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The latest immigrants to land in Brooklyn are little green men.
The borough where Ralph Kramden kept threatening to send his wife to the moon now has its first 24-hour UFO hotline, where New Yorkers can report close encounters of the fuggedaboudit kind.
Joe Capp, 68, a retired computer consultant from Sheepshead Bay, started the out-of-this-world hotline in February, and has so far fielded calls reporting nearly two-dozen distinct sightings around the city.
“How is anybody going to report this stuff if everyone is discouraging them?” he said. “I’m looking at witnesses as a resource rather than someone to slam around.”
So far, the most memorable sighting he’s gotten has been from a woman who spotted three lights traveling in unison in the sky over Park Slope.
At about the same time he got similar calls from UFO spotters in Queens and New Jersey, though he can’t say if they are linked.
He also got a call from a person in Long Island who said that UFOs had been following him and he was worried that he was going to be abducted.
Capp personally called the man back and asked him if he had any unexplained gaps in his memory. When the man said he didn’t, even Capp doubted the man’s fears were warranted.
“I wasn’t sure if this was about his own loneliness,” Capp said.
The hotline was an outshoot of a UFO meet-up group Capp has held with other New Yorkers at a diner since 2007.
“It’s good to hear shared experiences,” said group member Julio Barriere, who said he sees UFOs any time the sky is clear, and was recently lasered in the cheek by a spaceship in Jamaica Bay.
Capp, who saw his first UFO as a young man in Atlantic City, said that people who have had alien encounters need others to talk to who have had a shared experience.
“Seeing a UFO not only changes your belief system, it makes you vulnerable,” he said.
For years, Capp only told family and friends about his encounter. “It threatens your career.”
After he retired, he started the UFO Media Matters blog, to keep a growing network of believers up to warp speed.
But experts are not convinced there’s something out there.
“There is no compelling evidence for any life beyond Earth, intelligent or otherwise. Not yet,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California.
Shostak said a third of the country thinks Earth has been visited by UFOs.
“But evidence for this is considered weak by most scientists,” he cautioned.
Capp said that he expects to be getting increased calls in the summer, but that the city — despite a recent incident in Williamsburg — is not necessarily a sighting hot spot.
“People in New York don’t look up and see the stars,” he said.
UFO spotters can call the hotline at (347) 298-9020.
©2011 Community Newspaper Group
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