From the time he was a child, Ted Phillips has been looking up into the sky. In those early years, growing up in rural Missouri, all Phillips saw was stars. But it wasn't long before he started hearing stories about things that went "whoosh" in the night -- things other people swore they had seen -- and he wanted to know what they were.He's has been investigating UFO sightings ever since.This weekend, Phillips will be preaching to the choir when he speaks at the 2004 Ozark UFO Conference in Eureka Springs. And he admits he'll hear stories even he doesn't believe."Good stuff is hard to find," Phillips says of UFO evidence. "And the stuff that gets in the newspaper is goofy! Reporters don't want to write about plant evidence at a landing site."That, however, is one of Phillips' specialties. Over the last 35 years, he has logged some 3,059 investigations and heard stories from witnesses so credible, he says, they could "send a man to the electric chair on their testimony. Yet once they start talking about flying saucers, they're no longer credible."If I'm in any group of people and the subject (of UFOs) comes up, I will hear of a sighting," Phillips says. "It's difficult to imagine science is not doing cartwheels to investigate."Over the years, Phillips was involved in hundreds of investigations with Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and a consultant to the U.S. Air Force on the subject of unidentified flying objects. Scientists and astronauts "privately admit great interest," he says, and he believes the government does indeed know a lot more than the public is being told."There's no question there is a cover-up to some extent," he says. "And you've got to wonder why: A case in 1950 can't affect our security in 2004."Although Phillips will speak this weekend about the two best cases of physical UFO evidence among his 3,059 investigations, that's not his primary subject. In fact, he's not sure that "Project Tatra" is related to UFOs at all. It is, however, a fascinating story.The short version is that Phillips gained access to the diary of a Czech soldier injured in fighting in Slovakia during World War II. Rescued by a sheep herder, the soldier and two of his comrades were hidden in a cave in the Tatra Mountains -- and there, Phillips says, "Tony" found something extraordinary. It was a "huge black wall, overgrown by cave formations, 2 miles back in a cave, 2,700 feet below the top of the mountain."The "artifact," as Phillips calls it, was 27 feet high, about 20 feet wide and curved. "It looked almost like looking in a mirror of steel," he describes, "totally smooth, no seams, no rivets."
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