Ufo

DUANYUAN, China - Tucked away down an unpaved cart path, behind a high brick fence, is about the strangest thing anyone could expect to find in the middle of rural nowhere, short of a UFO - an "experimental base" for building one. Well, technically, it's not unidentified, and it's not flying, but what Du Wenda is building here in eastern China is indisputably an object. Du, the son of a horse-cart driver, is founder and president of the Global UFO Scientific and Technological Research Institute of Xiao County of Anhui Province, an institute with a single proposition: to make a flying saucer for earthbound travel.

Celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie performs with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tonight through Sunday, after a decade-long absence. The Grammy-winning Dame Commander of the British Empire will be the soloist in UFO, a big, brilliant work from 1999 by Michael Daugherty. Glennie, 43, was reached by phone in London. An assistant repeated the questions and the percussionist, profoundly deaf since the age of 12, lip-read them and then answered them in her light Scottish accent. Writing about UFO, Daugherty conjures up images of aliens, strange metal objects and Roswell, N.M. Do you have any particular convictions about interplanetary visitors and that sort of thing?

A lot of people who should know better are talking about H. Ross Perot and the things he says rather than focusing attention on the critical issues ahead in this presidential year. That's amazing, even if Mr. Perot is one of the richest men in this country, because he's really a UFO candidate: pops up on the radar screen, blitzes by at high speed, then disappears when the interceptors scramble up for a look-see.To begin with, being rich alone does not win elections. Or did Nelson Rockefeller really beat Dick Nixon in 1968?

The peculiar red orb hung motionless in the summer sky near Frederick. A boy at the time, Keith Chester vividly recalls that day in 1966. It was about 6:30 p.m., and Chester was on his way to a friend's house. As he walked, he noticed a shiny red ball in the sky near the Catoctin Mountains. "The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up," Chester said. "I was so scared that I ran into my neighbor's house. I still think it was a UFO." To this day, the 50-year-old Bel Air resident has not been able find an explanation for the object, but the incident sparked an interest in unidentified flying objects.

After a yearlong investigation, the Harvard Medical School has decided not to censure psychiatrist John Mack, a tenured professor and nationally known UFO researcher who has publicly asserted that extraterrestrial beings have "invaded our physical reality and [are] affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people."In a meeting last Friday, Medical School dean Daniel Tosteson informed Dr. Mack that the review carried out by a "Special Faculty Committee" had ended, according to committee chairman Arnold Relman.

In preparation for song-and-dance legend Tommy Tune's new show coming to Baltimore this fall, the weekly Broadway radio revue show "It's Showtime," with host Alan Field, offers some inside information in today's edition, 1 p.m.-3 p.m. on WWLG-AM (1360) and WASA-AM (1330, in Havre de Grace).Mr. Field's guest is songwriter Richard Sherman who, with brother Robert, wrote the score for "Buskers," which stars Mr. Tune as a British street performer. "Buskers" has a pre-Broadway run Sept. 13-24 at the Mechanic Theatre.

WASHINGTON -- Michael Regimente of Annapolis is sensitive to the image problem.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 Avenue in brutal heat and humidity yesterday to persuade the United States government to release about 20,000 pages of documents they claim proves the existence of UFOs.

ROSWELL, N.M. - Something happened here, that much is certain. Something crashed outside of town. It even made the local paper on July 8, 1947: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region." Next thing you know the military swoops in, cordons off the area, gathers up the mysterious debris, flies it out of town, covers the trail with a story about a weather balloon.Believers say the saucer came from outer space and several aliens were killed.Who knows? All the evidence is gone. Not a scrap of wreckage remains.

ROSWELL, N.M. - Something happened here, that much is certain. Something crashed outside of town. It even made the local paper on July 8, 1947: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region." Next thing you know the military swoops in, cordons off the area, gathers up the mysterious debris, flies it out of town, covers the trail with a story about a weather balloon.Believers say the saucer came from outer space and several aliens were killed.Who knows? All the evidence is gone. Not a scrap of wreckage remains.

FOR those of you who might have missed the story abou President-elect Bill Clinton's thrilling and historic ride over Washington in an alien space craft, as reported in the Dec. 1 issue of the Weekly World News tabloid, we gladly reprint prime parts of the piece.Headed "CLINTON RIDES IN UFO!" and subheaded "Alien takes President [sic] on secret flight over Washington, D.C.!," the article begins, "Hours after Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States, a space alien who endorsed him in his run for the oval office [sic]

Though the island in the Caribbean shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic was spared a direct hit from Hurricane Dean this week, it may be that other, stranger entities made landfall there. Evidence "UFO Haiti" and "UFO Dominican Republic" - two authentic-looking home videos recently posted on YouTube. The films both appear to record close-up sightings of Area 51-type craft hovering above the island's beaches. As the ships pass eerily over, wind whips through the palm trees, dogs bark and a woman gasps in disbelief.

The program scheduled for this weekend's 38th International Fortean Organization conference reads a little like something from Harry Potter. Titles for lectures include: "Flight of A Dragon" "The Flying Saucer and I: Confessions of a Soft-Boiled Skeptic" "In Ireland This World and the Other World are but a Cobweb Apart" "Monsters and Maps: Strange and Extraordinary Peoples in Early World Maps" The meeting, which will be held at the Carlyle Hotel on...

DUANYUAN, China - Tucked away down an unpaved cart path, behind a high brick fence, is about the strangest thing anyone could expect to find in the middle of rural nowhere, short of a UFO - an "experimental base" for building one. Well, technically, it's not unidentified, and it's not flying, but what Du Wenda is building here in eastern China is indisputably an object. Du, the son of a horse-cart driver, is founder and president of the Global UFO Scientific and Technological Research Institute of Xiao County of Anhui Province, an institute with a single proposition: to make a flying saucer for earthbound travel.

There were many summer nights in the rural Midwest when I was convinced that the Northern Lights were really spaceships looking for a place to land. It didn't help that I had seen every UFO movie made during the 1950s, and was scared of my own shadow. I'm not saying that UFOs are real, but the UFO Anthology, a three-CD set for Windows and Macintosh computers, sure makes a strong case for their existence. The collection was made several years ago, but it contains an encyclopedic guide to UFOs up to that time.

SAN JOSE DE MAIPO, Chile - The snowcapped Andes have long attracted globetrotters, but the mayor of this picturesque Chilean mountain district insists that visitors are coming from even farther away - other galaxies and solar systems. Villagers have reported so many UFO sightings during the past two decades that Mayor Miguel Marquez will designate the region an official UFO tourism zone tomorrow. He plans to build two observation centers, erect signs where sightings have occurred, and offer workshops on topics such as how best to photograph aliens.

Two years ago, the National Security Agency began posting previously classified documents on its Web site to deflect the growing number of requests each year for information about flying saucers and space aliens. But the plan backfired. Rather than relieving suspicions that the agency is hiding information about unidentified flying objects, the result has been more people than ever demanding to see UFO documents. A record 36,000 people perused the UFO page last month. What has piqued UFO believers' interest is not so much what the documents on the Web site say - often little or nothing between the blacked-out censored sections - but their extraordinary volume: thousands of pages of unofficial reports and antiquated radio interceptions from abroad.

Celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie performs with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra tonight through Sunday, after a decade-long absence. The Grammy-winning Dame Commander of the British Empire will be the soloist in UFO, a big, brilliant work from 1999 by Michael Daugherty. Glennie, 43, was reached by phone in London. An assistant repeated the questions and the percussionist, profoundly deaf since the age of 12, lip-read them and then answered them in her light Scottish accent. Writing about UFO, Daugherty conjures up images of aliens, strange metal objects and Roswell, N.M. Do you have any particular convictions about interplanetary visitors and that sort of thing?

Donald Fedderson 81, producer of television shows ranging from "My Three Sons" and "Family Affair" to the musical programs of Liberace and Lawrence Welk, died Sunday in Los Angeles after a long illness stemming from heart problems.Noel Pointer, 40, a contemporary jazz violinist and composer, died Tuesday in New York of a stroke. He made his solo debut at age 13 as a classical violinist performing with the Symphony of the New World Orchestra in New York. He recorded seven solo albums, including "Phantazia," which went platinum.

What the movie-making Kuchar Brothers have lacked in budget they have made up for in imagination. At the end of a Cold War film, they piled chairs atop the actors to represent the aftermath of a bomb blast. For a ship scene, somebody off-screen tossed water onto the actors to simulate waves splashing onto a nonexistent ship's nonexistent deck. When they needed sunlight to shoot by, they'd go on the rooftops of the Bronx neighborhood where they grew up. The 57-year-old twins, George and Mike Kuchar, made dozens of needless-to-say noncommercial, mostly short movies in the 1950s and 1960s.