No, She Does Not Wear a Tin Foil Hat
Costa has a lot of experience with skeptics. However, she has never once let that stop her from pursuing her passions. Her life has been a zigzag of professions, ranging from radio disc jockey to submarine sailor to aerospace security engineer to Buddhist nun to playwright, and most recently to UFO columnist for the Syracuse New Times.
Cheryl Costa, a UFO researcher and expert from upstate New York, was at a convention when a man began flipping through the book she and her wife, Linda, co-wrote, UFO Sightings Desk Reference: United States of America 2001–2015, which presents scientific data and analysis of over 100,000 UFO sightings. The man slammed the book down on the table and said “Did you get a man to check this?”
Costa bluntly replied “No, but I’ve got one in a jar at home.”
As a woman in a scientific field, Costa has faced a lot of discrimination. On top of that, because her area of focus is the study of UFOs and “space-faring off-worlders,” which are more commonly exhibited in society in the image of The Great Gazoo and Marvin the Martian than it is in science textbooks, Costa has a lot of experience with skeptics. However, she has never once let that stop her from pursuing her passions. Her life has been a zigzag of professions, ranging from radio disc jockey to submarine sailor to aerospace security engineer to Buddhist nun to playwright, and most recently to UFO columnist for the Syracuse New Times.
“Did you get a man to check this?”
“No, but I’ve got one in a jar at home.”
Her fascination with UFOs started early, when she saw her first UFO at the age of twelve.
“We were coming down the hill and off in the western sky, there was this thing out there,” she said, “as big as my finger. A big silver ball, sitting up there like a rock.”
Her family was driving back from a farm, when her mother had her father pull the car off the road and pointed it out.
“NASA was only five years old at that point. My mother said it could be something the Air Force is doing, it could be a weather balloon, it could be people from another world,” she said. “We sat there watching for fifteen minutes, and it didn’t go away. So we get back on the road, and I crawl up to the back window, and just watch that thing for twenty minutes, and when it decided to leave,” she clapped her hands together loudly. “Gone — like that. Have you seen those movies, with the starships? That’s what this was like.”
She paused, reliving the moment that pushed her to the edge of reality. “It changed me.”
When Costa first saw that UFO at the age of twelve, she was in a boy’s body. She was born and raised as a boy in Corning, New York, in 1952. The way she puts it is, “I had a monkey on my back — she would not be quiet.”
After years of not feeling at home in her own skin, she changed genders in 1989. She began going by Cheryl, and now refers to her past male identity as “what’s his name.” She was an activist in the late 70s and early 80s, and was on the original board for the International Foundation for Gender Education.
“You know the term transgender?” she asked. “I was one of the eleven people who coined that term.”
She first knew that she was onto something with UFOs when she read a CNN article that claimed UFO sightings had gone down in recent years, and “perhaps they’ve always been an urban legend.” After doing some digging, she disproved this statement, and wrote articles about her findings. After being rejected by numerous editors, Larry Detrich from Syracuse New Times gave her a chance.
“Have you ever seen the Princess Bride?” she asked. “Well there’s this great line from the dread pirate Roberts, ‘You did a good job today Westley, but I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.’ Well that was this guy’s tone.”
She has been there for six years now, is booked for nine events this year. Two weeks ago, she spoke at the UFO MegaCon in Laughlin, Nevada. The event was hosted by Lorien Fenton, a talk radio host and good friend of Costa’s. She said her favorite memory of Costa was watching the look on her face when she won Researcher of the Year in 2018.
“Her mouth dropped open and she stared blankly,” Fenton said. “She had no idea she was going to win.”
According to Fenton, the win is profoundly more meaningful when you look at the adversity Costa has faced in her career and life, as a result of being transgender. “You would think we’d be more accepting in this community, considering we accept aliens!” Fenton laughed.
Costa attributes the concept of acceptance to the concept of consciousness. To her, we are not man or woman, human or extraterrestrial.
“We are connected to everything, everywhere, everywhen,” she said. “What we are, is consciousness looking at each other. If we have a human persona, we think we’re separate from it but we’re not.”
Although she knows that not everyone will accept her for who she is and what she observes about the universe, she refuses to compromise her identity.
“Be yourself,” she said firmly, “and it does get better.”
