The Mothman Prophecies Part 12

"We know all about the shenanigans in this building," Dalton told her curtly. "A lot of funny people have been going in and out."

"Well, maybe some of my relatives are a little strange," Jane smiled.

Dalton opened his briefcase and brought out a sheaf of printed forms. He handed her a long, complicated form and asked her to fill it out. She took it, read it over, then handed it back.

"If you don't want to fill it out," he said, handing her a pen, "you can just sign it."

"Now that would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it?" Jane said.

Later she recalled that the form did not ask any questions about UFOs but was solely concerned with personal history, education, medical background, and family history. "It even asked when my grandmother died and what she died of," Jane told me.

Finally the two men gave up trying to browbeat her and left. She saw them drive away in a blue station wagon.

Around this same time two young men visited Mary -Hyre at her home in Point Pleasant. Both were wearing black clothes, and both had short white hair. "It looked so unnatural," she exclaimed. "I wondered why such young men would dye their hair such an odd color."

At first she a.s.sumed they were just more in the endless stream of UFO buffs, but they seemed to know very little about flying saucers. They were mainly concerned with asking questions about me, which she hedged.

"Did they use any unusual words or expressions?" I asked Mary on the phone.

"Not really. Just when they went out the door ... one of them turned and said something like, 'We'll see you in "time" or "sometime".' It sounded odd the way he said it, like it was meant to mean something."

Tom's meeting with Vadig was still six months away so the phrase meant nothing to me.

III.

On June 19 Mr. Apol gave Jane a message to pa.s.s along to me. It was a prediction: "Things will become more serious in the Middle East. The pope will go there soon on a peace mission. He will be martyred there in a horrible way ... knifed to death to a b.l.o.o.d.y manner. Then the Antichrist will rise up out of Israel."

I was shocked. But here was a statement that could be checked against future events. Apol also said the Vatican was planning to send food and materiel to Arab refugees. There had been no announcement in the press about this.

Two days later Miss Paro had an unnerving experience. A black Cadillac pulled alongside her as she was out walking at 8 P.M. and a well-dressed man in the back seat ordered her into the car. He named a friend of hers and she foolishly obeyed him. The car headed for Mount Misery.

"There was a funny smell inside," she reported. "Antiseptic ... like a hospital. And there were flashing lights on the dashboard. I couldn't take my eyes off them. I felt like they were hypnotizing me."

The car traveled isolated back roads until it reached a crossroads where another vehicle was waiting. A man holding something like a doctor's bag was standing there. He got into the Cadillac and waved a small object in Jaye's face, like a bottle of smelling salts. She felt her will power drain away and sat there helplessly while the men asked her questions which didn't make any sense to her. Finally they returned her to the spot where they had picked her up. The whole episode had terrified her and she called me immediately.

Was Jaye's experience merely an updated version of the Mattoon "ga.s.ser" and old Springheeled Jack? (*) Months later when I interviewed Tom in Washington I remembered this seemingly meaningless incident. Had Tom also been ga.s.sed or hypnotized the moment he stepped into Vadig's old Buick?

[*] Springheeled Jack was a tall, caped phantom with a bright light on his chest who appeared in England in the 1830s. He was able to leap great distances and he spewed a nauseous gas into the faces of surprised witnesses. Although he was the subject of a ma.s.sive manhunt, he was never caught or identified. A black-garbed phantom terrorized Mattoon, Illinois, in the 1940s, spraying a noxious gas into bedroom windows.

On October 23, 1971, the Washington Post published a strange "gas" story involving President Nixon's maid. The story contains some of the elements we have been discussing here.

Nixon Maid Stole In Trance, She Says Miami, Oct. 22 (AP)-A part-time housekeeper at President Nixon's Key Biscayne retreat has testified she was put in a hypnotic daze by a stranger who told her to shoplift four dresses.

Shirley Cromartie, 32, and a mother of three, pleaded no contest Thursday and was given a suspended sentence after law enforcement officers and a psychiatrist testified they believed she was telling the truth.

Mrs. Cromartie holds a security clearance to work in the Florida White House, according to testimony. She said a woman met her in a parking lot and asked the time, then ordered her to take the items and bring them to her.

Mrs. Cromartie testified she fell into a daze when the young woman released a jasminelike scent from her left hand. "I just sort of lost my will ... it was a terrifying experience," she testified.

Mrs. Cromartie joined the Key Biscayne White House housekeeping staff about a year ago, according to FBI Agent Leo Mc Clairen. He testified her background was impeccable.

Dr. Albert Jaslow, a psychiatrist, said he examined her and found she could be hypnotized "quickly and easily" and believed she was telling the truth.

"But it wasn't the same when he hypnotized me," Mrs. Cromartie said. "I couldn't remember anything afterwards. Whatever that young woman did to me, it was like being in a sleepwalk, only awake."

There was no further comment on this strange incident. At the time I wondered if perhaps this was not some small demonstration for the benefit of President Nixon, similar to the power failures that seemed to follow President Johnson in 1967. (The lights failed wherever he went ... from Washington to Johnson City, Texas, to Hawaii.) IV.

Woodrow Derenberger found a new world with Cold, Klinnel, Ardo, and company. Now Jane was moving among twilight presences; Mr. Apol, Lia (the name of his female companion), and several others who mischievously adopted names from my obscure (d.a.m.n it) novels! They amplified their dire prophecy for Pope Paul. He would be attacked in a crowd at an airport, they said, by a man dressed in a black suit and wielding a black knife. After his a.s.sa.s.sination there would be three days of darkness and worldwide power failures.

On June 28 the Vatican announced that a personal envoy of Pope Paul VI, Monsignor Abramo Frescht, was being dispatched to Cairo to discuss "Vatican a.s.sistance to war victims and refugees." On June 30 it was announced that the wooden throne said to have been used by Saint Peter was going to be dug out of the Vatican bas.e.m.e.nt and placed on display for the first time since 1867.

I went out to Mount Misery and hypnotized Jane. She was a good subject and after performing various tests to a.s.sure myself that she was really in a deep trance, I began to ask her subtle questions about Apol and his friends. To my utter amazement, the impossible happened. The control was taken away from me. I couldn't direct the session. Instead, I found myself talking directly to Apol through Jane. He wanted to talk about Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy. I didn't want to gossip, I insisted, but wanted some hard facts on the overall situation. Apol persisted, warning me that Kennedy was in grave danger. Where was he talking from? He said he was parked nearby in his Cadillac. He made some specific predictions about pending plane crashes, then returned to Marilyn and Kennedy.

All the while we were conducting this insane conversation, Jane's telephone was ringing madly. Each time I picked it up there was no one on the line. Finally I just left it off the hook.

The session ended abruptly when Jane woke up by herself. Another impossibility. She would have required a suggestion from me before she could awake. (*) ----.

[*] In comparing notes with psychic investigator-author Brad Steiger, he told me he had similar experiences with hypnosis; that is, the control was taken out of his hands by some other intelligence.

The predicted plane crashes occurred right on schedule. I was slowly convincing myself that the ent.i.ties were somehow tuned to the future.

I was making other startling discoveries. I had only to think of a serious question and my phone would ring and Jane would deliver a message from Apol answering it Other ufologists were also getting predictions from contactees. When Gray Barker arrived in New York for the convention at the Hotel Commodore he told me that he'd received a prediction that "a famous newsman in the Midwest" would die very soon. Two days later, on the evening of June 23, Frank Edwards died suddenly of a heart attack in Indiana. Edwards was a newscaster and author of the 1966 bestseller Flying Saucers-Serious Business.

The Year of the Garuda-1966-67-was only half over and I was talking to half-a-dozen ent.i.ties through contactees scattered throughout the Northeast. Scores of new games were going on at once, each one designed to prove something to me, not to the contactees. The latter would never quite figure out what was happening to them or what it all meant. Like the UFO enthusiasts themselves, the contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it, why the wonderful s.p.a.ce people had abandoned them.

On Long Island, a dozen eccentrics still sit by their phones waiting for Princess Moon Owl to call again and restore their waning faith.

16 - Paranoiacs Are Made, Not Born

I.

"The U.S. government is being taken over by the s.p.a.ce people!"

This rumor spread throughout the country in 1967, an updated version of the old devil theory. Actually it got its start in 1941 when James V. Forrestal, the brilliant secretary of defense in the Truman cabinet, went bananas and raced through the corridors of the Pentagon screaming, "We're being invaded and we can't stop them!" He was convinced that his phones were being tapped and some enormous conspiracy was underway. Soon after he was placed in a hospital he leaped out a window to his death. While the press blamed his paranoia on the tensions of the cold war, the UFO enthusiasts knew better. Air force Intelligence had compiled a Top Secret Estimate of the Situation following their UFO investigations in 1947-48. Their conclusion, according to the late Capt. Edward Ruppelt, was that flying saucers were extraterrestrial. Forrestal, so the story went, was one of the few to read that report before Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg ordered all copies destroyed, and it blew his mind.

Two other top military men, Gen. George C. Marshall and Gen. Douglas MacArthur were obsessed with the flying saucer phenomenon. MacArthur made several public statements declaring that the next war would be fought against "evil beings from outer s.p.a.ce." A fabled "think tank," the Rand Corporation, was a.s.signed to feed UFO data into a computer and fight an imaginary war with those evil beings. Since we wouldn't know where they were from, what their technology was, or how to attack their bases, the computer advised us to surrender.

Contactees adrift in the hallucinatory worlds were convinced the s.p.a.ce people were walking among us unnoticed. Los Angeles alone had a s.p.a.ce population of ten thousand. Actually this was just a tiresome repet.i.tion of the earlier beliefs that devils and angels were everywhere in human guise. Early in the Age of the Flying Saucers (1947-69), air force and CIA agents undoubtedly came across MIB cases similar to the ones outlined here and, being human, some of those early investigators leapfrogged to UFO cultistlike conclusions. Paranoia gripped the upper echelons of .government. Millions of tax dollars were sunk into UFO research. (In 1952, Captain Ruppelt said the air force was spending one million dollars a year on the subject. Gen. Nathan Twining declared "the best brains" in science and the military were trying to solve the mystery.) Cold war hysteria added to the atmosphere of fear and loathing. A 1953 CIA doc.u.ment, kept cla.s.sified for over twenty years, noted that the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) "should be watched" as a potential propaganda menace. APRO had been founded the year before by a Wisconsin housewife and circulated a mimeographed UFO newsletter to a few dozen scattered buffs. Apparently more thousands of tax dollars were expended in "watching" APRO's Coral Lorenzen over the years, according to evidence she published in a series of paperback books in the 1960s. The only propaganda she ever distributed was anti-air force, and she never sold any of our flying saucer secrets to the Soviet Union.

Military men-and the UFO enthusiasts-had no knowledge of or interest in psychic phenomena. Their materialistic, pseudo-scientific approach to the sightings and attendent manifestations merely increased the lore and intensified the mystery. The age-old changeling concept, for example, must have caused many gray hairs in official circles when it was introduced into the UFO lore. Were the s.p.a.ce people really switching human beings? Many of the contactees and their open-mouthed followers believed this was the case. Were humans being dragged aboard s.p.a.ceships and examined like cattle? The contactees' tales indicated this and their stories gave impetus to the expanded devil theory; that government officials were being kidnapped and replaced by clever androids obeying the dictates of the sinister leaders of some other planet. Idiocy was piled upon idiocy over the past twenty-eight years. The paranoia once isolated to the very small lunatic fringe grew until it swallowed up a large part of the world's population.

I was concerned not with the sincere but falsified memories of the contactees, but with a more worrisome question. What, I wondered, happened to the bodies of these people while their minds were taking trips? Trips that often lasted for hours, even for days. A young college professor in New York State was haunted by the same question in 1967. After investigating a UFO-related poltergeist case he suffered possession and was led to believe that he had committed a daring jewel robbery while he was in a trance or possessed state. He abandoned ufology and nearly suffered a total nervous breakdown in the aftermath.

Were our contactees being used by exterior intelligences to carry out crimes, even murder? The answer is a disturbing yes. If you review the history of political a.s.sa.s.sinations you will find that many were performed by so-called religious fanatics who were obeying the "voice of G.o.d" or were in an obvious state of possession when they committed their crime. Even the ten co-conspirators in the a.s.sa.s.sination of President Lincoln were in this category. And the soldier who shot and killed John Wilkes Booth against the orders of his superiors claimed he pulled the trigger because a voice told him to do so.

The madness that grips crowds and produces violent riots, some of which have changed history, seems little different from the madness that produced the widespread dancing mania of the Middle Ages when thousands of people danced in the streets until they dropped dead from exhaustion. The mania spread from Italy to Turkey. Survivors claimed they believed they were knee-deep in blood and were prancing to get out of it. This was a collective or ma.s.s hallucination. Even today there are annual incidents in which whole towns are seized by hallucinations, usually in obscure parts of South America and Asia. Such events are traditionally explained as being caused by tainted bread despite the fact that people who have not eaten the local bread are also affected.

In contactee parlance, persons who perform involuntary acts are said to be "used." Apparently a relatively small part of the population have auras or biological radiations which attract elements of the superspectrum. Such people are p.r.o.ne to controlled hallucinations and possession. Since the ent.i.ties probably exist as energy in a field outside our s.p.a.ce-time continuum they can only see, and be seen, by these special people. (In innumerable UFO reports the ufonauts apparently could not see the witnesses.) Derenberger's Cold identified himself as "a searcher." Searching for what? For biological, oddities like Woody, no doubt.

A contactee may feel a sudden impulse to go for a pointless late-night walk or drive. During that drive he encounters, he thinks, the s.p.a.ce people and has a fine visit with them. Actually his body proceeds on to, say, Point A where he picks up a letter or object left there by another contactee. He carries the letter or object to Point B and deposits it. Later he has no memory of these actions. Meanwhile some poor slob with the wrong aura, like myself, receives a phone call advising him to proceed to Point B where he will find something left for him by the s.p.a.ce people. In short, all physical evidence and manifestations are produced by human beings. They dig holes in fields, rifle mailboxes, and who knows what else.

These games have been going on since forever.

I have received thousands of letters from contactees since 1967, many of them filled with glowing praise for their contacters, other pathetic and touched with terror. One of the first letters arrived unexpectedly in the summer of 1967 from an elderly man in New England.

"I found your name and address on a slip of paper dropped onto my kitchen floor by an 'Indian-like' friend," he wrote. "If this letter is not returned to me I will no [sic] you received it ... I wish I could tell you how my life has been taken over & what condition our country & government are in. If you have been through the 'misery' you no [sic] you are not alone. I am not a nut. I am sincere. I am concerned for you ....

"P.S. I have been 'used'!"

This letter, and others like them, helped to convince me that my own investigations could be manipulated. I was being led to people and cases to support whatever theory I was working on at the time. I tested this by inventing some rather outlandish ideas. Within days I would receive phone calls, reports, and mail describing elements of those ideas. This was the feedback or reflective effect. Other investigators concerned with solving problems such as how flying saucers are propelled have automatically been fed, or led into, cases in which the witnesses supposedly viewed the interiors of the objects and saw things which confirmed the investigators' theories.

If the phenomenon can produce any effect through hallucination, it can easily support any theory. It took me a long time to realize that many of my Men in Black reports were just feedback. It is even possible that affairs like Tiny's visit to the Christiansens were somehow arranged for my benefit, even though I didn't know them at the time. I came across the Christiansens during an investigation far from Cape May. They were almost dumped in my lap, just as the letter from the man in Ma.s.sachusetts came at a time when I was involved in cases with "Indian-like" ent.i.ties on Mount Misery. (Note he put "misery" in quotes.) My thoroughness led to the discovery of coincidences that seemed significant at the time. Two of my silent contactees shared the same birth date-September 6. As soon as I realized this, circ.u.mstances added several new contactees to my stable-all women and all born on September 6!

During one of her almost-daily conversations with Apol and Lia, Jane was told that a number of women were being selected for artificial insemination! They would be bearing very special children for the s.p.a.ce people. This led to a whole new game in which I found myself trying to cope with pregnant women, though I eventually figured out they were victims of pseudocyesis-false or "hysterical" pregnancies. This was probably feedback from my concern over Derenberger's statement that if the truth were known, women the world over would panic, throw their babies out the window, and commit suicide.

By mid-July I was in indirect contact with the ent.i.ties through three different systems. First, contactees would relay my questions to them and relay their answers back to me. I was still extremely skeptical, so many of my questions were complicated and beyond the abilities of the individual contactees to answer ... even if they spent hours in a library trying to research the answers. Second, I was able to communicate by mail by sending letters through the U.S. Post Office to addresses which I later discovered were nonexistent. I would receive replies by mail, often the very next day, written in block letters. Some of these replies covered several pages. Third, I was sometimes able to speak to the ent.i.ties by telephone! A contactee would call me and inform me that an ent.i.ty was present in his or her house and wished to speak to me. Sometimes I just asked questions and the alleged ent.i.ty whispered the answer to the contactee who relayed it to me. Sometimes a strange voice would come on the line and speak to me directly. In some, if not all, of these instances the contactee probably entered a trance state and the voice came from their own vocal chords just as "spirits" speak through mediums at seances.

As soon as I entered this communication phase my problems with the mails and telephone intensified. Important letters of a non-UFO nature went astray ... or arrived days late and had obviously been opened by someone en route. My telephone rang at all hours of the day and night with beeping calls, eerie electronic sounds, and, most interesting of all, frantic calls from people who were superb actors and who described UFO incidents containing those secret details in cases I was working on, but when I tried to check out these people I found the addresses they had given me were nonexistent and the phone numbers they gave were false.

Someone somewhere was just trying to prove that they knew every move I was making, listened to all my phone calls, and could even control my mail! And they were succeeding.

II.

On July 20, 1967, the Vatican announced that the pope was planning a trip to Turkey. He would be flying to Istanbul where he would be greeted by a huge mob at the airport. Several of my contactees had been gravely concerned with the prediction of the pope's impending death and the three days of darkness that would follow. The accuracy of earlier predictions led me to take this one seriously. Very seriously.

The a.s.sa.s.sination was supposed to take place on July 26. It would be preceded by a violent earthquake.

On July 22 more than one thousand people were killed in an earthquake in Adapazari, Turkey, one hundred miles southeast of Istanbul. The news really shook me up. The whole prophesied scenario was being carried out to the letter!

The night before the quake, there were a rash of telephone hoaxes throughout the Northeast. These calls consisted of two people talking indistinctly for the most part, but certain names were clearly audible. Ivan Sanderson received such a call on his unlisted phone in the mountains of New Jersey at midnight. My call came through at 11:40. A UFO buff on Long Island received one at 1 A.M. He heard, "Hang up, John ... and I'll turn off the recorder." On my call the name "Jim" was used.

These calls were part of a broader nationwide pattern which had successfully disrupted, even destroyed, many local UFO groups. The receiver heard the name of a fellow UFO enthusiast and regarded it as proof that the other person was responsible for all the hoax calls he or she was receiving. The very same ploy was used against the civilians quietly investigating the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination! Penn Jones, a Texas newspaper editor who has been investigating the death of JFK for years, received similar calls, including the playing of a tape of his phone conversations with other investigators ... proof positive that his phone was being tapped by someone and they wanted him to know it. This playback of taped conversations also happened on my phone. The object of such gimmicks is clearly to incite paranoia. Since many of the UFO enthusiasts are very unstable to begin with, the device has been very effective.

I was now receiving many messages phrased in biblical terms. Some came from unknown elderly ladies who phoned me late at night claiming to be from Western Union. Then they would read long Bible quotations that were supposedly telegrams. But Western Union disavowed any knowledge of these messages. I had hooked up a tape recorder to my own phone so I could keep track of all these things.

"If it is the days of darkness," said a message received on July 23, "behold there will be voices, thunder and earthquakes and disturbances upon the earth. And at their cry all nations shall fight one against the other. And fear shall fall upon the earth and the sky shall be darkened except for the illuminating round lights that will be the only sparks of light. And rain shall come at the end of the happening.

"John: Do not trouble yourself over trivial matters such as strange calls. We're in greater danger than you can imagine. Not only is your world involved, but many others too."

I am an amateur herpetologist and once kept three-fanged cobras in my New York apartment ... until my concerned neighbors squealed to the Board of Health. Some of the descriptions of the ent.i.ties impressed me as resembling some kind of reptile rather than human mammals. I didn't mention this reptile notion to anyone. But on July 24, Lia visited Jane and refused to talk about anything but eggs. She took some eggs from Jane's refrigerator and sucked out the contents like a reptile! Jane was perplexed by this exhibition and called me soon afterward.

That evening I received a phone call from Harold Salkin, a Washington, D.C., UFO researcher. He wanted to tell me that people all over Washington had been receiving strange phone calls during the past week. We had a perfect connection until I started to ask him if he had heard any rumors about Pope Paul. We were instantly drowned out by heavy static. As soon as I changed the subject, the static went away. Later in the conversation I tried again. The moment I named the pope the static resumed. When I again dropped the subject, the line cleared instantly.

Now they were even controlling my phone conversations!

Convinced that Pope Paul was about to be knifed to death at the Istanbul airport, I rented a car, loaded it with flashlights, candles, food, and bottled water, and drove out to the Mount Misery area to await the blackout. On the way I stopped to see one of my contactees and he informed me that a s.p.a.ceman had just been to see him and had left a silly message.

"Tell John we'll meet with him later and help him drink all that water."

The contactee had no idea that I had several quarts of spring water in the trunk of the car.

Near Mount Misery I picked out a motel at random (I thought). The motel clerk asked to see my identification (very unusual).

"We've got a lot of messages here for you, Mr. Keel," she said, pulling out a sheaf of message slips. I started to protest since I had not even known I was going to stay at that motel until minutes before. The messages were all nonsensical, meant only to prove once more that my movements were being antic.i.p.ated.

The pope landed in Istanbul safely. There was no three-day blackout. The whole episode served no purpose other than to demonstrate to me how and why so many contactees and prophets go and sit on hilltops to await the end of the world.

Three years later, on November 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI arrived at the Manila International Airport in the Philippines and the scene described to me in 1967 suddenly became a reality. A man dressed in the black garments of a priest came out of the crowd and sprang at the pope with a long black knife in his hands. Fortunately, security guards wrestled him to the ground and the pontiff was unhurt. The would-be a.s.sa.s.sin was a Bolivian painter named Benjamin Mendoza who allegedly practiced black magic and witchcraft. Witnesses said that he had gla.s.sy eyes and seemed to be in some kind of trance during the attack.

The ent.i.ties had correctly described the general circ.u.mstances of the attempt, but their dates were all wrong, and it took place in the Far East rather than the Middle East.

(In January 1968, I received a phone call informing me that the Reverend Martin Luther King would be murdered on February 4. He would be shot in the throat, I was told, while standing on a balcony in Memphis. I took the prediction seriously and spent some frantic hours trying to contact King by phone to warn him. I never got through. He was not a.s.sa.s.sinated on February 4, but on April 4, exactly as described to me four months earlier.) III.

August 3, 1967. Jaye P. Pare was awakened at 3 A.M. by the sound of a baby crying. There were no babies in her house. She got out of bed and searched for the source of the sound without success.

Reports of telephone hoaxes, beeping and electronic sounds, tapes being played back, etc., reached me from as far away as Seattle, Washington. Flying saucer enthusiasts from coast to coast were suddenly having identical problems. Obviously this was not the work of a few random pranksters. It was more like a well-organized, well-financed campaign. On the night of July 21 between the hours of 10 P.M. and 1 A.M. hoax calls were received in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Ma.s.sachusetts, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, and probably many other places that I never learned about. Unlisted phones were no protection. Were these calls the work of the CIA, as so many of the UFO enthusiasts believed? They seemed too pointless and expensive to be the work of the government.

After the UFO convention in June, Princess Moon Owl faded away, just as I had suspected she would. Aside from the single interview on WBAB, she had not been given any publicity. But in late August she was phoning UFO enthusiasts again, showering them with predictions ... all largely silly. Then, unexpectedly, she became respectable. She traveled around Long Island handing out money, usually less than twenty-five dollars, to people in need. The entertainment editor of the Long Island newspaper News-day, Bob Nickland, told me he received "over twenty-five phone calls" in September describing the Princess's good deeds. Long John Nebel phoned me to see if I knew how I could get in touch with her so he could interview her on his radio show. I told both men that I smelled a large rat ... a blatant bid for publicity.

The n.o.ble princess was the least of my worries. I was like a general advising a dozen deeply troubled contactees and trying to guide them through the games they were caught up in. One woman in Brooklyn was searching for a mysterious crucifix that seemed to have special meaning to the ent.i.ties. It was like the search for the Holy Grail. A man on Long Island was frantically making preparations for the big evacuation. He even traveled to a secret underground flying saucer base, in a black Cadillac with a dashboard festooned with flashing colored lights, where he partic.i.p.ated in a "dry run." Other normal human beings were present, he said, and manned various kinds of equipment to communicate with the rescue s.p.a.ceships somewhere overhead. "Funny thing, John," he mused, "all the equipment was manufactured by Western Electric, Hallicrafters, and other U.S. companies."

One woman told me she had been flown to another planet where she was placed in a huge gla.s.s hospital and examined by a great eyelike machine. Her hosts told her they were "copying" her insides.

I knew from my lengthy interviews and examinations that none of these people were run-of-the-mill kooks or schizophrenics. And I was impressed that many of their experiences were interrelated even though they were scattered geographically and not one of them knew any of the others. The ent.i.ties adopted a system of code names, giving each contactee a biblical name. I was the only one who knew which name applied to which contactee. They would tell Contactee A in New Jersey to give me a message or piece of advice about Contactee B who lived in Connecticut. Contactee A wouldn't have the faintest notion of what they were talking about.

Another trick was to use certain key phrases. When a contactee whispered to me, "Do you know that cancer is contagious?," I knew he or she had been talking to this one set of ent.i.ties.

Then there were those d.a.m.ned synchronized events.

The contactees stopped talking about the pope's fate. They were concerned now about an "EM effect" scheduled for sometime in December. All of them said it would happen in the middle of the month and would affect a large part of the United States. It was going to be a ma.s.sive power failure.

On September 24, Jaye P. Paro received a phone call from a man claiming to be on the city desk at Newsday. He told her that Princess Moon Owl was going to visit WBAB that afternoon and he was sending a photographer to get a picture of the two of them together. Miss Paro went to the radio station and waited all afternoon but neither the princess nor the photographer showed up.

But, curiously, a photographer did turn up in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, at the home of Linda Scarberry. He was very tall, wore a black suit, had a heavy "sunburn," and wanted to take pictures of Linda's "family." She and Roger had no children but she was very pregnant at the time. She refused his offer and phoned her mother in a panic after he left. Something about the man just hadn't seemed right...