Man Stays Grounded Checking UFO Reports

By WINSTON ROSS
The Sunday Oregonian
7-2-06

Lights in the sky - Greg Barnes is the go-to guy in the Florence area when there's a sighting

     FLORENCE -- Mike Johnson and his daughter, Brenna, were driving home to Woahink Lake from town one spring night in 1995 when Brenna turned around in her seat and saw a strange light hovering above the water.

The Johnsons knew exactly who to call: Greg Barnes, regional UFO investigator; a self-taught expert in the field of "UFOology."

Barnes began with his typical first question: "What do you see right now?" Then, "How do you feel about it?"

The latter query is nearly as important as the first, he said. It tells him whether the caller is panicked or calm, fearful or skeptical. That state of mind could affect a person's ability to report information accurately.

"A person who's awestruck responds differently than a person who's petrified," Barnes said. "The person who's afraid isn't so much interested in details; they just want the thing away from them."

Ultimately, Barnes drove to the Johnson house, not far from his own Woahink getaway. He missed seeing the lights himself but wound up interviewing 11 people who claimed they'd seen either the lights or the floating, silent object that carried them, before the object veered west and glided out toward the ocean, reportedly disrupting cable television signals throughout Florence in its wake.

Barnes knows his hobby and his business card adorned with a flying saucer place him squarely on the fringe.

"You're easily branded a nut," he said. "I have to accept that, with this topic. What we have here is ordinary people seeing extraordinary things. A whole lot of what people see are obviously misidentifications; fishing boats, that kind of thing. People tell us, 'Oh, that's just something that Lockheed made.' But I doubt very seriously the government would test their latest, greatest underwater machines in Florence."

Mike Johnson, for one, isn't sure whether what he saw was of this planet. But he's willing to accept that it might not have been.

"I think it would be extremely egotistical not to think there's other intelligent life out there, being that there are probably 100 billion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, and there have got to be hundreds of galaxies," Johnson said.

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See Also: “UFO” Spotted Over Oregon, Washington!