UFO BELIEVERS: `NO BEANIES OR TREKKIES'
07/18/93
THE SEATTLE TIMES

Sharon Filip says alien beings have visited her for the past
four decades.

Her most recent experience was two years ago on a September
morning at her Kirkland home. She woke from a dream and saw
something staring at her with black, liquid eyes. The creature had a
yellowish tint and a sky-blue glow circling its head.
Filip was not afraid.

"I felt as if I was visited by a friend I had known forever,"
Filip said yesterday as she sat outside a seminar on Mysteries on
the Surface of Mars. "I had a sense of oneness with the universe."
Filip, now director of the UFO Abduction Studies Center, was
one of 250 participants at the Seattle UFO Research Conference,
where believers in extraterrestrials gathered in the Grand Ballroom
of the Bellevue Hyatt Regency to discuss the latest research on
third encounters and abductions - the phenomenon of being kidnapped
by aliens.

It was a low-key event, not much different than the convention
of insurance agents going on next door.

Topics at the two-day conference  ranged from artifacts on Mars
to government secrecy. Participants talked about their latest
abductions, examined computer-enhanced photos of extraterrestrials
and picked up pamphlets on how to interpret crop-circle language.
Today's seminars will feature John Mack, a psychiatrist from
the Harvard Medical School, who will give his perspective on UFO
abductions; and Fred Alan Wolf, a physicist and author, who will
talk about the "Dreaming Universe."

Organizers said participants include teachers and university
professors as well as psychologists whose clients say aliens
abducted them.

"There are no beanies or Trekkies here," said John Carpenter,
a hypnotherapist from Springfield, Mo., who treats abductees. He led
a seminar on multiple-participant abductions. "They're not wearing
T-shirts saying, `I've seen an UFO.' "

"Abductees are much like Vietnam veterans who saw some awful
things or people who have lost loved ones in a tornado," said
Carpenter. "The experience is just too much. They are knocked off
their centers."

There's no pattern among those who believe they've been
abducted by alien beings, Carpenter said, and many abductees have
friends and family who don't believe them.

Filip says she doesn't know why alien beings visit her. She
does know they keep coming back. They don't talk to her but make her
feel their emotions. There have been times when the visits have been
scary.

"One of them stared at me so hard that I felt like its eyes had
tentacles and was reaching into my soul and my entire being," Filip
said.

Marilyn Childs, a baby-boomer from Bothell, heads the local
chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network Inc.,  which has 100 active
members. She said she has had hundreds of visits or "missing-time
episodes" involving space aliens. She believes they are beings from
the future who are checking up on their ancestors.

Her last missing-time episode occurred Jan 11, 1992, she said,
while she and a friend drove in her van eastbound on Interstate 90
toward Issaquah. Somewhere along the highway, they entered a "black
void" and time stopped.

And that was all. It was as ordinary as that.

"I kept asking, `Where are the lights of Bellevue? Where are
the lights of Issaquah?' "  Childs said. "All I saw was black
darkness."

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