Gresham Outlook Profile of Tom Bowden
Kari Hastings, a staff writer for the Gresham Outlook, interviewed your State Director, Tom Bowden, and wrote up the following story. Download some images of Tom.
[From the 2007 Portrait: Amazing but true tales special publication of the Gresham Outlook.]
Beyond Belief: For Gresham’s Tom Bowden, UFOs Are Serious Business
BY KARI HASTINGS
staff writer
Tom Bowden knows he can be a bit long-winded when it comes to UFOs. But who could blame him? It’s taken him a lifetime to learn what he knows. His passion for science fiction and space travel began when he was a child in the 1950s, when all the country was abuzz with talk of astronauts, spaceships and . . . yes, flying saucers and aliens, too.
The Gresham resident has read countless books, studies and reports on unidentified flying objects and their implications for the human race. It is ridiculous to expect him to sit down with a visitor and explain the UFO phenomenon over the last 60 years in a mere two hours.
He’s not always forthcoming about the fact that he’s the state director [of Oregon] for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). He doesn’t readily talk about his work as a field investigator who conducts lengthy interviews of "experiencers" (people who have seen a UFO or been abducted) or about his painstaking documentation of the incidents, which he files with MUFON’s world headquarters in Denver, Colo.
To be too open about this subject is to invite ridicule/raised eyebrows, laughter.
Some think he’s buying into propaganda. Some offer up an alien joke. Some think he’s drunk. Or nuts. Or both.
But Tom Bowden, in his words, is just “fairly average person.”
He lives in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Southwest Gresham at the end of a cul-de-sac, with his wife, Sue, and their cat.
His back deck looks out on a lovely pond surrounded by tall, mature trees. On a recent summer night, the sky seems to stretch endlessly toward the horizon in deep shades of midnight blue.
The computer programmer and outdoorsman scans the night sky and sighs.
“I don’t see them,” he says. “I’d like to. I want to. But I’m just not lucky. Some people see them alt the time. Some people attract them. We don’t know why.”
Well, there was that one time. A little silver object. There, then gone. No rational explanation.
But it most certainly was not “noteworthy,” he says.
That’s another thing about Bowden. He’s not an alarmist. Nor is he reactionary or prone to exaggeration.
In fact, much of his fieldwork is spent explaining away “sightings.”
For example, several reports came in to the Oregon MUFON Web site between June 18-20 — sightings of two bright lights, one chasing the other. Bowden knew there was activity on the international space station. He knew the space shuttle Atlantis was ready to depart. He knew Russia had two service modules in the air.
That’s what people saw.
But there are other cases he can’t make sense of, like the one in August 2003. A Portland man was driving down Division Street and saw lights.
He turned onto Angeline Avenue and saw that it was a dark shadowy triangle, about 70 to 90 feet in length with lights on the comers, hovering about 500 feet above ground. He blinked, tried to rationalize it. Maybe it was a plane, a stealth bomber, a military craft. He turned onto Fifth Street. It was right in front of him.
While he was reaching for his camera, the triangular object swiveled in place and sped away.
The man knew then that it wasn’t a plane. A plane would have had to bank as it turned. This thing turned, as if on an axis.
If one person saw it, Bowden thought, most likely others did too.
He created an ambiguous flier, with a crude drawing of a triangle with lights on it and put his phone number on the bottom. He posted them all over the neighborhood. Three weeks later, a woman called to say she’d seen it.
The woman’s story mirrored the man’s almost exactly. The report is on file with the MUFON database.
In May, another woman reported seeing a bright light just below the moon. Her sighting was from Gresham, toward the east. It couldn’t have been landing lights from an airplane — the bright light was still and then disappeared. It wasn’t the right place for Jupiter or Venus.
It, too, will be logged as an unidentified flying object.
It’s easy to be skeptical, Bowden says. It’s easy to be a nay-sayer. But when you’ve read and studied the mountains of available evidence and reports, it changes you.
“For me, it’s beyond belief,” he says. “I know intelligently controlled UFOs are real. There’s something going on that can’t be denied.”
Bowden believes there are several races of extraterrestrials. And they are not, he says, necessarily nice.
“I would not want to assume that they’re benevolent,” he says. “don’t think that would be safe.”
It is very possible, Bowden says, that aliens are working on some sort of human/alien hybrid that would eventually replace humans on earth.
His theories may seem far-fetched to some, but Bowden believes that’s because of an effort to keep the people in the dark.
“For the general public, there is very little information,” he says. “Someone doesn’t want us to know what’s really going on.”
Hollywood’s version of spaceships and aliens is frustrating to Bowden.
“Steven Spielberg has made millions of dollars off aliens, but do you think he’s ever even admitted that they might exist? Or donated some of that money for research?” he says.
The movie “Contact” bothered him too. The movie romanticized the SETI Institute, he says, which used to receive government funding and now exists on private funding.
“So they’re sending radio transmissions out into space, and they’re getting funding for that,” Bowden says. “Do they ever think about the fact that UFOs have already been here?”
Meanwhile, Bowden lives his life. Takes reports. Goes to the national MUFON symposium every year. Puts in a fair amount of time sky watching. And his passion for UFOs never fades.
“Belief is like religion,” he says. “It’s a leap of faith.”
Copyright © 2007 The Gresham Outlook.
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