

Ballot Initiative 300 would require the city to set up an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission, stocked with Ph.D. scientists, to "ensure the health, safety and cultural awareness of Denver residents" when it comes to future contact "with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles."

Jeff Peckman is pushing Initiative 300, which would create an extraterrestrial affairs commission in Denver Chris Schneider for the Wall Street Journal


Mr. Peckman has recruited about 20 volunteers for his campaign.

They face an impassioned opposition led by Bryan Bonner, who dismisses the unidentified-flying-object buffs as delusional if not outright frauds.



"This is about the reputation of the city," Mr. Bonner says.


Initiative 300 made it to Tuesday's ballot on the strength of roughly 4,000 voter signatures. It starts from the premise that intelligent aliens have been visiting Earth for decades, but the federal government has conspired to keep that quiet.

"We need to get this out of the realm of the Tooth Fairy and into the realm of diplomatic protocol," says Ricky Butterfass, who works on the campaign.

He and several other volunteers spent a recent afternoon hanging flying-saucer posters on a college campus in Denver. More than a few students brushed past with bemused looks. But those voters who stopped to talk seemed taken by the concept, especially when they learned that the ET commission would be financed by donations, not tax dollars.

"I don't really believe in extraterrestrial life, but if we set something up like that, we'd be prepared for anything," said Brandon Coby, 23 years old, a biology major at the University of Colorado. "You can't go wrong with it."

That logic drives the ghost-hunters at Rocky Mountain Paranormal nuts. Mr. Bonner, a founder of the group, says he has no problem with anyone scanning the skies for UFOs. But he does object to giving the saucer seekers credibility by setting them up with an official commission and posting its findings on the city of Denver's website, as Initiative 300 requires.

Compared to that, he says, his profession is a model of discretion.

"The world is full of ghost-hunters," Mr. Bonner says, "but we're not trying to get ourselves affiliated with the city government."

UFO believers got a big boost in September when six former Air Force officers held a press conference in Washington to share what they called credible sightings of otherworldly craft cruising over nuclear weapons sites in decades past. Days later, a team of respected astronomers announced they had detected a far-off planet that had the essential conditions to support life.

But Steven Vogt, one of the astronomers who made that discovery, says Denver need not worry about a welcoming committee just yet.

Or ever, really.

If intelligent aliens make it to Earth, "it will be very obvious—they won't be playing hide-and-seek," says Mr. Vogt, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "All of humanity will surge after this thing, and it won't matter what any commission says."





Such talk does not sit well with Julie Shuster, director of the International UFO Museum in Roswell, N.M., which attracts 150,000 visitors a year.

Her father, a bombardier, issued the famous press release on July 8, 1947 declaring that the Roswell Army Air Field had captured a flying saucer. The military soon amended the statement, saying it was just a weather balloon.

"I don't mean to be ugly," Ms. Shuster says, "but we have the UFO cover-up. What does Denver have, other than that they want to make money off this?"

Plenty, Mr. Peckman answers, starting with location. The city is perched a mile above sea level, so why wouldn't travelers from a distant galaxy stop here first?

Mr. Peckman didn't have much luck with the last initiative he managed to put on the Denver ballot. That was a 2003 measure that would have required the city to "help ensure public safety by increasing peacefulness" through stress-reduction techniques such as mass meditation or the piping into public buildings of soothing primordial sounds. Voters rejected it.

This time, Mr. Peckman thinks he might pull it off. His campaign has its own rap song and a poster that asks: "Are you ready for the truth?" A cluttered website lists a half-dozen celebrities alleged to have seen UFOs.

Mr. Bonner, the ghost hunter, is fighting back with his own website asserting that "Peckman and his 'little green people' are not representative of the people of Denver."

"Little green people," Mr. Peckman responds with outrage, is a "racial slur."

The intergalactic-ectoplasmic smackdown ends Tuesday. No polling has been done on the initiative. But a 2005 Gallup poll found one in four Americans believes extraterrestrials have visited Earth. One in three believes in ghosts.

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