"Most of the UFO phenomena don't interest me," Carey, 70, said last week. "I'm not big on lights in the sky or crop circles or stories of abductions. They lead nowhere."
But the facts of Roswell led him to believe we are not alone.
"This was a nuts-and-bolts craft that apparently crashed in the New Mexico desert with humanoid beings on board. On top of that, you had a cover-up by the Army Air Force that continues today."
We sat in the living room of his split-level home, which he and his wife of 43 years have just moved back into after it mysteriously filled with steam - a mishap, it turns out, of plumbing, not the paranormal.
Carey, who grew up in Mayfair, seems extra-normal himself, a former Temple shortstop who dropped out of a Ph.D. program in human paleontology at the University of Toronto, having wasted too much time watching hockey games.
He's long been taken by the notion of another world, ever since he was 8 and his older brother showed him a newspaper article about a UFO said to have crashed in Aztec, N.M.
"As I got older, I started reading magazines about UFOs. And soon I wanted to do more than read - I wanted to investigate. Are they real or aren't they?"
The July 8, 1947, ABC radio bulletin lasts only 20 seconds, but it raised a possibility that few open to the idea of alien life have been able to ignore ever since:
"The Army Air Forces have announced that a flying disk has been found and is now in possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile, found sometime last week, has been inspected at Roswell, N.M., and sent to Wright's Field, Ohio, for further inspection."
