BUFFALO, N.Y.- As long as mankind has had an imagination there have been reports of UFO sightings, but the advent of the space age came an open invitation to wonder could we really be the only ones out there?
Here in western New York a group of dedicated curious and open-minded professionals by day spends one weekend a month pondering UFO sightings and discussing eyewitness accounts.
Niagara County Community College anthropology professor Philip Haseley leads the Western New York Mutual UFO Network-- MUFON for short.
And the members run the gamut.
"We have doctors, lawyers, scientists of every stripe," said Haseley.
Some say they have had sightings, while others are just curious.
"I saw a faint object, a faint light that just started to track on a great circle trajectory, and it just moved slowly," said Robert Galganski, a retired engineer and MUFON member of a sighting he had back when he was a grad student at the University at Buffalo. "In a 45 minute time period I would say roughly 14 to 16 of these very faint lights had followed the same track from one horizon to the other," he recalled.
Another member, Kathryn Shorey says she's had sightings too.
"I have experienced a lights phenomenon over Lake Ontario on many many occasions," Shorey says.
MUFON is a world-wide organization. Here in Western New York the club gets about 15 to 25 reports of sightings a month.
"If you have a truck, I can give you the evidence, and you can cart it home," said Haseley. "The kinds of evidence that convinced me is basically evidence like joint radar reports, plus visual observation, plus landing types of evidence."
Haseley says there are several skeptics in the group.
"You need them to keep you honest," he said.
Haseley says he has started working on a syllabus for a class about UFOs, but he's not sure if or when it be offered as a class at NCCC.