Aliens aren’t coming; we’re already here

One small move for Peter B. Davenport.

One giant leap for flying saucer research in the Inland Northwest.

Davenport, who directs the National UFO Reporting Center, is in the process of relocating his operation from Seattle to a rundown Cold War missile site he recently purchased in Lincoln County.

This is stellar news. It’s like having a piece of the spaced program right in our own backyard.

Spokane. Near Neptune. Near Pluto.

Davenport won’t set a target date for physically moving into the massive underground bunker, which is about five miles south of the city of Davenport. (How about that for a cosmic coincidence?)

The new digs are dirty and decrepit. The site is in dire need of a serious makeover before it is elevated to a West Sider’s standard of habitation.

But Davenport says he is up to the task. Plus, running a UFO clearinghouse out of a defunct missile site has a lot of promotional sizzle. It certainly grabbed my attention.

As long as we’re talking drawbacks, it must be mentioned that this is the same place where a state tax auditor was ambushed, shot and dismembered in 2002. Ralph H. Benson, a creepy long-haul trucker, was convicted of murdering Roger Erdman when he showed up at the missile site to audit the trucker’s books. Benson died in prison in 2004.

Davenport, who says he bought the property from Benson’s son for $100,000, is not given to silly superstitions like bad karma or ghosts.

He is a well-educated, serious-minded guy who believes “our planet is visited by other intelligent creatures on a regular basis.”

That was just one of the fascinating things I learned the other day during a lengthy telephone interview. Interview is a poor choice of words. It’s more like receiving a lecture.

Davenport, who says he saw his first UFO as a 6-year-old in 1954, is loaded with facts, figures and theories that all point to a few dramatic conclusions:

1. UFOs are real.

2. The government is covering it up.

3. The press ain’t doing diddly-do about it.

I took a liking to Davenport despite his pontificating. He has one of those measured, mellifluous radio voices, which is understandable since he is a go-to UFO expert for chat shows.

His IQ is probably stratospheric, too. According to his bio, Davenport has an M.B.A. in finance and international business and an M.S. in the genetics and biochemistry of fish. He was once a Russian translator, too.

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.

Davenport took over the National UFO Reporting Center in 1994. The organization was founded 20 years earlier by Robert J. Gribble, a retired Seattle firefighter. Since its inception, the center’s hot line and online report form has logged untold thousands of UFO sightings of all shapes and sizes.

Take this report filed out of Florida: “A woman awakens and walks to her screened bedroom window. She sees a self-luminous spherical object hovering above the ground. A cat notices objects, which suddenly streak away.”

Beam me up, Tabby.

Most of the claims are presumably sincere. But while checking out the National UFO Reporting Center Web site, I saw that there has been a disturbing recent rash of prank telephone calls.

“We already are severely overworked, and we do not welcome having to handle what has become dozens of abusive calls per day from ill-disciplined children.”

I agree. Listen up, you little brats. Do not dial the UFO hot line – (206) 722-3000 – unless you have a legitimate extraterrestrial experience to report.

Davenport is single. That’s probably for the best. Selling a spouse on the idea of moving into this mother of all fixer-uppers wouldn’t be easy. The missile site sits on 21-plus acres. Davenport said it comes with two wells and 18,000 square feet that is ensconced in 3 million tons of cement and steel.

A bunker like that could come in mighty handy if that runt of a North Korean dictator actually starts World War III.

Several times during our “interview,” Davenport took the opportunity to kick my journalistic profession right square in the asteroid. He contends that we members of the press are a bunch of lazy no-goods who have turned an institutional blind eye to unidentified flying objects such as the huge mysterious lights that hovered over Phoenix back in 1997.

When I told him I didn’t know anything about any hovering Phoenix lights, Davenport sounded pretty disgusted. I felt like a total boob who didn’t even know how old the country is.

“You guys reside in caves much more than owners of missile sites,” he said.

Ouch! You know, I’m not going to get defensive. Davenport is right. We journalists have fumbled the UFO ball.

I could use the excuse that we have been preoccupied by trivialities like suicide bombers and terrorist subway plots. But if you think you can handle the truth, Mr. Davenport, here it is.

We journalists ARE SPACE ALIENS. We’ve adopted human form and slithered into our jobs with one purpose: to keep the lid on our invasion.

Soon the world will be ours. There is nothing you poor Earthlings can do about it.

Klaatu barada nikto!