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*%PAUL RODRIGUEZ, STAfT PHOTOGRAPHERJan Harzan says he has been fascinated by the search for extraterrestrials since he saw a UFO when he was 10.UFO EXPERT’S JOB IS LOOKING UPJan Harzan heads an organization that searches for signs of alien life.BY TOM BERGSTAFF WRITERJan Harzan is the kind of guy you want to sit next to at a dinner party.What’s he been up to lately?Oh, investigating alien abductions, looking for extraterrestrial mot hei^ships a quarter-mile long and running tests on jxssible fragments from a UFO crash.And that's all before 10.30 a.m. on a typical day.People ask me. ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ said Harzan, 59, of Newport Beach. My answer is, ‘No, 1 don’t believe. I know.’ A knower is someone who's seen one so close up, in your face, you can’t denv it.Evi l* since his own close encounter at age K), Har-zan’s diva in has been to find evidence of an unidentified Hying object. That drove him, as a child, to t ry to build his own rocket ship; as a young man. to study nuclear engineering at UCLA; and later, as an IBM executive, to seek out a certain type of corporate research.He always ran into the same , problem, what he terms the silly factor.”“People laugh alxiut it,” he said. There arc companies interested in researching UFOs, but they are very quiet about it. They don't want the silly factor.”It wasn't until 1991 that Harzan found a group of like-minded people at a Lc.; Angeles meeting of the Mutual UFO Network. Within four years, he was running the Orange County chapter, volunteering about 20 hours a week.Recently, he made the leap to national director of MU-FON, moNing its headquarters to Newport Beach.By all appearances. Harzan. a husband and a father of two, is tlie most normal guy you’d ever meet: polite, deferential, constantly fiddling with his laptop.But he also happens to be the Indiana Jones of extraterrestrials.He can tell you about the Ohio cop who watched a r.lXWV-foot metallic tiiaagie hover over his police cruiser. Or the Montana nuclear missile silo crew members who believe the missiles were deactivated as a UFO flew overhead. Or the Arizona logger who sjiid he disappeared in a beam of light and w as gone for five days.Scientists generally say it’s silly. And it turns out that about half the countrySEE
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Newport Beach Current
Newport Beach, California, US
Thu, Jun 05, 2014
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CA, USA 19 Apr 2017
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