Anyone who thinks UFOs aren't serious business hasn't met Peter Davenport.

The acclaimed UFO investigator has spent more than 20 years fielding calls and written reports of UFO activity as the director of the National UFO Reporting Center. He's a staunch believer - if it can truly be called a matter of belief for a man so reliant on evidence - having investigated countless UFO sightings and experienced at least five himself.

"And they were good ones," Davenport said Saturday at McMenamins' UFO Festival in McMinnville.

On the surface, the UFO Festival may appear as pure frivolity with its costume parade and campy alien merchandise. That an expert like Davenport has been a regular speaker for more than half of the festival's 17-year existence would indicate otherwise.

To understand the nature of the festival, you need only understand the difference between having fun and making fun.

Sure, it has its wacky bits like the parade, which brought out alien impersonators of all varieties and turned cars and wagons into UFOs Saturday. But the silly parts comprise just a small part of the four-day event.

This year's conference focused on the 1997 mass sighting known as the Phoenix Lights, with eyewitnesses and other experts who've dealt with the case. In his talk Saturday morning, Davenport shared enough evidence to erase nearly any doubt that something otherworldly flew over Arizona and New Mexico that night.

But you don't have to believe to enjoy the UFO Festival.

"There has to be a certain amount of levity," Davenport said, otherwise the lectures, documentary screenings and panel discussions might start to seem a bit stodgy. And for all the work he's put into educating festival attendees over the years on the more than 60,000 reports his database holds, Davenport said he's never been bothered by an alien mask or pair of silvery antennae.

Still, he stuck with his sport coat and tie as he waved to the parade watchers from a car.

No, it's not the people who have a little fun with the notion of alien life visiting Earth that bother Davenport. It's the people who ignore it altogether.

He decries the media at large, in particular, for neglecting to report some of the most dramatic UFO sightings, like the Phoenix Lights.

"If they can engage in the frivolous nonsense that they do," he said, all the talk of Kardashians and Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan's driving record, "why would they ignore this?

"This is the biggest scientific question in the history of humankind. Are we alone or not?"

The only explanation he can come up with with for any lack of coverage is that news outlets want tidy tidbits of information, concrete factoids free of conjecture.

But ufology, as the study of UFOs is called, isn't always tidy. Davenport's presentation on the Phoenix Lights reports included varied descriptions of the v-shaped crafts that apparently hung over the Southwest on March 13, 1997. And as convincing as the data Davenport and his peers have compiled might be, convincing still isn't concrete.

At the very least, though, perhaps the public ought to know that organizations like Davenport's National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network exist. If you can't read reports of every potential UFO sighting in the newspapers, you can read them in online databases (more than 50 Oregon sighting reports have landed in Davenport's in 2016).

They're not always tidy, but they can be awfully fascinating. And, for people like Davenport, serious business.

--Dillon Pilorget

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