A Site For Sightings -- From His Montlake Basement, Peter Davenport Catalogs Reports Of Ufos

I ring the door of the National UFO Reporting Center, which is actually a pleasant home near the Arboretum, and where the headquarters is a crammed basement office in that home.

When the calls come into its 206-722-3000 "manned 24 hours every day" phone number, it's likely you'll be talking to a man named Peter Davenport. He's 49, and shares the rental home with three others.

UFOs consume his life. "No woman would be dumb enough to marry someone like me, while I'm doing something like this," he tells me as we sit in the basement office, another UFO phone call having just come in.

A guy from a little town in Idaho is calling, hoping that Davenport has an explanation for what he saw the evening of June 24. The guy had gotten home from a construction job when he happened to look out the window. He saw a green ball of light streaking across the sky. Then the green ball of light blinked red twice, and disappeared. It all lasted maybe a couple of seconds.

"It's not like anything I've ever seen," the guy says. "I thought it might be an airplane going down, but they're not green. Every time I think about it, I wonder what the heck I saw."

The guy remembered hearing Davenport on a talk show. He called directory assistance in Seattle and asked for the UFO center's number. "It was kind of embarrassing," the guy says. There is that microsecond pause the operator has when you ask for the UFO phone number.

Davenport doesn't tell the guy, "Yeah, it was an alien spacecraft you saw." Davenport tries very hard to be analytical and scientific and all that.

"We get calls like yours on a consistent basis," he tells the guy. He asks the caller to send a written report, a drawing illustrating what he saw, and a map pinpointing the location that'll later be posted on the center Web site (http://www.ufocenter.com), a compilation of nationwide sightings that grows larger every day.

Davenport receives 10,000 to 20,000 phone calls a year - when you estimate calls about UFO sightings, people trying get information about UFOs, and his dealings with the press, which can get touchy.

These days, Davenport is quoted with some frequency on talk shows and in national publications. It is, after all, the 50th anniversary of Ken Arnold seeing flying saucers near Mount Rainier, and the 50th anniversary of that legendary "spaceship crash" outside Roswell, N.M.

And it is also a time when everything from the movie "E.T." to the TV show "The X-Files" has been cached in our consciousness. Not surprisingly, a CNN-Time magazine poll last month found that 22 percent of adult Americans believe we've had visitors from other planets.

"I'm exhausted," he tells me. "This is the same effect as an amoeba has on its prey."

Some of that exhaustion comes from dealing with the media, which sometimes are looking for a quick quote, and often ignore Davenport when he calls a city desk about the latest UFO sighting.

It's now been three years since he took over running the reporting center. Previously, Robert Gribble, a retired firefighter who founded the center in 1974, ran it from his South Seattle home.

Gribble funded the phones and other expenses from his own pocket, and so does Davenport, who now spends $5,000 to $10,000 of his savings on the center a year.

Davenport, not surprisingly, has a rather eclectic background. He earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford, specializing in biology and Russian, and then earned master's degrees from the University of Washington in fisheries and business. He's worked at everything from commercial fishing to teaching to translating Russian.

And, yes, he's seen UFOs several times, the first time when he was 6 and living in St. Louis. His family went to a movie drive-in, and his attention was drawn by the commotion of other moviegoers. In the sky, he saw an orange-red disc that cast a pall of red light on the ground. "Then, suddenly, it accelerated, and whoosh!" That memory never left him, and Davenport became fascinated by UFOs.

On the speakerphone, I'm now listening to another UFO call. Sometimes it's an answering machine you'll get when calling, but it well might be Davenport who'll personally take your report at 11 p.m. Dave Lindsay, 40, who runs Dave's Cappuccino coffeehouse in Collinsville, Ill., is telling about what he and two of his employees saw the evening of July 4. It definitely wasn't fireworks being shot off in that small town.

Later, Lindsay says, many of his clients told him they saw the same thing: "An extremely bright lime or mint-green light with a similar trail streaked across the sky." Then it just vanished. "I like to think I'm very rational and logical, but I've never seen anything quite like it," the coffeehouse owner later tells me. "I've seen falling stars, and meteor showers. But this appeared close, directly in front of us. I'm baffled. I don't know what to tell you."

That is one more sighting for the UFO Web site. "It is a very real phenomenon to any rational person," Davenport tells me. He uses careful wording, but he knows how easily a UFO expert can be ridiculed. It burns him how easily mainstream "corporate pinstripe" journalists can ignore him. We sit and talk in his basement office. Davenport plays tape recordings, including radio communication between the FAA and two commercial aircraft, in which the pilots tell the tower about this object they saw - a very bright object with a white light and a green tail.

He shows me e-mail from an air traffic controller describing yet another mysterious sighting. He shows me videotape of mysterious triangle-shaped lights seen March 13 by thousands in the Phoenix area, and for which there has been no explanation. I myself have never seen a UFO. But I do believe that Dave out there at Dave's Cappuccino saw something, and talking to him, he sounds like any other everyday small-business owner, like your neighbor.

In the basement office of the National UFO Reporting Center, the phone rings again. It's somebody else who wants to tell about something strange he saw in the sky.

There is no government agency that wants to take down such a report. The Air Force says it's out of the UFO investigation business. But Peter Davenport logs the call. He's keeping track. Someday, who knows? We might be very thankful he did.