Posted Tuesday, January 23, 2018 7:00 pm

When The New York Times broke a story Dec. 16 about how the U.S. Department of Defense had funded a $22 million program to investigate unidentified flying objects from 2007 to 2012, the Washington state members of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) regarded the Times as late to the party.

Port Townsend’s Maurene Morgan has served as the Washington state director of MUFON since the middle of June 2017.

Morgan said MUFON of Washington received five new reports within 24 hours of its already scheduled Jan. 20 Olympic UFO Meet-up at the Port Townsend Friends Meetinghouse. During that meeting, at least two to three dozen attendees discussed The New York Times news article on UFOs with a level of skepticism that one might not expect from a group that pop culture has associated with the motto “I Want to Believe.”

Although MUFON has roughly 5,000 members across the United States, Morgan explained that the group has 12 investigators to cover the entire state of Washington.

Those investigators have been kept busy. MUFON of Washington has received 135 reports since Morgan took over as state director. She only has three days to assign a report to each investigator, and they have only 90 days to complete their investigation.

‘NOT CRAZY’

“As UFOs get more mainstream coverage, I think we’re getting more sightings, because people are saying, ‘I’m not crazy after all,’” said Morgan, who is quick to point out that MUFON of Washington has “the third- or fourth-highest rate” of reported sightings in the United States.

At the same time, Morgan freely acknowledges that, with the number of “high-value military installations” in Washington, “it can be a challenging state to do UFO investigations in.”

Morgan hopes to get three new field investigators trained soon. However, their manuals are still in transit, and she’s assigned eight cases to herself in the meantime.

Morgan was heartened to see the Times devote such coverage to UFOs, especially with published UFO investigator Leslie Kean as one of the journalists credited with writing the piece.

Those who attended MUFON of Washington’s Jan. 20 meeting were far from feeling credulous or validated by the Times’ coverage, and instead expressed concerns that this seeming bombshell of disclosure might merely represent an even deeper conspiracy by the government.

While the attendees of the meeting requested not to be photographed or identified by name, in keeping with Morgan’s pledge that such meetings would serve as “a safe space, where you can say what you want without other people rolling their eyes,” they freely exchanged theories about the possible nature of UFOs, as well as what might motivate the mainstream press and government to release such a story.

A frequently voiced suspicion was that the government might be laying the groundwork to present extraterrestrials as the next threat to national security, requiring further increases in military spending and curtailments of civil liberties.

CONCERNS EXPRESSED

One woman alluded to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as an example of how such fears of “aliens” have been used against the populace. Morgan herself condemned the enactment of the Patriot Act in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“The powers that be are so far removed from the rest of us that they think the United States would fall apart if we disclosed that these things exist, and that they’ve been here for years,” said a retired military member who’s retained his regulation crewcut. “The only people who would really have to worry would be the power elites in politics and religion.”

Even as multiple attendees floated the idea that UFOs could be manifestations of extra-dimensional forces, rather than merely extraterrestrial intelligences, they sought to do a sanity check on their own theories, with Al Thompson, a field investigator for MUFON of Washington for the past two years, drawing self-aware chuckles from the crowd as he framed their discussions as dueling conspiracy theories.

“Why do we need conspiracy theories?” Thompson said. “Because the answers are unknown. We’re operating in a vacuum, because the government isn’t telling us anything, but even if they did, we wouldn’t necessarily believe them. That being said, no one came here because we believe that any one of us has the definitive answer.”

Thompson conceded that, as a MUFON field investigator, his inquiries are slightly less rigorous than one based on the strict scientific method.

“We’re all writing our own mystery books,” Thompson said. “I’m there to hear these people’s histories, so that if and when E.T. walks through the door, you can say, ‘I told you so!’”

Morgan echoed Thompson’s priority of expressing empathy over obtaining clinical details in MUFON field investigations.

“Your most important job as an investigator is not getting the exact nuts-and-bolts details, but letting people know that you’ve heard them and they’re not crazy,” Morgan said. “Even if they’ve misidentified Venus or [the International Space Station], thank them for their report. I’ve had so many people start by telling me, ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy,’ until I remind them who they’re talking to.”

One man, a fan of UFO researcher Jacques Vallée, warned his fellow attendees against assuming that all such phenomena stems from the same causes. Even if UFOs do turn out to be manifestations of alien intelligences, he said, they could belong to different factions and be driven by conflicting motivations.

“I am so glad you said that,” a woman told him. She was one of a half dozen in the crowd who identified themselves as firsthand “experiencers” of such phenomena. “There are tons of things I’ve come across that I can’t prove, but I know what I experienced, because it happened to me. There are a lot of us who don’t want to talk about it in public, because we don’t want to be shuffled off to the margins of society. I like that this group is open to allowing us to express ourselves.”

As is her typical practice, Morgan invited those who wanted to talk further to come to her house, and welcomed anyone interested in joining MUFON of Washington, or in becoming one of its field investigators, to contact her by phone at 360-344-2991 or via email at:

olympic.ufo@gmail.com