NUFORC Director Takes Scientific Approach To Study Of UFOs
One might ask why Peter Davenport, after 16 years at the helm of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and thousands of UFO sighting reports (and countless crank calls) into his tenure, persists in such a decidedly not-for-profit, largely thankless enterprise.
Technorati put that question to Davenport and got a healthy dose of good old fashioned professorial fury in reply.
“We’re dealing with the most significant scientific question that has ever confronted man,” says Davenport, whose C.V. includes degrees in Russian, genetics, biochemistry and international business from Stanford and the University of Washington.
“Are we alone, or are we not? From my point of view, the clear and resounding answer is that we’re not. If I were to stop what I’m doing, it would contribute to the government’s apparent desire to keep the American people in the dark.”
Davenport’s passion is shared by many in the field, though his credentials set him apart from most. A former Russian translator, flight instructor, college instructor and fisheries observer aboard Soviet fishing vessels, he founded and later cashed out of BioSyn, a 300-employee biotechnology company based in Seattle, before assuming the NUFORC directorship in 1994.
He now runs NUFORC’s 24/7 hotline and database out of his home, a two-bedroom apartment in Washington state roughly seven miles from the decommissioned Minuteman missile facility he owns and may one day occupy.
Or maybe not.
“I’m not quite the hermit that I thought I was when I purchased the site,” Davenport says. “It’s quite remote.”
The scientific approach
Throughout Technorati's one-hour interview , two things were made abundantly clear. The first is that Peter Davenport is, above all else, a scientist. He declines to speculate about anything, including people’s motives or any fact that he can’t verify. The other is that Davenport is exasperated with the consistent failure of journalists, scientists, and government officials to come to proper grips with the evidence that pours into NUFORC on a daily basis.
“When I look at the events in Washington, DC and across this nation, I get profoundly alarmed,” Davenport says. “It’s almost as if it’s a government that has no interest in serving the American people. I used to live in the Soviet Union as a Russian translator. What we routinely laughed about 31 years ago is now happening in the United States.”
Another issue that has caused Davenport considerable consternation is the lack of interest in a method he’s proposed for proving, once and for all, that American airspace is teeming with solid objects cable of maneuvers that would liquify any terrestrial occupant subject to the laws of physics as currently understood.
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