The Mothman Prophecies Part 10

I.

"How much did Keel pay you to say these things?" a middle-aged man with a cultured voice demanded over and over again as he systematically called several of the witnesses named in my syndicated newspaper columns. All those long-distance phone calls must have cost him a lot of money and all he succeeded in doing was raising the ire of people who had already been plagued by an endless stream of unwelcome visitors, crank phone calls, and crazy letters. Some of them forwarded their mail to me, not knowing if they should answer, or how.

Our UFO enthusiasts are compulsive letter writers. A major portion of the mail received by witnesses are letters scribbled on sheets of cheap ruled paper in pencil demanding, "Send me everything you know." Others are neatly typed and cover forty or fifty pages. Threatening letters are not uncommon, some are laborious paste-ups using words clipped from magazines and newspapers ... "Do not talk about flying saucers." Others are painfully written in block letters in red ink. Almost unreadable mimeographed forms are sent out by many of the teen-aged UFO investigators who spring up after each flap, asking such vital scientific questions as: "Which planet did they come from?"

Unfortunately, no qualifications are necessary to join the various nationwide UFO correspondence clubs. Anyone who could sc.r.a.pe up the five or ten dollars could receive an impressive-looking members.h.i.+p card which gave them carte blanche to hara.s.s local police and witnesses.

Members of the "little old ladies in tennis shoes" brigade found instant ident.i.ty in joining such clubs. Then they trooped about their state, lecturing on the coming of the Brothers, appearing on local radio and television as the local "experts," and, more often than not, bringing more ridicule to an already ridiculous situation.

Although they are largely a harmless, humorless lot, a few of the ego-tripping characters in ufology are not above creating a few hoaxes of their own, placing prank calls, and, of course, circulating the idiotic rumors. Ivan Sanderson referred to them as "neurots," short for neurotics. Dr. Edward Condon of Colorado University labeled them "obstructionist." On several occasions I did find that some of these card-carrying ufologists had warned witnesses to report only to them. Members of competing correspondence clubs often engaged in open battles, trying to reach witnesses first and accusing each other of all kinds of misdeeds. Donald E. Keyhoe, head of the Was.h.i.+ngton-based NICAP, had spent years building and publicizing his case against the air force. The only tangible result of his campaign was the quality of the people attracted to ufology, and to his ideas. Paranoid-schizophrenics and obsessive-compulsive personalities dominated the field.

Many of these groups collapsed inwardly in a short time because of the conflicting egos and the excessive paranoia (members often regarded their fellow members as "agents of the air force"). Even NICAP, which had been founded in 1956 by a physicist who was hot on the trail of the secret of frying saucer propulsion systems, came apart at the seams in the late 1960s. The few qualified members of its headquarters staff departed in an atmosphere of rancor, taking choice files and mailing lists with them, and Stuart Nixon, the office boy during the Keyhoe regime, became director of the organization.

The air force and CIA did not have to try to disrupt the ufological movement. It is by its very nature a self-disrupting network of disoriented people.

In the spring of 1967, following the publicity that attended Mothman and the UFOs, mobs of strangers descended on Point Pleasant. Cars filled with students from neighboring colleges would arrive unannounced at the homes of witnesses named in newspaper accounts, often late at night, and expect to be welcomed. Mary Hyre and all the others were subjected to silly interviews by people who obviously didn't have any notion of how to go about investigating anything. Some of these investigators were tactless and impolite, as only teen-agers can be, to the point of being offensive. One by one the witnesses fell silent, refusing to talk to any more strangers, so newcomers saw a new mystery-someone had obviously ordered everyone in the Ohio valley to shut up.

While reporters from all the neighboring cities were flocking to Point Pleasant and writing extensively about the UFO and monster sightings, the little local daily, the Point Pleasant Register, ignored the whole situation. When a girl on the Register staff was pursued by a UFO one night that spring, Mary Hyre printed the story in the Messenger. The young editor of the Register remained steadfastly anti-UFO throughout the fracas.

It was then my policy to publish only reports in which the witnesses allowed their names to be used. I avoided "blind" items. But as time went on and I saw what was happening to some of these people, I realized they had to be protected, not from Men in Black or sinister government agencies but from the UFO believers themselves. This unfortunate problem persists, and this is why I have used blind items here, or, in some cases, altered the names of the witnesses or their location. This is a common policy in medical books and scientific literature, but it is sad that it becomes necessary in studies of this kind.

II.

One Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1967, I was walking along Forty-second Street and Third Avenue with a lady friend. There were very few people on the streets at the time. Suddenly a tall, thin man came around a corner. His face was gaunt and pointed, and he was carrying a camera. He raised the camera and deliberately took our picture, then he turned and ran up the street. My friend knew nothing about Men in Black, and it is not unusual to see tourists snapping pictures in New York City. I deliberately refrained from making any comment.

"That was strange," she remarked. "And he was such an evil-looking man. Why did he take our picture?"

I could only shrug. The man, incidentally, was not dressed in black. He was wearing a sports jacket and slacks but his clothes seemed to hang very poorly on his thin frame.

A few days later, Dan Drasin phoned me. He was preparing to go back to West Virginia with a camera crew.

"You know, this probably doesn't mean anything," he said slowly, "but the other day I was walking through midtown Manhattan and an Indian took my picture. He was even wearing a black suit."

Dan knew of my concern with the MIB, but he was not well-known to the UFO enthusiasts (I had tried to tell myself that the photographer on Third Avenue was a ufo-nut of some kind).

"Probably just a tourist," I offered.

"Probably."

In West Virginia, Mrs. Hyre was continuing to have problems. A luminous object appeared over her house and projected a powerful beam of light into her backyard. She was not home at the time but her husband and several neighbors saw it. Then one evening her confused "little man" reappeared on the streets of Point Pleasant. She was certain it was the same man who had visited her office in January. This time he was wearing a khaki-colored uniform but had on the same thick-soled shoes. When he saw Mary approaching him he looked alarmed, took off on a dead run, and leaped into a black car driven by a very large man.

"By the time I got out in the line of traffic," Mary said, "he was gone across the bridge into Ohio. I didn't get the license number but the color looked orange."

Three days later, on May 8, Mrs. Hyre arrived home from a civic meeting around 11:30 P.M. Just as she was opening her front door a large black car squealed to a stop directly outside her house. She stood on her porch and watched as a man got out of the vehicle, raised a camera to his face, and snapped her picture.

"His flash gun was very bright," she reported. "It blinded me momentarily. While I was standing there rubbing my eyes he got back into his car and it drove off. I couldn't see if there was anyone else in the car." She paused. "Now why do you suppose anyone would want to take my picture like that?"

Why indeed. Our Men in Black were now engaged in a new game. Or perhaps the game had been going for years but no one had ever noticed it before. As if I didn't have enough trouble already, now I was chasing phantom photographers all over the landscape.

On a rainy night in April a man from Ohio had been driving along Route 2 near the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds when a large black form rose from the woods and flew over his car. "It was at least ten feet wide," he claimed. "I stepped on the gas and it kept right up with me. We were doing over seventy. It scared the h.e.l.l out of me. Then I saw it move ahead of me and turn toward the river."

Months later, late in October, he returned home from work and found a prowler in his apartment.

"When I opened the door I saw this man standing in my living room," he reported. "I think he was dressed all in black. I couldn't see his face, but he was about five feet nine. I started to fumble for the light switch when he took my picture. There was a big flash of light, so bright I couldn't see a thing. While I was rubbing my eyes the burglar darted past me and went out the open door. I guess I arrived just in time because nothing was missing."

Burglars with flash guns!

Sixty miles north of Point Pleasant, a young family in Belpre, Ohio, was having the full range of UFO-a.s.sociated problems. The man in the family, I'll call bun Ben, had seen a UFO hovering near a chemical plant on the river. He'd heard you could signal to the objects so he flashed his car's spotlight at it The spotlight went out instantly and later he found that all the electrical systems in his car had burned out.

His sighting marked the beginning of all kinds of weird happenings. First, his telephone went crazy. Like so many others, he had not reported his sighting to anyone yet he began to receive the beeping calls, and calls from "metallic voices," urging him to attend undefined meetings (he never went). A poltergeist moved into Ben's house. Drawers opened by themselves. Objects disappeared. A heavy cabinet pushed against a window was moved by some force. (Later I tried to move this cabinet by myself and found it was too heavy.) Ben's wife began to notice unusual people in the neighborhood. Ben received a mild scare that August as he was walking down the Main Street in Parkersburg and saw two black-garbed Oriental-looking men who grinned at him broadly as if they knew him. They appeared to be confused or drunken, he noted, and seemed to have difficulty walking. Ben knew nothing of the MIB lore, but the men so alarmed him that he crossed to the other side of the street.

He had more UFO sightings. And more freak phone calls. Finally he mentioned his troubles to Parke McDaniel ... they worked together ... and Mrs. Hyre and I drove to Belpre. Two weeks before our visit, according to Ben's wife, a black car had stopped in front of their house and a man in a black suit had apparently taken photos with a large camera. Two of their neighbors had also witnessed this and corroborated their story. The photographer did not pay any attention to any of the other houses on the street.

On Long Island, less than thirty miles from New York City, UFOs, Men in Black, and phantom photographers were all very busy that summer. Eventually I gathered reports of the photographers from as far away as Seattle. An aeros.p.a.ce engineer in the Northwest reported: "For some three days photographs were taken of our house. We thought they might^be realtors or someone doing a film on the area. Then began the telephone interference, mail stoppage and misdirection, etc."

The engineer, a well-educated man with a responsible position in a major aircraft company, involved himself in UFO research as a hobby. At first he a.s.sumed the photographers, telephone hara.s.sers, and all were agents of the government. Then something uncanny attacked his new home.

'Twice a very powerful specterlike influence visited the house which projected FEAR of an incredible nature," he wrote. "I am certain that anyone who did not understand these things would have been driven in very short order to the state mental hospital. Another attack was interference with the time Constance of a heart beat. I would be awakened with a pulse of over two hundred! However, I always awakened because I sleep with plastic ear stoppers and in each of about thirty to thirty-five instances the noise awakened me."

I had heard of this heart-beat phenomenon in Ma.s.sachusetts and several other places, and put it down as more psychological than physiological. When Mary Hyre complained of hearing a loud, pulsing heart-beat sound late at night I knew she had suffered one severe heart attack and worried that she was really hearing her own heart beat.

The Linda Scarberry and the McDaniels complained of hearing the same sound.

Roger Scarberry was haunted by something else ... by dreams of a great eye floating in the sky over Mary's house. Point Pleasant was filled with omens and portents. A man and a woman carrying a camera visited Steve and Mary Mallette, wanting to take pictures of them. Mr. Mallette took down the license number on their Volkswagen and when Mary had the police check it out it proved to be nonexistent. This business with license numbers was repeated over and over, and in many places. Witnesses would carefully note the plates on the black Cadillacs and mysterious panel trucks, but when the police ran a routine check the computers came up with a blank.

When you consider the many millions of licenses issued in the United States, the odds against your being able to manufacture an unlisted number are astronomical. Yet our MIB always manage to come up with unused numbers. (There were more incidents of this type during the October 1973 wave.) Phantom photographer reports have been rare in England, but in 1973 two leading British ufologists, Brinsley Le Poer Trench and J.B. Delair, came across an incident involving the Bogart family who live in a forest near Maresfield, Suss.e.x. The Bogarts' isolated cottage has been plagued with apparitions, strange sounds, and poltergeist activity. And a large number of low-flying luminous objects have been seen repeatedly in the vicinity.

"On more than one occasion Mrs. Bogart alleges that she has been perturbed to find a yellow Volkswagen car (having smoked-gla.s.s windows) following her discreetly at a distance," Delair reports. (*) "Once this involved the vehicle slowly following her down a woodland cart-track leading to Piltdown Lake, of it then stopping some distance from her, of two medium-sized individuals emerging and hurriedly taking photographs of her, and of the individuals quickly re-entering the car and driving off in the opposite direction. On another occasion, in Maresfield,. the same vehicle (or one exactly similar) seemed to be 'kerb-crawling' several yards behind her. Mrs. Bogart has no idea to whom the Volkswagen belongs, or why it should apparently follow her about in such furtive fas.h.i.+on, nor why she should be so mysteriously photographed."

[*] Awareness, Autumn 1973 (J.B. Delair, ed., 19 c.u.mnor Road, Wootton, Boar's Hill, Oxford, Berks.h.i.+re, England).

III.

If you review the thousands of UFO contact reports you will find that many of them begin with the appearance of an ent.i.ty holding some kind of "flashlight" which is shone directly at the witness. In cases in which the percipient was taken aboard a saucer, a light flashes and he is told his picture has just been taken. In other instances, some of which have already been described, the ent.i.ty approaches the witness and suddenly flashes a light at him which causes paralysis.

Woodrow Derenberger was among the very few contact claimants who did not describe such flashes.

In trying to nail down the exact chronological order of events in the contactee experience, I found that the witnesses observed the flash first and then they saw the ent.i.ty approaching with some kind of flashlight. A second flash paralyzed them or rendered them unconscious.

The phenomenon takes yet another form. The witness is stepping out his door, or getting out of his automobile, when there is a sudden burst of light "like a flash gun going off." No photographer or camera is visible. There is no sudden paralysis or ill effects. The witness just scratches his head in bewilderment and goes about his business. However, those who see these flashes have usually had psychic experiences previously. They have seen a UFO, a monster, or a ghost, or they are gifted with ESP or precognition.

In 1967, I was living in one of those gla.s.s buildings in Manhattan, part of a huge apartment complex. I was on a high floor facing an identical building across a small park, but I also had a splendid view of lower Manhattan. In the evenings while hammering away at my typewriter in front of a wall-to-wall window, I began seeing sudden flashes of blue light in the s.p.a.ce between the two buildings. At first I a.s.sumed there was a photographer in the other building: Then I saw the same kind of flashes high in the air, further down the avenue. I watched them night after night. When friends were in my apartment the flashes seemed to stop. I thought of them as "psychic flashes" because very often my phone would ring immediately after I saw one.

Later I moved to another apartment on the other side of town, with no real view of the sky, although my study faced a small courtyard favored by fighting cats and a few scrawny trees hopelessly battling for survival. There were no more psychic flashes until the summer of 1971 ... just prior to a major change in my life. Suddenly there were brilliant flashes outside my window, although there were no photographers, or people of any kind, in the courtyard or across the way. A couple of times I went down into the courtyard to see if I could find out what was causing the flashes but there was no possible explanation. A month later I was called to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to serve as a consultant to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. I worked in the Capital for a year, heading a special project under Elliot Richardson, then-secretary of HEW.

I haven't seen any of those flashes since.

Were they a part of some subtle programing process? My life has gone through many abrupt changes, and each major change has been preceded by some form of inexplicable phenomena. In observing other witnesses, this also seems to be true in their lives Are these things clues to a psychic force which controls us all?

14 - Sideways in Time

I.

You are driving along a deserted highway late at night when suddenly you see a flash of light in the sky ahead. The light draws nearer and a peculiar feeling overtakes you: a kind of tingling sensation. Your car radio, which is turned off, begins to emit a loud beeping like Morse code. Your headlights dim and then your engine sputters and stalls. You coast to the side of the road, overcome by a great wave of sheer terror.

Suddenly it is morning. You wake up in your own bed with absolutely no memory of having driven home, undressing, and retiring. When you try to recall the night before, it all seems hazy and unreal. Maybe it was all a dream, you tell yourself. But you feel exhausted, as if you had been on a drunken binge and your eyes are very sore. Within a few days you have forgotten the whole incident, if it was a real incident, but occasionally you wake up at night sweating profusely from a recurrent nightmare. You dream that you are in some kind of hospital operating room with strange figures gathered around your outstretched body.

Thousands of people have shared this kind of experience in recent years. It may have happened to your next-door neighbor even though he or she has never mentioned it to you ... or to anyone else. Such people are "silent contactees." Others traveling that same highway may have seen that same light and even reported it to the local police or newspapers. But the silent contactee remains uncertain of the reality of it all and keeps quiet.

For every publicly known contactee like Woodrow Derenberger there are thousands of silent ones. Some later manage to recall fragments of what happened and then their mind plays tricks and colors what they can remember with false details ... confabulations. The terror they felt becomes linked with awesome monsters and apparitions. The operating room becomes a chamber on a s.p.a.cecraft.

Like all the other things discussed here, this is not a new phenomenon. Black magicians, witch doctors, arid shamans of other ages evolved explanations as fanciful as those of modern UFO buffs. They thought spirits kidnapped humans and somehow dismantled their bodies and reconstructed them, or even created an exact duplicate in some fas.h.i.+on. The changeling concept in religious and occult lore is a variation of this. Small children are supposedly whisked away and subst.i.tuted with bodies that look just like them but are really programed in an entirely different way.

A person who consorted with the devil supposedly had a mark somewhere on his flesh as a souvenir of the experience. A modern UFO contactee develops these "devil's marks," sometimes in the form of a wart or boil, sometimes a rash or blotch that looks like a birthmark. In occult lore, pains in the stomach or solar plexus occur during the experience, just as UFO contactee Mrs. Barney Hill thought the s.p.a.cemen were probing her stomach with a long needle. Blood is drawn from the chin, neck, or the tips of the fingers and the affected areas remain sore for several days afterward. A number of contactees have had a reddish mark on the side of their neck, just below the ear, and recalled that an ent.i.ty had touched them there causing them to pa.s.s out. A few contactees have claimed that the ent.i.ties simply sc.r.a.ped their arms with some kind of instrument and apparently removed a few cells "for study." Actually each cell of your body contains the elaborate memory system called the genetic code. If someone wanted to construct a duplicate of you, and had the necessary technology, they would need only a cell or two from your body. Or a sample of your blood might do it.

It is, of course, really impossible to tell what is actually going on from these meager clues. The memory of the contactees is unreliable; the phenomenon deliberately sets up false trails and creates manifestations designed to support the beliefs of false frames of reference. By drawing blood conspicuously from a few people who let their stories be known, they establish an explanation for the thousand of dead animals who have their blood drained during flap periods. We blame the devil, vampires, or s.p.a.ce people.

Nothing in the paranormal world is as it seems.

Let us examine three different cases of UFO contact, each belonging to a different category, but all probably caused by the same cosmic mechanism.

The first is the story of Eugenio Siragusa, the Italian contactee who is the center of a growing cult. (1) I have chosen him rather whimsically because we share the same birth date. He was born on March 25, 1919. I was born on March 25, 1930. Here's a summary of his story in his own words.

I was 33 years old ... and for the requirements of my job, I was up very early that morning. Having arrived at the "Martyrs Square," I was waiting for the bus as usual when suddenly, I spotted in the sky, a kind of luminous object of a white mercurial color, which zigzagged very rapidly. This luminosity continued to intensify; it approached and I saw an object similar to a spinning top which stopped above me. I admit that I was petrified. What could this object be? A wave of thoughts flowed into my mind when suddenly, a brilliant ray left the object and struck me, it pierced me completely, while an indescribable serenity flowed into me. Upon that all my fear left me and a moment later, the brilliant ray became thinner and disappeared, as if absorbed by the machine, just like the spot on a television set when it is turned off. As the ray disappeared, this object, which I later understood to be one of these "flying saucers," began to move and left an arc in the sky before disappearing.

When I pulled myself together, I rapidly discovered more and more that something extraordinary had happened to me: a sort of re-dimension of my personality, my voice even changed to a gentle tone.

Ever since then an inner voice has begun to instruct me on geology and cosmology; it opened my mind to the mysteries of Creation and of my former lives. This re-dimension of my existence was possible thanks to continued ESP contacts which were established between certain Extraterrestrians and myself. This extrasensory perception was continually developing within me; it lasted 11 long years before I could actually, physically meet my extraterrestrial instructors. One day, at last I had my first meeting with them. Here is briefly how these events unfolded: ----.

[1] C.E.J.F.C., 12, me des Bossons, 1213 ONEX, Geneva, Switzerland.

One night, in 1962, I suddenly felt the need to go on the Etna (Sicilian volcano which overlooks Catalina). I got into my car and drove off. On my way I had the distinct sensation that instead of it being me, it was the car which was guided by a superior force. As I was winding up the mountain, I approached Mount Manfre at an alt.i.tude of 1370 meters. After having stopped my car on the side of the road, I continued by foot along a path which led up to an extinct crater. I had gone up half way on this steep path when I suddenly saw on top of the hill, in the darkness, two silhouettes standing out in the moonlight with s.h.i.+ning silver s.p.a.ce suits. They were tall, well built, with blond hair which fell over their shoulders. They wore brilliant armlets around their wrists and ankles which had the color of gold; they also wore a luminous belt around their waist, and a strange metallic plate on their chests. When I saw them, my blood froze and I felt a cold sweat flow out of me. I had hoped for this moment for eleven years, but as the spot was isolated, the nocturnal obscurity and sudden meeting were not situations which would give me courage. One of the Extraterrestrians then directed a green light towards me, which was projected by an object he had in his hand. Instantly a strange sensation calmed me and gave me an indescribable serenity; my heart which in the beginning seemed to explode in my chest, set itself to throb regularly. Looking at their two faces enlightened by the moon, I could admire their soft features and their austere and serene look.

Suddenly, one of them spoke to me in Italian: "We have been waiting for you," he told me. "Record in your memory what we are going to tell you"; they gave me a message to send to the governors and the responsible of the earth. In this message there was the "reprimanding" warning to all those responsible, to stop the atomic explosions as well as to grant humanity the well-being of true progress, but with Justice, Freedom, Love and Fraternity. Following this meeting, we had several conversations during other meetings; I was told that they are part of an Inter-Galactic Confederation, to which adhere the inhabitants of many planets. They are the tutors of human kind, including our planet. We should consider them as thus like big brothers who are concerned about the bad turning we have taken, making us risk to bring the use of the atomic bomb. They come all this way to us to warn us in time of the danger we are heading into, because the Cosmic Counsel condemns the people of Earth for their inhuman behavior: the people to which the truth is hidden, are governed by lies; shameful crimes are considered acts of heroism; violence becomes a necessity; racial hatred appears as a normal thing to our civilization; religion has been deformed and brought to fanaticism....

Then one day, on a stern tone and with deep sadness in their voices, they told me: "A highly evolved humanity sends to you astronauts and missionaries from a distance of several light years to enlighten you on the nature of your existence, but Instead of being thankful for their efforts, you ignore them and mock all the teachings they bring to you; know that an evolution which has failed is a planetarian catastrophe, and this will be the inevitable consequences of your acts." They then added: "In a past life, everyone of you has worked towards the establishment of the civilization which exists today; you have all collaborated in partic.i.p.ating in the development of humanity. Understand that you are preparing yourselves today! As tutors of your kind, we can do nothing else but condemn your acts; know this: you are rigorously supervised by a superior race who will never permit you to come to the disaster of a 'nuclear war.'"

Mr. Siragusa was reprogramed in the cla.s.sic manner of all fanatics, and he has been used to disseminate propaganda couched in terms understandable and acceptable to us. The messages include references to reincarnation, politics, and religion, but not within the loftier intellectual framework of some alien "superior culture." Instead of telling us things we do not know, they tell us the things we want to hear and believe. Our own fear of nuclear annihilation was epidemic in the 1950s and early 1960s. So many of the UFO messages of the period were stern warnings about our misuse of atomic energy. As our own paranoia subsided, so did these threats from outer s.p.a.ce.

II.

The most widely publicized UFO contact of October 1973 was also the least important. Two fishermen in Pascagoula, Mississippi, suffered a rather routine hallucination which hurled them onto national television and attracted the attention of UFO-philes, crackpots, and astronomers. The case has been so widely discussed that I will just summarize it very briefly here.

"It is my opinion that he told the truth when he stated that he believes he saw a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, that he was taken into the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, and that he saw three creatures," Scott Glasgow, a New Orleans polygraph (lie detector) specialist declared after examining Charles Hickson in October 1973. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer, also interviewed Hickson and his friend Calvin Parker.

"There is no question in my mind that these men have had a terrifying experience," Hynek stated. "Under no circ.u.mstances should they be ridiculed. Let's protect these men."

Hickson, forty-two, and Parker, eighteen, would need all the protection they could get.

The two men had been fis.h.i.+ng from a pier on the Pascagoula River when at 8 P.M. on October 11, 1973, they heard a loud pulsing, humming sound. Then they saw a brilliant flickering blue light moving over the water toward them.

Both men became paralyzed. "I felt immobilized," Hickson said later. "I couldn't move. But I know I was scared to death."

As the light drew closer it took on an egg-shaped appearance. Young Parker lost consciousness, fainting dead away, so the two-witness sighting now became a one-witness event. Hickson said two five-foot-tall beings came out of the object. They were grayish with wrinkled skin, no necks, pointed ears, and crablike claws. They picked up the two men ("It was like just floating in the air") and carried them into the object where "a big eye," somewhere between the size of a large softball and a basketball, moved over their bodies, apparently studying them. Then they were deposited back on the river pier to the exact spot where they had been picked up.

When the light withdrew, the two men came to their senses and ran in terror to the local sheriff's office. Following their experience, Hickson and Parker suffered blinding headaches. "At first, those dreams I had was awful," Charlie Hickson told NBC News reporter Ralph Blum, "and the headaches was so bad-like a pressure on my skull."

The day after the incident a small wound opened up on Hickson's arm and bled profusely for a few hours. Then it closed just as mysteriously as it had come.

The pier from which the men were fis.h.i.+ng was under surveillance by a TV system at a naval installation across the river. The men monitoring the system saw nothing unusual that night. They were also in full view of a nearby drawbridge, and the toll-booths for a neighboring highway. The men manning those positions did not see anything unusual on the river. They saw no lights; additional proof that the episode was hallucinatory.

Ralph Blum learned another interesting fact when he asked Hickson why he was not carrying a watch. "Never could. People said I had electricity," Hickson explained. "To give you an example, before I went into service, I tried two or three wrist watches. But they wouldn't keep time on me. They'd either lose time, or gain time. Or they'd just stop. ... I never did find one that would keep correct time. I even tried Elgins, these railroad pocket watches? And they don't keep correct time. So I don't tote a watch."

Obviously Mr. Hickson's physical makeup includes some unknown but not unheard of force which interferes with watches. He could be surrounded by that special energy field or aura which attracts UFO-type phenomena. Calvin Parker was just unfortunate enough to be present when the phenomenon zeroed in on Hickson. Since the light was not operating on his alpha wave frequency, Parker wasn't entranced ... he was knocked unconscious. Hickson entered a hypnoticlike trance and hallucinated.

Besides all the press attention, crank phone calls, and attending nonsense, Calvin Parker suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet, despite the uproar in Pascagoula, the men were never properly investigated by qualified persons ... aside from the air force. A hydraulic engineer from Berkeley visited them, hypnotized them, and when they began to relive their terrible fear he cut the session short. Afterward he soberly informed reporters that he was certain the men had been examined by "robots from outer s.p.a.ce."

The air force investigation was another story. Deputy Tom Huntley accompanied the two men to the Keesler Air Force Base. "When we got there it was something amazing," Huntley told Ralph Blum afterward. "We were in an unmarked car but the guards were expecting us and Waved us through the moment I said who we was. I looked back through my rear-view mirror, and d.a.m.n if two cars full of air police hadn't fallen in behind us. They had more air police stationed at each crossing all along the road. We pulled up in this concrete area behind a building The police had halted all traffic. Doctors were waiting, and man, they looked like s.p.a.ce creatures-all wrapped in white and masked and gloved. They went over Charlie and Calvin from head to toe. They ran a radioactive check. They swabbed between the boys' fingers, along the tops of their shoes, even under the heels. Then they put each swab into a little bottle and labeled each bottle."

It was clear the air force doctors knew what they were doing and had probably done it many times before. After the examination was completed, Huntley, Hickson, and Parker were escorted to another building.

"It was something," Huntley said. "Armed air police at each door and all along the route! Four of 'em in the conference room! And the bra.s.s-colonels, majors-the whole base command must have been there. And a heap of doctors."

The men were closely interrogated for several minutes. Some of the questions asked were identical to the questions I asked in my own interviews. Questions about diet (some contactees seem to favor a high starch diet), marks or punctures, on their bodies, family history, etc.

The intriguing part of this is the extensive security measures taken. It sounds as if the whole base had been put on alert for the occasion, and the two contactees were so closely guarded during their visit that it seems as if the air force expected them to blow up the base. To me, this Keesler Air Force Base investigation "was far more interesting than the UFO contact itself.

Perhaps someone in the air force had read my 1967-68 articles in Flying Saucer Review advising investigators to "find out what they had for breakfast"

III.

Woodrow Derenberger regarded the ufonauts as "time travelers." He noted some interesting distortions of time during his jaunts to the far-off galaxy of Ganymede (actually Ganymede is the name of one of Jupiter's moons). When he went off on a trip with Indrid Cold, a trip that seemed to take hours or days, he always found on his return that only a few hours of earth time had pa.s.sed. He rejected the notion that he may have hallucinated his interstellar voyages, so time-traveling was the only answer acceptable to him.

In many of the cases outlined here I have pointed out the ent.i.ties' obsession with time. Their behavior as described by various witnesses further suggests their problems in adjusting to our time frame. For example, their rapid-fire unintelligible "language" noted by witnesses all over the world as sounding like "a speeded up phonograph record" could be caused by their failure to adjust to our time cycle when they enter, our s.p.a.ce-time-continuum. They are talking at a faster rate because their time is different from ours. When they manage to adjust, they have to forcibly slow themselves down, articulating their words slowly, in a singsong manner. For high-speed radio transmissions we record signals at a normal speed, then broadcast the tape at a very high speed. The receiver records it at the same high speed and then slows the tape down again to play it back. Our ent.i.ties are like those radio receivers, playing back the message at slow speeds until they hit upon a speed we can interpret.