LEOMINSTER -- Aliens, Bigfoot, and the paranormal descended on City Hall over the weekend for the sixth year of the Greater New England UFO Conference.
By Mina Corpuz
Plaster casts of Bigfoot's feet were on display during the Greater New England UFO Conference at Leominster City Hall this weekend.
"It's a place for us around here to gather instead of flying out to California," said Tennie Komar of Shirley.
She was one of hundreds who attended the two-day conference that began Friday and featured a lineup of speakers who covered topics including the science of potentially life-sustaining planets, paranormal filmmaking, and cryptozoology.
Organizer Susan McNeill Spuhler said the conference attracts people from the region and sometimes as far out as Arizona and Canada. Over the years, the number of attendees has grown.
"It's a comfortable environment to talk about their experiences," she said.
Keynote speaker Marc D'Antonio, chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network, gives a talk called 'Our History, Our Earth' during the conference. SENTINEL & ENTERPRISE/MINA CORPUZ
Spuhler, who grew up in Leominster, said the city is a good location to hold the conference because Leominster and New England are hotbeds for UFO and Bigfoot activity.
On Saturday, keynote speaker Marc D'Antonio, an astronomer and chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network, gave a talk about life on other planets.
"It's really a universe full of possibilities," he said during his presentation.
Understanding how the earth developed and what characteristics make life possible on it can be helpful to determine if those conditions exist on other planets, D'Antono said.
At the end of the talk, he unraveled a 117-foot-long toilet paper roll representing earth's history and pointed out major events, including the formation of the continents, when dinosaurs walked the land, and the emergence of man.
