The Extraterrestrials of Indian Stream

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by Ellen Barry

Whatever the scientists might make of her, Sandy Black has brought many people in the North Country into the UFO fold. The Mutual UFO Network is the only national UFO-investigation network, and relies on its local representatives to spread the word among the populace. Along with Peter Geremia, the state MUFON director, Black has passed out innumerable business cards and introduced herself to innumerable strangers. She's tramped through the snow to knock on back doors.

"One of the things I try to instill in section directors is that you have people everywhere that are interested in the subject, and if they don't know you're there, it's going to be like looking for something in the dark without a flashlight," Geremia says. "Sandy has done an outstanding job of letting people know MUFON is there."

If the quantity of reports is any measure of success, then Black is succeeding. Locals are coming forward from every direction to say they had been seeing UFOs all along. Black attributes this to destigmatization. She knows how this works, because it happened with her own mother.

"She was really frightened when I first got into this stuff," Black recalls. "Now she sends me all these UFO magazines all the time. She actually took a cattle-mutilation report for me in Texas last year."

Black doesn't try to convince people --"It's like religion. People develop spiritually at their own rate," she explains. It's not really necessary, either; it is fairly common, for instance, for family members to follow each other into this realm. Johanne Rodrigue, a 33-year-old jeweler from Stewartstown, says there is only one person in her immediate family now who hasn't seen a UFO.

"It's funny the way it happened with my father," says Rodrigue, a bouffant brunette in a tiny miniskirt. "When I first joined MUFON, he had the greatest time with it." But he recently had another experience, Rodrigue says. "He comes to me and he goes -- he's got these big, big hands -- he says, `I'll put my hand right in the fire. It was real.' "

And once a person accepts that what they saw was real, UFO investigation is a welcoming world. Part of what drew Black into the field was an expansive quality among the investigators she meets; they have "kind souls," she says. Black herself has the same quality -- she is engaged, and open, and infinitely reassuring, if a little overcome by wayward case files.

And she's had some success in recruiting investigator trainees -- 10 local people are card-carrying members. As with any volunteer network, recruiting is part of the job. The MUFON Investigator's Handbook advises recruiters that "civic, fraternal and professional organizations offer excellent opportunities for recruitment, as their members are typically intelligent, enthusiastic and proven joiners."

The "Elks Club" quality disturbs John Horrigan, who runs Boston's Paranormal Investigative Lecture League. Recruiting is a double-edged sword: it roots out unreported sightings, but it also prompts bogus ones. And one particularly charismatic field investigator can easily touch off a flap, he says.

"When you go in there, you're bringing a pathology with you. Bang, the UFO bug has hit the state of New Hampshire," Horrigan says. "When you have a small neighborhood, word gets around. The story is told and retold. It's a nice little literary genre."

To a certain degree, though, that's the point; Ray Fowler says grassroots UFO investigators like Black are doing the job that the government should have been doing all along: "conditioning" the populace to believe in the presence of extraterrestrial life.

"In a small way . . . MUFON [is] conditioning people without the government having to do anything," Fowler says. At press time, 48 percent of the American public believed in UFOs.

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.