- "This," White said, "is the most difficult
thing I've ever done in my life."
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- The odds are stacked against him, no question about it.
He and his partner at the museum, Robert Gibbons, have been rejected and
ridiculed. White estimates he has spent more than $60,000 traveling to
conferences, starting the museum, having the artifact tested and retested.
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- And yet he forges on.
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- "I'm 73 years old," White said. "I don't
have much longer.
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- "What I'd like to see before I'm gone is the national
media get their heads out of their..." White paused, choosing his
words carefully, "...out of the sand. I'd like to see the national
media and everybody else realize that what I have is real."
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- Scientists theorize that the 'UFO' lights White said
he encountered could have been nothing more than a falling star, that his
artifact could be space debris. Some scientists who have tested the object,
or arranged for a laboratory to test it, said there was nothing extraterrestrial
about it.
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- People have questioned White's motives, even his sanity.
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- "I've been called every name you can think of,"
he said.
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- For his part, White doesn't wear outlandish clothes,
and he looks as if he could spend the winter months as a department-store
Santa Claus. He comes across as a plain-spoken, level-headed guy who is
every bit as homegrown as his Kansas City roots.
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- And if he's doing this for the money, well, that plan
was a miserable failure.
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- The museum, about 13 miles north of the glitzy Branson
strip, might as well be in another world. There are no neon signs pointing
the way, no twinkling lights outside the front door. Rather, it's sandwiched
between the Humane Society thrift shop and the Sunrise Cafe on Main Street.
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- Visitors pass the crumbling concrete steps, the "Flying
Saucer Parking Only" sign. Inside, three donation jars sit in various
locations, and the attached notes say, "Your generosity supports this
museum."
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- On this day, the jars have gathered layers of dust but
not so much as a quarter.
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- "Business is slow," White said. "We're
barely getting by."
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- But White isn't going anywhere.
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- This has become his passion, his mission. His life was
forever changed during that spine-tingling encounter, he said, and he's
got the souvenir to prove it.
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- "Once it happens," White said, "it's something
you'll never forget."
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- ***
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- Ask White whether he believed in unidentified flying
objects prior to 1985, and he scrunches up his nose.
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- "Never," he said. "Not a bit. I was the
biggest skeptic in the world."
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- That all changed overnight. Here's how he remembers it:
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- White and a friend were driving from Denver to Las Vegas
on a desolate highway near the Colorado-Utah border. It was 2 or 3 a.m.,
he said, and White was sleeping in the passenger seat of the car. At one
point, his friend woke him up and pointed out a strange light in the distance.
White didn't think much of it and went back to sleep.
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- Then his friend woke him up again. This time, White said,
the lights were practically blinding.
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- He got out of the car and stared, dumbfounded. The object
was about 100 yards in front of him, he said, "and it was huge ...
absolutely huge."
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- White was paralyzed, not with fear but with awe.
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- In time, he said, the lights bolted toward the sky. He
said that they connected with a pair of neon, tubular lights -- "the
mother ship," White guesses now. And just like that, he said, the
entire contraption zipped eastward through the Colorado sky and disappeared.
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- "What I saw," White said, "was not of
this earth."
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- As the craft flew away, White said, he noticed an orange
light falling to the ground. A locator probe? Something that simply broke
off?
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- It was red hot when he reached it, he said, but in time
it cooled enough to pick up. White shoved the object into the trunk of
the car, and he and his friend headed off to the nearest all-night diner.
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- "The strongest thing they had was coffee,"
White said, chuckling. "We wanted more than that."
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- ***
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- White didn't say much publicly about his encounter when
it first happened. A comedian and a singer, he was trying to earn a living
in show business.
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- "I didn't want anybody to call me a UFO nut,"
he said. "I was afraid it might hurt my career."
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- So he packed up the artifact and forgot about it, at
least until the mid-1990s. Around 1996, after his nomadic show business
career had ended in Branson, he decided to seek out answers.
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- The object is about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like
a teardrop. It has a coarse, metallic exterior and weighs less than 2 pounds.
It looks a bit like it could be a petrified pine cone and is composed primarily
of aluminum.
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- White has had the item tested several times.
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- The Nevada-based National Institute for Discovery Science
in 1996 sent a sample of the object to the New Mexico Institute of Mining
and Technology.
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- "The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane,"
said Colm Kelleher, a scientist who runs the day-to-day operations of the
National Institute for Discovery Science. "We didn't find any evidence
that it was extraterrestrial.
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- "ìNow you can make the argument that we didn't
spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn't cover
every base."
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- Gibbons, whose background most recently includes work
as a senior technician in the interconnect technologies division of Northrop
Grumman in Springfield, is quick to point that out. He said it was the
first test conducted on the artifact and wasn't very thorough. A later
test, he said, was conducted by a laboratory in California and showed that
the object's strontium isotope levels were "virtually the same"
as those found in meteorite samples from Mars.
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- A scientist at the California laboratory, who asked that
his name and that of the laboratory not be used, disagreed.
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- "It didn't show any extraterrestrial signature,"
he said.
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- Meanwhile, skeptics abound.
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- Sgt. Gary Carpenter, who works at the North American
Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., said it was not uncommon
for NORAD to get calls about strange lights and unidentified objects.
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- Not once, he said, has the object been identified as
an alien spacecraft.
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- "Usually it turns out to be space debris from a
satellite that's decaying, or it's in the realm of naturally occurring,
celestial lights," he said. "It could be something like a falling
star. It could be contrails, the things you would see trailing an aircraft."
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- But White and Gibbons are undeterred, proclaiming that
White has twice passed polygraph tests about the encounter and the artifact.
Capt. George Larbey, who is in charge of the criminal investigation and
drug units for the Greene County Sheriff's Department in Springfield, conducted
the first polygraph test in 1998.
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- "I believe he found an object that fell from the
sky," Larbey said. "As far as the UFO goes, I don't know if I'll
go there, but in his mind, that's what he believes he saw.
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- "There was no reason for me to believe he was intentionally
fabricating any aspect of his story."
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- ***
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- This year alone there have been 16 alleged UFO sightings
in Missouri reported to the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle. There
have been 10 in Kansas, including one in Olathe in March in which the person
filing the report said, "There was a threat present."
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- White and Gibbons still hope to tap into that market.
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- White opened the Museum of the Unexplained with visions
of turning it into a destination. He wasn't looking to get rich - according
to the Missouri secretary of state's office, the museum was registered
as a nonprofit organization in August 2000 - but hoped to spread the word
about his experience.
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- But the museum has struggled, unable to tap into the
Branson spin-off crowd and secure a niche audience of its own. Only 2,800
people went through the doors that first year, when admission was free,
and the museum hasn't been able to replicate those numbers since.
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- These days, patrons age 12 and older pay $5 to stroll
through about 2,000 square feet of space. There's a keyboard, for example,
from the movie "Men in Black II" in which the shift key doesn't
capitalize or decapitalize but translates from English to alien. Other
exhibits are little more than newspaper articles or passages from the Internet.
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- Such exhibits are nothing but ambience, White concedes.
The focal point is the artifact, and White takes no chances with its safety.
Motion detectors, closed-circuit TV, and window and door alarms protect
it at all times. White packs it up in a gun case every day at 5 p.m., and
the object never spends the night at the same place two nights in a row.
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- You can never be too sure, he figures, even in a town
with just 465 residents.
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- "I'm happy for them that they're having a good time,
but I guess I'm just not into that kind of thing," said Kacee Cashman,
the Reeds Spring city clerk since 1998. "I really think they've been
accepted, but everybody's kind of taking it with a grain of salt."
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- Everybody, of course, but White and Gibbons.
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- They have a Web site about White's experience - www.hardevidence.com
- up and running, and Minnesota-based Galde Press said it was planning
to publish White's book this summer. A member of the museum's board of
directors recently purchased a 42-foot transit bus from the city of Dallas,
and White and Gibbons hope to take it to Kansas City and other cities across
the country.
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- White has told his story on radio shows nationwide and
was featured on a segment of the TV show "Extra" in 2000. He
recently was flown back to the site of the original encounter by a TV crew
from England, and that segment will be broadcast this fall.
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- "I don't know what I have to do to prove this is
the truth," White said. "You can't make this stuff up."
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- © Copyright 2002 Knight Ridder. All Rights Reserved
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- http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/8884581.htm?1c
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