News from all over - Harrington
"That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast." Peter Davenport has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick.
It is Davenport's door, opening into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear-missile complex here in the scrubland of Eastern Washington. The Air Force decommissioned the site in the mid-1960s, and it sat empty for most of the time since. Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, bought it for $100,000 two years ago to turn into his new headquarters.
The plan was to live and work in here, but the place leaks and has poor ventilation and a bat problem. For now, the center's phone and answering machine will stay at Davenport's Harrington apartment, a few miles away, until Missile Site No. 6 is fixed up. Davenport is doing most of the fixing up himself.
Davenport says most UFO sightings, up to 90 percent, are explainable: weather balloons, military aircraft, satellites and hoaxes. But in a tiny percentage, maybe only a handful each year, something was definitely seen — often by multiple reliable sources — and defies explanation. He believes that clues lie buried in the hill-sized mounds of paper he has meticulously cataloged, if only the government or a well-funded university would do the research.
"I'm willing to share data," he says. "I'm willing to throw all of it to anyone who wants to know."
Source
It is Davenport's door, opening into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear-missile complex here in the scrubland of Eastern Washington. The Air Force decommissioned the site in the mid-1960s, and it sat empty for most of the time since. Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, bought it for $100,000 two years ago to turn into his new headquarters.
The plan was to live and work in here, but the place leaks and has poor ventilation and a bat problem. For now, the center's phone and answering machine will stay at Davenport's Harrington apartment, a few miles away, until Missile Site No. 6 is fixed up. Davenport is doing most of the fixing up himself.
Davenport says most UFO sightings, up to 90 percent, are explainable: weather balloons, military aircraft, satellites and hoaxes. But in a tiny percentage, maybe only a handful each year, something was definitely seen — often by multiple reliable sources — and defies explanation. He believes that clues lie buried in the hill-sized mounds of paper he has meticulously cataloged, if only the government or a well-funded university would do the research.
"I'm willing to share data," he says. "I'm willing to throw all of it to anyone who wants to know."
Source
