SUBJECT: FORMER TEACHER BACKS "BELIVERS" IN UFOs FILE: UFO1163 ARIZONA REPUBLIC, Phoenix, AZ-Sept. 4, 1990 OBJECT LESSONS FORMER TEACHER BACKS 'BELIEVERS' IN UFOS By Arizona Republic The skies were moody and heavy with clouds about midnight on June 20, 1960, as Americo Candusso drove his red 1957 Plymouth toward Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Candusso, then a science teacher who was enchanted with the stars and the mystery of UFOs, looked up into the thick blanket of clouds and saw that night what he considers the "most impressive" of his dozen or so "major sightings" of unidentified flying objects. "To me, it was exciting because there were five of them," says Candusso, 68, retired and living in Fountain Hills. Candusso, who taught a course in "ufology" at the University of Akron in Ohio from 1974 to 1977, says he was attracted that night first by a silent "bulb of light" ambling at about 35 mph along the bottoms of the clouds. As the light dipped beneath the clouds, Candusso said he saw a "configuration of lights, bronze on the right and blue on the left." "Beneath that were two bands of red, white and green lights," he continued. "Those (bands of lights) were sparklers. They looked like diamonds. Scintillating." Using his knowledge of angles and landmarks, Candusso calculated that the lights overhead outlined a 200-foot-long oblong about 4,100 yards away. Over the next 35 minutes, Candusso said, he saw five of the unexplained objects meander out of the clouds, hover overhead and disappear. Excited, Candusso left his post for five minutes to race to a phone to call friends and find out whether they had seen the lights. They hadn't. When he returned, he said, he followed the last object for a few hundred yards before it faded away. "Between the trees, I saw a round object," he recalls. "It might not have anything to do with what I had seen before." Candusso, who said "I can still remember it like it was yesterday," is convinced that the brilliantly lighted shapes he saw that night were unlike any aircraft he had ever seen. An astronomy enthusiast, weather observer and cryptologist for the Army Air Forces in North Africa during World War II, Candusso said it is unlikely that he mistook the shapes of airplanes or heavenly bodies for UFOs. "I am used to what is out there," he said. "I know how to look at the sky." A field investigator for an international UFO group, he moved in May to a sunny home in Fountain Hills from Medina, Ohio, where he taught at an elementary school. He was attracted to Fountain Hills, northeast of Phoenix, by the desert and the promise of good golfing. But he said the skies over Fountain Hills, illuminated by surrounding city lights and commercial aircraft, are "the worst place in the world to see UFOs. It's all lit up like Christmas trees." Although he hasn't had a sighting for several years, Candusso is clearly convinced that UFOs exist. He is in respectable company. In the 1960s, Gen. Douglas MacArthur warned of the dangers of "interplanetary war." The late Dr. James E. McDonald, senior physicist at the University of Arizona, and astronomer Carl Sagan told a House panel on July 29, 1968, that they believed the existence of UFOs should not be discounted. Although McDonald said his two years of study did not provide "Irrefutable proof," he added that he believed "UFOs are probably extraterrestrial devices engaged in something that might be very tentatively termed surveillance." SOME ARE SKEPTICAL There also have been respectable skeptics over the years. A two-year study commissioned by the Air Force at the University of Colorado and published in 1969 concluded that there "is no evidence to justify a belief that extraterrestrial visitors have penetrated our skies and not enough evidence to warrant any further scientific investigation." More recently, UFO enthusiasts have been intrigued by reports of hundreds of sightings during the past few months in Belgium. In a sighting reported in July, Belgian F-16 jet fighting used their radar screens to track an object that, according to a military official, "exceeded the limits of conventional aviation." Belgian Air Force Col. Wilfried de Brouwer said at the time that the UFO dived from about 10,000 to 4,000 feet in two seconds. At the same time, it increased its speed from 600 to 1,100 mph, according to news accounts. Although Candusso is sure of the existence of UFOs, he does not talk about them with the fervor of an evangelist seeking converts. Instead, he speaks in the careful tones of a scientist, pointing to tables and bookshelves in his airy study laden with hundreds of reports and newspaper clippings detailing sightings. And he has tape recordings of law-enforcement officials, motorists and others who believe they saw UFOs. INVESTIGATING 'FRAUDS' Candusso acknowledges that reports of sightings have diminished since the 1960s and that some of the accounts "are frauds." As a field investigator for the Texas-based national Mutual UFO Network, Candusso has probed hundreds of reported UFO sightings. He is convinced that at least 10 percent of them were actually vehicles from outer space. He was one of the investigators who taped an interview with Deputies Dale Spaur and W.L. Neff of Portage County, Ohio. On the tape, the pair recount with a certain sense of wonder a 100-mph chase of a brilliantly lighted, dome-shaped object at dawn on April 17, 1966. They raced 86 miles from Randolph to Conway, Ohio, in pursuit of the object, which eventually "rose straight up until it was lost in the sunny morning sky," according to a 1977 story in the Sunday magazine of the Akron Beacon Journal. Attempts by The Arizona Republic to reach Spaur and Neff were unsuccessful. SIGHTINGS FROM AGE 10 Candusso said he saw what he now believes was his first UFO during recess at Liberty School in Alliance, Ohio, when he was 10. "It was a white ball of light, very brilliant, like a star," he said. "It was moving." Skeptical, his teacher ordered him inside. One of his early encounters as an adult occurred April 6, 1959, at 10:45 p.m., when he saw what looked like a fluorescent tube headed northwest near Twinsburg, Ohio. "It looked like a ball point pen with the bigger part going south," he said. "It looked like the fuselage of a B- 19, all light, no openings." The object disappeared 10 or 15 minutes later, he said. Despite diminished reports of sightings today, Candusso continues his studies, talking with others in meetings held the third Wednesday of each month at 7 p.m. at the Valley National Bank in Fountain Hills. He is buoyed by the enthusiasm of others and his own belief. "There is no doubt UFOs exist," he said. ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************