The ent.i.ties also foul up in other ways. They arrive in clothes that are out of style, or not yet in style. Their vehicles are out of date. If they use slang, they might come up with archaic terms like "twenty-three Skidoo" or "hubba hubba." The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds not only fail to understand who or what they are, but also where they are or what time period they're in. Some of these mistakes seem intentional and have some allegorical purpose. But others seem to be just... mistakes.

This brings us to one of the most puzzling contact stories in my files.

At 1:15 A.M. on the morning of Sunday, December 10, 1967, a young college student from Adelphi, Maryland, was driving home alone outside of Washington, D.C. As he was crossing the then-partially completed cutoff on Interstate 70, leading from Route 40 to Route 29, he saw a large object on the road directly ahead. At first he thought it was a tractor-trailer jackknifed across the road. Then he realized it was a bone-white reflective object shaped like an egg and standing on four legs. As he pulled to a stop a few feet from the object he could make out two figures standing next to the thing. Their appearance terrified him.

One of the men walked to his car with a broad grin on his face. He was about five feet ten, wore light blue coveralls, thick-soled boots or shoes, and he had a ruddy or suntanned complexion with large eyes "like thyroid eyes." The grin remained fixed on his face throughout the episode.

"Do not be afraid of me," he said several times in an audible voice. His name, he said, was Vadig. He spoke with Tom, the witness, for several minutes, asking ordinary questions about where he was from, where he was going, what he did, etc.

Finally he said pointedly, "I'll see you in time," and walked back to the object. A small door opened and a metal ladder folded down. A hand reached out and helped Vadig aboard, then the thing rose silently into the air and disappeared. Tom told his three roommates about the encounter, but they didn't take him seriously so he didn't mention it to anyone else.

Tom was working his way through school by serving as a waiter part-time in a chain of restaurants in the D.C. area He had not mentioned this to Vadig. But one Sunday night in early February 1968, Vadig entered the restaurant where he was working and sat at one of his tables. Vadig was now wearing a conventional suit with a black outer coat.

"Do you remember me?" Vadig asked.

"I sure do." Tom answered, very surprised. They exchanged a few words and Tom brought him a cup of coffee.

"My presence here would be detrimental to the family trade," Vadig said at one point with a chuckle.

He asked Tom if he would be willing to meet with him the following Sunday. Tom agreed and Vadig left the restaurant.

"I'll see you in time," he promised.

After work the next Sunday, a waitress drove Tom home and dropped him off. As she pulled away, a big black car with its lights out glided from the shadows and halted at the curb. Mr. Vadig called out to Tom. Another man was in the car. Tom later recalled only that he wore a gray coat, had black hair, and never spoke. Tom got into the car.

"It was a very old Buick," he reported. "But it was very well kept. It looked brand-new. It even smelled brand-new."

They drove for about thirty minutes to a remote spot on a back road in Maryland. When Tom got out of the car he was astonished to see the egg-shaped object waiting for them. He was put into a circular room containing nothing but a couple of bucket seats and a gray TV screen. Vadig and his companion disappeared into another part of the ship.

After a few minutes the TV screen came alive, the object shuddered, and Tom watched the image of the earth receding to a tiny speck on the screen. Three or four hours pa.s.sed. He was still dressed in his waiter's uniform and did not have a watch. But it seemed like hours before another planet appeared on the screen, grew larger, and then the craft landed with a thump.

The young waiter found himself in a place not too unlike the earth. He and Vadig got into a wheelless vehicle that traveled along a kind of trough.

"This is Lanulos," Vadig announced with pride in his voice.

He repeated the name several times so it would stick in Tom's memory.

Their vehicle traveled through a large city with low, flat buildings and signs written in some kind of Oriental-looking characters. The people, male and female, were all nude.

"There were some real lookers there, too," Tom commented.

After the tour, they returned to the egg-shaped craft and took off again. Tom sat alone in the same circular room watching the television screen for hours. Finally they arrived back on earth at the same place from which they had left. Tom, Vadig, and the silent man returned to the old Buick and drove for about thirty minutes until they reached his apartment house.

"I'll see you in time," Vadig declared, then the car drove off.

Tom ran into his apartment, determined to wake up his roommates and tell them of his adventure. He found they were sitting up, waiting for him. But what amazed him most was the clock on the wall. The waitress had dropped him off around midnight. Now it was only 1:30 A.M. The whole trip, including the thirty-minute rides to and from the UFO, had taken less than two hours!

His excitement and bewilderment were real and his roommates took him seriously this time.

A month later, Woodrow Derenberger visited Washington and appeared on a number of talk shows. Tom was sleeping when one of his roommates burst into his bedroom exclaiming, "Tom, there's a guy on the radio talking about Lanulos!"

All four were flabbergasted to hear Woody describe experiences very similar to Tom's. They called the radio station and spoke to him after the program.

By sheer coincidence, I was in Washington at the time and agreed to go with Woody when he interviewed the young man. But I sternly warned Derenberger and his wife not to ask any leading questions. Naturally, I suspected the whole thing was some kind of put-on. Either Tom and Woody were in cahoots, or Tom, who was a psychology major, was working on a paper about the gullible UFO buffs, I thought.

It quickly became apparent that Tom and his roommates were quite sincere. They were too involved in their studies to read UFO literature and, in any case, some of the details in Tom's story could not be found in any of the superficial UFO lore. I finally had to conclude Tom was on the level. He was not looking for publicity and I decided I would not write up his story.

However, Woody told others about him (I think even Woody was surprised by such direct confirmation of his own experiences) and some Washington UFO enthusiasts convinced Tom he should reveal his adventure to the world. Two years later he lectured before a UFO club and appeared on Long John's radio program in New York. Since he had chosen to come out publicly, I finally devoted a paragraph to him in one of my books. After the book was published, Tom wrote me an angry letter.

Ever since those appearances ... I have been pestered and plagued by a horde of kooks. They call, write, stop to visit, etc. They drove me crazy. Some of my very close friends began to advise me of the dangers to my reputation that these types of individuals were posing. I decided to tell them all once and for all that I desired no more public contact. ... Although the experiences I had were completely true, I sometimes wish I had never revealed them to anyone. The only reason I made them known was because I thought I could help to verify and help uncover some of the mystery that shrouds the UFO phenomenon. ... I should have kept my mouth shut like I had planned to when you first interviewed me.

Tom married a beautiful girl and she didn't learn of his weird meetings with Vadig until months after the ceremony. Like so many others before him, myself included, he learned that the only thing more bizarre than the phenomenon itself is the unruly mob of true believers, cranks, and irresponsible self-styled investigators who pursue the subject; moths attracted to the flame. They tormented Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in 1973, just as they had arrived by the carload in Point Pleasant in 1967.

15 - Misery on the Mount

I.

Daniel Drasin was about eighteen when he filmed a riot in New York's Washington Square, t.i.tled it Sunday, and won a number of motion-picture awards. Now still in his mid-twenties, handsome, quiet-spoken, intelligent, and perceptive, he was well into a promising career in the film industry. The West Virginia UFO doc.u.mentary was an important break for him and he plunged into the project with a mixture of awe and enthusiasm. As I was on my way to Washington, D.C., from Point Pleasant, he was headed in the other direction with a skeleton crew hoping to get some authentic movies of those funny lights in the sky.

When I reached Washington I parked my car on Connecticut Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares, in broad daylight for a few minutes. Some of my clothes and camera cases were in the back seat so I carefully locked the doors. While I was gone someone smashed in the vent on the side window and robbed my car. They left behind my clothes and some of my cameras. They took my briefcase, tape recorder and all my notebooks, exposed films, taped interviews with witnesses, cheap telescope and other items with little or no value to anyone except me. Strangely, they had removed my irreplaceable address" book from one of the cases and left it on the seat. I called the police. When they finally arrived their att.i.tude was not very sympathetic. Anyone who would leave anything plainly visible in a locked car at 2 P.M. on a main street in Washington was plainly a fool, or so they suggested.

My problems were minor compared to Dan's, however. He was seeing plenty of aerial lights but his battery-powered cameras malfunctioned when he tried to photograph them. Finally, he thought he had managed to get some footage. Then the precious films were later accidentally ruined in a processing lab back in New York. Members of his crew began to have troubles with their telephones, and a female production a.s.sistant was awakened one night in her apartment in Brooklyn by a loud beeping noise. She got up, looked out the window, and saw a large luminous sphere hovering directly outside her building.

During his second visit to Point Pleasant Dan uncovered some Mothman witnesses I had missed. And he also came across some more baffling Men-in-Black-type reports. People up in the back hills had been seeing mysterious unmarked panel trucks which sometimes parked for hours in remote spots. There seemed to be several of these trucks in the area and the rumor was that they belonged to the air force. Men in neat coveralls were seen monkeying with telephone and power lines but no one questioned them.

A woman living alone on an isolated island north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, had two curious encounters with the same kind of beings. She had moved into a tiny one-room cabin on Keats Island in October 1967 and was soon seeing UFO lights nightly. On January 29, 1968, following a close sighting of "a long dark body with dim red and yellow lights at both ends," she was surprised by two visitors. Both wore "neat, dark coveralls" and claimed to be employees of the hydroelectric company. They offered to help her put up a stovepipe. The younger of the two climbed on the roof of her cabin while the other handed him the pipes. "I could hear the man on the ground directing him and the one on the roof would answer, 'Yes, Master.'"

After the pipe was installed, the pair joined her for tea. They seemed "a little stiff." When they left she wondered how they had known she was there because "the cabin couldn't be seen from the road [and] the stove was out when they arrived, so there was no smoke from the chimney."

On May 2, she again encountered two men. "One was the 'boss' Hydro man in his neat coveralls," she reported. (1) "The other was a different, younger man of about 19-20. As I entered the path, the boss man indicated with his hand for the young man to get behind him. They got well off the path and waited for me, the young man a little behind his boss. The fellow stared at me as if I was some kind of freak ...."

[1] Canadian UFO Report, #13, 1972-73.

This time she didn't invite them for tea. One odd thing she noticed during both meetings was their slow, careful way of walking. They looked at their feet and stepped very uncertainly.

The next day a jeep came along the road, containing four men inspecting lines ... "carelessly dressed, workaday men, none in coveralls. The boss wasn't obviously so. They expressed no surprise at seeing me there, no concern or any particular interest. I told them two of their men already had been around the day before, inspecting the lines. They a.s.sured me yesterday's men weren't Hydro men, that somebody had been 'pulling my leg.'"

Somebody was also pulling a lot of legs on cosmopolitan Long Island. In West Virginia I had heard some stories about three men who looked "like Indians" and were accompanied by a fourth man, more normal-looking and very shabbily dressed in contrast to the other three. So I was nonplused when I heard identical descriptions from people on Long Island.

An elderly woman who lived alone in a house near the summit of Mount Misery, the highest point on Long Island, had received a visit from this quartet in early April 1967, immediately after a severe rainstorm.

"They had high cheekbones and very red faces, like a bad sunburn," she told me. "They were very polite but they said my land belonged to their tribe and they were going to get it back. What frightened me was their feet. They didn't have a car ... they must have walked up that muddy hill ... but their shoes Were spotlessly clean. There was no trace of mud or water where they walked in my house."

That same week another visitor came to Mount Misery. This was a woman with striking white hair who claimed to represent a local newspaper. She carried a book "like a big ledger" and asked the witness a number of personal questions about her family background. When I later checked 'with the newspaper I found they employed no one of that description.

The local Mount Misery expert was Miss Jaye P. Paro, a radio personality then with station WBAB in Babylon, New York. Miss Paro is a dark-haired, dark-eyed young lady with a soft, haunting voice. At that time she conducted an interview show, largely devoted to the historical and psychic lore of the region. Soon after she reported some UFO sightings around Mount Misery she began to receive all manner of crank calls, both at the station and on her unlisted home phone. Metallic voices ordered her to meet them on "the Mount" (she didn't go).

Through Miss Paro I met several local UFO witnesses and contactees. Long Island, I discovered, was crawling with contactees of all ages and both s.e.xes. One of these was a lovely young blonde, whom I will call Jane, who lived near Mount Misery with her family. Jane was not illiterate, but she seldom read anything other than the comic strips and "Dear Abby." She knew nothing about UFOs and cared less. She was a "fallen Catholic," having abandoned religion when she reached adulthood. She was a very sensitive woman, more ethereal than sensual. There was almost something mystical about her appearance and grace.

Mount Misery is a heavily wooded hill with a few narrow dirt roads slicing through it and a number of large mansions set back among the trees. The late Henry Stimson, secretary of war during World War II, maintained a lavish estate on the summit. For decades the Mount was known as a haunted place, the site of a number of mysterious deaths and disappearances. In the spring of 1967 young couples necking on the back roads began to see low-flying UFOs, particularly around a field that was used as a junkyard for old cars. Others claimed to see a giant hairy monster with gleaming red eyes.

After Miss Paro began to broadcast reports of what was happening on Mount Misery, the usual mobs started to cruise the area nightly to the consternation of the scattered and sn.o.bbish residents. Jane and her boyfriend Richard joined the stream of cars one night in early May and eventually found themselves alone on a back road near High Hold, the old Stimson place.

Richard, who was driving, suddenly complained of feeling unwell. He stopped the car and a moment later slumped over the wheel unconscious. Jane was terrified. But before she could focus her attention on him, a brilliant beam of light shot out of the woods next to the road "like a floodlight." It dazzled her and she fell back in her seat unable to move.

The next thing they knew, they were driving along Old Country Road at the base of Mount Misery.

"How did we get here?" Richard -asked her, baffled. "What happened?"

"Let's go home," Jane choked. They never discussed the incident again until I arrived on the scene.

A few days later, on May 17, Jane answered the phone (she had her own phone in her room) and a strange metallic voice addressed her. "Listen carefully," it said. "I cannot hear you." It instructed her to go to a small public library nearby and look up a certain book on Indian history.

She did as she was instructed. On May 19 she went to the library at 10:30 A.M. The place was deserted except for the librarian, who struck Jane as being unusual. The woman was "dressed in an old-fashioned suit like something out of the 1940s, with a long skirt, broad shoulders, and flat old-looking shoes." (Remember, this was in 1967, long before the 1940s styles became popular again.) She had a dark complexion, with a fine bone structure, and very black eyes and hair. When Jane entered, the woman seemed to be expecting her and produced the book instantly from under her desk.

Jane sat down at a table and began to riffle through the book, pausing on page forty-two. Her caller had told her to read that page.

"You won't believe this," she told me, "but the print became smaller and smaller, then larger and larger. It changed into a message and I can remember every word of it.

" 'Good morning, friend,' it began. 'You have been selected for many reasons. One is that you are advanced in autosuggestion. Through this science we will make contact. I have messages concerning Earth and its people. The time is set. Fear not... I am a friend. For reasons best known to ourselves you must make your contacts known to one reliable person. To break this code is to break contact Proof shall be given. Notes must be kept of the suggestion state. Be in peace, [signed] A Pal.'

"The print became very small again, and then the normal text reappeared."

As soon as Jane left the library she became quite ill and vomited several times during the next two days. She approached Miss Paro with her story and was advised to get in touch with me. Her experience on the Mount, her phone call, and the remark about "autosuggestion" all stirred my interest. In those days none of the UFO enthusiasts knew anything about these factors and a hoax seemed very unlikely. And, unknown to Miss Paro and Jane, I was in touch with a distant contactee who was communicating with "Apholes." The signature "A Pal" seemed close enough to Apholes to take seriously. I suspected that Jane had been programed for a set of special experiences and I kept in constant touch with her in the months which followed, maintaining an extensive record of her experiences.

In early June, Jane began to see the "librarian" wherever she went. On June 6, while wandering through a local department store, the woman appeared behind a dress rack. She wore the same old-fashioned clothes and tried to speak to Jane in "broken English" There was something wrong about her speech and movements. "It was as if ... she were dead," Jane said. When asked if she lived around Babylon, the woman laughed in a strange hysterical way, "like an emotionally disturbed person." (This weird laugh has been described by many contactees.) "Is there any A-U here?" the woman asked. Jane didn't know what she meant. Just that week I had been pondering the significance of gold in UFO and religious lore. Gold is the seventy-ninth element and the chemical symbol for it is AU.

Jane offered to give the woman a lift but she declined and wandered off.

Unable to sleep at night, Jane got up at the crack of dawn the following morning and went for a walk on an impulse. The dark-skinned woman stepped out of an alley and approached her shyly. "Peter is coming," she announced.

This statement shook Jane. She remembered that Catholic lore predicts that the final pope will be named Peter.

"Why are you interested in our Mount?" the woman continued, then repeated, "Peter is coming very soon."

Next a large black Cadillac came down the street and stopped next to them. It was "brand-new, very shiny and polished," Jane recalled. The driver was an olive-skinned man wearing wraparound sungla.s.ses and dressed in a neat gray suit, apparently of the same material as the woman's clothes. The rear door opened and a man climbed out with a big grin on his face. He was about five feet eight inches tall, with dark skin and Oriental eyes. Jane thought he looked like a Hawaiian. He had the air of someone very important and was dressed in a well-cut, expensive-looking suit of the same gray material that was shiny like silk but was not silk.

He solemnly shook hands with the girl, "his hand was as cold as ice," and stared at her steadily with his jet-black eyes, grinning all the while.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked. "I am Apol [p.r.o.nounced Apple]."

The Cadillac" pulled away and drove off, leaving the three of them standing on the street. Apol produced a piece of folded paper and handed it to Jane.

"Wear this always," he told her. "So 'they' will know who you are."

"Who's they?" she asked.

"They are the very good people," he answered.

The paper, a piece of very old parchment, contained a small metal disc about the size of a quarter. As they talked they walked slowly toward the center of town until they stood in front of the post office. Jane impulsively announced she was going to mail the disc to someone. She went into the post office, got an envelope, and sent the disc and parchment to me special delivery. The two strangers smiled broadly at each other.

When she came out of the post office, Apol told her a number of things about her childhood that no one could have known and advised her to avoid iodine. (She had a minor health problem which required her to avoid iodine in her diet.) The car reappeared and the two people got into it and drove off. "I felt very strange while I was talking to them," she recalled. "I was whoozy ... like I was in a daze or something."

If it hadn't been for the metal disc I would have cla.s.sified the entire episode as hallucinatory. The next day I received the special delivery envelope and was very disappointed by the contents. The disc looked like a blank identification tag similar to those that come with flea collars. The parchment seemed to be the remnants of a very old envelope. After examining it, I put the disc back into the paper exactly as I had received it, then placed the whole thing in a small envelope which I sealed with Scotch tape. I put this into a larger manila envelope and mailed it back to Jane special delivery.

She phoned me the next day.

"Why did you bend the disc and tear up the paper?" she demanded.

She had just received the envelope and found that the parchment in the sealed inner envelope had been ripped into three pieces. The metal disc was bent, as if it had been folded double and then unfolded again. It had also turned charcoal black and smelled like "rotten eggs."

The implication was clear. Someone had the ability to intercept the U.S. mails and tamper with things in sealed envelopes!

II.

While Jane was holding clandestine meetings with Mr. Apol and his mysterious lady friend, Jaye P. Paro was being entertained by the redoubtable Princess Moon Owl, a character who would become a legend on Long Island by the end of 1967. At 3:30 P.M. on June 11, 1967, Jaye entered the studios of WBAB and found a very weird woman waiting for her. She was at least six feet tall, was very dark (Negroid), with large, gla.s.sy eyes, and wore a costume largely made up of feathers. She was gasping and wheezing, having great difficulty breathing. Jaye thought she was having a heart attack.

"I am Princess Moon Owl," she declared between wheezes. "I am from another planet. I came here by flying saucer."

Jaye slapped a tape on a tape recorder and offered to interview her for the air. The Princess was delighted, pulled herself together, and delivered a hilarious thirty-minute monologue about life on the planet Ceres in the asteroid belt. She seemed to be familiar with all the New York/ Long Island UFO buffs and eccentrics, denouncing some as "phonies" and praising others. As the interview progressed, Jaye became increasingly uncomfortable. Cerians had a problem with body odor. "She stank like rotten eggs," Jaye said afterward. The smell was slight at first but gradually became overpowering. The Princess admitted to being "Seven Ooongots" old ... or about 350 Earth years.

While the interview was in progress, I was sitting in my New York apartment and my telephone was going crazy. It rang several times but there was no one on the other end. (Until this period I had had very few problems with my personal phone.) Later that afternoon I received a call from a middle-aged woman who said she was Princess Moon Owl and that I could reach her through "contactee Paro." The woman's voice did not resemble the voice on Jaye's tape, which I heard later.

The taped Moon Owl sounded like a man faking an Aunt Jemima accent. He was a very bad actor. I accused Jaye of a hoax and advised her not to put the interview on the air. If it was not a hoax, then Moon Owl was the victim of demonic possession (Jaye's description of the Princess's behavior certainly indicated this). Jaye aired the tape anyway and Long Island's lunatic fringe went wild with joy. At last a genuine s.p.a.ce person was in their midst.

Once she had established her credentials on WBAB, Moon Owl began to systematically telephone all of Long Island's prominent UFO enthusiasts. They accepted her authenticity without question. What troubled me was the fact that she managed to vector in on a number of unlisted numbers, and she obviously knew a great deal about the local personalities. The most suspicious things of all were her transparent references to a major UFO convention scheduled to be held that June 24 in New York's Hotel Commodore. James Moseley, publisher of Saucer News, had rented the hotel's auditorium and practically an entire floor for the event and was staging press conferences and radio and television appearances to promote his investment. Princess Moon Owl seemed to fit too neatly into the publicity campaign.

Meanwhile, Jane's phantom friends were visiting her daily and helpfully giving her surprising information about my own "secret" investigations. My interview with the Christiansens of Cape May, and the details of their pill-popping visitor, Tiny, was then known only to a few trusted people like Ivan Sanderson. But on June 12, Mr. Apol and his friends visited Jane when she was alone in her house and asked for water so they could take some pills. Then they presented her with three of the same pills, told her to take one at that moment, and to take one other in two days. The third pill, they said, was for her to have a.n.a.lyzed to a.s.sure herself it was harmless. They undoubtedly knew that she would turn it over to me.

Two hours after she took the first pill she came down with a blinding headache, her eyes became bloodshot, and the vision in her right eye was affected. When her parents came home they expressed concern because her eyes were gla.s.sy and her right eye seemed to have a cast.

The sample pill proved to be a sulfa drug normally prescribed for infections of the urinary tract. - Two days later she obligingly took the second pill and her phone rang shortly afterward. A man with "a crude Brooklyn accent" told her he was Col. John Dalton of the air force and wanted to talk to her about "Mitch.e.l.l Field." She told him, honestly, that she didn't know anything about Mitch.e.l.l Field. He insisted that he wanted to talk to her. Would she come to his office? She asked where his office was and he hesitated for a moment, then said he would interview her at her house. He didn't ask for her address and since she hadn't reported anything to the air force, she wondered how he had gotten her phone number.

At 7:45 P.M. the next evening Jane's parents left the house for a few hours and as soon as they were gone Colonel Dalton and his partner, a young lieutenant, rang her bell. Both men seemed normal and were polite and well-spoken. Colonel Dalton was in civilian clothes ... a black suit, naturally. He was about five feet eight inches tall, had brown hair, brown eyes, and "a very pointed nose." The lieutenant was two or three inches taller, in an air force uniform, with "whitish blond hair that looked dyed" cut very short, "like a crewcut growing back in." They flashed identification cards with their photographs affixed.

The colonel asked her what she knew about a local saucer landing and saucer occupants in the area. Jane laughed and said she didn't believe in flying saucers.