"The UFO Reporting Center is Known Worldwide Among UFO Enthusiasts, as it is Among Law-Enforcement Agencies . . ."

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

"The UFO Reporting Center is Known Worldwide Among UFO Enthusiasts, as it is Among Law-Enforcement Agencies . . ."

Peter Davenport Believes in UFOs

ByEllis E. Conklin
Seattle Weekly
2-9-11

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.

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.