By MICHAEL BOYLAN
Weekend Editor

The truth is out there and Tom Sheets wants to find it.

Sheets is the state director for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, a group dedicated to the scientific investigation of UFO sightings.

MUFON has a chapter in almost every state of the union as well as in several foreign countries. Members approach their investigations as if they were criminal investigations, searching every avenue and weighing many possibilities.

For Sheets, the investigations are a piece of cake. He was a detective in College Park for a number of years before becoming chief of police there. He retired in 1995 but his work with MUFON keeps him busy.

The first thing that needs to be explained is that MUFON is not a fringe group. It is made up of people from all walks of life; homemakers, educators, policemen, ex-military personnel, physicists and geologists. The new international director of MUFON is John Schussler, a former employee of NASA.

Membership in the Georgia chapter is over 70 people and the number continues to grow. In fact, there is a meeting open to the public in Griffin Sunday, Nov. 14. The goal of the group is to determine what people are seeing when they see UFOs.

“The large majority of sightings are misidentified aircraft,” explains Sheets. “They can also be celestial objects or natural phenomena.” While they find that lots of times the sightings are natural or man made, they still believe that some of the sightings are of objects not of this world.

Sheets saw his first UFO in the mid 1960s. Always interested in astronomy, he and some colleagues were out snapping photos of star clusters. While they were preparing their equipment, they saw a V-shaped formation with unusual lights flying east to west in the night sky. The crafts in the formation flew at a very high rate of speed and some objects left the formation. Sheets knew that the objects were traveling too fast to be airplanes, but he called some relatives who were high ranking officials at the airport.

“There were no flights over that part of Atlanta at that time,” said Sheets, “and that started my lifelong study in UFOs.”

The first group that Sheets joined was ISUR, the International Society for UFO Research, where he eventually became a member of the board of directors. While studying and investigating sightings with ISUR, Sheets was also hearing reports from citizens that sought his help as a policeman. “People knew that they could come talk to me and I wouldn't laugh,” Sheets said. “They still can.”

The history of sightings in America goes back a long way. One of the earliest was in 1870 by a man named Charles Fort. Fort was an investigator of the strange and supernatural and he reported seeing an unidentified flying object, but the heyday for UFOs, that is, until now, was during and after World War II.

Anti-aircraft batteries picked up UFOs in their spotlights and fired upon them and many flight crews reported seeing crafts shaped like orbs or spheres following their planes. They called the unidentified crafts “foo fighters,” which is where the popular rock band got its name. There were suspicions that the crafts were of German origin but that turned out not to be true. Can thousands of fighter pilots, navigators and bombardiers be wrong?

The crafts that people reported seeing then and now have many similarities. They appear to be under intelligent control and they travel at speeds and in directions that cannot possibly be performed by humans. “The technology does not exist,” said Sheets. “Many of the sightings are just military aircraft. The stealth bomber was a secret for at least 10 years before it was announced to the public. But our crafts cannot make a standing start and accelerate immediately to rates of 1,000 miles per hour or make 90 degree turns at incredible speeds.”

So, just what are these objects that fly through the night sky? What was the source behind the loud booms and alleged sightings that occurred in West Georgia and Alabama in August? We hear about strange occurrences and then never get an explanation.

Is it a conspiracy like the “X-Files” television show proclaims? Are the objects escaped craft from Area 51? Are the aliens looking to land in a new Roswell, perhaps one in Georgia? Sheets, and many other members of MUFON, don't think so.

“Half of the stuff you read and see on television about Roswell and Area 51 and UFOs and aliens is malarkey,” Sheets said. “Pop culture detracts from serious research and makes all groups look like kooks.” As for the incident this summer, a former state director of MUFON conducted an investigation into the booms and sightings. Both GEMA and the GBI conducted an investigation into the incident and neither group interviewed any of the more than 20 witnesses involved. There will be a video presentation at MUFON's meeting this weekend concerning his investigation.

Also on hand at the meeting will be Officer Michael Hill of the Roswell Police Department (seriously). He is the local historian for MUFON and has written a book, “Georgia's UFO Phenomena, 1947-1987.” There will be a question and answer period with the MUFON staff for the public and there will be a discussion on recent sightings in Israel and elsewhere internationally.

MUFON seeks credibility and to not be associated with fringe groups. Members feel that there is something out there, and even they do not know what it is yet. Some members of the group believe it is extra-terrestrials, while others believe there is a perfectly logical explanation behind the sightings. As for Sheets, he sides with some of the popular physicists of the day.

“People like Stephen Hawking and Dr. Wolf believe that multiple universes exist side by side,” Sheets explained. “I don't think these craft traveled from 10,000 light years away; I think they found a way to pass through into our reality. A sort of quantum state.”

Wherever you fall on this topic, it certainly opens doors for some very interesting discussion. MUFON tries to meet every other month and will meet this Sunday at the Holiday Inn in Griffin at 1 p.m. The meeting is free and open to the public. Tom Sheets also is available to talk to at anytime. He can be reached on-line at MUFONGA@webtv.net.

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