On a bitterly cold mid-January afternoon on the outskirts of Harrington, Wash., a wheat-farming hamlet 50 miles west of Spokane, grain silos sprout on the edges of a snow-bleached horizon. Scrub brush and frozen tumbleweed skitter across a windswept terrain that in the early 1900s Lincoln County residents called a "howling desert." It is home to bobcats, coyotes, and a massive underground nuclear bunker, where once, in its enormous cement-encased womb, a 3.75-megaton intercontinental ballistic missile was pointed straight at the Soviet Union.
Jenn Ireland
Davenport, shown standing inside the missile bunker he purchased from a convicted murderer's sons in 2006.
Jenn Ireland
Davenport is happy to give impromptu tours of his UFO Reporting Center when the snow's not too thick.
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For an audio slideshow of author Ellis Conklin talking about Davenport, click here.
Davenport will join three other experts on Sat., Feb. 26, at what is being billed as the first annual UFO Truth Event. There he will address the question "Are We Alone in the Galaxy?" He will be joined by James Clarkson, Washington state director of the Mutual UFO Network; author Nicholas Redfern, speaking about "Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife"; and Kewaunee Lapseritis, on "Psychic Sasquatch and the Sasquatch People and Their UFO Connections." The all-day event begins at 9 a.m. and will be held at Fort Worden Commons in Fort Worden State Park, 200 Battery Way, Port Townsend. Admission is $40. For more information, contact Charlie Arthur at 360-531-3357 or truthevent@gmail.com.
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The unholy shrine to the Cold War now belongs to Peter Davenport, a nationally prominent investigator of unidentified flying objects. Over the past decade and a half, Davenport has almost single-handedly put Washington state on the map as a hotbed of UFO research.
Years ago, Ralph H. Benson lived alone in this dark, dank subterranean fortress, an abandoned missile site he purchased in 1983, more than two decades after the government decommissioned the complex and returned its 22 barren acres to the public. An independent trucker, Benson had fallen far behind in his taxes, so agreed to meet at his missile cave with Roger Erdman, a state fuel-tax auditor. On June 12, 2002, Benson proceeded to shoot the tax man in the head and, with a set of flesh knives, dismember his body with such uncanny precision that Washington State Patrol investigators suspected he might have killed before.
"We think there is a high probability there are other victims out there," State Patrol Detective Ken Wade told the Associated Press in 2004, referring specifically to the disappearance of an Illinois trucker, John Warren Deetz, last seen at a Spokane Valley truck stop on December 30, 1988.
Benson thwarted all hopes of additional confessions when he died of natural causes at age 65 in September 2004. Two years later, Davenport, one of the most recognized ufologists in the U.S., bought the missile site from the killer's sons and moved his extraterrestrial-tracking operation from Seattle to Harrington.
Beneath icy-blue skies this January day, Davenport moves gingerly down a slippery slope that leads to the missile bunker. "Careful, now," he cautions, "there may be wolves out here. Let's stay together." Davenport is the longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, an independently operated 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, which he's run in Washington since 1994. Each year he posts on his website (ufocenter.com) as many as 5,000 sightings, taping callers and making written reports. He figures he has 70,000 sightings on file; he'd surely turn them over to the government, he says, if only they'd ask.
Navigating the entryway where the nuclear bomb was gently backed into the cathedral-sized launch room, Davenport posits, "I estimate that 90 to 98 percent of all UFO sightings are explainable events—a satellite, an aircraft, a weather balloon, or a light on a distant airplane. You wouldn't believe the number of calls I get when the International Space Station goes over."
The UFO Reporting Center is known worldwide among UFO enthusiasts, as it is among law-enforcement agencies and 911 emergency dispatch centers. A one-man operation, Davenport, 63, who never married nor had children, works almost every day, "from wake-up to lights-out," and fully funds the hotline out of his own pocket—costs which can range from $500 to $5,000 a month, depending on how much he travels.
The small fortune he made selling his stock in BioSyn, a Seattle-area biotech company he helped create in 1983, has enabled Davenport to indulge his compulsive preoccupation with the specter of alien life. In 1994, Robert Gribble, a retired Seattle firefighter who'd run the nonprofit UFO Center for two decades, called Davenport and said it was time to pass the torch. Davenport, whose passion for UFOs germinated after witnessing an unfathomable jumble of lights as a young boy growing up in the northerly suburbs of St. Louis, agreed without hesitation.
Known for his deep interest in science and his encyclopedic memory in recounting dates, times, locations, and even the most arcane details of a sighting, Davenport is highly respected among peers. "He has an excellent reputation. He's top-flight and extremely intelligent," declares Clifford Clift, international director of the 5,000-member Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the world's largest UFO organization, based in Greeley, Colo.
Yet there are days when Davenport wonders why he's made the search for alien beings his life's work. "You may ask why do I do this, and I must admit that I do not have an adequate explanation for you," he says in a deep baritone that may be familiar to those who listen to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, a radio show exploring unexplained phenomena on which Davenport is a frequent guest. (Locally it airs Monday through Friday from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on KIRO-FM, 97.3.)
Davenport grouses that an increasing number of calls in recent years are from foul-mouthed pranksters—kids, mostly, who find the hotline number on the Internet and are out to have some mean-spirited fun at Davenport's expense. "I'd say at least the half the calls I get are crank calls." He concedes that UFO hunters need skin as thick as an elephant's to endure the stinging brunt of ridicule and skepticism. Then there's the added nuisance of the ever-present lunatic fringe and callers who just won't shut up. "People will go on and on say anything. No wonder the monkey house is the loudest place at the zoo."
