My favorite UFO story from Wisconsin - and there are zillions - is about an Eagle River chicken farmer who said the spacemen served him pancakes.

In the spring of 1961, Joseph Simonton said the silver flying saucer landed in his yard. Three short men who appeared to be of Italian descent indicated they wanted a jug filled with water, which he gladly did. One of the visitors on the ship "was frying food on a flameless grill of some sort," Simonton, 60, said in a Milwaukee Journal article from back then.

They gave him three small pancakes, but no syrup, and zoomed off. The locals backed up Simonton as a solid citizen and, according to the sheriff, not a drinking man. The Air Force investigated and proclaimed the space food to be ordinary pancakes.

The encounter was peaceful and friendly, not at all like the ones envisioned by Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, who last week warned that extraterrestrials that show up here someday will be interested mostly in conquering and colonizing us.

Hawking went on to say we should keep to ourselves and stop any efforts to beam "Hey, here we are" messages into space where aliens almost certainly are lurking.

Life on this Earth isn't scary enough already without the scientific community freaking us out about space invaders? Hawking compared it to Christopher Columbus discovering America and how poorly that turned out for Native Americans.

I ran Hawking's comments past two UFO enthusiasts from Wisconsin to see how worried they are. Not very, they said.

"The first thing I thought is that it was great that somebody in mainstream academia is talking about the possibility of extraterrestrials or that they're coming here. That alone lends credibility to the study of ufology," said Chad Lewis of Eau Claire.

He's an author and lecturer on E.T.s, haunted sites, crop circles, that sort of thing, and he has a master's degree in psychology. He wrote "The Wisconsin Road Guide to Haunted Locations," among other books.

"Researchers in this field, we deal with a lot of people who believe there have already been encounters with extraterrestrials. That not only is it possible that they're out there, but they've actually visited and are abducting people," he said.

Or at least flipping flapjacks. Actually, these people report undergoing forced physical and mental tests at the hands of the aliens, Lewis said. Don't believe it? No, me neither. Without concrete proof, even Lewis remains unconvinced.

Both he and Noah Voss, who runs UFOWisconsin.com, said they can imagine a scenario where spaceships come in peace.

"What if they're so advanced from us that war is not known to them? We never think of that. We always think of the negative," Lewis said. "There's always an old joke in ufology that the proof that intelligent life is out there is that they haven't tried to contact us."

"Hopefully they're not bent on destruction. Perhaps I've just seen 'Star Trek' too many times," Voss laughed. The Sun Prairie man has archived more than 1,000 UFO reports, mostly from Wisconsin. He's the author of "UFO Wisconsin: A Progress Report," and he sells paranormal investigating equipment online. His day job is fire and security alarm system inspector.

"I think it's extraordinarily exciting to speculate and to think and daydream about potentially encountering another civilization that developed off of our planet. I think it would be very exciting just personally to experience. I don't have high hopes or low hopes that it happens in my lifetime," Voss said.

He calls himself an open-minded skeptic. Lewis said he has more questions than answers about the paranormal. Part of the fun, he said, is in the what-ifs about other life forms in the universe.

Unless Stephen Hawking is right and we're destined to be on the dinner menu.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail at jstingl@journalsentinel.com