Out there: A Top-Ten List For Aliens

By Martin Kidston
The Independent Record
12-29-05

I get tired of all those top 10 lists and New Year’s resolution stories this time of year.

     There’s the top 10 local stories, the top 10 Montana stories, the top 10 AP stories, health stories, business stories and Dave Barry’s top 10, too.

     My question is, how can you plan ahead when you’re always looking back?

     The truth is, these top 10 lists are an easy way out when there isn’t any “real” news. So to be a sport, I’ve made my own top 10 list for lack of other work.

     Needless to say, it was a big year for local “otherworldly” circles, to include UFOs, Big Foot stories, and other oddities that don’t get much publicity or get laughed at when they do.

     You certainly won’t find them on any top 10 list.

     Lynda Cowen, a 1963 graduate of Powell County High School who now lives in Texas, discussed her recent docudrama, “The Secret of Redgate,” this year, even though she filmed the movie last year in Deer Lodge.

     She told me her film was inspired by her brother’s own UFO encounters as a boy. The stories down in that small prison town are strange. I used to live there but I never heard any talk of UFOs. Back then, it was arsenic in the Clark Fork River and the local lumber mill that got all the attention — that and the prison siren that sounded curfew at 10 p.m. every night.

     “My brother consciously remembers having a lot of encounters with aliens as a child — playing with them as a child,” Cowen told me over the phone in March. “No one ever talked about this stuff growing up.”

     The film propelled Deer Lodge to the fore of Montana’s most mysterious destinations. The film also won the “People’s Choice Award” at the UFO Congress in Texas — selected by 700 people from 15 films as a matter of fact.

     This year’s talk of UFOs was nothing new. Last year, Timothy Good — perhaps the world’s leading UFO authority — came to Helena to interview Leo Dworshak.

     Dworshak’s book, “UFOs Are with Us — Take my Word,” shares his own alien encounter as a child. But what strikes me as strange is not Dworshak’s alleged encounter but rather how Good, who lives in England, found out about it.

     It seems that Good heard of Dworshak through a man named Lucius Farrila.[sic] And who’s Farrila [sic]you ask? He runs a UFO news clipping service in Arkansas.

     At any rate, even Art Bell’s “Coast To Coast AM” was interested in that story. They called me trying to track down Good. I don’t know if they ever connected though.

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