the NYT Park profile
<ErikBaard <at> a.yahoo.invalid>
2004-10-16 00:31:11 GMT
By PATRICIA COHEN
OLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Late one night in 1954, Robert L. Park was driving back to Walker Air Force Base in
Roswell, N.M., on a desolate stretch of West Texas highway. News reports of U.F.O. sightings were
practically a daily occurrence, but when he saw a dazzling blue-green light streak across the sky, he
figured out precisely what it was. After all, he was an electronics officer, a lieutenant overseeing the
installation of a new radar system in Roswell, and he recognized the fluorescent illumination of an ice
meteorite plunging into the atmosphere.
Susana Raab for The New York Times
Robert Park, a physicist who delights in deflating tales of alien abductions and miracle cures, during a
pause in his morning run. He is leaning against a model of the Washington Monument, with the original
behind his left shoulder.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So he was feeling rather superior to the U.F.O.-spying hysterics when, after crossing into the New Mexico
desert, he suddenly noticed a shiny metallic disc racing along the horizon.
"I stepped hard on the gas pedal of the Oldsmobile," Mr. Park writes, "and the saucer accelerated. I slammed
on the brakes -- and it stopped." For a moment he was convinced he was seeing a flying saucer. But when he
looked a bit more closely, he realized what had happened: "I could see that it was only my headlights,
reflecting off a single phone line strung parallel to the highway."
Now a distinguished physicist at the University of Maryland, Mr. Park wonders, "What if that phone line
ended, and the 'spaceship' just vanished?" Would he now consider alien visitors to be at least a
possibility? Would he still be so quick to dismiss seemingly incredible claims?
For while many professional physicists recognize him for his technical research on the structure of
crystal surfaces, to the somewhat wider audience that includes readers of his weekly newsletter and zany
inventors of all types, Mr. Park, 69, is known as a gadfly, an indefatigable debunker of alien abductions,
(Continue reading)