"No." He paused. "But Herk-that's Hercules-my big old collie dog ran off that night and we ain't seen him, since."

Mary had been with me when I had checked into other missing dog incidents. She gave me a meaningful glance and he caught it.

"Say, you don't think that thing took old Herk, do you?"

"No. It was probably just some kind of electrical phenomenon," I answered gently. "Herk will probably come back."

"I hope so. We sure loved that dog." He looked thoughtful. "Electrical, huh. Let me show you something else."

He led us into bis barn and showed us a brand-new circuit box.

"I had to have this put in the next day so I could run my milker. The old box was completely burned out. In fact, it was melted ... like somebody had put a welding torch to it."

"See, it must have been some kind of electrical thing," I said lamely. I knew Ivan Sanderson had investigated an almost identical incident in New Jersey only weeks before. But in that case the cows had been in their stalls in the barn and were found dead.

"Has anyone else been around to talk to you about this?"

"No ... I haven't told anyone. Just some fellows from the electric company who turned up the next day. They fussed around with the transformer on the pole by the road. I tried to talk with them but they didn't have much to say."

"Did you know them?"

"Never saw them before. Come to think of it, they didn't have a regular electric truck. Just a panel truck."

"Would you recognize them if you saw them again?"

"Sure would. They was foreigners. You know, j.a.ps or something. Like I said, they weren't very friendly."

"How were they dressed?"

"Oh, you know ... ordinary coveralls. I did notice their shoes, though. They had on funny shoes with very thick rubber soles. Guess when you work around electricity you need insulation."

Mary shuddered perceptibly.

"Say, do you know these fellows?" he asked.

"Well, I saw a man with thick-soled shoes like that once," Mary began. I cut in sharply, thanking the man, promising to keep him out of the papers, and reminding Mary that we had an appointment elsewhere.

Back in the car, Mary could no longer curb her natural curiosity.

"What do you make of all this, John?"

"The more I find out, the more confusing it becomes."

"That's the way I feel. That phone call ... sounds like someone didn't want you to talk to him."

"It could work the other way, too," I suggested. "Maybe this whole thing was set up so I would talk to him. I just picked his farm out at random. If he had just turned me away with a smile I would never have bothered him again. But when he came to the door with a gun ..."

"But how did they know you were going to stop there? How could anyone have possibly known?"

"That's the real question. How could anyone have known?"

II.

A few days before leaving New York I called Gray Barker in Clarksburg and he agreed to meet me the following Tuesday in Point Pleasant. As soon as he hung up, I dialed Woodrow Derenberger's unlisted number and spoke to his wife.

"When are you coming to see us again?" she asked.

"I expect to be in West Virginia next week," I replied.

"I know. I hear you're having a secret meeting with Gray Barker on Tuesday."

I was stunned.

"I'm meeting with Gray," I admitted, "but it's not very secret. I didn't know about it myself until a couple of minutes ago, so how on earth did you know?"

There was a pause.

"Charlie Cutler over in Ohio told us about it a couple of days ago," she finally said.

"And how did he know about it?"

"I-I don't know. I suppose he heard it somewhere."

When you enter the unreal world of the contactees, predictions, prophecies, and a mysterious invasion of your privacy become commonplace. Contactees seem to develop heightened perceptions, ESP, and precognition. The changes occur almost overnight. In their meetings with the ent.i.ties they are served up platters of propaganda along with rumors and nonsense which they accept and repeat as fact. Many of the choicest tidbits in UFO lore were not actual events but were put into circulation by contactees who placed their complete trust in their contacters. The ent.i.ties spun wild tales about crashed saucers being confiscated by the U.S. Air Force, farmers shooting and wounding s.p.a.cemen, and so forth. Contactees repeated the stories to wild-eyed UFO enthusiasts and so they spread in ever-widening circles until they appeared in articles and books.

Derenberger never claimed psychic powers. He said he received telepathic messages from Indrid Cold giving him specific information. Others such as Ted Owens and Uri Geller have also claimed that their psychic abilities came from s.p.a.ce intelligences. Mr. Owens has racked up an impressive record predicting the outcomes of football games. Mr. Geller, an Israeli psychic, became world famous after his alleged contact with a flying saucer on a desert in the Middle East. Both men have been examined and tested by armies of scientists and parapsychologists.

I have probably examined and befriended more UFO contactees than anyone else. Usually their experiences follow certain patterns which they are not even aware of at the time. A long series of seemingly unrelated events occur prior to the first overt contact These events can begin in childhood and span many years. Then, too, most contactees have active or latent psychic abilities before contact. People who see ghosts or religious apparitions have the same patterns as the UFO contactees. And, in fact, the apparitions described in religious "miracles" usually share the same physical characteristics as our UFO ent.i.ties; that is, long fingers, dusky complexions, pointed features.

The flying saucer lore of the past twenty-seven years has been built on three main components: (1) the sighting reports, usually poorly investigated by amateurs and believers, or based entirely on fragmented and often inaccurate newspaper stories; (2) the testimony of the contactees; (3) messages received through spirit mediums and ESP. In recent years a new element has been added by the few scientists pulled into the controversy. This is the tiresome use of probabilities to explain that there must be zillions of other planets and therefore there must be uncounted numbers of inhabited places in the universe. In the early 1960s exobiology became the new scientific rip-off. Various foundations and NASA poured millions of dollars into the study of extraterrestrial life. Since there were no samples available for study, and since there is not the slightest bit of evidence that even a single planet exists in any other star system, exobiology was not an easy field. Scientists had to justify their enormous expenditures with reams of speculative papers. We do not even have enough facts, after fifteen years of study, to form a real basis for the coveted probabilities. If Nick the Greek were asked to make book on the existence of extraterrestrial life, he would find the scientific arguments so tenuous that the odds would have to be somewhere around a trillion to one. Of the nine planets in our own solar system, only three-Mercury, Earth, and Mars-are solid, and only one of these three is infested with life. The appearance of life requires a long list of environmental and chemical conditions. For all these conditions to exist simultaneously on a single planet also requires a whole series of improbable coincidences.

Men have always gazed at the night sky and dreamed of other worlds. Four thousand years ago, Enoch became the first s.p.a.ce traveler, visiting seven worlds or planets after being roused from his sleep by angelic s.p.a.cemen. Swedenborg, the great Swedish mathematician, went wandering through the cosmos in the 1700s, and a proper Bostonian named William Denton was given a guided tour of Venus in the 1860s. George Adamski, Howard Menger, and several others visited the moon in the 1950s, preceding Neil Armstrong by more than a decade. Menger, a New Jersey sign painter, brought back some "moon potatoes" that looked like rocks ... and they didn't cost the taxpayers a cent. Adamski, a California eccentric, found the backside of the moon rich in vegetation and water. Others observed cunningly concealed underground cities there.

Still others have traveled to scores of unknown planets in distant galaxies. Planets with exotic-sounding names adopted from ancient Greek, just as most of the ent.i.ties who stop lone drivers on isolated back yards claim names from mythology.

For example, on Wednesday, July 26, 1967, Mrs. Marts De Long and Michael Kisner were driving in a park near California's Big Tujunga Canyon when they heard a bodiless voice which instructed them to watch for something unusual. There was a flash of light in the sky and a glowing disc twenty feet in diameter appeared. Soon they were chatting with "Kronin," master of the Kronian race. He was very tall and both boneless and eyeless, and said he was "a s.p.a.ce robot encased in a time capsule."

As soon as Mrs. De Long reached her home after the visit her phone rang. It was Kronin. She later recorded several conversations with him in which he explained the problems of the universe. She had never heard of Cronus, the Roman G.o.d of time.

Another ent.i.ty popular in occult circles for centuries is Ashtoreth, the Phoenician G.o.ddess of love. A character called Ashtar has been communicating with UFO fans for years, coming through worldwide stances, on Ouija boards, and through mental telepathy. Ashtar is a big cheese in the Intergalactic Federation. Contactees have churned out dozens of books filled with his messages.

A woman on Long Island had an encounter with an olive-skinned gentleman in a greenish suit in May 1967 and his name caused me some problems. He called himself Aphloes. I finally figured out that it was from aphlogistic, a word derived from Greek meaning "a lamp giving light without flame."

Woodrow Derenberger's Mr. Cold did not fit this pattern. In fact, the name made me suspicious of Woody's story and if I had not talked with others who had shared similar experiences on the same night, I might have rejected Derenberger outright because of it.

In earlier times, fairies, demons, and even human witches practicing their Black Sabbath rites, chose gravel pits, garbage dumps, cemeteries and crossroads for their appearances. Modern hairy monsters and UFOs select the same sites, and quite a few UFO contacts have occurred near crossroads or on highways still under construction at points where old highways once intersected. Derenberger's first contact with Cold was on a newly completed highway yards from an old intersection.

Across the river, the vast "Indian" mounds of Ohio stand as mute testimony of some earlier culture almost identical to the culture which constructed the great mounds of Great Britain. The latter were joined by straight tracks or "leys" which formed a complicated grid system. I wondered if a similar ley grid may not have once existed in West Virginia and I studied aerial photos and old maps looking for such a system. There are tiny traces . here and there, but modern fanners and builders have destroyed most of the old artifacts, just as they had destroyed a great many of the mounds, stone towers, etc., that stood on this continent when the first Europeans arrived.

Had Woody been stopped on a cross-point of some old ley network? The only clue lies in Mr. Cold's uncharacteristic selection for a name. In his study of the British leys, The View Over Atlantis, John Mich.e.l.l stated: A peculiar feature of the old alignments is that certain names appear with remarkable frequency along their routes. Names with Red, White and Black are common; so are Cold or Cole, Dod, Merry and Ley.

It would be in keeping with the twisted logic of the ent.i.ties to call attention to a West Virginia ley system by staging their landings at specific points along the grid and adopting names like Cold. Apparently this is exactly what they did in 1966-67.

So far as I know, Cold and his mischievous companions never presented themselves to other contactees ... or they changed their names to suit each occasion. This, too, is a break with tradition. Ashtar, Orthon, and several others with names that sound like synthetic fabrics have contacted thousands of people all over the world in the past twenty years.

In September 1973, just before the great October UFO wave, posters sprang up all over Atlanta, Georgia, proclaiming the eminent arrival of the s.p.a.ce people. A Georgia psychic was in mental communication with Zandark, who identified himself as "a member of the United Cosmic Council; a Commander in Chief in Charge of Directing Technical Transmissions Via Mental Telepathy or the Combination of Mediumistic Telepathy Under the Direction of the Confederation of Cosmic s.p.a.ce Beings." Zandark delivered the usual "We come to bring peace" message, claimed credit for building the Sphinx, the Pyramids, "and other structural phenomenas," and complained that contactees were not being taken seriously enough, but were being "branded fools, fanatics, and personal publicity seekers." We were advised to shape up.

Bach of Zandark's communications began with the salutation, "Adonai Va.s.su." When the sitters at the Atlanta seances asked for a translation they were told it meant, "Peace be with you, and love forever."

Unknown to the Georgia Group, a contactee in Italy, Eugenio Siragusa, has been in touch with the s.p.a.ce people for years and his contactor always signs off with, "May the light of the universal peace be with you ... [signed Adoniesis."

Adoniesis is a manufactured word, a sort of Romanization of Adonai, an ancient Hebrew word for G.o.d; Va.s.su stems from the Latin va.s.sus, meaning servant. So Adonai Va.s.su really means "servant of G.o.d." Old Zandark is just another angel in disguise! Adoniesis and Adonai are not so far removed from each other. It is interesting that the same terms would turn up at seances an ocean apart.

Even more interesting is the fact that the messages received by psychics everywhere bear remarkable similarities in content, even in phrasing. I have researched obscure contactee-type books written two and three hundred years ago and have found the same identical messages and phraseology were prevalent then. Since much of this literature is very obscure and hard to find, and since many of our psychics and contactees are poorly read, it is doubtful if this is a question of fakers repeating the earlier material. Rather, it seems as if there is a phonograph in the sky endlessly repeating the same material generation after generation as if there were a crack in the record.

Author Brad Steiger interviewed scores of psychics, prophets, and contactees for his study of this phenomenon, Revelation: The Divine Fire. He found that people claiming to be in communication with G.o.d, angels, spirits of the dead, and s.p.a.cemen from other planets were all receiving essentially the same information. All spoke of an impending disaster, just as Zandark warned, 'The time for your planet is crucial." But the prophets and seers of the last century were getting the same spiel.

William Miller (1782-1849) founded the Seventh-Day Adventists in the belief that the world was coming to an end in 1843. Interestingly, prophets all over the world and tribes of Hopi and Navaho Indians in the Southwest picked that same year. Clearly, they were all tuned in to the same "static." Jehovah's Witnesses were founded in 1872 on a similar premise.

The messages delivered to the children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, also discussed the coming disaster, but phrased in obscure theological terms.

Again and again, psychics and contactees have gathered their family and friends together to sit on a hilltop and wait for the predicted end of the world. This charade has been repeated many times in the past twenty-five years with UFO contactees preparing for the wonderful s.p.a.ce people to descend in their flying saucers and evacuate a chosen few from our doomed planet The world was supposed to end on December 24, 1967. Occult and UFO groups around the world got the message in every language. A Danish cult actually built a lead-lined bomb shelter and spent the holidays cringing in it, waiting for the big blast.

In 1973, a UFO contactee in Wisconsin soberly announced that the comet Kahotek was going to wreck the earth that Christmas. He was recruiting people to be evacuated by his s.p.a.ce friends.

Zandark, Orthon, Ashtar, Xeno, Cold, and all their cronies have been leading many of us around by the noses for centuries. First they convince us of their honesty, reliability, the accuracy of their predictions, and their well-meant intentions. Then they leave us sitting on a hilltop waiting for the world to blow up.

When the world was spa.r.s.ely populated and the signals from the superspectrum were not smothered in so much static from the lower spectrum, men learned to place great faith in these ent.i.ties and their prophecies. Priests, scholars, and magicians achieved a marvelous understanding of the cosmos and the cosmic forces through astrology, alchemy, and the magical manipulation of matter. But as man followed the angelic dictate, "Multiply and replenish the earth," our planet began to suffer from psychic pollution. The record on that great phonograph in the sky cracked and stuck in a single groove ... single groove ... single groove ... single....

III.

The contactee syndrome is a fundamental reprograming process. No matter what frame of reference is being used, the experience usually begins with either the sudden flash of light or a sound-a humming, buzzing, or beeping. The subject's attention is riveted to a pulsing, flickering light of dazzling intensity. He finds he is unable to move a muscle and is rooted to the spot.

Next the flickering light goes through a series of color changes and a seemingly physical object begins to take form. The light diminishes revealing a boat (if the event occurs on a lake or river), a flying machine of unusual configuration, or an ent.i.ty of some sort.

What's really happening?

The percipient is first entranced by the flickering light. From the moment he feels paralyzed he loses touch with reality and begins to hallucinate. The light remains a light, but his or her mind constructs something else. This can be compared with normal hypnosis. (I have been an amateur hypnotist for many years.) A hypnotized subject very often thinks he is fully conscious, that the hypnosis isn't working and he is just going along with the hypnotist, but when he tries to move or disobey a command he is surprised to find he can't. The paralysis reported in so many UFO cases is really a form of hypnosis.

In the 1940s medical science discovered the flicker phenomenon; that some human brains are extremely responsive to a flickering light; that such a light can produce an epileptic-type trance accompanied by elaborate hallucinations. In Battle for the Mind, William, Sargant pointed out: It should be more widely known that electrical recordings of the human brain show that it is particularly sensitive to rhythmic stimulation by percussion and bright light among other things and certain rates of rhythm can build up recordable abnormalities of brain function and explosive states of tension sufficient even to produce convulsive fits in predisposed subjects. Some people can be persuaded to dance in time with such rhythms until they collapse in exhaustion. Furthermore, it is easier to disorganize the normal function of the brain by attacking it simultaneously with several strong rhythms played in different tempos. This leads to protective inhibition, either rapidly in the weak inhibitory temperament or after a prolonged period of excitement in the strong excitatory one.

When the flicker-or pulsing sound-happens to be synchronized with the alpha rhythm of a particular brain, the brain is short-circuited. There are cases in which some people were triggered by the flickering of a motion-picture image and overcome by an urge to strangle the persons sitting next to them. Dr. Grey Walter of the Burden Nemo-logical Inst.i.tute at Bristol, England, had a patient who pa.s.sed out while riding a bicycle along an avenue of trees. The trees produced the flicker phenomenon as he sped past them.

"A few subjects yielded epileptic patterns," Dr. Walter noted in his book The Living Brain. "Auditory experiences were rare; but there may be organized hallucinations, that is, complete scenes, as in dreams, involving more" than one sense. All sorts of emotion are experienced; fatigue, confusion, fear, disgust, anger, pleasure. Sometimes the sense of time is lost or disturbed. One subject said that he had been 'pushed sideways in time'-yesterday was at one side, instead of behind, and tomorrow was off the port bow."

In short, a light flickering at exactly the right frequency can place the witness in a hypnoticlike trance. He views this as paralysis since he loses control of his limbs for the duration of the trance even though a part of his mind remains conscious. He views the hallucinations of the trance as a continuation of the reality he was experiencing a moment before. Like a normal subject of hypnosis, he loses his sense of time. Time can be compressed or expanded, as in a dream. Events which seem to span several hours are actually hallucinated in seconds or minutes, or the reverse can occur. When he comes out of his trance and looks at his watch he finds that hours have pa.s.sed even though he thought he only watched the light for a few seconds.

In a religious miracle such as that at Garabandal, Spain, in the 1960s, crowds surrounded the small children as they entered trances and conversed with ent.i.ties 'only they could see. The children sometimes remained motionless for hours, but when they came out of their trances they thought only minutes had pa.s.sed.

The psychedelic lights and flickering strobes so popular with the youth culture in the 1960s actually served to induce trances and produce quasi-religious experiences, particularly when coupled with the mind-numbing beat of hard rock music and hallucinogenic drugs. The euphoria of the big rock festivals was a direct product of this phenomenon. Young people voluntarily, and enthusiastically, submitted themselves to a brainwashing process ... reprograming themselves, or being re-programed by an outside force which, as the violence and social upsets of the period demonstrate, was not always benevolent.

When a contactee comes out of his trance he often finds himself suffering from severe headaches and muscular aches and pains for days afterward. Great lethargy is another common symptom, with the percipient indulging in excessive sleep, exhausted. These symptoms are comparable to those of epileptics who have suffered muscular spasms. Excessive thirst, another symptom, is probably caused by something else ... dehydration from exposure to intense low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic radiation. Such radiation penetrates and dries every tissue.

The mechanism-the light flashes-can be subjective, seen only by the percipient, or objective, seen by others and even photographable. The subjective flashes must be caused by radiation which by-pa.s.ses the eyes and optical nerves and is received directly by the brain. Objective flashes are ma.s.ses of energy moving through the visible spectrum. Witnesses whose minds are not tuned to the specific frequency of the flickering of the object are not affected, except by the actinic rays that may be emitted.

When investigating multiple UFO sightings I am not concerned with the chance witnesses of an objective light. Rather I try to seek out those persons who were directly affected by the light. They rarely report their sighting, either because the accompanying hallucination was so bizarre or so terrifying, or because they simply had no memory of the entire event; they suffered lacunal amnesia. When I succeed in finding such people I obtain their entire life history and keep in touch with them for a long period after my interview to observe any changes in personality or outlook that may occur. In some cases, rapid deterioration takes place. The percipient has innumerable secondary hallucinations, just as a person who has taken LSD can go on another "trip" unexpectedly weeks later. He can become mentally unbalanced, abandon his family and his work, develop into a fanatic, and, in several unfortunate cases, end up with a nervous breakdown or commit suicide.

On the other side of the coin, some percipients experience a profound expansion of consciousness, a greatly increased IQ, and a complete change of life-style ... for the better.

Since this is a historic process, and a continuing one, it is probable that most great leaders had a contact experience at some point in their early life. Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Richard Bucke conducted the first study of this phenomenon in his book Cosmic Consciousness published in the year 1900. In religious circles !he phenomenon is called "illumination."

In its purest form, illumination is not a religious experience. For a few brief moments the percipient understands, truly understands, the workings of the entire universe. He perceives all of history, past, present, and future, totally. He feels he is a part of the superspectrum and is one with the cosmos. Unfortunately, when the brief experience is over he cannot remember most of it because it has been added to his subconscious, and he cannot articulate those parts he can remember. But he has been re-programed, even prepared for a new role in life. To some the experience is "the call" that propels them into the clergy.

There seems to be a rule that each cosmic force has its imitators. Victims of UFO contact are often suffering from false illumination. Either their minds have misinterpreted the experience, or a lower force has re-programed them using the same mechanism. In a sense, they have become "possessed." They suffer from hallucinosis-repeated hallucinations. Their lives are manipulated disastrously. Once a person has undergone false illumination he becomes vulnerable to repet.i.tions, just as once a person has been hypnotized he can be easily hypnotized again.

The phenomenon is dependent on belief, and as more and more people believe in flying saucers from other planets, the lower force can manipulate more people through false illumination. I have been watching, with great consternation, the worldwide spread of the UFO belief and its accompanying disease. If it continues unchecked we may face a time when universal acceptance of the fict.i.tious s.p.a.ce people will lead us to a modern faith in extraterrestrials that will enable them to interfere very overtly in our affairs, just as the ancient G.o.ds dwelling on mountaintops directly ruled large segments of the population in the Orient, Greece, Rome, Africa, and South America.

However they arrived at their 1953 decision, the CIA/air force plan to debunk, downgrade, and ridicule flying saucers was, in retrospect, the most responsible course the government could take. But they underestimated the scope of the phenomenon and its ability to manipulate humans and generate propaganda.

IV.

On May 20, 1967, Steve Michalak was out prospecting near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, Canada, when he saw a large circular object land. It seemed to be made of glittering metal "like stainless steel." He approached it and thought he could hear voices mumbling inside. He called out but received no answer. Instead, the object spewed out some kind of gas or flame which caught him full in the chest and sent him reeling backward as it took off. Both his shirt and the skin underneath were burned with an odd checkerboard pattern.

Mr. Michalak became extremely ill, suffering a week of blackouts, nausea, headaches, and a weight loss of twenty-two pounds. It took him many weeks to return to normal. Then, on September 21, 1967, 124 days after the initial incident, the burns on his chest returned and his body began to swell. He was hospitalized and again returned to normal. But the malady returned every 109 to 124 days. In August 1968, after a year of recurring illnesses, he visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota at his own expense. Doctors there told him they had treated another UFO victim from California who suffered from the same thing. His problems stemmed from "a foreign substance" in his blood, he was told.

When scientists from the air force-financed UFO study conducted by Colorado University visited Michalak, they asked to see the place where the saucer had landed He admitted that he had been searching for the spot himself, without success. He was puzzled by his inability to locate it. Despite his inexplicable injury, the scientists viewed this inability as proof that his story was a hoax. In their final report they implied he was not telling the truth.

Actually there are a great many cases in which the witnesses found they could not relocate the site of their experience. Buildings and landmarks clearly seen at the time seem to vanish. Roads and highways disappear. This bewildering phenomenon is well-known in psychic lore also, probably because many psychic experiences are hallucinatory, too. There are innumerable stories about restaurants that seemed to dissolve after the witnesses stopped there. Tales of disappearing houses are common. A weary traveler stops at an old abandoned house for the night, just like in the movies, and later learns the house he stayed in does not exist... or had burned down years ago.

True to the reflective factor, as I was writing this I received a letter from F. W. Holiday, the British investigator, in which he tells the following: A family in the south of England still spend their weekends driving around woods looking for a mysterious lake they encountered some fifteen years ago. Out in the middle they saw a huge rock with a sword driven into it. Later they went back to do some research but there was no trace of such a lake. No one had heard of it and it isn't on the maps.

One could fill a book with such incidents, and, indeed, some authors have. Long ago I cla.s.sified such episodes as distortions of reality. Throughout history people have been straying through Alice's looking gla.s.s, seeing things that don't exist, visiting places that spill off the maps into some hallucinatory other dimension. Fifteen years ago there was a lake in England with a sword jutting out of a stone, waiting for some king to come along" and pull it out, shouting, "Excalibur!" This is no more ridiculous than stumbling upon a secret flying saucer base nestled in the hills of New England and bustling with activity. Contactees have claimed such things.

An engineer Rex Ball swears he came upon a mysterious underground installation in Georgia in 1940, manned by small Oriental-looking men in coveralls and a few American military officers. When he was caught in the tunnels, one of the officers issued the curt command, "Make him look like a nut!" He woke up in a field, uncertain whether his experience had been real or a dream.

That seems to be the battle cry of the phenomenon.

"Make him look like a nut!"

13 - Phantom Photographers