Alien coffee club: Paranormal conference descends on area this weekend

Is there a big, mysterious hole in your life where "The X-Files" used to be? The kind of hole that makes dogs dig in their heels to avoid it? The kind of hole that doesn't make a noise when you throw something into it?

Then whisk yourself to the SeaTac Radisson Hotel for the Northwest UFO Paranormal Conference this weekend and get your fill of alien implants, remote viewing, flying saucers and the Ellensburg mystery known as "Mel's Hole."

"We're the real 'X-Files.' This is the real stuff," says organizer Charlette LeFevre of Kent. She heads the Seattle UFO Paranormal Group, formerly the Seattle Chat Club, originally the Seattle Art Bell Chat Club — which sponsors the event.

Formed by devotees of syndicated paranormal radio host Art Bell's late-night forays into the bizarre and the unexplained, LeFevre's group is "a local coffee club" whose members gather monthly to kick around the subjects and listen to guest speakers. (See www.seattlechatclub.org for details.)

"But I don't want to give people the impression that we're a 'Star Trek' convention. This is a conference," LeFevre says. "We're a very discerning group, and we do take this field very seriously."

Still, LeFevre, a 37-year-old sales graphics worker, nearly bursts with enthusiasm for the subject. She'll interrupt her excited monologues with "Oh, my God, ohmyGod!" if you say you don't know about the "Alien in the Freezer" controversy or alien-abductee investigator James Harder (both will be featured at the conference).

Last year's drew about 250 attendees on Memorial Day weekend and just about broke even. To boost attendance, the club has lowered the fees from $20 to $12 to see individual speakers.

LeFevre has a vision of the UFO Paranormal Conference as a big annual event, as well as visions of a Northwest UFO and paranormal museum some day.

"The Roswell museum gets 83,000 people a year, and they're out in the boonies," she says of the alleged spacecraft crash site in New Mexico.

Among the weekend's other attractions:

• Dr. Janet Elizabeth Colli, a Seattle psychotherapist who helps victims of "alien-contact trauma."

• Red Elk, a local medicine man who will discuss "Mel's Hole," and perhaps be joined by Mel's Nephew. The mysterious and seemingly bottomless hole on land owned by Ellensburg's Mel Waters has been the object of recent search and speculation. "If people want to bring sacred tobacco to recognize him, he takes Pall Mall unfiltered," LeFevre advises.

• Santiago Garza, a Mexican UFOlogist who researched the case of a Washington family that allegedly videotaped a strange object that followed them on a car trip to and from Mexico.

• Making a return visit, "Intergalactic Diva" Pamela Stonebrooke, the lounge singer who claims to have done the nasty with a reptilian alien. Perhaps she'll hook up with Colli.

• The hotel bar has gotten into the act and concocted new drinks, "Alien Abduction," "Martian Mistic" and "Egyptian Gold."

• Peter Davenport, who runs the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center.

Davenport was featured on Fox's Sunday news broadcast as a follow-up to "The X-Files" series finale. He'll make a presentation with updates on some of the UFO cases from the last year or so. "And there have been some dramatic ones," he says:

Impossibly fast-moving bright lights over Lake Forest Park in April 2000; a Missouri cop who said he aimed his radar gun at a disc-shaped UFO this January and got no reading; the same month, a border-patrol agent who allegedly saw a dozen flying discs in the California desert.

Davenport is increasingly frazzled because his one-man operation keeps him busy from about 7 a.m. to midnight seven days a week, and astronomers won't give his reports the time of day. "It's impossible," he fumes. "These people have made up their minds."

"Psychic futurist" and frequent Art Bell guest Sean David Morton will also be on hand.

A former TV producer, Morton, 43, claims he's had psychic gifts since he was a kid. His first visions were about astronaut Gus Grissom, a family friend who died in the 1967 Apollo I fire.

"I had horrific visions of Gus' death," Morton says.

He'll discuss seeing — and allegedly getting burned by — a UFO at the infamous Area 51 north of Las Vegas, and researching a New Mexico mesa where he says cattle mutilations occurred and a secret underground complex that is said to be run by an alien/government cabal.

Mulder and Scully would be proud.

Morton, who also practices "remote viewing," says he's too tired for a demonstration of his skills when reached by phone on the road.

But here's an easy one: How does he predict the conference will go?

"I think it'll go very well," he says.

Verify it yourself.

Mark Rahner can be reached at mrahner@seattletimes.com