Unlike Agent Mulder in The X-Files, Bob Gardner doesn't want to believe - he has to believe.

By, Jeff Gammage

Bob Gardner became a believer almost 20 years
ago when he spied a UFO over Franklin Mills Mall.
Now, he's a field investigator for the Pa. MUFON

For him, sneaking suspicion turned to concrete certainty one winter night in early 1989, when he saw a dark, cigar-shaped object hovering about 60 feet off the ground near Franklin Mills Mall.

He got out of his car to watch - and seemed to sense, he said, that at one point the object was watching him. After almost five minutes, the craft silently moved away through the sky.

"Some people laugh it off and say I'm nuts," Gardner said. "Some people say, 'Yeah, there is stuff out there."

On Sunday, Gardner, a 40-year-old former maintenance supervisor turned flying-saucer investigator, will help run the Philadelphia area's first "UFO Public Awareness Day."

Yes, like penguins, malaria and methamphetamines, UFOs now have their own awareness event. Of course, you might wonder exactly what a UFO awareness day would raise awareness of. Imminent alien invasion? Impending death from the skies? - Nothing so drastic.

The Pennsylvania chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON, declared the special day after a series of sightings in Bucks County, hoping to recruit new members, take reports of encounters, and share UFO history with believers and skeptics. The gathering is less a formal seminar than a chance for people to meet and discuss their shared curiosity.

It will be held - where else? - at Germ, the conspiracy-and-apocalypse bookstore in the city's Fishtown section. The 114-member chapter plans awareness days for several Pennsylvania cities this summer.

His field manual at the ready, UFO investigator Bob Gardner
prepares for Sunday's UFO Public Awareness Day, to be held
at Germ bookstore in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia.

MUFON, among the oldest and largest UFO organizations, with 2,500 members worldwide, contends that after 36 years of study, three things are certain: We are not alone in the universe. Our planet is visited by intelligent beings. More scientific study is needed.

Plainly, there's enormous public interest in the topic. Type the letters U-F-O into Google, and you get 69 million search results.

This month, The X-Files: I Want To Believe arrives in theaters, six years after the demise of the TV show. The popular History Channel program UFO Hunters, which follows a band of "ufologists" looking for evidence and explanations, is preparing for a second season.

UFO sightings in the Keystone State go back at least to the 1965 Kecksburg incident, known as "Pennsylvania's Roswell." That year, people in the hamlet near Pittsburgh saw something crash into the woods. Firefighters reported finding an acorn-shaped object the size of a car. But military officials who arrived and blocked access to the area said their own search found nothing. Four decades later, the incident continues to confound researchers.

Some are bewildered now by the strange craft and blinking lights said to have appeared in the sky near the Oxford Valley Mall. Since the beginning of June, MUFON has taken 21 reports of UFOs in the Philadelphia area, and hopes to get more on Sunday.

"We want people to . . . report their sightings," said John Ventre, director of the state MUFON chapter. "People are afraid to come forward because - no offense - the media makes fun."

MUFON has dispatched field investigators to Bucks County. You can be an investigator, too. First, you need to pay the $45 fee to join MUFON, and $45 more for the official Investigators Manual. Then you have to score at least 80 on a 100-question quiz. (It's open-book.)

If you pass, you qualify to interview witnesses and search for physical evidence of UFOs. You'll have to pay your own expenses, though. The job is strictly volunteer.

By definition, a UFO is anything traveling the sky that can't be identified. The ranks of those who say they've seen UFOs number in the thousands, perhaps millions, and include two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Explanations range from alien spaceships to time machines to top-secret government craft. But most UFOs eventually become IFOs, identified flying objects, the sightings resolved as common airships glimpsed in odd light, or as clouds, planets or weather phenomena.

Ventre, who said he works as the security director of a 400,000-employee firm that he declined to identify, estimates that 90 percent of sightings are explainable. It's the other 10 percent that intrigue.

He joined MUFON about 12 years ago - but saw his first UFO only last month. It was 10:15 p.m. on June 29, and he had just let his dogs out of his Pittsburgh-area home. He noticed a large, bright object flashing across the sky, moving slower than a meteor but much faster than a plane. In three seconds, it was gone. It left no contrail.

"Our military," he said, "has got nothing like that."

Gardner, of Northeast Philadelphia, has been interested in UFOs since he was a teen at Archbishop Ryan High School. Sidelined from work by a back injury, he joined MUFON in February and became an investigator the next month, seeking to document UFO sightings like his own.

"More people are coming forward, and they know they're not crazy, and they did see something," he said. "Their imagination wasn't running wild."

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