EDMONTON
-- The two men didn't want their names used for fear of ridicule, but they had a
story to tell. It haunts their dreams and has forever changed the way they look into the night sky, said the men, who came, as did about two dozen others, to the first conference of the Alberta UFO Study Group on Saturday afternoon.
Around 2 a.m. on April 29, 1997, the two men were driving between Valleyview and Grande Prairie when a bright red light approached them from above, one of the men recalled.
The wind around them picked up, they fell unconscious, and awoke in a space ship, he said. "I remember I was fighting them and I kicked one between the legs, but they didn't have no testicles," one of the men said.
He said he looked at his friend, who had some sort of golden apparatus in his mouth.
"Then they probed me," he said, with tears beginning to well in his eyes.
"I remember it as clear as yesterday."
He said he blacked out and when he regained consciousness he was back in his car, speeding down the same highway in the wrong direction. It took them more than six hours to make a 45-minute trip.
Physically, the former bull rider said he felt as sore as if he'd competed in a rodeo the night before.
"I was quiet for two or three weeks, then I started to remember it," he said. "I still have dreams."
The men came to the rented room at University of Alberta Conference Centre, as others did, with an intense or personal interest in unexplained phenomena. They gathered to share experiences, philosophies, conspiracy theories, even skepticism, at the day-long event organized by Jim Moroney, a health and safety inspector with his own life-changing story to tell.
The executive director of the Alberta Municipal Health and Safety Association says he was driving from Edmonton to Ontario several years ago when he stopped his car near Winnipeg.
Moroney discounts theories that he might have temporarily fallen asleep on his feet. He maintains he was completely awake and standing next to his car to get some fresh air when a UFO appeared -- a big bright object that hovered above him for six or seven seconds before disappearing.
"It was probably about 20 feet above me," he said. " I still get shaky talking about it, but the air underneath it was dead."
He's uncomfortable recounting the story in public. "It would be silly to say that I wouldn't be nervous some people would be prejudiced against me because of my ideas on these phenomena," he said.
But like others at the conference, he believes there needs to be serious study into unexplained stories shared by so many people around the globe.
"We have to invite skepticism into this because it is only through challenging this through scientific means and really being honest about these challenges, that we'll filter out a body of evidence that is irrefutable one way or the other."
Former pilot Ken Burgess, who investigates UFO sightings for the group, isn't about to speculate about the strange object he saw above a plane he was flying. He's angered by tales of little green men, because they damage serious inquiry into the subject. But he knows he saw what he saw.
He has talked to people who have reported all kinds of objects in Alberta's skies. Some sightings have been as recent as last month -- giant flying black triangles above St. Albert.
"I just take the information and try to track it down," he said. "Did they pick it up on radar or did anyone else see it?"
The conference also heard from Fern Belzil, one of the world's top authorities in cattle mutilation. In the past eight years, the 80-year-old rancher from St. Paul has investigated more than 100 cases, the last ones just a few weeks ago.
Since the mad-cow crisis, farmers have generally kept quiet when their cattle or other animals are found with lips, tongues, udders, genitals, noses, eyes and rectums removed with surgical precision.
Showing slide after slide of mutilations, he insists he can instantly see differences between inexplainable injuries and those caused by predators or maggots.
Belzil is not certain what is happening to the animals.
"A lot of arrows point towards aliens," he said. "But we have no proof."