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Constable: Proof elusive, but local UFO activists push for open minds

A group called the Raëlian Movement this week revealed a blueprint for an E.T. Embassy. Embracing the “If you build it, they will come” philosophy, this group says constructing a modern building with a spacecraft landing pad, welcoming room, aseptic chamber, conference room, eight living quarters and a 21-seat dining room will encourage space aliens to set up camp on Earth.

That seems like a waste to Mary Kerfoot, 80, a Schaumburg woman, who says she has spent much of her life interacting with aliens, and working with groups for decades to spread the word that aliens have visited and continue to visit Earth.

“The very first thing I can remember is this kind of like person shining a light in the bedroom where I was, and taking me away,” says Kerfoot, who grew up in the town of Ottumwa, Iowa, and says this first interaction when she was not yet 3 years old was followed by many more. “The ‘real one.' That's what they called themselves.”

She says she started seeing UFOs hovering above the ground when she was 5.

“Somehow I'd end up in a meadow and this little boy would be there,” Kerfoot says. “I was worried for his safety because he didn't seem like a normal human. He had some sort of alien self. This is kind of weird, I guess, but we would have several encounters together in this meadow, which never existed.”

Once, she remembers having direct contact with the otherworldly creatures.

“A being actually came out of the craft and escorted me into the craft. I said I didn't want to do this by myself,” remembers Kerfoot, who asked about the boy from the meadow.

Led to a table, she says the aliens taught her a “remote viewing” skill. “I couldn't leave the table so my consciousness left me, and I went looking for him,” she says.

While many of the usual stories about interactions with aliens involve medical probes, Kerfoot says the “only physical thing” she endured was a small puncture in her lower leg, which she believes was a sort of biopsy to take her DNA.

Kerfoot realizes how bizarre this sounds to most people. She studied premed and experimental psychology at the University of Iowa and planned to become a doctor. Instead, she married Bob Kerfoot, who graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in civil engineering. When he got his doctorate at Lehigh University, she got her master's degree in experimental psychology. When he took a job teaching at Michigan Technological University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she got a second degree in math, and started in the relatively new computer science field, working on game theory and developing algorithms.

She made her living as a senior systems analyst for an international suburban company, often overseeing dozens of people on a project. A wife and mother of sons, Robin and Ian, Kerfoot says she went nearly three decades without any major alien interactions until 1991, when a two-dimensional circle of light entered her bedroom.

In 1998, Kerfoot says, she opened a French door to let her dog out when a beam of white light swirled around her body, melded her with the door frame, and pulled her body up through the ceiling before she lost consciousness. Wormholes and portals have appeared in her home, she says.

She still has a 1993 Daily Herald article featuring an interview with a Northwest suburban woman who told of similar events and was part of a survivors' support group called Mutual UFO Network, of which Kerfoot later became a state officer.

“Last year we had some 150 plus reports submitted to MUFON for Illinois,” says Sam Maranto, state director of the network, which has more than 120 members in Illinois. Maranto says his interest in UFOs began as a boy in 1959 when an orb maybe 2 feet in diameter flew near him in Fox Lake, changed directions, left him with a tingling sensation and scared him. He doesn't know what that was.

Maranto says the “vast majority” of UFO sightings can be explained, but the 3 to 10% that remain a mystery intrigue him. He notes that Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer who heads the Galileo Project and wrote a book titled, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” says that ‘Oumuamua, an interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017, wasn't natural, but was an alien probe.

When our government declassified sightings by military pilots of strange things in our skies, those documents didn't proclaim anything as an alien spacecraft, but they did acknowledge that experts can't explain some of the movements of those objects.

Kerfoot and Maranto say they think the powers that be know more than they let on. Kerfoot marched with Operation Right To Know in Washington, D.C., in 1993, urging the government to tell the full truth about UFOs.

A Gallup poll in July of 2021 found that 41% of Americans now think some UFOs have been alien spacecrafts, up from 33% two years earlier. Kerfoot says she understands why the majority of people aren't ready to accept the idea of beings from another planet traveling to earth.

“It's very logical,” Kerfoot says of skeptics. “But once you actually encounter a craft and its occupants, and interact with them, and they interact with you, you know it's real.”

  A longtime leader in the Mutual UFO Network, Mary Kerfoot of Schaumburg has marched on Washington, D.C., to demand government officials reveal what they know about alien visits to Earth. She has files filled with stories from other people who say they have had interactions with extraterrestrials. Mark Welsh/mwelsh@dailyherald.com
  Schaumburg resident Mary Kerfoot describes the encounter she says she had with a UFO with a self-penned drawing of the spacecraft she said she boarded when she was a young child. Mark Welsh/mwelsh@dailyherald.com
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