Pine Bush UFO Festival 2012

The backwoods farming hamlet of Pine Bush, New York has been dubbed the UFO Capital of the Northeast due to thousands of sightings of mysterious lights since the 1960s. Unexplainable things such as the giant craft dubbed the "Westchester Boomerang" have been known to cruise the sky, and the locals have become notorious targets for abductions and experiments.

For several months I’d been inching close to the New York community of extraterrestrial enthusiasts, attending gatherings arranged by internet meet-up, where stories and theories are openly shared and discussed. Disclosure Network New York is a small a bunch of truth-thirsty and conspiracy-driven shut-ins whose stories range from the typical abductions and penetrations to spiritual pranksters that trash their apartments. One month a guest speaker focused on her personal guardian angel ghost, which led to bickering about differences between aliens and spirits. The big topic of the UFO Roundtable meeting I recently went to in Yonkers was haunting orchestral sounds and vibrations heard at night, the unexplainable noises driving audiences wild with sleeplessness.

I can admit that I am a believer. My quest for the truth mixed with fascination with the people who live and breathe for this kind of weirdness led me two hours up the Hudson to the Pine Bush UFO Festival for a celebration of all things alien.

The main drag of town is kind of like an Anywhere, USA out of an old Twilight Zone episode. The paint is peeling off the old buildings and there's pretty much only one of each kind of business, surrounded by rolling farmland. This makes for an ideal UFO playground. It also makes me wonder what the hell these people do for fun the rest of the year.

Pulling onto Main Street Saturday morning, the scene looked like a church fair that had been barfed on by Alfie the Alien, the DayGlo-green mascot of the weekend. The E.T. Visitor Center saw the most action that day, with low-budget fair games and all kinds of crap for sale, from t-shirts to alien slime. Across the way, a teenage band played pop-punk covers in the gazebo. Several otherworldly costumed beings wandered around in their sci-fi-convention gear, posing for children with painted faces. This clearly wasn’t just a gathering of nocturnal researchers and UFO die-hards, but also a family-fun extravaganza that would ideally boost business revenue for the struggling town of Pine Bush, population 2,000.

I found the select serious enthusiasts intently listening to the speakers in the gym of EJ Russell Elementary School, where invited speakers and pro-UFO types shared their insight. The audience demographic mirrored what I’d found previously in other groups: mostly middle-aged on up to senior citizens, with ill-fitting clothing, unkempt hairstyles, and Velcro shoes.

First up was Robert Van Der Clock, a Vietnam vet and retired employee of the US Postal Service, where he worked for 37 years. The main theme of his presentation dealt with the skepticism of the government’s disclosure of UFO information and how he feels that he knows more than everyone else. With a frank and self-righteous tone, Van Der Clock was quick to draw lines snuffing out supposed encounters that described aliens with noses and genitals. He discredits these story-tellers as “a bunch of attention-seeking phonies.” Unfortunately, Van Der Clock had to leave before he could continue on with his pompous approach—as a Roy Orbison cover singer, he had a gig to get to.

Next: Dr. Bill Wiand, aka “the Wizard,” a native to the Hudson Valley who claims to have picked up his psychic skills over the course of his many abductions and encounters. He says aliens showed him the future and gave him the ability to read minds and connect on higher levels. His ET experience varies from a gang of small beings who kidnapped him and floated him around to full-size Greys who prodded him, utterly fascinated with his belly button—an orifice that they apparently don’t share with humans. Dr. Wiand, with his wise white beard and matching ponytail, spoke sincerely and was fairly convincing, even though he admitted to being a sci-fi movie buff, continually citing films such as Battlefield Earth, Men In Black, Cowboys and Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course Star Trek and Star Wars.

The gist of his lecture was based around a handout titled, Are You An Alien Experiencer?, which included a list of 25 questions to help us answer the overriding question for ourselves. Some of my favorites:

            9. Do you ever dream of flying?

            13. Do you ever feel like a tiny speck in the awesome magnitude of the Universe?

            16. Do you ever suffer from deep desire and longing of an unidentifiable origin?

            19. Do you ever find unexplainable marks or bruises on your body?

            21. Have you ever become aware that you completely missed a block of time?

            23. Do you ever hear people talking to you inside your mind?

As much as I want to believe in all this, what I gathered from the Wizard’s criteria is that experiencing aliens firsthand and discovering drugs and alcohol as an adolescent is pretty much the exact same thing.