In Kansas City, celebrity UFO-filmer Stan Romanek finds an audience of believers — and one reporter

Stan Romanek is telling everyone to look at the sky.

Most of the people standing around on this mid-July evening outside the Intrigue Park Place Hotel, near Interstate 435 and Front Street, don't need to be told. The annual Mysteries of the Universe Conference — a national gathering for devotees of the paranormal and the interstellar — is again in Kansas City, and Romanek is one of the main attractions.

Before this break, during the first two hours of a presentation about his alien abductions, Romanek described the way UFOs seem to follow him. At a recent speech he gave in Denver, Romanek says, during a break like this one, 200 people saw three red lights overhead. Tonight, about 60 people are standing out here, chatting and smoking, just like any conventioneers. But they've also set up telescopes. They gaze upward hungrily.

"Over there!" a woman shouts.

Sixty heads turn up, to the east.

"That's Venus," someone calls.

Attention returns to Romanek, who fields questions. He says he doesn't travel by airplane because he wouldn't put it past "them" to take out a whole plane to get him. Whether "them" refers to the aliens or the government isn't clear. "Still," he adds, "I bet I have more frequent-flyer miles than anyone."

If Romanek is telling the truth, he has already shown this crowd the single most important piece of film footage in human history.

Shot in 2003 in the middle of the night in his daughter's bedroom in Kearney, Nebraska, Romanek's so-called "Boo Video" purports to show the head and face of one of those black-eyed gray aliens peeking into his window. It's nothing less than evidence, at last, that we are not alone.

He has been on Larry King Live. Soon he'll be on 20/20. His book, Messages, is in every Borders and Barnes & Noble in America. But he shows the Boo Video only at UFO events and conventions like this one. His associate, Jeff Peckman, discussed the video on Letterman, Fox News and a host of other major media outlets last summer. But the most Romanek would let them broadcast was a single still frame.

Romanek is a disarming guy in his 40s, goateed, still a little thick from his bodybuilding days. He comes across as straightforward, maybe a little brusque, an unpolished guy trying to remember not to swear in front of a crowd. He seems to hate BS, and there's something refreshing about the way he takes on natural objections.

"People say, 'Aliens come 50 billion light-years — why would they peep in your window?' Then, exasperated: "I don't know! But it happens all the time!"

Many in the crowd have journeyed far to see the video. Two teenage brothers from Denver have seen Romanek speak three times. The younger brother describes how the older one used to freak him out by slowly pushing a copy of Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story up over the edge of the bunk bed, so that the black-eyed, waiflike gray alien on the cover seemed to stare at him.

In some ways, Romanek's video looks like the same stunt.

Just as philosophy has failed to offer definitive proof of God, science has had no luck determining the existence of alien life. Scientists have guessed at the likelihood. In 1960, astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake whipped up what has come to be known as the Drake equation, an attempt to quantify the key factors that must be considered in order to begin determining the probability of human contact with an alien civilization.

The equation multiplies seven variables: the average rate of star formation in our galaxy times the fraction of planets that develop life, times the fraction of those whose life is intelligent, times four other factors. Finally, multiply this ever-shrinking number by the length of time that intelligent civilizations might bother to beam signals to each other through programs like SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and you have a vaguely scientific number of communication-ready civilizations.

Although most of its variables are unknowable, the Drake equation is the hands-down favorite mathematical formula of ufologists.

Romanek says he once wrote it while hypnotized.

With the variables plugged in.

And a cheeky "x 100" at the end.

Nocturnal and trance-state equation writing is a habit he has developed since he underwent hypnotic regression in 2002. (Such regression is the ufologists' controversial method of uncovering repressed memories of abductions.) As Romanek tells it, aliens look him in the eyes and fire strange images into his brain, and he then scribbles these down. Of course, he claims the math knowledge of a fourth-grader and is quick to point out that he doesn't know what any of these equations mean.

However, he does mention an astonished physicist who helped him piece together some of their meanings. Another equation involved the electron makeup of the then-theoretical Element 115, a synthesized element now called ununpentium. Since 1989, a UFO circuit regular named Bob Lazar has claimed to have done military work on flying saucers in the Nevada desert. Those saucers, Lazar has long insisted, were fueled by Element 115.

In short, the messages that the aliens give to Romanek are well-chewed bits of UFO lore.