TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADERS

Torrance author sets out his case that not only are UFOs here,

but that they seem to be flying around Washington, D.C.

By Melissa Heckscher • DAILY BREEZE • 11/ 17/06

Sitting in front of his computer inside the cozy pastel-colored house he shares with his wife and 11-year-old son, Torrance resident Robert Stanley looks surefootedly straight-faced as he points to a photo of a blurry blue blip in the night sky above the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. "You might look at this and say, 'Well this is real grainy. That's just a little blue dot, what does that have to do with anything?' " Stanley said, looking at the little blue dot in question, a hazy orb hovering near the illuminated white rooftop. "But when you get close up on the blue thing, you actually see that it's a sphere, and it's in motion."

Call him crazy, he doesn't care. He believes the "sphere" in the photograph — the little blue dot most people would chalk up to some kind of camera error — is a UFO. He doesn't know where it came from (other than, maybe, a galaxy far, far away), but he believes it's real. "Even if the president said, 'I saw a UFO landing out in front of my White House,' people are not going to accept it," he says. "They want to see it for themselves to believe it." In lieu of seeing-and-believing, Stanley is hoping his book, Close Encounters on Capitol Hill, a hulking 416-page tome of unbroken text, will convince them that not only are there such things as UFOs, but that there has been a veritable swarm of them around the nation's capital for at least 50 years.

The book is available only on Stanley's Web site. "I was skeptical about all of this," he said, adding that seeing anything in the skies above the Capitol is noteworthy given that it is restricted airspace. "But the more I looked into it, into the credibility of the photographers, it proves quite conclusively that something is going on in D.C. that is being ignored by the media." He knows people might question his credibility and, more importantly, his sanity. But he's done his research — using accounts from more than 200 alleged eyewitnesses and an assortment of photographic evidence, including an image he said was taken by a former ABC News photographer who spent eight years assigned to the White House.

According to Stanley, Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of UFO sightings in the world. Beginning with the first crop of unidentifiable spheres seen above Capitol Hill in 1952, his book chronicles the experiences and opinions of numerous UFO investigators and retired military officials, among them Air Force Col. Wendelle Stevens, a fighter pilot who became a UFO investigator after retiring from the military. "I recall a fighter intercept where two jets were vectored in on a formation of five or six illuminated spheres that were zipping around the Capitol area," Stevens says in the book. "The UFOs evaded the jets every time." Stanley has been interested in UFOs since he was a young child, when his uncle showed him a picture of a spherical silver disk appearing to sink vertically into a California desert.

Growing up in Malibu, the son of an ordained Self-Realization Fellowship minister, Stanley said he believes in God, but that such faith doesn't nullify the search for extraterrestrial life. "If God created this world with life" he said, "then why couldn't he create other worlds with life?" After graduating from Santa Monica College, Stanley worked in the emerging technologies department at Honda Motor Co. After retiring from the job in 2003, he began working as editor of Unicus, a magazine published by his wife, Irene Chen, whom Stanley met at a UFO conference 14 years ago. Unicus ("unique" in Latin) is billed as a "magazine for earthbound extraterrestrials."

"I know that there's a ridicule factor; I've dealt with it a long time," he said. "You can dispute this all day long. Anybody's welcome to dispute whether these are all lens flares [in the photographs], but what about all the eyewitness accounts? Are all these people nuts?" Clearly, crying "alien" isn't easy. But Stanley's not the only one doing it. There have been numerous accounts from well-known and so-called "credible" figures throughout history. John Lennon, David Bowie, former President Ronald Reagan — even Christopher Columbus, who spotted a "light glimmering at a great distance" while sailing to the New World in 1492 — have all claimed to have seen UFOs.

These days, more than half (56 percent) of the American public believe in UFOs, according to a 2002 Roper poll. Not only that, but nearly as many (48 percent) believe that UFOs have visited Earth, the poll said. "I think a lot of people see these things," Stanley said, "but who are you going to report it to?" There are a few organizations set up to field such reports. The National UFO Reporting Center in the state of Washington, for one, gets about 3,000 e-mails and phone calls a year. In 1976, former President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen something strange above the skies of Leary, Ga., (debunkers have called his sighting a misidentification of Venus). "It was the darndest thing I've ever seen," Carter reportedly said during his presidential campaign that year. "It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors, and it was about the size of the moon. We watched it for 10 minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. "One thing's for sure," he continued. "I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen unidentified objects in the sky."

Perhaps one of the most compelling reported UFO sightings occurred in 1997 when thousands of Arizona residents watched a large V-shaped formation of lights gliding across the sky for almost two hours. News teams swooped down on the story, calling the formation "the Phoenix Lights" and broadcasting eyewitness accounts, video footage and photographs. "The data speaks for itself," said Dr. Lynn Kitei, who won the best director award at the 2005 New York International Independent Film & Video Festival for her documentary, "The Phoenix Lights," which explored the March 13, 1997, incident. The Air Force later claimed the lights were flares dropped from an A-10 "Warthog."

"They've been seen everywhere on this planet," Stanley said of UFOs. "The Phoenix Lights definitely happened. I think it could happen again. Here's the bottom line. This is going to keep happening." Curious? To learn more about Robert Stanley's Close Encounters on Capitol Hill, go to: www.unicusmagazine.com

Article published on November 17, 2006 - © Daily Breeze