BOB COLLINS

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS:
HE'S SEEN FLYING SAUCERS, MET THE PILOTS
Sunday Post, Bridgeport, CT

Bob Collins isn't surprised people call him crazy when he tells them he's not only seen flying saucers, but met some of the creatures who fly them.

Since his fascination with unidentified flying objects started with his first "close encounter" over 20 years ago, Collins has grown used to the raised eyebrows, the nervous laughs, the forgotten important appointments suddenly remembered.

"Sure people think I'm nuts, but you've got to be a little crazy to live in this society anyway," he said.

Earlier this year, Collins quit his job as a quality control manager at Connecticut Finebanking in Bridgeport to devote all of his time to his passion for UFOs.

He now spends his days seated behind a typewriter at the kitchen table in his North End apartment, banging out the final chapters of a 400-page-plus tome based on his experiences with extraterrestrials. He calls it 'UFOs - A View from the Inside."

His nights are often spent watching the skies. Collins firmly believes UFOs exist and claims to have had several run-ins with alien beings and their ships.

The first occurred when he was a boy of 15 living on his family's farm in Napa, California. The most recent just a couple of weeks ago.

"When I was a kid there was a huge wave of UFO activity in California about 1960. We were talking about it in school one day, and I had a friend who told me later he had gone up on one of these things. It was on my mind a lot after that. I kind of had a feeling something was going to happen to me.

"I was walking in the woods near our farm one day with my dog and my .22 (caliber rifle) when I saw this disk; like two hubcaps, about 100 feet away. I started running after it, and after it went about 300 yards, it disappeared.

A second encounter two weeks later convinced Collins that whoever was operating whatever it was he saw wanted him to know about them.

"They apparently need people here to know more about them. I was in the right place at the right time," he said.

Since then, his fascination with UFOs has skyrocketed.

Just over two weeks ago, Collins was one of many people to report seeing a large UFO buzzing the Bridgeport area.

"I just happened to be looking out the window about 10:30 one night when I saw this large V-shaped object hovering above the trees," he said, pointing toward the vicinity of Saint Vincent's Medical Center on Main Street.

"It had red, green and blue lights and could not possibly have been any kind of conventional air craft," he said.

In addition to these sightings, Collins also claims to have had "psychic contact" with beings not of this world, including those in the vessel spotted last month. "I looked at it, and I said to myself, If you are who I think you are, tell me I'm not crazy, and the lights suddenly blinked, and then doused," he said.

A good number of these otherworldly beings -- as many as 20 percent of the earth's population -- are walking the streets right now, he claims.

"I know I'm sticking my neck out, but I believe there are people from other worlds living here," he said. They aren't, he said, little green men. They look like us, and may be from our own future, not another planet.

"Some theories say that UFOs may be time machines that are capable of interdimensional travel," he said.

Their mission? Not the end of civilization as we know it, he says. In fact, Collins believes these alien life forms are actually pretty nice guys, here to prevent us from blowing ourselves to smithereens with nuclear weapons.

"If they're from our future, they may have a vested interest in our survival," he said.

Their shyness at coming forward and, say running for office may result from their reluctance to directly interfere in our culture, he explained.

Collins apartment is filled with the results of his years of research. He has bookcases lined with volumes on UFOs and astronomy and stacks of files filled with witness's accounts of UFO sightings, studies and documents he says prove the existence of the elusive space vehicles. "I know how this sounds, but everything I say I can back up."

Collins is not your every day crackpot. His exhaustive knowledge of UFOs, extensive research and thoughtful manner separate him from many of the thousands of people who claim to have seen flying saucers each year.