UFO Conference Draws True Believers and the Curious

Patty Wolfer, a soft-spoken computer operator for a Torrance law firm, does not usually tell strangers about her rides aboard spaceships from other planets.

But this weekend, in the ballroom of a hotel in Inglewood, she made an exception.

“Sometimes it’s at night,” she said quietly, “and I’ll just be taken. . . . I saw or was in this place and my energy was all different. And as I turned around, I saw all the panels of the spaceship. I turned and I saw this person in the corner and he was very tall and he was wearing a black wet suit, sort of. I saw that he was beaming me through, to be up there in this spaceship. . . .

“One time in Hawaii I was completely awake. . . . They came in a form of lights and they went into my body and they scared me. I screamed because I didn’t know what was going on. It was like they were researching.”

Looking for Believers

Wolfer, 31, said she went to a weekend gathering at the Quality Inn because she thought she might find some sympathetic listeners.

She found a few. About two dozen, including believers and the curious, attended the two-day conference on Unidentified Flying Objects, sponsored by New Frontiers, a Malibu group that founder Marc Michaels calls “a metaphysical society.”

The conference, which Michaels said is part of his “psychic journey seminar series,” touched on a wide range of topics that, one might safely say, were out of this world.

For $99.99, participants heard from, among others, Frances Steiger, who said she once used psychic energy to will a spaceship to fly over her house.

Others included R. A. Amigron, a “psychic archeologist,” who believes he has found evidence of an ancient city buried in the hills of Malibu, and Alan Vaughan, a psychic who--in addition to claiming that he predicted Watergate, the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the Challenger space shuttle disaster--practices “channeling,” in which he says a 1,200-year-old Chinese man named Li Sung enters his body and speaks through him.

A former skeptic of such alleged phenomena, Michaels, 33, spent 12 years in business (marketing, retailing and advertising) before his self-proclaimed psychic awakening several years ago during a seminar in Sedona, Ariz., an area known in metaphysical circles as “an energy vortex.”

Michaels founded New Frontiers a year ago and runs it full time out of a house on his Point Dume property.

His mission: to enlighten the skeptical public.

Enlightenment, however, does not come cheap. So far, Michaels said, he has spent $80,000 on the venture.

Sees Possibilities

“We’re appealing to the guy and girl next door,” he said. “The person who sends their kids to school, the guy that’s been going to his office for the last 18 years and had some psychic experience that he didn’t want to talk about, because he didn’t want to be considered crazy.

“There’s a lot of people like that out there.”

For instance, there’s Philip McAiney. A Beverly Hills film producer and director, McAiney said he has just finished a documentary about channeling narrated by actor Telly Savalas. However, he is mum about his own experiences.

“I’ve just made a policy not to really discuss it.”

Estelle Delgado, a retired schoolteacher from Hawthorne, has never seen a UFO.

“I’m just interested,” she explained. “I think think there’s a genuine possibility there are UFOs of some sort, and I think they might help us save our planet.”

Edith Santos, a retired apartment manager from Los Angeles, said she saw a UFO 30 years ago, but has not seen one since. She said she has always maintained a curiousity about life on other planets, but is leery of people who say they have been scooped up into flying saucers and carried to faraway galaxies.

“There’s so many loony tunes around,” she said. “You don’t know whether they’re telling the truth.”

Just as there are skeptics, however, there are believers. And where else to find believers but in Los Angeles?

“I just saw a UFO coming back from Sedona, Ariz., and the harmonic convergence (last summer),” said Topanga resident Tony Selvage, who plays New Age music on an electric violin-viola. “I’ve sighted them many times. I’ve played to them. My music is where they come from.”

Among the most fervent believers on the weekend’s speaking roster were Sherie Stark and Vicki Cooper, editors of UFO magazine.

Name Change

The two journalists used to call the publication “California UFO.” But Stark said it is difficult enough trying to establish a national magazine about a topic like UFOs without having California’s name attached to it.

“They (others in the publishing industry) told us California was too flaky,” she said.

Stark and Cooper say they are trying to do what they say the conventional press hasn’t: report the UFO story in a non-sensational, unbiased and serious fashion.

It’s a tough assignment, Stark said. After all, she explained, how can you report the facts on something that disappears without warning, changes form and renders witnesses incapable of describing what they have seen?

Despite such obstacles, the magazine carries articles about UFO sightings and alleged government cover-ups of such activity, and also advertises therapy and support groups where abductees (that’s UFO-talk for people who, like Wolfer, say they have been taken away by aliens) can talk about their extraterrestrial experiences “in a safe environment.”

Wolfer does not seem to yearn for such support. Nor does she doubt the reality of her alien visitors.

“I’ve always been responsible,” she declared. “I am a normal person. I go about my daily work and I’ve had experiences with extraterrestrials.”

As for the possibility that her experiences were drug- or alcohol-induced, Wolfer quickly dismisses it.

“I’m not on drugs,” she said. “I don’t need them.”