Whitley Strieber broke months of Internet silence this week, providing the Net with its biggest UFOlogical story for the week, while millionaire Majestic buff Joe Firmage wasn't far behind with a eulogy for the paranormal summer of 1999.

In a two-page journal item posted on his personal Web site, Strieber, one of the patron saints of abduction research, said his contact experiences had diminished markedly since he moved from upstate New York to San Antonio.

Although the loss of firm guidance from other levels of reality left him "heartbroken" and in a state of "hideous agony," he noted that his communication with the visitors has continued at a subdued pace, with at least two unusual nocturnal encounters since spring.

In particular, he repeated his belief that reliable communication with extraterrestrial intelligence will not take place before humanity has its own cheap means of space propulsion.

He also warned that such communication is vital to our survival as a species.

"That is, I believe, also the message of the visitors: Unless we make it off the planet and into the higher world, our future is to decline and die as we use the Earth up. We're on a spaceship that is running out of supplies."

In a much less apocalyptic open letter to the UFOlogical community, Joe Firmage, chairman and chief executive officer of Internet services company US Web, marveled at the density of groundbreaking events over the last few months.

While Firmage praised efforts to secure peace in the Middle East and freedom from Y2K computer errors as the millennium looms, he was also sobered by forecasts of the extinction of some two-thirds of the Earth's plant and animal species over the century to follow.

"I will be greatly surprised if the health of the biosphere is not a principal focus of the next presidential election," he wrote. A once and future software prodigy, Firmage framed humanity's environmental problems in digital terms, as the result of a "bug" in our civilization's ideological programming.

Firmage is best known in the mainstream media as the computer millionaire who went public with his belief that the government had indeed recovered a wrecked UFO from Roswell, NM, in 1947, as laid out in the so-called "Majestic documents" and other sources.

While the famous names of the UFO universe were making their broad pronouncements, the everyday laborers in the field were still poring over the accumulation of decades of research.

Some of the most promising news came from the United Kingdom, where a fresh look at the June 12, 1998, Heathrow Airport "UFO-style incident" bore ambiguous fruit.

In a new report, the British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) found no explanation for the fiery object sighted by two commercial pilots bound from London to Oslo last year.

At the time of the incident, the pilot described the object as "a flare or something" that passed as close as estimated 20 feet (7 meters) from the plane. The co-pilot saw "a bright light, very close."

The CAA said the radar record contained no sign of such an anomaly, leaving the encounter unexplained.

Joseph Trainor of the UFO Roundup was likewise busy collecting sighting reports from around the world last week. In an invaluable digest of original material and reports published elsewhere, he provided readers with a wealth of raw data for conducting their own investigations. What was the "unidentified creature" that went on a chicken-eating spree in Jordan last July? Where did the triangular object flying over Tel Aviv come from?

Among the fascinating material collected by Trainor was confirmation that the wave of UFO sightings from the first week of September had spread all the way across North America, from Seattle to Florida.

"People all down the Gulf (of Mexico) coast of Florida, and as far inland as Orlando, were thinking about UFOs, too," he quoted Kennedy Space Center spokesman George Diller as saying on September 7.

However, he noted, Diller explained the Florida sightings as being caused by the disintegrating Russian rocket that had caused a stir in the western United States and Canada a few nights earlier.

Finally, Thomas Bell, media and communications director of John A. Logan College in Carterville, IL, launched his experimental course on "UFOs: An Alien Connection" last Monday. The Internet-only course, part of the school's continuing education program, promised students seven weeks' worth of "intriguing stories and unsolved mysteries" for a registration fee of only $15.