Virginia Beach UFO club takes off

By Ricardo Lopez

VIRGINIA BEACH

Mae Burdette knows that when she mentions UFOs and extraterrestrials, her statements often fall on skeptical or even deaf ears.

But at the second meeting of a newly formed UFO Club, Burdette found an audience willing to listen with an open mind.

She told a group of 20 people Wednesday night at the Princess Anne Area Library about her experiences with alien abductions, mysterious men in dark suits and her ability to foresee events, such as a neighbor's house fire.

"The club is about bringing people together and putting their experiences into perspective," said Burdette, 64, who lives in Chesapeake.

Cameron Pack, 25, created the UFO Club so people like Burdette can share their experiences and connect with others who have felt marginalized after speaking about peculiar events.

He began to advertise the club through fliers distributed at local holistic healing stores and in a classified ad. About a dozen people attended that first meeting.

"People have been wanting to have this for a long time," said Pack, a Virginia Beach resident.

Pack, who works part time in retail, is a local field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network. He became interested in UFOs after seeing a triangular object in the sky with many bright lights in 2003.

Pack is passionate about his investigative work. He receives assignments to look into UFOs from his director. He interviews witnesses, collects any evidence and updates the network's nationwide database with a completed report.

Pack carries a briefcase packed with reports, a camera and a field manual on how to conduct inquiries. He is not paid for his work, even though it takes up a lot of his time.

In a little more than a month on the job, he's worked on about 25 cases.

"Cameron is new, but he's very good," said, Susan

Swiatek, the network's state director. "We're glad to have him aboard. He writes well, and he writes copious quantities in his reports."

Most of the sightings are reported directly to Mutual UFO Network on its Web site, but some are forwarded by Virginia Beach police dispatch, a practice that began in the 1970s.

A 1976 letter from the Advance Research of UFO Organization to then-Chief of Police William Davis requested that the Police Department forward UFO sighting reports to the organization.

Shortly after, an internal memo sent to dispatchers instructed them to take reports and then call UFO Central to relay the information.

An officer is rarely sent out to investigate, said Sue Frazier, a dispatch supervisor.

Several dozen reports have come in to dispatch since then, and most people never figure out an object and keep silent, Swiatek said.

"When you experience something like that, what you believe to be alien spacecraft, you really start to question yourself," said Terrell Cope-land, a Marine veteran who reported seeing a huge triangle-shape craft floating over a Suffolk shopping center in 2005. "You're just lost."

Copeland said people aren't open to talking about their experiences because they don't want to strain their relationships with work, family or friends.

"This club was necessary because there's nothing like it in the area," Copeland said.

Wednesday's meeting included a diverse group - 20-somethings, senior citizens, a married couple - and all showed genuine interest in hearing Burdette's experiences.

When a pair of men in dark suits approached her at work in 1973 in downtown Norfolk, Burdette said, they knew her husband, where he worked, how many children she had and other personal information. They questioned her, but she became spooked and asked them to leave. They returned a few days later, she said, and requested that she not tell anyone about them.

"Then I saw the movie 'Men in Black,' and I made the connection," she told the group. "I still don't know who they were to this day, but I knew something was suspicious."

Ricardo Lopez, (757) 222-5125, ricardo.lopez@pilotonline.com