Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2023
Back in the old days of ufology
by: Rick Hilberg
Back in the late 1970s and well into the 1980s, we were involved with a local Cleveland UFO group that was affiliated with Flying Saucer Digest and editor Allan Manak, Robert Easley and myself. We did have regular monthly meetings as well as an annual event where we would bring in speakers and advertise to bring in attendees from the general public. We were quite successful year after year with these events, always drawing a large audience.
Anyway, one year long after we set and publicized our annual meeting a now defunct national organization, the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) out of Tucson, Arizona, announced that they were holding a similar event on the same weekend at a large hotel venue not more than four miles from ours. I tried contacting one of the directors of the organization, Jim Lorenzen, by phone to advise him of this, but he brushed me off and insisted that they wouldn't change their date, and too bad for us.
To make a long story short, we had an SRO crowd at ours and they basically couldn't draw flies. In fact, several of their speakers even snuck over to ours to attend after their presentations to a mostly empty house.
Here's a shot of Stan Friedman visiting our event. Left to right: Bob Easley, Jim Moseley, yours truly, Stan and Gray Barker. Sadly, I'm the only one still alive on this ball of mud now.
