| THURSDAY, NOV. 07 2002 | ||
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Once the darling of the UFO community, Dennis Bossack is now described as 'the worst thing that ever happened' to it. Where did he go wrong? BY CHRIS WRIGHT
A SHORT TIME ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Dennis Bossack fraternized with aliens. He ate their food, listened to their music, laughed at their jokes, and conversed with their pets. "They have dogs and cats and they look like dogs and cats," Dennis says. "Mentally, however, they are a lot more advanced than our animals. You can talk to them and they will understand everything you say." This is Dennis Bossack's story, and he's sticking to it. And why not? According to an ABCNEWS.com poll last year, over 25 percent of Americans believe earth has been visited by aliens. Almost 50 percent believe that there is intelligent life on other planets. Members of the UFO community, of course, are 100 percent true believers. So when Dennis Bossack came on the scene a few years back claiming to have firsthand knowledge of an "above top-secret" intergalactic agency, he found plenty of followers. In fact, when word of Dennis's role in the so-called Omega Agency began to circulate, UFO buffs from London to Biloxi trembled with anticipation. Today, believers are somewhat harder to come by. Once a respected propagator of UFO conspiracy theories, this Rhode Island resident now finds himself being denounced as a conspirator, a fraud. He has been vilified and ostracized by the very community that once embraced him. In a particularly weird twist - and this is a field where weird twists are par for the course - people whose beliefs are founded on conjecture and anecdote are heaping scorn on Dennis for the very reason that mainstream society often heaps scorn on them: no solid, verifiable evidence backs up his claims. In the face of these attacks, Dennis Bossack is doing what any self-respecting space buff would do: he's deploying his deflector shields and sitting tight. "In four and a half years, I am scheduled to deliver the proof to this entire planet," he says, referring to a series of three books he says he is writing. "I will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been Visitors. Not one person on this planet will go without proof." THE STORY of Dennis Bossack's rise and fall begins in the mid 1990s, when a Mississippi woman named Bobbie Felder - who goes by the Web name Jilain - authored a series of essays called the "Omega Agency Files," based on a series of interviews she conducted with Dennis. "The Omega Agency is the one running the show," the files begin. "Omega is a multi-level, multi-structured organization of secrets upon secrets." The document goes on to catalogue Omega's plans for "world betterment," detailing the agency's policies on everything from crime prevention to population control. The Omega Agency Files quickly found their way onto dozens of Internet sites. Their measured style and preponderance of detail led many to believe they were authentic. Also, Bobbie Felder had a reputation as a relatively level-headed UFO enthusiast. Even more scintillating for the UFO community was the fact that Felder refused to reveal the true identity of "Robert," the files' mysterious central figure. Thanks to Felder, Dennis - a/k/a Robert - was on his way to becoming a UFO celebrity. In 1997, Dennis boosted his status in the UFO field even further when he met and married a woman named Ann Harris. When Dennis met Ann, she owned a space-age emporium called the UFO Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of the only businesses of its kind at the time, the lab attracted national publicity. It seemed the perfect base for Dennis Bossack to loose his Omega theories on the world. Better yet, Ann had impeccable credentials of her own. She is a native of Roswell, New Mexico, the Mecca of the UFO movement. Her father, Richard Clayton Harris Jr., was stationed at the Roswell air field in 1947, the year a space craft is supposed to have crash-landed there. As a budget officer, Ann says, Lieutenant Harris allotted the funds for the clean-up and cover-up of the crash site. In 1997, the noted UFO expert Kevin Randle investigated Harris's claims for the TV show Strange Universe, and called them "credible." In the UFO community, this is as close to a ringing endorsement as you're likely to get. Ann also counted Stanton Friedman - one of the UFO field's most respected investigators - among her friends. Indeed, it was Friedman who first introduced Dennis to Ann. The couple insist, though, that their marriage was more a matter of divine - or at least otherworldly - intervention. "When the Creator formed the foundations of the earth," says Ann, "he meant me for Dennis and Dennis for me." In any case, the two share one thing in common: both have had a lifelong obsession with things that go bleep in the night. And, whether or not you believe their account of the night they met, the way they tell the story lends credence to Ann's assertion that they are "a match made in heaven." Dennis: Tell him about the light. Ann: Dennis was parked in the parking lot. There was a huge spotlight kind of thing on the building. Dennis: Ann and I kept making eye contact all night long. Ann: And we got equidistant between ... Dennis: The light ... Ann: The light ... Dennis: It blew ... Ann: It exploded ... Dennis: And I mean it exploded. It didn't just go out: it exploded. Both: A big ... halogen ... halogen light. I mean, it blew ... that was it: boom! Ann: And that was the first time. Dennis: We took that as a sign. Ann: Stan [Friedman] said to me once, he always wanted to be the one to change the world, and little does he know that he did, by introducing me to Dennis.
The Bossacks don't immediately strike you as the kind of people to bring about a revolution in consciousness. Ann, 54, is jolly and chatty. Dennis, 49, is opinionated and chatty. She sports a honey-blond rinse. He is portly, balding, and bearded. They are given to wearing matching outfits and calling each other things like "Hon." They wear age-appropriate eyeglasses. They smoke constantly. And both lavish excessive amounts of affection on their terrifying German shepherd, Buddy. But there is more to Dennis and Ann than meets the eye. They represent the radical, evangelical wing of the UFO community. They are whirling dervishes of the paranormal, prophets of the improbable. For these guys, UFOs are no mere hobby, nor even a way of life - they are a religion. Shortly after I first meet the Bossacks, Ann pulls out a photograph. It's a familiar - even hackneyed - representation of an alien: the bulbous dome, the boiled-egg skin tone, the outsize eyes. The alien's name is Aviel, says Dennis, and she's from the planet Zeta 2 Reticuli. How old is she? "Seven hundred and fifty years." Ann chimes in: "Middle-aged." Um, has either of you ever met her? "She's a personal friend of Dennis's," says Ann, a little proudly, as if talking about a middle-tier celebrity. "I used to have lunch with her every day," adds Dennis. "I actually got her hooked on Burger King hamburgers with mustard and mayonnaise." I watch for a flicker of amusement, or even self-doubt. None. Not even when Dennis says that Aviel the Reticulan finds McDonald's burgers "a little dry." But the Bossacks aren't here to talk fast food. They're here to talk about What They Know, a secret doctrine that, they say, will one day turn the world on its head. As Ann puts it, "We're here to wake people up." The flagship of the Bossacks' UFO clearinghouse is their radio talk show, DNA Live, which airs every Sunday from 6 to 9 p.m. on WBLQ in Westerly, Rhode Island. Granted, DNA (which stands for "Dennis 'N' Ann") is no All Things Considered: WBLQ is a community radio station with a stone's-throw signal range; DNA shares air time with a wrestling talk show, a pet talk show, and a computer-repair talk show, but still. "They have their listeners," says a station spokesman. They also manage to snag some pretty impressive guests, bigwig UFOlogists like Betty Hill, Timothy Good, and Nick Pope. They also host a monthly "discussion meeting," in which local UFO buffs are invited to sit around munching on complimentary potato chips and discussing government cover-ups and the inevitability of life on other planets. "MUFON [Mutual UFO Network] averages 12 people a month," says Dennis, leaning into the tape recorder. "We average 30." Dennis is also a regular on the UFO lecture circuit. This July, he has been booked for a prestigious speaking engagement at a conference in Roswell, New Mexico. If the Bossacks don't seem like your typical New Age missionaries, the location from which they proselytize seems equally improbable. Shortly after they married, Ann and Dennis moved to Richmond, Rhode Island, where they established another UFO Lab. Never mind remote corners of the universe - the UFO Lab is tucked away in a remote corner of a shopping mall, the Ocean State Job Lot Plaza, which is itself tucked away in a remote corner of Rhode Island. Right next to the lab is a Doggie Depot, a NAPA Auto Parts, and an East Coast Karate and Kickbox. The UFO Lab actually feels less like a temple than like a little bit of Route 66. A Web site describes it as "a museum, research center, and gift shop." The gift shop is the most apparent branch of the operation, offering a vast array of alien-themed trinkets: alien playing cards, alien candles, alien T-shirts, alien key chains ... "We don't use the term 'alien,' " says Ann. "We prefer 'Visitor.' " ... Visitor neckties, inflatable Visitors, and assorted Visitor figurines. But you get the sense that the majority of people who enter the UFO Lab do so less to stock up on Visitor frisbees than to shoot the breeze. The Bossacks are terrific, tireless talkers. And if you don't want to listen to their repertoire of intergalactic intrigue, you can get a thorough briefing in the UFO Lab Museum. The Bossacks' UFO Museum is, as far as I can gather, the only one of its kind in New England, and one of only a handful in the US. It lies just beyond the gift shop, behind a set of tinsel curtains, in a small, cluttered, dimly lit room. Almost immediately, it reminds me of something. When I was a kid, I turned my bedroom into a dinosaur museum. It had things like little plastic tyrannosauruses attacking little plastic sheep. The UFO Museum reminds me of my Dinosaur Museum. "It's under construction," Ann explains, perhaps sensing my disappointment. There are, though, a few exhibits on display. Mostly, these consist of grainy photographs and placards bearing information like: "The pyramids were built 125 billion years ago ... by people known as Plajarans." The most absorbing part of the museum is the section detailing the life and death of Ann's father. A few months after he gave the Strange Universe interview, Harris, 82, died at his home in Albuquerque. "The death certificate says it was a fall from a standing height," says Ann. "But he was murdered by the CIA." She believes the weapon that killed her father was a super-secret gun that uses compressed air. "It can make you fall over," she says, "or it can take your heart out and blast it through that wall." Right next to the stuff about Ann's dad is a compression chamber containing the prostrate form of a Visitor. The figure is perhaps four feet tall, with the same whopping head and wasted torso as those adorning the T-shirts and key chains outside. The Visitor, alas, is also made out of the same material as the key chains. You can see the bobbles and creases of a botched molding job. "It's a replica," says Ann, "but it's pretty accurate." The museum at the UFO Lab is, in fact, not really a museum at all - at least not in the traditional sense of the word. It is a visual representation of the Bossacks' world-view - a fascinating, idiosyncratic, even gonzo take on the UFO phenomenon. "History as we know it is wrong," Ann says, puffing a cigarette. "There is information in here you can't get anywhere else on earth." On this point she is absolutely right. Following a brief tour of the museum, I am led through another door and ushered into a back room, where, surrounded by jars of peanut butter, computer equipment, and UFO paraphernalia, Dennis and Ann Bossack tell me stories I am quite sure I could not hear anywhere else on earth. Or possibly the universe. THE OMEGA Agency is the security force for the Universal Government. The Universal Government consists of 752 advanced planets from around the known universe," says Dennis, bracing himself to deliver a pitch he has clearly made many times before. "I was the director of the agency here on earth." This stuff goes on for about four hours, and not once does Dennis deviate from his deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery. Indeed, the truly impressive thing about his stories is that they are both incoherent and consistent. Ask Dennis a questions about the tiniest detail of his Omega days, and he will fire back an answer before you can blink in disbelief. The story begins in New York, back in the early 1970s, when a pair of Omega representatives approached Dennis about working for the agency. "Men in Black, that's what they looked like," he says. "White shirts, black pants, black jacket, black tie. They knocked on my apartment door. I said, 'What the hell are you talking about?' " A visit to Omega headquarters, five miles beneath the New Mexico desert, allayed his doubts. "It was amazing," he says. "The first place we went to was the cafeteria. It was stark white, immaculately clean, indirect lighting everywhere. They had any kind of food you wanted to eat, Zeta food too. They had this mango-banana-type food that's very sweet. I'm a diabetic, and I could eat it." After meeting with the Omega leader, Dennis agreed to join the agency. He ended up working there, he says, for 28 years, 15 of those as director. His main job was overseeing the day-to-day operation of the underground facility, in which hundreds of earthlings and Visitors worked side by side to prepare the planet for the day Omega takes over. "It was a very hectic life," he says, "very time-consuming. I missed a lot of family functions." Dennis "semi-retired" from Omega in 1997, though he still has a role in the organization. He is, in his own words, a sort of PR man. Even so, Dennis misses the Omega lifestyle. "It's one big family down there," he says. "Everybody watches out for everybody." He especially misses his friend Aviel, the hamburger-munching Reticulan. Aviel still works at Omega as a biologist, specializing in the study of human emotions. Actually, this isn't entirely accurate - she studies earthling emotions. Aviel is herself a human being, as are all the Visitors. She is simply 200 million years more evolved than we are. For Aviel, earthlings are like infants. She finds us difficult to understand. We make her sad. She used to quiz Dennis for hours, asking question after question about our aggressive, warlike ways. "For her, this was like looking into the past," he says. "Her planet actually had 12 world wars before they matured. But she hasn't seen any of that. Watching earth is like watching ancient Zeta." More often than not, Dennis and Aviel's conversations concerned more mundane subjects, like family and work. Aviel has a husband and two kids back on Zeta, Dennis says, and "every other weekend or so" she would go back for a visit. Occasionally, Dennis would go with her. "It's actually only a 15-minute trip," he says. "That puppy takes off from zero to 10 times the speed of light, and you have no idea you're doing it. You do not have to be seat-belted in. You do not have to be seated." It's been a while since Dennis went to Zeta, and it's been a while since he saw Aviel. "We still communicate telepathically," he says, "but it's not the same." The day of Dennis's retirement, Aviel demonstrated her regard for him by violating a Reticulan taboo. "One of the things that surprised me most after 25 years of working with Aviel," he says, "I was the only one who left there and got a hug. To her, any kind of touching is sexual, but she had to take that and turn it into an earth gesture to say goodbye." "They don't even shake hands," adds Ann, without a hint of jealousy. |
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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Dennis Bossack says that the Visitor in this picture, a 750-year-old Reticulan, was his lunchmate for 25 years. |
IT SEEMS strange, but there are people out there who believe these stories. Even stranger, though, is the fact that there are people out there who are involved in a systematic effort to shut Dennis up. Ironically, the person causing the most damage is Bobbie Felder, author of the Omega Agency Files and Dennis's onetime champion.
For the past year, an increasingly dubious Felder has publicly and persistently challenged Dennis to produce evidence to back up his claims. So far, she says, he has failed to do so. She now believes that Dennis used her, that he used her credibility in the UFO community to gain some credibility of his own. And she is pissed.
"He was my friend and I trusted him," she says. "And frankly, at that point in time, I was very much an idiot. To this day it bothers me that there are people out there who believe those files. The story just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It bothers me that people believe the stuff he says."
Okay, here's a question: why? Why does anyone care if some guy wants to us to believe that he shared BK Broilers with a 750-year-old woman from outer space? Where's the harm?
"You don't know UFO people, do you?" says Felder. "There are people who take this stuff very seriously, fanatics. They don't need any help moving further from reality. Some people, for whatever reason, are looking for authority figures, someone to validate their beliefs, and then someone like Dennis comes along. It can mess up their lives."
These days, Felder spends her time circulating another document: "Anatomy of a UFO Hoax." Like Felder's first Internet opus concerning Dennis, the "Anatomy" files are causing quite a stir. Beyond this, Felder has posted untold chat-room messages calling Dennis a fraud. And she has publicly apologized for helping to proliferate his ideas. "There is nothing I can say that will undo the damage this tale has done to the Internet UFO community," she writes, "and to the credibility of the UFO field at large."
In its turn, the community that once embraced Dennis is now turning a collective cold shoulder. "I've reminded Bossack that he failed to apologize to either me personally - or the group - for his Omega deception," wrote the administrator of a UK-based UFO message board called Black Triangle. "I've told him that he really was NOT welcome on B-T, & I've removed [him] from our group."
Dennis, of course, denies that there has even been a deception, and therefore refuses to apologize, which makes the UFO buffs even madder. When he is challenged on his beliefs, which is quite often these days, Dennis resorts to a Schopenhauer aphorism: "All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next, it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
"Right now," he says, "I'm being violently attacked."
Another of Dennis's most dedicated foes is an out-of-work truck driver named Tim. For Tim, discrediting Dennis has become, if not an obsession, a mission. When DNA announces upcoming guests, for instance, Tim will make a point of writing to them. He has a form letter he sends out: "I am contacting you about an interview you are scheduled to do ... " If the guest doesn't cancel, Tim will call in and ridicule the host on the air: "Dennis says he was the director of a top-secret agency; I can't see this guy directing traffic."
"Dennis talks about things he really has no knowledge about," says Tim, speaking on the phone from his Rhode Island home. "He constantly contradicts himself. He makes up absurd stories to cover his butt. I've caught him in too many lies, too many fantastic stories. The UFO community has rejected him wholeheartedly. MUFON has rejected him because he can't prove anything he says."
A call to the Rhode Island chapter of MUFON backs up this claim. "I really don't feel comfortable talking about him," says a woman on the other end. Click.
"I'm telling the truth," Dennis says. "One of the things I'm constantly saying to people is, 'I'm not asking you to believe.' What I'm saying is, 'I want you to keep an open mind and think about it. Is it possible that I am telling the truth?' "
DENNIS FLAT-OUT lies," says Bobbie Felder. "He will say whatever he thinks it takes to move those books and videos off the shelves of his little gift shop, whatever he thinks it will take to get the ratings points on his little radio show, whatever he thinks it will take to get his name in lights."
And this, perhaps, is his most damnable transgression. The UFO community's anger at Dennis has far less to do with what he says than with what he does. He is, after all, by no means the first person to make odd claims about UFOs. A recent report to MUFON described "a reptilian creature walking on the beach with a black suit on and with glaring red eyes" - clearly a tough one to verify. Yet there was no subtextual "What a nut!" in MUFON's account of the report. Why not?
In the end, Dennis Bossack's crime is not that he made extravagant claims; it's that he made extravagant claims from a position of authority. The fact is, Dennis could have claimed to be the King of Mars and no one would have given a hoot - as long he had done it quietly. In this sense, Dennis is something of a tragic figure. The very qualities that raised him to the heights of UFOlogy - a great story and a knack for self-promotion - are the things that have proved to be his undoing.
It's no coincidence that Felder's assault on Dennis began around the time he launched his radio show. It's equally telling that Tim puts so much effort into "giving a heads-up" to DNA's guests. On one recent show, DNA hosted Harold E. Burt, author of Flying Saucers 101 (UFO Magazine, Inc., 2000). After a while, Dennis began to talk about his years at Omega. Burt Mmm-hmmed his way through it, but you could hear the consternation in his voice. There was an "Oh jeez" in every Mmm and a "D'oh" in every Hmm. Later, Burt said a very astute thing about the UFO community: "Ridicule is the biggest thing," he said. "People would rather die than get embarrassed."
UFO buffs cannot abide the idea that Dennis has the likes of Harold Burt Mmm-hmming over this Omega stuff. As far as they're concerned, Dennis is opening the UFO community up to ridicule, and the community is closing in around him. Some buffs actually believe Dennis is a government infiltrator, a saboteur. It's far more effective to discredit a belief, the argument goes, than it is to deny it.
"There are people who have devoted years to researching these things," says Felder. "Then Dennis opens his mouth on his radio show and it gets all shot down. The UFO community gets upset with this garbage because legitimate researchers get lumped in with what one idiot says. They become crackpots by association."
At least one legitimate researcher disagrees. "I have some doubts about Dennis's claims," says Stanton Friedman. "I'm not part of his coterie of believers, but I don't agree with this guilt-by-association thing. There are people saying he's bad for the cause, but I don't think that way. I don't think Dennis is doing any harm."
Indeed, the final twist in this tale is that legitimate, respected UFO researchers - as opposed to UFO fanatics - seem to be the only people who are not turning their backs on Dennis Bossack. Even those who cringe a little on his radio show still agree to appear. As one authority puts it, "Controversy is good."
Friedman, for one, is more troubled by Dennis's detractors than he is by Dennis. "I don't understand the zealots of this world," he says. "I don't understand what drives them. Maybe they don't have faith in their own thinking ability. Get a life, people. There are more important things you can spend your time on." Besides, he adds, "there are plenty of crazy ideas out there."
Is Dennis Bossack crazy? "I'm a physicist," Friedman says, "not a psychiatrist."
Tim, of course, is more forthcoming. "Dennis might buy his own line of crap," he says. "He may be sincere. He may be lost in madness about all this stuff."
Right now, Dennis doesn't care whether people think he's nuts or not. All he wants is to do his Omega work in peace. "Why do I have people stalking me on the Internet?" he says. "Why do I have people harassing me if I'm just some lunatic? Leave the lunatic alone and he'll go away."
Chris Wright can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
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