Family-Placed Funeral Notice

ROBERT V. PRATT Robert Vance Pratt died Sunday, November 20, 2005 at a local hospital following a brief illness. He was born August 12, 1926. He was 79 years old. A journalist and UFO researcher, he retired in April 1999 after 48 years as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, writing under the byline of “Bob Pratt.” He studied at the University of California- Berkeley and American University. During the first 22 years of his career, he worked in various reporting and editing positions on the Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, the Charlottesville (Va.) Daily Progress, the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, the Buffalo (N.Y.) Evening News, the Miami (Fla.) News, the Philadelphia (Pa.) Inquirer, the Louisville (Ky.) Times and Courier-Journal. He worked for the Charlottesville newspaper three different times for a total of 10 years, twice as a reporter and the third time as managing editor, for seven years. After leaving the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal where he had been executive assistant to the editor and publisher, he worked for eight and a half years as a writer and reporter for the National Enquirer. The last 17 years of his career he worked in computer page design and production for three other tabloid magazines, the National Examiner, Globe and the Sun. During his newspaper days he was a skeptic on the subject of UFOs, but in May 1975 as a reporter for the National Enquirer he came to believe UFOs are real after interviewing more than 60 people in one week who had seen UFOs. From that moment on UFOs became a major interest in his life, and since then he has interviewed more than 2,000 people who had UFO experiences. He traveled all over the United States and Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, the Philippines and Japan looking into reports of UFO sightings. During the six years he worked as a UFO reporter for the Enquirer, he traveled to Brazil four times. He found that UFO encounters there were often more hostile and harmful than anywhere else in the world. As a result, after leaving the Enquirer in 1981 he began investigating UFO reports on his own and traveled to Brazil 10 more times, most recently in 2003. He wrote the book UFO DANGER ZONE: Terror and Death in Brazil - Where Next? (Horus House Press 1996). An updated version in Portuguese was published in Brazil in July 2003. In recognition of his research in Brazil, on May 3, 2003 at a conference in the city of Curitiba in southern Brazil, he was given a diploma naming him an “Ufologo Brasileiro Honorario” or Honorary Brazilian Ufologist. Seventy-eight Brazilian ufologists signed the diploma. He also co-authored (with Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Philip Imbrogno) NIGHT SIEGE: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings (Ballantine 1987) and the NIGHT SIEGE Second Edition Expanded & Revised (Llewellyn 1998). He was also editor of the MUFON UFO Journal in 1983-84. In more than 28 years as a UFO researcher, he never saw a UFO. He created and maintained a web site devoted to some of his UFO research, http://www.bobpratt.org, that can still be accessed. He was a veteran of World War II, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. At a New Year's Eve Party in Charlottesville, Virginia, he met Faith Collins. They were married October 22, 1955. She and their son, Alan Collins Pratt of New York City survive him. Another son, Robert Scott Pratt, died in 1975 at the age of 17. A cousin, Richard Taylor of Boca Raton, and numerous nieces and nephews in California also survive him. A private service was held for the family. Faith and Alan welcomed visitors on Friday, November 25, 4:00-6:00pm at Dorsey-E. Earl Smith Funeral Home at 3041 Kirk Rd. in Lake Worth.