UFO couple: `real nice people'

Headline: UFO couple: `real nice people'

Eugene, Ore (AP)

A middle-aged couple whose promise of cosmic utopia convinced at least

20 Oregonians to follow then have been named by a Eugene printer as a

Mr. and Mrs.  Joseph Simon.

The printer, Done Fast, said he made up 5,000 posters advertising their

meetings.  The couple also gave that name to the Bayshore Inn in the

coastal town of Waldport where they conducted a meeting Sept 14.

Fast descibed the couple as "read nice, clean-cut people."

He said the man paid him less than $75 in cash for the posters.  The man

also paid $50 in cash for a meetin room at the Waldport motel.

Meanwhile, the 20 persons who migrated from the Eugene area and Oregon's

Lincoln County apparently have graduated from a training camp in

Colorado and moved on a new site in Nebraska.

"They knew they were going to be taken from Earth and picked up by some

form of extraterrestrial life but not for sure when or where." Said Doug

Greene, superintendent of Bonny Dam near where the group was camped in

eastern Colorado.

Greene said in a telephone interview he had talked with Frank Lamb, who

said he was part of a group that left Waldport last month.

Greene quoted Lamb as saying his group was moving to Nebraska to join

others from the Waldport group.

In Tillamook, Oregon a judge granted Stephen Berlow legal custody of two

young children whose parents allegdly abandoned them to follow the

middle-aged couple.

Berlow told the court he was the children's natural father an had been

supporting them.

About three weeks ago, a newspaper report said 20 persons had suddenly

disappeared after attending a meeting in Waldport in which they were

promised travel to another world and a better life.

Reports trickled in about other disappearances and similar meetings in

California and Colorado.

Some of the original 20 persons contacted friends and relatives by mail

or by telephone to say there were all right before disappearing.

A Portland newspaper columnists said he got a phone call from a

prominent Waldport citizen who said two persons told him they started

the whole thing as a college project.

But that angle was fizzled out and disproven later because the

columnists refuses to identify the caller and the two students, if they

exist at all, aren't talking.

In Lincoln County, the two men who had worked on the disappearances -

deputy sheriff Ron Sutton and state police investigator Melvin Gibson -

have been assigned to other work.

"To the best of our knowlege there has been no fraud, no crime, of any

kind in connection with all this, and at this point the investigation,

if you want to call it that, is at a standstill.  These people are

gone." said a state police dispatcher.

"We have no missing persons reports to really work with on this," said a

sheriff's department spokesman.

"True, some residents have left the county.  But when an adult chooses

to pick up and leave without telling anybody where he's going, is that a

missing person?" adds the spokesman.

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