When she was a little girl growing up in northern Indiana, Janet Sailor didn't see dead people. But she says she did see colors surrounding living people — or auras, as she came to call them.

The colors might hover close to a person's body or far away, or they might be spiky, blurry or wavy, she said. They came to mean many things to her — such as whether a person was angry or happy, healthy or in poor health, or even whether they were lying or telling the truth.

"And I didn't know no one else saw this," said Sailor, now a 65-year-old living in Angel Fire.

Although grown-ups told her to shut up, it was her introduction to studying the paranormal, which by definition is the unknown. Along with auras, or energy fields, Sailor has come to believe in alien abductions, crop circles, ghosts and other sightings that have become the fodder of conspiracy theorists and tabloid headlines.

The skeptics who laugh off such stories, she said, are working with closed minds. "I don't believe in everything," she said, "but I do believe everything is possible, and we do know very little."

Last August, she founded the Alliance Studying Paranormal Experiences, a nonprofit that seeks to compile stories of poltergeists, animal mutilations and reincarnation. She also launched a Web site, which she said has since gotten more than 100,000 hits. In September, she plans to hold a three-day symposium on the paranormal, and this month, she's having a planning session in Angel Fire.

For six years, Sailor ran a newspaper called the Enchanted Circle Free Press, and readers would tell her of UFO sightings and other unexplained sightings. She would turn these accounts into stories. "People thought I was spoofing, but I really wasn't," she said.

For her symposium, she expects about 18 speakers, including a Roswell-based UFO expert, a Gallup man who claims to have UFO artifacts from a 1947 crash west of Socorro, and a crop-circle expert who teaches at New Mexico State University.

Sailor has pulled in other people to study the Taos Hum, a low-level noise that some Taos-area people say they've been hearing for years, and she hopes to disclose the group's findings soon.

More recently, she said, people from around the world have been studying a photo she said she took of a UFO in October.

It qualifies as a UFO, she said, because people have told her it can't be identified as any kind of known propelled object. "I didn't notice it at the time (when the shot was taken)," she said. "It's just something I saw accidentally as I was downloading photos."

She believes aliens sometimes fly around in UFOs, just as she believes some stories of people who say they were nabbed by extraterrestrials. But she has yet to be yanked into a flying saucer. "They probably don't want me," she said. "I'm a real pain in the butt."

Contact Doug Mattson at 986-3087 or dmattson@sfnewmexican.com.

IF YOU GO

What: Planning session for paranormal symposium
When: 2-4 p.m. Saturday
Where: Our Place Café, 52 Crestview Drive, Angel Fire
Cost: Free
More information: www.apsefiles.org