In northern Florida during the Autumn of 1999 S.P.A.C.E. South was formed, the nation's second Search Project for Aspects of Close Eencounters community, by Roberta Puhalski and a group of brave encounter explorers. The group meets privately usually on a regular basis.
Puhalski, before moving south, lived in Connecticut where she began uncovering her own encounters in the late 1980s and sought to open a two-way communication with her visitors. Soon after she started, on her own, a support group for experiencers in Connecticut.
A social worker, a member of MENSA and a mother of two grown daughters and one grown son, she had an experience in the early 1990s while visiting Florida. She felt compeled to travel to Pensacola Beach and Gulf Breeze, where there was a UFO conference. Gulf Breeze was where people were having UFO sightings and videotaping the objects, causing a national sensation, sparked by the Ed Walters reports and photos in 1987.
Over Pensacola Beach a UFO swooped down, aimed a beam at Puhalski and her daughter, moving them along the beach to their surprise and those of witnesses. There she gained the title "Pensacola Beach Lady."
In 1991 she heard about the mysterious stone chambers of Putnam County in New York's Hudson Valley, believed to be built by ancient Celts way before the travels of Columbus or even Lief Ericson. On Sunday in September 1991 she and a friend traveled to Magnetic Mine Road in the town of Brewster, site of UFO encounters and a stone chamber, and parked her car at a random spot.
Another car, with two men from Connecticut, one a MUFON investigator, and with Harold Egeln, pre-S.P.A.C.E., pulled up behind her car, not knowing at all that she was there.
The men got out of their car. One of them recognized the woman in the car and said, puzzled, "Roberta! What are you doing here?" The two men from Connecticut knew her, but Egeln did not.
She told them that she wanted to find the stone chambers and felt compeled to park at that spot. It was a very unusual coincidence! Or was it "staged" by unphatomable forces?
In February 1992 Puhalski spoke at a meeting of the NYC Psychotronics Association about her experiences (there's a video clip from her talk below). Right after that Egeln got the idea for forming a group called S.P.A.C.E.
As the "PBL" Puhalski soon after began writing her column for the print "SPACE Newsletter." Later in the 1990s she moved to Georgia, near Atlanta, continuing her work, and then she moved to northern Florida, forming S.P.A.C.E. South.
During Spring 2005 Puhalski founded the Central-Florida UFO Group (CUFOG), the investigative component of S.P.A.C.E. SOUTH.
ROBERTA PUHALSKI, the S.P.A.C.E.-South Group Leader/Founder and the CUFOG Founder/Investigator, is shown here in her first public speaking appearance about her close encounters at a meeting in New York City in February 1992, the month SPACE was created.