The Bossacks don’t immediately strike you as the kind of people to bring about a revolution in consciousness. Ann, 54, is jolly and chatty. Dennis, 49, is opinionated and chatty. She sports a honey-blond rinse. He is portly, balding, and bearded. They are given to wearing matching outfits and calling each other things like “Hon.” They wear age-appropriate eyeglasses. They smoke constantly. And both lavish excessive amounts of affection on their terrifying German shepherd, Buddy.

But there is more to Dennis and Ann than meets the eye. They represent the radical, evangelical wing of the UFO community. They are whirling dervishes of the paranormal, prophets of the improbable. For these guys, UFOs are no mere hobby, nor even a way of life — they are a religion.

Shortly after I first meet the Bossacks, Ann pulls out a photograph. It’s a familiar — even hackneyed — representation of an alien: the bulbous dome, the boiled-egg skin tone, the outsize eyes. The alien’s name is Aviel, says Dennis, and she’s from the planet Zeta 2 Reticuli.

How old is she?

“Seven hundred and fifty years.”

Ann chimes in: “Middle-aged.”

Um, has either of you ever met her?

“She’s a personal friend of Dennis’s,” says Ann, a little proudly, as if talking about a middle-tier celebrity. “I used to have lunch with her every day,” adds Dennis. “I actually got her hooked on Burger King hamburgers with mustard and mayonnaise.” I watch for a flicker of amusement, or even self-doubt. None. Not even when Dennis says that Aviel the Reticulan finds McDonald’s burgers “a little dry.”

But the Bossacks aren’t here to talk fast food. They’re here to talk about What They Know, a secret doctrine that, they say, will one day turn the world on its head. As Ann puts it, “We’re here to wake people up.”

The flagship of the Bossacks’ UFO clearinghouse is their radio talk show, DNA Live, which airs every Sunday from 6 to 9 p.m. on WBLQ in Westerly, Rhode Island. Granted, DNA (which stands for “Dennis ’N’ Ann”) is no All Things Considered: WBLQ is a community radio station with a stone’s-throw signal range; DNA shares air time with a wrestling talk show, a pet talk show, and a computer-repair talk show, but still. “They have their listeners,” says a station spokesman. They also manage to snag some pretty impressive guests, bigwig UFOlogists like Betty Hill, Timothy Good, and Nick Pope.

They also host a monthly “discussion meeting,” in which local UFO buffs are invited to sit around munching on complimentary potato chips and discussing government cover-ups and the inevitability of life on other planets. “MUFON [Mutual UFO Network] averages 12 people a month,” says Dennis, leaning into the tape recorder. “We average 30.” Dennis is also a regular on the UFO lecture circuit. This July, he has been booked for a prestigious speaking engagement at a conference in Roswell, New Mexico.

If the Bossacks don’t seem like your typical New Age missionaries, the location from which they proselytize seems equally improbable. Shortly after they married, Ann and Dennis moved to Richmond, Rhode Island, where they established another UFO Lab. Never mind remote corners of the universe — the UFO Lab is tucked away in a remote corner of a shopping mall, the Ocean State Job Lot Plaza, which is itself tucked away in a remote corner of Rhode Island. Right next to the lab is a Doggie Depot, a NAPA Auto Parts, and an East Coast Karate and Kickbox.

The UFO Lab actually feels less like a temple than like a little bit of Route 66. A Web site describes it as “a museum, research center, and gift shop.” The gift shop is the most apparent branch of the operation, offering a vast array of alien-themed trinkets: alien playing cards, alien candles, alien T-shirts, alien key chains ...

“We don’t use the term ‘alien,’ ” says Ann. “We prefer ‘Visitor.’ ”

... Visitor neckties, inflatable Visitors, and assorted Visitor figurines.

But you get the sense that the majority of people who enter the UFO Lab do so less to stock up on Visitor frisbees than to shoot the breeze. The Bossacks are terrific, tireless talkers. And if you don’t want to listen to their repertoire of intergalactic intrigue, you can get a thorough briefing in the UFO Lab Museum.

The Bossacks’ UFO Museum is, as far as I can gather, the only one of its kind in New England, and one of only a handful in the US. It lies just beyond the gift shop, behind a set of tinsel curtains, in a small, cluttered, dimly lit room. Almost immediately, it reminds me of something.

When I was a kid, I turned my bedroom into a dinosaur museum. It had things like little plastic tyrannosauruses attacking little plastic sheep. The UFO Museum reminds me of my Dinosaur Museum. “It’s under construction,” Ann explains, perhaps sensing my disappointment. There are, though, a few exhibits on display. Mostly, these consist of grainy photographs and placards bearing information like: “The pyramids were built 125 billion years ago ... by people known as Plajarans.”

The most absorbing part of the museum is the section detailing the life and death of Ann’s father. A few months after he gave the Strange Universe interview, Harris, 82, died at his home in Albuquerque. “The death certificate says it was a fall from a standing height,” says Ann. “But he was murdered by the CIA.” She believes the weapon that killed her father was a super-secret gun that uses compressed air. “It can make you fall over,” she says, “or it can take your heart out and blast it through that wall.”

Right next to the stuff about Ann’s dad is a compression chamber containing the prostrate form of a Visitor. The figure is perhaps four feet tall, with the same whopping head and wasted torso as those adorning the T-shirts and key chains outside. The Visitor, alas, is also made out of the same material as the key chains. You can see the bobbles and creases of a botched molding job. “It’s a replica,” says Ann, “but it’s pretty accurate.”

The museum at the UFO Lab is, in fact, not really a museum at all — at least not in the traditional sense of the word. It is a visual representation of the Bossacks’ world-view — a fascinating, idiosyncratic, even gonzo take on the UFO phenomenon. “History as we know it is wrong,” Ann says, puffing a cigarette. “There is information in here you can’t get anywhere else on earth.”

On this point she is absolutely right. Following a brief tour of the museum, I am led through another door and ushered into a back room, where, surrounded by jars of peanut butter, computer equipment, and UFO paraphernalia, Dennis and Ann Bossack tell me stories I am quite sure I could not hear anywhere else on earth. Or possibly the universe.

THE OMEGA Agency is the security force for the Universal Government. The Universal Government consists of 752 advanced planets from around the known universe,” says Dennis, bracing himself to deliver a pitch he has clearly made many times before. “I was the director of the agency here on earth.”

This stuff goes on for about four hours, and not once does Dennis deviate from his deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery. Indeed, the truly impressive thing about his stories is that they are both incoherent and consistent. Ask Dennis a questions about the tiniest detail of his Omega days, and he will fire back an answer before you can blink in disbelief.

The story begins in New York, back in the early 1970s, when a pair of Omega representatives approached Dennis about working for the agency. “Men in Black, that’s what they looked like,” he says. “White shirts, black pants, black jacket, black tie. They knocked on my apartment door. I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ ”

A visit to Omega headquarters, five miles beneath the New Mexico desert, allayed his doubts. “It was amazing,” he says. “The first place we went to was the cafeteria. It was stark white, immaculately clean, indirect lighting everywhere. They had any kind of food you wanted to eat, Zeta food too. They had this mango-banana-type food that’s very sweet. I’m a diabetic, and I could eat it.”

After meeting with the Omega leader, Dennis agreed to join the agency. He ended up working there, he says, for 28 years, 15 of those as director. His main job was overseeing the day-to-day operation of the underground facility, in which hundreds of earthlings and Visitors worked side by side to prepare the planet for the day Omega takes over. “It was a very hectic life,” he says, “very time-consuming. I missed a lot of family functions.”

Dennis “semi-retired” from Omega in 1997, though he still has a role in the organization. He is, in his own words, a sort of PR man. Even so, Dennis misses the Omega lifestyle. “It’s one big family down there,” he says. “Everybody watches out for everybody.” He especially misses his friend Aviel, the hamburger-munching Reticulan.

Aviel still works at Omega as a biologist, specializing in the study of human emotions. Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate — she studies earthling emotions. Aviel is herself a human being, as are all the Visitors. She is simply 200 million years more evolved than we are.

For Aviel, earthlings are like infants. She finds us difficult to understand. We make her sad. She used to quiz Dennis for hours, asking question after question about our aggressive, warlike ways. “For her, this was like looking into the past,” he says. “Her planet actually had 12 world wars before they matured. But she hasn’t seen any of that. Watching earth is like watching ancient Zeta.”

More often than not, Dennis and Aviel’s conversations concerned more mundane subjects, like family and work. Aviel has a husband and two kids back on Zeta, Dennis says, and “every other weekend or so” she would go back for a visit. Occasionally, Dennis would go with her.

“It’s actually only a 15-minute trip,” he says. “That puppy takes off from zero to 10 times the speed of light, and you have no idea you’re doing it. You do not have to be seat-belted in. You do not have to be seated.”

It’s been a while since Dennis went to Zeta, and it’s been a while since he saw Aviel. “We still communicate telepathically,” he says, “but it’s not the same.” The day of Dennis’s retirement, Aviel demonstrated her regard for him by violating a Reticulan taboo. “One of the things that surprised me most after 25 years of working with Aviel,” he says, “I was the only one who left there and got a hug. To her, any kind of touching is sexual, but she had to take that and turn it into an earth gesture to say goodbye.”

“They don’t even shake hands,” adds Ann, without a hint of jealousy.