I was out that night looking for the meteor shower in Riverside Park, New York City, but NYC was totally overcast and I didn’t even see a “blink” through the cloud cover.But Arizona got “the blast,” at 40/minute.
I had to wait 33 years for the next greatLeonid Meteor shower, which came in December 1999 when the Leonid Meteor shower, which i saw from the Great Oval in Central Park and got some of them on video.
The Night of the Eta Aquarid
One night in In May of the year 2000, I was flying a T-tailed Piper Arrow II RT in the dead of night from Boston to Essex County – Caldwell Airport, New Jersey, which is just a few miles outside New York City.
It was about 9:30 p.m., flying in the black of night over Oxford-Woodbury, Connecticut. The sky was black , but visibility was unlimited and I could see the stars. the land was black, but I could see the lights of highways, occasinal street lights, and some house lights in the little sleepy towns below.
As I flewwest, homing in on the 310 radial of a VOR beacon in Carmel, New York, I glaced down at the landscape passing below my aircraft.
Suddenly, as I was making out the coast line of Connecticut to the south along Long island sound, I was very surprised as I looked down at a brilliant luminosoity on the gound, which made no sense to my ratiional mind.
As I looked at this puzzling sight, I thought I saw “a lake on fire” or “fireworks underwater (?).” I was mesmerized by the sight of it what looked to be a fiery lake, adn I thought of an amusement park or somesuch thing as the possible cause for this most ununusual never-before-seen phenomenon.
My eyes stayed fixed for several seconds on the rainbow of brilliant streaks of light emanating, as it seemed from beneath the waters of the small lake, until the fiery lake disappeared under my left wing.
When I looked forward again, I could see diffuse green and yellow bands of light wavering over the dimly lit landscape and I was puzzled by the effect illuminating the hilltops of Connecticut when it had been pitch black just 10 seconds before, except for street and highway lights, 6500 feet below.
I looked for the light source and looing south, I could see “late afternoon sunlight,” shimmering in long Island sound and the Atlantic ocean farther south.
I could see all of Long Island as a black mass floating in a sea of silver light, and when I raised my gaze to the sky, I thought I was looking at the sun. My brain went “bonkers,” and slipped into cognitive dissonance for a moment as i said to myself :
“Did I miss the dawn? … Am I on my way to Holland?” <simultaneously Thinking of Lindberg + “Holland Tunnel”>
I glanced forward once again to see the land was still dimly lit with now brighter green and yellow “tiger stripes” wavering cross the Connecticut hills. I could see 2 “rectagular lakes,” which later turned out to be local reservoirs.
Looking back at “The Sun,” I noticed that it had dropped a couple of degrees in declination and now had a white aura surrounding it, so my next thought was “O my God, It’s a Supernova.” but as i thought it, I saw the luminosity drop nd stop twice move, vertically, like a spider sometime “drops and stops” suddenly while hanging on its silken thread.
The object was now lower than before and the aura around it looked like was boiling, at which point it leapt and streaked right toward me and an intersection with my airplane’s line of flight, ‘bouncing” twice (like the bouncing ball in old cartoons) and covering a distance of 50-75 miles in two “hops” lasting only 2 seconds in duration.
the object was now nearly upon me and realizing it was meteoric, I scream or yelled out loudly out “METEOR!” to alert my co-pilot and my passenger in the rear seat, a USAF Tech Sgt. named William Larrea.
The object seemed to slow down suddenly and changed color and shape from bright white roundness to a long fiery green and red object, shaped like a black apple see, with a ruby colored “belt” or ring around its center and a “ruby knuckle” like ajewel on a ring, and spinning/rotating like a beacon.
My inner voice said “Don’t stare at the ruby belt ’cause you’ll miss the rest of it!”
So, I broke my fixation on the spinning ruby belt to take in the rest of it, which was a green color of every possible shade and hue of green from lime green to Kelly green and the saw a 100 foot long acetylene torch like tail , and as my flight line was on a collision course with the streaking object, I said to myself:
“If I fly through that tail, it will shear my wing and ‘Bang!, ” my plane will explode and the NTSB accident report will only say “pilot error.”
He was like a bomb about to explode! His fist drew blood in the scratches he inflicted upon himself as he punched the bark on the oak tree. He had tried for three weeks to seduce Mary Jane Williams in any number of ways, and each time something had stood between him and his goal. Either Jack Sampson wouldn’t loan him his car to keep a date with her, or his mom and dad had ‘cracked down’ that night and didn’t want him meandering into those darkened, devilish areas of the city; he dreaded another brawl. Besides, everyone knew she was an easy ‘make.’ A pretty one, but an easy one.
And now he had an oil stain on his shirt from an unfinished burglary attempt at ‘hot wiring’ an old car down the street. Even though he had wrapped his jacket over the smudge, and zipped it shut, you could smell the heavy odor of oil. Some dirt had caked into the grooves of his fingers, and he was unaware that a streak of it was across his chin. He wished he could have gone home, but he was locked out of the darkened duplex which appeared to him as a foreboding evil and sick. He needed to be in a nice warm bed—he needed someone to talk to—some friend. As he analyzed that feeing, he became unconsciously ware of his next destination, somewhere along the river where its hourly chimes would echo across the lower-income neighborhood.
The traffic bothered him, and he had stepped-back three times at the demands of angry motorists who honked at him impatiently. “What a cruddy-looking kid,” shouted one girl from the backseat of the last auto to pass by. She rocked back into the seat as a bundle of laughter. Bud Hendricks made his way at a frantic pace across the street, glancing back on the passing hulks of metal, he spit on the street in contempt. He looked over his shoulder, up Vermont Avenue to the confectionery two blocks north. The Pepsi sign outside was waving in the chill wind. It would lap against the wind, then hang somber. After a moment, it would lap again.
He’d go there and play the pinball machine and think—think as to whether he should knock on that solid oak door with a small stained-glass window in the center: a radiant picture of the Good Shepard. Then a gentle swing its pewter-like hinges, the doorway would be graced by the slim shadowy form of an older priest, who was no comparison for the younger priest, Father Raymond Herbert. Bud recalled his last discussion with Father Herbert:
“I’d like for you to keep coming back, dig man?” asked the young priest. Father Herbert kept talking, flipping his almost shoulder-length hair behind him. Bud had heard about some of the liberal innovations the younger priests were bring about in the Catholic Church, especially since the most recent Vatican Council. But seeing them in person was a little more startling.
“Like, we have made quite a few changes, dig? And I don’t think you understand what is in store for you? Right?” The priest was bouncing around before the boy, looking much like one of his wisecracking exuberant boyfriends. It made Bud feel comfortable, familiar, identifiable with the priest; yet, at the same time, he felt a sight revulsion, a disgust at these theological innovators.
“Like, you know, new things are happening. The Holy Spirit promised to lead into all truth! Well, man, it’s happening—-it’s today—-it’s the New Creation! You’re part of it, cat! Dig? The Church is not against you. Why not split to my office now and then, we’ll have a little discussion? I don’t know if I can talk to you every time you come—-Father Eugene O’Brien usually handles the Religious Study, but don’t split the scene. Keep coming.”
He did keep coming back. He returned. Bud was split between exhilaration , and, yet, a form of disillusionment.
The boy was still sipping on the Pepsi when he walked away from the pinball machine in the corner of Pat’s confectionary. He paced back and forth by the glass window—-restless, wearily, like a lion in a stinking cage, but only more discouraged. His freshly washed hair shone in the store’s ceiling light highlighted by a recent palmful of Brylcream. He hiked one leg, put it down, then placed the other up on the store window counter. From there he could see the girls coming home from school, carrying their books close to their sweaters, brazenly flaunting the rear ends from the hem of the miniskirts.
“The bitches, how do they keep their asses from freezing?” Bud mumbled to himself in a low growl.
The trees outside bent and bowed in the wind. His soda dribbled down his chin as he set the empty bottle with a thud on the counter. He smeared the auto oil streak away from his chin with the soda drippings. A bunch of teenagers, gruff, disheveled, shaggy, bustled through the door. The bell above the door rang tinnily and was drowned out by the kids.
“Praise the Lord, praise the Lord Almighty!” sang one teenager demanding change from the cashier to play the pinball machines.
“Sing man, sing! What did Father Hubert give you in Science, Dan?” another asked from the midst of the confectionary.
“B? B-plus? I don’t know. Should have been an A,” the other boy cracked back. “Hey, give me those nickels!”
The bundle of flesh and noise had finally moved over to the pinball machine carrying their customary confections and soda. They took their usual vulgar stances intermingled with the traditional “go to hells’’ and other “ah go screw yourselves”-type obscenities. Later they would settle down to their nightly routine of doing their schoolwork—-provided they felt like doing it.
Though a high school drop-out himself, Bud could feel nothing but contempt for the parochial school kids. “So, you are the Light of the World?” he thought to himself as he casually lit a cigarette. It was a term derived from his talks with Father O’Brien. Too many talks, Bud protested to himself, but it was getting to be a habit for strange reasons. It was about to be fulfilled again tonight.
Bud forced his way outside in a brisk manner. There, he took two robust puffs on the cigarette. He threw it down and crushed it lifeless. He walked swiftly to the street corner. Bud noted it was about to rain, placing him in a somewhat somber mood.
“What about those rumors telling of the Communists and their takeover?” Bud had asked the shaggy-headed Father Herbert during one visit. “Wasn’t there something said about an avowed ‘psychological infiltrations’ starting way back with Lenin?”
“Bunk!” the flippant priest jested back. “Christ hid the purpose of the New Creation until after his death, and now the Holy Spirit has that Church into ‘all truth.’ Communism is not an enemy but a phase, a necessary transition to the ultimate conquest by Christ of the universe. Even democracy.’’ The priest smiled mysteriously.
“Yah, but didn’t consecutive Soviet leaders avow Lenin’s same purpose to ‘debauch us from within?’” Bud brought the question up during one visit. “Wasn’t there something about an avowed ‘psychological infiltration’ starting way back in history with Lenin?’’ Still, they sometimes barred rock music and censored dirty movies and such in their naïve country, Khrushchev said that he would ‘bury us,’ meaning….
“So,” Father Herbert countered, “America has room for Communism, rock music, liberal movies—-those are very charitable acts. Christian acts, dig? Like, Christ said His Father’s house had many mansions….’’ The priest smiled with an Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat expression.
“Sounds a little strange. But, yah, it could mean that,” exciting visions and scenic sights burst in the boy’s head. “But Father O’Brien disagrees. He feels that the Anti-Christ is personified…’’
“Father O’Brien!” The priest suddenly became solemn, a barely subdued sneer upon his lips. “Father O’Brien,’’ he continued more softly, “will have to learn of the evolving trend of the New Creation, as will everybody else!”
On Shara Avenue, Bud noticed one unusual house in the middle of the block. In its small front yard was a solitary flagpole with an eagle with outspread wings atop the pole. The front porch desperately needed painting and strips of the old paint lay on the ground. There was a light within the house and a certain melancholy atmosphere hung over the structure. Who lived in the house? An elderly couple? When was the house built? Before the Second World War—-earlier, when? Bud identified closely with the house. He wondered how little houses—-little people—-could survive in this big town, this big nation, this big world.
And then he noticed many things around him. Maybe it was the damp, dark weather that was requesting persons and things to silently ask humanity to cuddle, examine and befriend the scenery: there was the yellow crabgrass that sprouted out from the edges and creases of the sidewalk, how many years ago could it have been when they made sidewalks out of red brick laid in a cris-cross pattern? The gas station on the next corner had an ancient-looking building next to it; its chimneys were bent, broken and ready to fall; the windows were boarded; rubber ties; automobile oil pans and general litter lay in the front yard. Sixty, eighty, or a hundred years old? How old was the building?
************
The flashing beacon on top of the filling station that Bud’s vision encapsulated seemed to recede to a dot between revolutions. It reminded him of the little white dot that appeared at first when the television is turned on and a picture appears an instant later.
(“Tingle Soap,” the broadcaster in the television commercial had been saying, “will give you that magical feeling from head to foot, as if a beautiful Polynesian maiden had caressed you.” A teenage boy in a bathtub was wiggling his toes at one end of the tub as he exhibits a broad grin. “Tingling,” the broadcaster continues, “like the new dawn freshness of a beautiful south sea day.” Off comes a bosom halter from the maiden. The boy’s toes wiggle fanatically, and the boy’s smile turns into a lusty grin. “Tingling,” the broadcaster continues, “like a boy rejuvenated by the desire of a South sea goddess.” The boy appears to be erotically aroused. The girl in the commercial laughs exhilaratingly—-off comes her skirt. “And now, back to our movie feature THE BONTUS: THE FLESH EASTING SEA FIEND.)
In two more blocks, Bud would turn down a side street heavily pockmarked with cracks in the hard topped street. The city needed to repair it but it probably would remain dilapidated for a year or more. From where Bud stood, Bud would be able to see the stately lawn to the priest’s parish house and its plush evergreens along the small white and spotless walkway to the noble redbrick building.
The setting Sun, an enormous orb looming from beyond the buildings and homes to his back, had thrown a golden hue on everything. The dark clouds of the late autumn afternoon had dissipated briefly as if to allow the Sun to give a final goodnight salute. Bud turned the corner towards the priest’s house, and the two-story vacant house diagonally across the street seemed aflame with the golden red rays of the setting Sun and the multiple windows defiantly reflecting that source.
When Bud reached the lawn of the vacant house his eyes rolled in anxiety as he examined the scene. He glanced back and forth across the street, up and down the extent of the building and the church on the conner, then back to the vacant house with its first-floor windows overlayed by strips of plywood nailed diagonally across them. The thick front door was boarded shut with two big boards. The shrubberies were unkempt with long reeds thrusting through them, the concrete steps were chipped and crumbled. The lawn was bare in spots with stubs of crab grass spread about. Bud felt just as emotionally desolate.
Bud stood there momentarily, shivering, undetermined. Suddenly, another youngster came shuffling along the street out of a nearby alley. He barely noticed Bud standing there and was snapping his fingers to the latest Hit Tune, a melody which could be heard coming from the bulge of a small radio in the boy’s hip pocket. The strolling youngster’s hair had been combed high onto his head and the nape in a Duck-Butt fashion. His shirt was a plaid design of red and black, barely discernable beneath a leather jacket—a jacket much like the one Bud wore, but much more soiled and torn. The strolling-youngster’s face was strained and enveloped in pleasure to the tune he was hearing.
Bud watched the boy disappear around the corner as the boy’s feet made a horrid sound of something dead being pulled across a concrete lot: it was the boy’s black boots being dredged along the pavement.
Bud spat on the street, then drew his eyes back onto the priest’s house. Bud lazily climbed the lawn to the front porch of the vacant house. When he sat down, the streetlights flickered on and he noticed several homes already appeared well-lit in the dusk of the evening. The rectory windows added their radiance to the scene. Bud suddenly realize the time as the church bell chimed the hour. A tugboat on the river gave a low moan adding to the melancholy.
“Why do I want to waste my time looking about a small Catholic rectory?” Bud questioned. He would have been at Louie’s house right now, Bud told himself, planning an evening at Betty Breg’s place. Her parents were never home and there was always a refrigerator full of food—-and a whole evening for ‘games.’ Bud liked Betty. She was a real swinger. He thought he could ‘make’ her if he really tried. That is if Louie didn’t run interference.
Maybe Louis wasn’t even home now. He never seemed to be home much lately. Often, he and Louie would end-up to be sitting in that two-room shack that Louie called home, staring into the pot-bellied stove for hours on end, talking about cars and sex, and then, sex and cars. What he needed was Jack Sampson and his car. That would make things right, Bud rationalized. If only Jack could suddenly materialize and help rid him of this insufferable ache of loneliness. “I need to screw Mary Jane, damn it,” Bud told himself; Bud knew where Jack was tonight, and it wasn’t playing guitar out at Hartsville like Jack’s sister said, it was more like Mary Jane than Hartsville. He had to fill this hole of loneliness, this stabbing in his heart caused by many drunken fights of his mother and stepdad, the screaming threats, banging of human bodies against hardwood floors, the smashing of beer bottle glass, and the guggling of someone’s fist on a human throat. Bud couldn’t recognize the teenage elements of fear, the deep shame of his acne, the puzzle-pieces of the love-hate relationship his mother carried within her ( probably going back many generations to hear her tell of her own family discipline episodes), and general childhood angst living in their lower-class scenery.
But above all this, Bud wanted to believe his mother deeply loved him.
“It’s not that you’re so shy, Bud,’’ his mother had told him one night, “you’re simply different from your friends. You like to read, for instance. You don’t particularly like to get your nose into hard dirty work like your pals—-you are just more serious about mystical things than they are. But why do you get involved with such punks?”
Bud couldn’t reveal his feelings of the terror and longing he carried like a bundle or bricks on his back or the slab of concrete in his stomach. Instead, he euphemistically tried to state it more commonly: “I want to be just another happy guy, Mom! Doesn’t a guy have a right to have fun?”
Bud wanted to tell her that he had to make ‘the scene’ the same as his buddies; they were natural at the art of seduction; but how does a guy tell that to his mother?
“But you have good friends. Go back to Church. You went to Sunday School once before, Bud…’’
“Mom, you don’t see the ‘picture’…’’
“Mom…” How could the boy explain? Explain that the world was not what she said it was. That a whole jungle of insects and bugs and green slimy things grow out in the world that aren’t even listed in her encyclopedia of facts—-or, perhaps the worst possibility: she wasn’t telling all the facts!
***********
The sky had become dark. The Moon was partially hidden behind passing bundles of grey-white clouds. The trees swayed in the autumnbreeze, and Bud noticed that in his ongoing anxiety he had knotted his protruding shirt cuff into a winkled ball. “Ah, the loneliness, the infernal loneliness, the gnawing loneliness!’’ I’ll go home, he thought at first. No, no. Try Jack’s place again? Nope, he wouldn’t be home, and besides Bud couldn’t stand his old lady coming to the bar smelling of Hill and Hill whiskey and eyeing Bud seductively. Anyway, Jack’s got a dog that barks worse than a herd of hyenas. And then Bud felt growing rage. He needed to expose his soul, he screamed in his thoughts, waving his hands about as if a lecturer, a rather pitiful sight as he stood on the steps of the deserted property. He was now acting-out his frustration—-not just looking at bodies on the covers of magazines (hurriedly hidden beneath a stack of shoes), and the pornography inside, or the faces of cute girls……he meant OUT!
His eyes had developed an intensity of rebellion as he glared over to the rectory door.
“Who do you think you are fooling, Father O’Brian? I’ve read my Bible. Can you prove any of it? Isn’t just more of this gobbledygook – those myths mankind and the Church have been handing out?’’ His thoughts were bold and direct.
The ornate rectory stood mute before his silent charge. The moan from the tugboat whistle from the muddy waters of the river gave another nocturnal sigh. Bud could smell that opaque odor of the muddy river—-so much soft dripping dirt, so many trunks and limbs of trees protruding the water as if thorns on some submerged victim: It was also the smell of so much urination and human waste from the city drainage; so much green foliage; and just so much dank mud that could have been likened to as the smell of the blood of civilization’s torn flesh.
From somewhere he could smell the heavy stink of sickening garbage from some alley nearby, of which he directed his thoughts to other memories in an act of avoidance.
Bud shoved himself erect. In his lingering frustration he kicked bits of gravel aside with his shoe (noting the rents alongside of the high- heeled boots). In lessened anger he glanced over at the rectory door as he skipped down the steps of the old house:
“Okay, O’Brien, okay. At least it’s warm inside your little office,’’ Bud was thinking, “if you’ll have me; yah, if anybody will have me.”
Bud was greeted at the door by the elderly housekeeper. She was wiping her hands on her apron. “Yes?” she asked in a quivering voice.
“Ah, Father O’Brien here?” Bud asked politely but nervously. The old woman recognized Bud from a previous visit and eyed him curiously.
“Just a minute please.” She hobbled off into a well-lit backroom. Bud was thinking to himself: “Why do places like this always seem to cater to older people?” Bud was leaning on the doorway, and visions of the fictional Hunchback of Notre Dame came to mind as the classic Hunchback crawled amongst those medieval spires and steeples; places like this seem to attract the old and downtrodden and emetic; but then, what did he expect: movie actresses like the late Elizabeth Taylor?
Within the hallway a dark shadow appeared at the bottom of a stairway; soon the light from an antiquated chandelier reflected on the face of Father O’Brien. O’Brien’s slippers slapped on the floor like a snap of a belt strap. Father O’Brien was still unaware as to who had come to visit him. The priest’s face held a slightly grim business-like expression.
“If you’re busy Father, that’s all right, I just took a chance and dropped by again. So…” Bud was apologetic.
Father O’Brien immediately recognized the youth and his face lit up in a warm smile. “Ah, Bud, yes. Yes. I did say that.’’ I must have gotten the old man at a good moment, thought Bud, but so what, he might change his tune after hearing me out.
“Come in. Come in,’’ the red-faced priest instructed, holding the screen door open, “what brings you tonight?” Yes, what, indeed brings me, asked Bud inwardly.
“Well, you said if I had any questions, to come over. I got a copy of the New Testament from a publishing house in California a translation from the original Greek, you know, like you said. Well, I found those passages we talked about last month…’’
‘’Did you bring that Bible with you?” the tall, thin priest asked ushering the boy into one of the side offices off the corridor. He gestured that the boy to be seated in front of a huge oak desk. The priest took out a cigarette from his pocket and began to light it as he situated himself in the large, cushioned desk chair. “Did you bring some notes?” queried the priest.
“Naw, no, I didn’t. However, I did stay up late several nights to read, so I still have a fairly good idea of the passages.” Bud informed the priest. The priest looked amiably at the boy, with his arms folded on the desk and his face somewhat clouded in a puff of cigarette smoke. As the evening progressed, the priest would place the cigarette in an ashtray near him following a series of nervous puffs. “It’s a literal translation of the original Greek, ah, it’s put out by the Concordant Publishing Concern. Ever hear of it?”
“No, but it sounds interesting.” The priest continued to smile as he reached into one of his desk drawers. The veins in the underside of his wrinkled arm seemed to have risen prominently, denoting his age. How tired he looked, Bud was thinking, but the smile on that pixyish Irish face caused Bud to ask of himself: I wonder if my laughter looked as amiable, a smile that had perpetual look of youth. “And I…and I have my Jerusalem Bible,’’ continued the priest. He placed the Bible squarely in front of him like an attorney presenting his court brief, or an oriental marketman presenting his wares, placing his hands on the item in a show of authority.
(Well, already it felt like home, Bud was thinking, and he began to relax. But his easing was short-lived as his memory starkly found himself in the terror of on-coming conflict in his single room, waiting for the sound of the front door to open and bang against the vestibule wall.
“You son-of-a-bitch! Don’t talk to me! Go on! Go to bed! You…” would come the shouting, the slurred drunken diatribe of his mother.
“Go to hell! Go to hell!” answered the rough drunken monotone of his stepfather, “I do what I damn well want!”
“Go watch your TV….” Came his mother’s intoxicated slur.
“I’ll do what I want! Why don’t you, dear, go back down to your friends…’’
Then would come a few quick steps. The floor would violently vibrate as if wall boards would give way. Someone pushed someone else against a dresser drawer and knocking perfume bottles over, midst grunts of pain and even terror. Then in exasperation:
“All right! All right!’’ his mother was saying to the stepfather. “You lousy…lousy…’’ A huge crash as his mother slammed the front door. Bud could hear plaster fall from parts of the house from the vibration.)
Outside the priest’s office window from the hilltop location, looking along the curve of the river towards the north, Bud could see the lights of the downtown area of the city. Red and white lights trailed all along the river’s bend indicating factories, granaries, and barges. One could still hear the vague drone of the tugboats, even though the sounds of thunder outside said that a storm was either coming or finally going.
“You like to read, Bud?” the elderly man asked as he ran his slender fingers through his hair. The priest relaxed into the desk chair. He had taken off the heavy black coat and was down to his white shirt and that magnificent clerical collar that always was attractive to Bud. The cigarette was hidden in his hand long one side of his head, giving the impression that the smoke was somehow arising from there.
“Well, yes, I guess it’s one of my secret pastimes. I have a good-sized library at home. I guess I am different from other kids that I know.” The priest nodded understandingly.
“Don’t get me wrong, father, I dig girls and cars, I collect jazz and rock records. I…”
“But still, you seek something more?” the priest interjected.
Something more! Something more! Something more! The words rang deeply in his mind and caused discomfort in his chest. “Em, yes, I guess. I guess.” Bud viewed the man curiously. Bud has heard those words before.
“Another thing, Father, while I’ve read the Bible, even gone to Sunday School, I want you to understand that I don’t dig all this Scripture stuff! You hear? I mean, you’ve got a lot against you, Father. You know?”
The priest smiled serenely, stood up, placed his hands to the arch of his back and stretched. Then he walked to the window and looked out.
“You have a lot against you too, you know.” The priest wasn’t trying to be directly sarcastic. He turned to look at the boy, “we all do.”
“Well, I know what you mean by that, Father, but get my point: I believe in the truth, and I’ve seen nothing but perversion of the truth in my life.”
The priest quickly turned to look at the boy. The priest still held a grin, though it was slightly subdued. “Truth?” the priest emphasized, “Bud, I have heard men, famous and infamous, spout that word: Truth! Are you familiar—yes—you said you were familiar with the stories of the Marque de Sade? Now, there was a man who believed that every wicked, idiotic thing he did was some form of the ‘truth.’”
Bud quickly recalled the thick glossed-cover paperback he had hidden in his closet. The book was a colorful history and photographic portrayal of the Marque de Sade, all the bloody orgies and sensuous rituals. There had been one picture that overwhelmed Bud greatly: a nude female with her face looking outward, her one hand upward and stretched in anguish, her eyes agog, as a man, painted a vile devil scarlet was performing some anal sexual act on her. “Yes, but de Sade felt that ‘act’ could be done or not—-that the truth was yet to be discovered in its totality. That no one had that right to say what ‘act’ was or was not to be done. I mean, just maybe de Sade was on to something good.”
The priest shook his head. Boy, this fella seems to have changed his tone since I last talked to him, the priest confided to himself. The priest touched a tapestry made by the Christian Youth Council, it bore a big crucifix and the words ‘Come forth Holy Spirit, come!’ in big jovial-felt letters. Then the priest turned back to his desk and sat down again. He folded his hands one more time and eyed Bud mysteriously.
“If someone came to you, Bud, pointed a gun to your head and fired it pointblank —-would you,’’ the priest’s forehead wrinkled when he said those words, “say something good has come of that?”
Boy, the teenager’s thoughts were whirling about him: You can pick some ‘good ones’ can’t you Father? Bud gave a sick little smile and nervously crossed his legs. Bud noticed that the office had appeared somewhat dull for what he had expected of a rectory. There was a well-used filing cabinet. A buffet table with religious books. The desk. Two chairs. One tapestry. One crucifix. And a small picture of Christ hanging on a cross with an aerial view of mourners praying at His feet.
“Well, I guess nobody wants to die. But who can say what would come out of my death?” Bud began to speculate. “I mean maybe somewhere there are cults of murder…”
“There are!” Father O’Brien interrupted sternly. “But come on, Bud, are you trying to tell me that people—-that you—-wouldn’t care if somebody blew your brains out? That’s fine in theory—-nutty theory—-but in actuality? Don’t you see, Bud, it’s more of this ‘abstract’ mumbo-jumbo various people are handing out today.”
And the Church, Father, and the Church, Bud jeered to himself, but we’ll get to that shortly, my pixie-looking friend.
“You see, Bud, Jesus was just that way. He was a down-to-earth, so-to-speak realist, but an idealistic-perfectionist too. He said that your conversation be ‘Yea, Yea and Nay, Nay,’ not this mystical jargon and doubletalk. He laid things down in black and white Remember what he said about His Law? That it should not pass away; that Heaven and Earth could disappear first. He said that He came not to destroy, but to fulfill the Law.”
**********
The scream of automobile tires were now flooding Bud’s memory. One, two, three dragsters pulled out of the auditorium parking-lot of Saint Jude’s parish. It was a breezy-night and Bud and two of his friends stood around a petite, nice-looking teenage girl. All three boys chomped rudely on chewing gum wads; Bud had his hands astutely entrenched in his pockets. His collar was turned up in hipster style.
“Come on doll, Jake’s got his car running; it’s a buet, ain’t it” Bud asked the shyly smiling girl. ‘‘Let’s swing. We’ll drag out of here; get some sodas. Take a little ride.’’ Bud winked at one of his friends casually leaning out of the car door. His friend smiled fiendishly back, “And then, well, we’ll take you home.”
Her smile broadened and she nodded sheepishly. “All right, but I have to be home before midnight. I must go to Mass tomorrow morning.” Jake’s words “it only takes a little while” were drowned-out by the squall of a dragster’s tires.
**********
“You made a point of the fact that I like to read, Father,’’ Bud fidgeted with the pages of a Living New Testament that he found on the corner of the desk. “Well, it’s a little more than a pastime. I think I am looking for something—-the truth. The truth. Have you read some of the Higher Critics?” Bud smiled wickedly.
The priest looked a little alarmed. He tapped the ash from his cigarette somewhat nervously. What a weird twist for a neighborhood renegade, the priest was thinking! I would have expected this conversation to be saturated with cars, girls, and beer. “Yes. They claim that Jesus hadn’t really been the Messiah, just a human being who did no real miracles.’’
“I know them,” the priest answered coolly, “ and they hadn’t added one bit for or against the question.” He lowered his eyes just for a moment and parted his lips slowly. “You know Bud, I ‘ve heard this argument before. And it has usually been put forward by those who are often less than honest.’’ Twitch, twitch, twitch tingled Bud’s nerves in his chest. ‘‘One man,” the priest lowered and raised his right hand as if to show it floating on an air-cushion, “wants to see Christ as anything but the Supreme. He wants to see Him as a man as weak and mundane as himself, so he goes into the written history of the Man —- or his bibliographies —- and begins to tear them apart bit by bit —- like a nefarious attorney.”
“And what do they hope to gain by that?” the boy asked innocently. The priest smiled dryly and again grew sober suddenly: “Their lust, Bud. Their lust.”
“Lust?” asked the boy. Twitch, twitch, twitch continued tht nervous tingle.
“Money. Those that feel that they need large amounts. They want more. Christ somehow stands in their way. Power: some see great gains in position and ownership. Christ, again, seems to stand in the way. Or, Bud, they crave human flesh. Sensuously, they worship one creation of God—fiendishly—-all out of proportion and more than their Creator’s intention.”
“And if they’re correct?” the boy began to narrate a few biblical passages as he spoke. The priest looked nonplussed; his mind began to wander as he gazed at the sheen of the boys hair. For a moment, the priest saw himself so many years ago; much, much healthier then; missing was the arthritis that completely tacked his aging body—-and the stiffness and aching of his left arm which carried a stinging sensation that would reach all the to his fingertips. It was cancer! Cancer, the priest thought solemnly, cancer! But that was a recent development and the priest thanked God again that it hadn’t always been like this. Soon the effects of drugs would wear off and he would feel somewhat guilty for being so selfish to think of his own infliction.
“Let us make one thing clear, Bud. Either Christ was everything He said He was, or, He was the biggest liar that ever existed, for He claimed to be God’s Perfect Son!” The priest looked statuesque at the boy; the gaze was different than any other he had seen from the older man. It was a gaze that seemed to say that ‘games’ had beginnings and endings, and that some moments were more than frivolous pastimes, moments to be flitted away; that life and death were stark realities; and here was a person who had a different—-sober and different—-way of looking at the situation. And just as suddenly, Bud began to feel a rage building-up within himself: partly due to an adolescent vanity, but also due to the alarming indifference, compliancy, and dank degeneracy that he had crammed into his nineteen years of life.
“And if he wasn’t?” Bud asked gristly. Someone, perhaps a fellow priest, had a stereo playing upstairs. The strings of Tchaikovay’s Piano Concerto No. 1 weaved its way downstairs. The priest raised himself up again and shut the door cautiously, all the while as if in deep thought. He began to caress his aching arm, successfully camouflaging the pain.
“We’ve been through all this before, Bud. You don’t think this big organization called the Christian Church began out of a hoax? There is something there, Bud. Do you remember what Christ said about the Holy Spirit and the guidance of His Church?”
“Yah, I read that, Father. I also remember where Saint Paul said that ‘wolves’ had entered the fold way back then. Besides, if all those churches are Christian, how can they qualify for Christ’s description as a small flock?”
“Comparatively speaking,” the priest answered rapidly. “Christianity comprises only a tiny percentage of the world population. So, you see, Bud, we still are a small flock.”
“Yeah, well, you might just have thrown it in a drain. It’s done no good.” The fury in the boy had begun to build.
“Wait a minute, let’s be fair. I know that you are going to say. But Christ said His Church was flesh and blood human beings; and they did make mistakes.”
‘“ Be ye perfect even as you Father in Heaven is perfect…’” The boy was reading a passage in the Bible.
“Yes, but not totally in their present human bodies!”
“But ‘God has not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness,’” Bud cited another passage he saw after flipping a few more pages.
‘‘Ah, this won’t get you anywhere. First things, first, Bud.” said the priest. “Your ignoring quite a bit of Church History. The lives of the Saints. Some of the better Popes. Modern miracles. It’s a matter of logic and priorities. Have you heard of the Miracles of Lourdes—-or even the Vision of the Virgin at Guarabandel, Spain?’’
The smoldering frustration within his limbs had finally exploded, but the fumes of that explosion leaked through his mouth slowly but more delicately.
“Let me tell you something, Father, when I was seventeen, I was dating a girl who had been a Catholic since her childhood. When I first met her, she was attending Mass every Sunday! Every Sunday! She mut have attended Confession too for I recall her telling me that the Confessional priest had told her not to see me anymore. He was right: I was seducing her quite often, at least once a week in the leisure of her own home. She was sixteen.”
The two people just stared at each other momentarily. The priest looked completely paralyzed. O’Brien was thinking: I don’t want to ‘tear’ into this kid, for he is much more than one single boy—-he seems to be ‘every’ boy—-any boy, any person, that needs a loving father; at least, how often have I heard that? But then, when Satan is face to face with you, O’Brien conferred to himself, you only feel contempt.
“That’s a Catholic girl,” Bud continued, “but I could say the same thing for Lutherans, Methodists….”
“I’ll be damned!” The words fumbled out of the priest’s mouth.
“That’s another thing, Father, that a religious person could curse so…’’
“It’s only an expression, no one is making a solemn oath.”
“Sodom and Gomorrah were damned,” Bud continued, ‘that’s supposed to be real and very solemn.”
“It’s an expression, you’ll hear priests and Catholics say it,” the old man explained resolutely.
“So, if fornication and drunkenness are accepted, does that mean we can do as we please?” the boy protested disingenuously.
“Those are realities, Bud, not just expressions!”
(It had been a rough day for Father O’Brien in many different respects. The Parish was in bad need if funds. It was a common problem in the Church. Annually, budgets were far from being met, and the extravagant measures that various priests invented to raise money, in the least, were ludicrous and sometimes dishonest. For Father O’Brien, it meant the debt of $4,000 to the carnival supply for the school picnic. The picnic proceeds had gone immediately to pay the salaries of three High School teachers who had been threatening sojourns. The Covent Nuns were limited to Grade School instruction and all appeared, based on rumor and experience, horrified to face High School students. Admittedly, there seemed to be a general and growing unrest, a continual anxiety as to the general quality of the Catholic Education here and at other Parishes.)
Father O’Brien rubbed his diseased arm, looking at it sympathetically. His affliction turned for the worse this day. Upon another visit to the hospital, the worse that he had suspected had come true: he had only a short time alive, to be on this Earth. Maybe a few months, he was told, maybe a year; but certainly, no more.
The priest looked at his covered arm, his Armageddon personified and covered before him. The Hill of Midiggo mentioned in the Book of Revelations, became more than just a description: It became the towering walls of the seemingly small priest’s office. The whole world seemed to suddenly converge on the youngster; a mysterious substance of love, hate, warmth, cold. The priest suddenly recalled the conversation he had with Mrs. Holleran just the week before as he and the parish housekeeper prepared an evening meal:
“I get so confused, Father, by all the unrest and confusion in the world. It worries me sometimes,” Mrs. Holleran was explaining as the priest smoked his after-meal pipe. “But the one place a person should feel completely safe, Father, is in the Church.”
“That’s one of its functions,” the priest spoke amiably as he puffed on the pipe.
“But that’s not my point: It is not! It’s not safe, not like it use to be,” the woman interjected, “it seems to me that years ago one heard the word ‘Sanctuary’ of the Church; and that meant a lot of things, but mainly that a person could look to the Church for sanctuary for himself, I suppose. That the disciplines the Church asked members and society to adhere to be a way of people protecting themselves from the world and themselves. Now, Father, it seems to be so confusing, so upside-down, anything goes — nealismistic—is that the correct word?”
‘‘Nihilistic, Mrs. Holleran, nihilistic. Yes. But if that’s true, for the Catholic Church, then it’s true for all Churches; Lutheran, Baptists….” The priest paused for a moment. “Besides, didn’t Christ say that He guaranteed the safe existence till he returned? That was a promise!”
Mrs. Holleran stopped placing dishes on the kitchen sink to soberly look at the priest . “I’m not a Bible Student, mainly I thought we Catholics weren’t allowed to read the Bible until about 1947, and it was always in Greek, literally that is. But I know a few things, Father, and no one has adequately explained how this hodge-podge of murder, wicked politics and rebellion that’s going on today, can’t be partly blamed on the Church. There’s a conspiracy of assort, Father, and some of these new teachings don’t hit the nail on the head. They just don’t.’’
“Well. The Church will always have problems, Mrs. Holleran. But people tend to see things in a limited light. If Christ is in the world, how can anything be really wrong?”
“I read Matthew the 10th Chapter the other day. Are you sure, Father, that Christ is in the world?’’ She smiled slightly.
‘‘You mean that He doesn’t exist?”
“Oh no. I mean, maybe we aren’t a part of his plan – maybe ‘ we’ aren’t on his side like we thought. Maybe, maybe, Father, we misinterpret His strategy!”
Strategy! Strategy! Strategy! The words rang in the priest’s mind causing a vibration that ended when he put out the stub or his cigarette. He began to rub his arm nervously. The pain had rapidly reached a certain level, and he knew it would only be a few more minutes before he would leave the room least he make a spectacle. Why are all the forces of evil working against me tonight? Now and then, flashes from the past, pleasant little memories of his days at the Seminary, and of his childhood, would filer through to his consciousness.
“You mean, Father, that as long as a Church-member has ‘faith,’” Bud was beginning to jeer, “that this allows him to do as he well damn pleases? Ha! You mean a family could be in some dire situation, personally ought about by themselves; poverty; crime; some degeneracy; but if they keep a Bible out on a dresser that is glanced at every now and then, that these people are virtuous hiding behind this so-called ‘faith?’’’
“No, no, Bud.’’ The priest gritted his teeth to hide growing pain in his arm. “It takes obedience to God’s Laws.” Father O’Brien was planning an exit strategy to get himself out of the room and out of the conversation and somehow to masquerade the pain.
“God’s Laws?” Bud smiled wickedly. “I attended a Catholic Mass a few times, Father; first your greeted by shapely thigh of a well-stacked female parading in front of you; then two, three or four and more girls wearing short skirts. I don’t suppose you realize how much a girl’s buttocks incites a young man’s passions?”
“We don’t approve of all these questionable fashions,” the priest said grimacing. “We have an organization in the Church that criticizes immodesty of dress. Besides, you can’t keep people from Church just because of the way they’re dressed.”
“But it’s okay for a man to ‘lust’? Let me tell you something else, Father, I know come of the kids that go to Church and I can tell you some of the stupid, lewd, dirty things they do when they go home and venture about. Not just Catholics, but Lutherans and a glut of the neighborhood. Betty Carson had invited me to her Youth Fellowship Night at the Messiah Lutheran School last year. Oh, they had basketball and ping-pong; but do you know what went on behind open doors, in the shadows, he hallways. Sex, Father, plain, raw sex.”
“Stop it, Bud!” O’Brien churned painfully in his chair. Briefly, momentarily, O’Brien visualized himself as a small boy of four-years walking in his mother’s garden trying to catch a beautiful butterfly. O’Brien would dip over the brick guard, politely trying to avoid crushing the flowers. Suddenly, he tried too hard, tripping, and falling. He began to cry. Within minutes the soothing voice and caressing arms of his mother were about him.
O’Brien’s childhood vision vanished from him and once again he became focused on the teenager seated before him. “I know some very fine and commendable people in the Church, Bud.”
“Father, I would just love to believe you. Heart and soul. But I can’t, not until I get this out of my chest: I need to make you see, Father. Can’t you see, Father?” Bud was vehement and pleading; the boy had been looking for that attracting lodestone of morality and truth! He had looked for it in the faces of his friends, of his schoolmates. He had looked for it in the stories of and tales of great writers and the not so great. There were always the various grownups that were able to produce an air of sophistication, nobility, and more so, popularity. But here, before him, was another type of individual —- a priest; the one type of person that he could have thought of as good and fine. Well, Bud would try —- if just a little; but no tricks, O’Brien, Bud announced to himself, no tricks.
“Bud, there is just so much that we could go into. Catholicism is built on an exceptionally fine tradition. Look at the Saints. Saint Sebastian, have you heard of him?” Saint Sebastian was the Captain of the soldiers who guarded the Roman Emperor but he also befriended suffering Christians. He was put to death for his compassion, he was martyred. “And there are many others: Saint Francis, Saint Lawrence…”
“What is a Saint considered today, Father? To be a Saint today, you must be a ‘demythologizer’—-denying all miracles in the name of what is called ‘natural science?’” Bud argued sardonically; his face barely hid a growing rage. “And what does that mean? First, that a lot of your ’Saints’ are nonexistent myths; that the New Testament miracles of Jesus are fairy tales; that Moses didn’t really make water come out of a rock; that modern visions such as Fatima are the works of mass hysteria. The psychologists call them hallucinations of the collective unconscious…” The boy wrestled uncomfortably in his chair. Outside, the soft pitter-patter of rain had begun with the cool trickles glazing on the windows. “…that we are the end product of a long line of animals formed from a primal primitive ooze at the dawn of time: Evolution, and some try to keep God in the picture—-theistic evolution, I believe…”
“I know that some of the younger priests like Father Herbert feel that way, Bud,” sullenly continued the priest. “Maybe quite a few of them do. But I assure you, Bud, that I don’t. I guess I am dedicated to that ole’ time religion, I don’t know. But it is true, there is a movement to liberalize what I would consider certain immutable teachings in the Church.”
************
In a moment of sad remembrance, and despite the increasing pain, Father Eugene O’Brien suddenly recalled a moment of himself as a 10-year-old as he walked the extra six blocks to Saint Jude’s Church. It was early Winter. Everything surrendered to the cold nip in the air. Eugene could have carpooled but instead walked twelve blocks out of the way, every morning now for several months so that he could attend an early mass.
“Eugene, don’t you think it’s a little special,” Sister Veronica had said to him one day, ‘‘that you walk several blocks out of your way everyday just so you could go to mass?’’
“I don’t know, Sister, I guess I never thought about it,” the young ‘priest-to-be’ said. Gene quickly grabbed a tissue from his pocket to wipe his dripping nose.
“It’s so cold these mornings, and most children haven’t been attending Mass regularly because of the weather. Do you think God’s been calling you?” The boy just looked at the Nun questioningly. “What do you want to be when you grow up? Have you thought about it, Eugene? Have you thought about becoming a priest?”
************
As the pain stretched further and further into O’Brien’s shoulder and to the foremost corners of his fingers, the priest swore to himself that he would order the boy to leave any minute. It was a short-sighted mistake not to have brought more pain tablets downstairs; and he would not feel guilty at all to ask the boy to leave. Still, the priest suddenly realized that some fateful reality depended deeply on him at this moment. It was as if he had a vision of things as never before, and slowly, things had begun to fall into place. Maybe he had begun to wake-up from the slumber so many others had particularly accepted as part of their struggle; at that, when did the priest begin to even think it was anybody else’s responsibility?
Before O’Brien sat someone that he could have sworn he had seen so many time before: in different seasons, different circumstances, but whose purpose was always the same. The moving lips, the quivering face of the boy, became the personification of the evils of other times, of other eras. Father O’Brien remembered the banner headlines of newspapers during his boyhood: the racketeers, the machinegun massacres. Why was it so convenient to pretend that the “New Creation” depended on something so untampered, so disassociated from this wickedness? What was the strategy of the Almighty, and wasn’t it a little foolish for a priest to be asking this question?
“Man, that’s crazy,” Bud stood-up quickly and began to pace the room, “‘certain Immutable’…I can only tell you what I see, Father. What do you priests do in your spare-time anyway, close yourself off from the rest of the world? Read only book out of the seminary libraries? You can read some pretty weird stuff there now, I understand.”
“You have to live up to it, Bud” the priest said, “you can’t just keep denying your part in God’s Plan…”
“I’ve been telling you what the kids today have been doing with ‘God’s Plan’——what’s the use?”
“Should we give up?” the priest grimaced, wrinkling his forehead. The priest began to perspire heavily.
“Should we keep pretending that colorful statues, pretty hymns, and wicked Church picnics are going to make any difference with the lewd ‘double life’ the people are leading?” Bud raced to the edge of the desk, leaned forward, smirking daringly into the priest’s face. Bud’s voice echoed within the room.
Was this the priest’s Waterloo? His Appomattox? His personal Armageddon? Or, was it the beginning of the end of all mankind? The answer was not available for the moment. Instead, O’Brien drew a folded handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the perspiration from about his face. His diseased arm lay limply on his lap, and it appeared hard and swollen with a pale greenish color in varying degrees.
Sudden feverish flashes out of the past appeared in O’Brien’s memory. His Theology Studies at Jackson Seminary. The beautiful choir and the crucifix held high before the long row of graduating priests. He recalled his first administrating of the Eucharist (“The Body of Christ,” “The Body of Christ…”) going from one parishioner to the next. His first sermon before a live laity (“The New Creation begins—-we are The New Creation…’’ the sermon started.) And one of his most remember able Confessionals (“Father, I have gravely sinned, I have murdered…”) between the priest and a middle-aged lady.)
“Are you so sure you have any of the answers? Is not the Church a sinking ship that every able-bodied is trying to abandon by changing its doctrines and meaning to suite their own comfortable philosophy?” Bud said angrily, tauntingly pacing the floor in front of the desk, “That is, farther, if the doctrines of the Catholic Church are even accurate to begin with! Why, Concordant translators of the original Greek say there is no such thing as ‘everlasting hellfire’ in the Greek, the original Greek speaks only of ‘age-lasting chastisement,’” Bud picked the Jerusalem Bible up and then brought it down again with a slap, “they say that King James saw only what he wanted to see in the original manuscripts. They say that the doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t a part of the original. They say that two-thirds of the Old and New Testament prophecies pertain to our own present-day age and the destruction to come upon us!”
The priest wanted to interrupt Bud’s soliloquy but his pain prevented him from interjecting and he sat immobile in torture, his arm riddled with throbbing pulsations. Bud continued:
“They say Catholicism is replete with Paganism —- from its inception to the present day! They say the Church is the ‘whore’ mentioned in the Book of Revelations and that the Church is in apostasy. You see, Father, I’ve read a little!”
(Bud’s memory took him momentarily to another cloudy day. Bud had slowly walked to the front of an old Catholic Church and observed the Church’s medieval-style architecture. In the center of the towering steeples was the stature of some famous Catholic Bishop from a century now lost behind us. The statue’s nose was chipped and a few fingers were missing from the hand which was grasping a shepherd’s staff. Because of this vandalism, a mystery to passerby’s, the parishioners enclosed the statue in a hard plastic booth. What an odd religion, Bud had thought, and Bud immediately began to recall the conflicting views he had read in the circulars of the Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been placed in the front screen door from time to time.)
As the priest tried to sit erect, he began to cough, and small strains of saliva dribbled out of his mouth, but he held the spit back successfully by coughing. He felt very nauseated, and he wanted to make a formal prayer, but what resulted was only a crushed alibi: Satan, why did you tempt me with such an amiable boy, turned dragon? Where there had been hope last month, now had turned into a curse.
(“Eugene,” the Archbishop told the priest several weeks before, “you’ve been doing a very able job at Saint Matthew’s. You know it, and I know it. But from what the doctor’s report is saying, your health is failing and the X-rays on your arm don’t look promising.”
(“We have some major projects going on here at Saint Matthew’s,” the priest retorted.
(“Yes, well, I think you’ll understand that I have to look after my people. You’ve always wanted to go to France and Lourdes. Well, go, and with my blessing! And when you come back, you will find that God will still provide you with a task in keeping with your strength.” )
“Satan is a myth!” the intense lips of the teenager continued, “The Scriptures are a myth! And now, are you so sure, Father, that you too aren’t a myth?”
“What of the realities? Nobody can deny the realities?” the priest rocked forwards as if to stand, but all he could do was to continue to feel the neurological stings of his disease. ‘‘Spiritual realities! What of Love?”
“Love? Is it love that caused my bother to die from venereal disease? Is it love that caused the massacre of thousands of infants in Red China during the ‘purge’? Was it love that allowed my mother to divorce my father, ruining the best years of my life? And what about the news headlines, or, is that a myth also? Is this all there is of the New Creation?”
Bud was now swirling around and around in the room as if to lecture to an invisible assembly gathered high above him.
“I am a priest! I am to give you answers! You must ‘Love’!”
The room began to swirl about Father O’Brien now as he tried to raise to his feet, holding a tight grip to the edge of the desk. “You must ‘Love’!”
“Oh, I’ll love all right, Father. I’m going to plow every able-bodied—-and maybe not so able-bodied—-female, one by one, in a bed, or any other place I can screw them. I’ll get mine!” Don’t fool me, old man, Bud angrily jeered to himself. “Drugs, liquor, excess—we’ll freak out, man: and in the end we’ll have ‘loved,’ yeah, sure, will have….’’
“You must ‘Love’!” the feeble priest demanded pounding his knuckles into the desktop, his face aflame with agony and his body quivering in exasperation. “You must ‘love,’ for God’s sake, ‘Love’!”
Instantaneously, the office door smashed against the office wall! The black smock of a fellow priest tore from a rack and thudded against the office window! Pencils and pens in a desk canister rose vertically several feet , suspended momentarily, and then went crashing against a wall. An accompanying office chair flipped completely over. In true poltergeist fashion, books on the office shelf propelled out into the office.
A fellow priest, Father Raymond Herbert, as well as the white apron of the housekeeper, appeared into the matrix. “Father O’Brien!” came the startled voice of Father Herbert. “Get out of here!’’ shouted the housekeeper. Bud could feel someone yanking on his jacket and forcing the boy out of the office. “Get out of here, you beast! Get!” The housekeeper was waving a broom in Bud’s face. Swap, lash, slap! Bud felt a peculiar exhaustion as if in a boxing match: everything was happening so suddenly.
The screen door slammed into his face, and Bud quickly got a glimpse of the elderly Father O’Brien being led into the hallway: no longer the stout priest who Bud had spoken to over the previous weeks, but a decrepit old man, doubled-up in in pain, whimpering as they led the priest to the stairway.
Bud exhaustingly found himself looking down at his shoes and outside of the thick rectory door. Stunned, Bud stood staring momentarily at his feet. Then he slowly walked across the lawn pillared by the forlorn evergreens. He glanced over his shoulder to see the stairway light turn on. The haunting sounds of the river businesses were being accompanied by rain drizzle.
Bud looked at one window on the second floor of the church rectory that he knew would light up any minute. It, however, seemed like an eternity, but finally a glow arose from within the room. Its yellow radiance stood out as a beacon in the darkened neighborhood.
Bud began to bite his lip as he was choking on his emotions. He knew now that the priest was no enemy: He could tell the difference between the teardrops and the raindrops on his cheeks—-he continually cried until near midnight when the light no longer shone from the priest’s window and another day was about to begin.
Mary Jane would just have to wait indefinitely. Tonight, Bud had felt and learned of a special and unique‘love.’
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Marshall Karlfeldt explores the work of the late Zecharia Sitchin from The Earth Chronicles (Sitchin’s meticulous translations of thousands of Sumerian cuneiform tablets concerning the history of the earliest human civilization). The tablets contain The Epic of Enuma Elish (The Story of Creation) and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as explained through the works of Sitchen’s deciphers, a civilization some 450,000 years ago from a far distant world called Nibiru.
(Adam, The Missing Link: The New History of Mankind’s Creation, Marshall Karlfeld, Trafford Publishers, 1663 Liberty Drive, Bloomington, In. 47403, CustomerSupport@trafford, 1-888-232-444, 812-339-6000, www.trafford.com, 2009, 66 pages, $38.95.)
ANUNNAKI
The book contains extremely handsome and elaborate photographs, professionally exquisite graphic charts, illustrations that are well worth the cost: outlining the arrival and rise of an alleged civilization called the Anunnaki; Gilgamesh, the king of Urek; Ekidu, a cloned humanoid of the Anunnaki; Lord Enki, the chief genetic engineer; and Gilgamesh’s mother as an Anunnaki Divine Princess; Gilgamesh’s father was human.
The 6th tablet tells about Princess Ishtar who lusts after Gilgamesh but is rejected by him. Furious, Ishtar travels from an orbiting mothership to Urek, stealing the “Bull of Heaven” from Leader Anu, and uses the laser-device to blast the streets of Uruk killing hundreds of people. Gilgamesh and Enkidu destroy “The Bull” as Ishtar retreats.
CYLINDER VA/243
Cylinder seal VA/243 is about 4,500 years old. The story on the cylinder tells of Anunnaki leaders: the Commander Enlil and Genetic Engineer Enki are shown experimenting with animals, says Klarfeld.
The same diagrams show the alleged solar system with 10 planets; Nibiru is supposedly the 10th planet.
CARL SAGAN
Klarfeld, as also so many other people, believes that a double entendre’ existed in the beliefs and statements of scientist Carl Sagan; Sagan always intended his words provoke additional thoughts on controversial topics, says Klarfeld. In Sagan’s 1985 book Contact, his photograph held behind him a “sentient belief” in Sumerian stories of the Anunnaki. Sagan once named a spaceship as Gilgamesh. It was Sagan that said: ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Klarfeld adds: “I suspect that Dr. Sagan was a believer who wanted to signal his beliefs, without overtly confronting the scientific community.”
THE ENUMA ELISH EPIC
Klarfeld summarizes that The Enuma Elish Epic predated the Hebrew Book of Genesis, and is the bases for the Genesis creation account. It is the originalcreation story that was transmitted orally from the Anunnaki. The Epic came to rest eventually in the form of seven cuneiform tablets.
(Why the Anunnaki didn’t use their advanced knowledge and technology to transmit history, as such, in a superior and very solidified means other than ‘oral’ and primitive ‘tablets’ is a curiously tantalizing question.)
THE SEVEN DAYS OF CREATION
Genesis spoke of seven days of creation. There were “seven” tablets relaying the Sumerian tale, said Sitchin. In Genesis, God saw on the 7th day that creation is good, and then He rested; in the Sumerian accounts, the ‘god’ created in the length of ‘six tablets,’ but on the last and 7th tablet, ‘god’ heralded and examined his creation. In the Sumerian seven tablets, creation was portrayed. In Genesis, God created and praised His creation in ‘seven’ days.
Zecharia Sitchin, Supporter of Planet Nibiru and of the Anunnaki
NIBIRU AND PLANETS AS ‘GODS’
The Enuma Elish tale, according to the late Zacharia Sitchin, named the planets of the solar system in the form of ‘gods’: Sun, Moon, nine planets, and Nibiru as the 10th planet. Starting from the Sun, they are Apsu (which is the Sun), Mummu, Lahamu, Tiamat (the Earth), Kishar, Arislar, Anu, Ea (Neptune). Apparently, Pluto is disowned and disenfranchised by Anunnaki and present-day scientists. Translating the personified conversations in the tale, the solar system was very mobile, causing all kinds of havoc and destruction until the sun stabilized their movements.
Tower of Babel built to Symbolize Seven Stellar gods
Earth’s moon is called Kingu, and the moon of Nibiru is called “Northwind.” When Nibiru came close to Earth in its 3,600-year orbit around the sun, ‘Northwind’ careened into the Earth about 225-million-years ago, fragmenting Pangea into continents, causing new orbits for Tiamat (Earth) and Nibiru. The asteroid belt was referred to as the HammeredBracelet.
LIFE ON A COLD PLANET
If Sitchin was correct, the inhabitants of Nibiru evolved on a planet that had no ‘goldilocks’ zone from a central sun precisely at the adequate distance for life as we know it. That meant that Nibiruites must have had a very peculiar evolution.
Has there ever been precedence in the UFO lore of beings evolving on a “cold planet”? Yes, there have been a few, one in particular: the stories of the late Richard Sharpe Shaver and the late Raymond Arthur Palmer.
Richard Sharpe Shaver and publisher Ray A. Palmer
THE TRADITIONS OF SHAVER AND PALMER
Through a period of about 1943 to 1977 the publisher of Amazing Stories Magazine, Ray A. Palmer (affectionately referred to as RAP), promulgated accounts of Richard Shaver’s journey into a Hidden World. Shaver, somewhat of a bohemian character who grew up with science-fiction and a dabbling of science, had also, for the most part, been an adventurer from occupation to occupation, talent to talent, territory to territory. Shaver also had an enlarged imagination as he discovered one day while working as a welder in a Detroit auto factory: voices were coming from his welding equipment; the voices were describing obscene depictions, and generally detailing outlandish events of anotherreality.
Right away, many would be quick to say that Shaver was probably schizophrenic or somehow mentally ill, but Palmer was swift to point out to Shaver’s detractors that much more was happening to Shaver. Palmer based that opinion on scientific verification of Shaver’s claims. There also existed modern theories on exactly what the brain perceives amidst the latest traditions of quantumphysics.
(One is reminded of the movie scene in A Beautiful Mind where schizophrenic John Nash, played by Richard Crowe, was observing the reflections of glass and crystal and seeing great mathematical possibilities: to quote the Halexandria Foundation: “On the one hand, there is the supposition that all of reality is an illusion. As discussed in Mass, the universe is nothing more than a figment of our prolific imaginations, a phantasm. That may be, but on a more, still-in-the-midst-of-this-life’s-drama level, we can ask about the degree to which we may be imagining — and/or creating — our own reality.” [Creating Your Perfect Reality])
In the Movie, ABeautiful Mind, John Nash (Actor Richard Crowe) Contemplates Unknown Mathematical Possibilities in Crystal Glass and a Tie.
DELICATE CONNECTIONS
David Darling, an astronomer, and graduate of Sheffield and Manchester Universities in England, spoke of ancient and current practitioners to ‘brain tapping,’ as one example, that by-passes the brain as a modulator to confronting cosmic consciousness. Darling also spoke of Clive Wearing’s Korsakoff Disease (Korsakoff had to reconstruct reality and memory every few seconds): “Cases such as these speak of more than just the fragile and constructed nature of self. They raise serious questions about the nature of time,” said Darling, “and the delicate connection between psychological time and physical reality. Could it be that time, likewise, is nothing more than a product of the way we think.” (Soul Search, Villard Books, Random House, New York, 1995, p. 117.)
SANCTIMONIOUS RIGHTEOUSNESS
Darling and other scientists pointed to altered states of consciousness where perception exceeded normal restraints. The sanctimonious judgments of such people, others would say, were probably premature if not also suspect and neurotic.
BACK INTO SPACE
Palmer received a rather sketchy manuscript at his office at Amazing StoriesMagazine telling of a vast underground civilization of demented creatures left on earth thousands of years ago by an Elder Race; this race possesses super-technology from their forefathers, who escaped earthly contamination by heading back into space.
Artist’s rendering of the proposed Mars Transfer Vehicle that would use NTR – Nuclear Thermic Rocket -Propulsion
AMAZING STORIES
The beings that were left behind on earth are a composite of ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,’ to use a movie metaphor: abandero or dero, and the not-so-bad, sometimes good, tero. Dero kept themselves “Dosed-up,” so-to-speak, through their machines which allowed them to continue long but torturous lives of radiation poisoning from the sun.
The Tero were a little more fortunate, knew the danger of the destructive “de” from the Sun, as well as the mechanics of surviving in such a surrealistic world. Some Tero actually waged war against the Dero who had the advantage of combat with their Ben-ray, Stim-ray, Telesolidography, and Telepathic-Augmentor.
And then, there are the “surface dwellers”: we humans, who have to deal with apparitions, ghosts, poltergeists, surface-type diseases and other mysterious calamities.
IT’S HELL!
Out of such a rich but chaotic history grew the legends of other legends; tales of other tales; Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, The Oahspe Bible, Hades (Hell), and hundreds of other sagas.
The Hidden Underworld
Palmer reconstructed Shaver’s story-line for Amazing Stories and presented the manuscripts in a serious vain and found himself avalanched by responses from thousands of readers with a chorus of “Real! This is really happening!” Most were certifiably sane. Carl Sagan said and (quoted by Elz Cuya) “….renamed the scientific method, ‘the baloney detection kit.’ He admitted that science at times had been wrong.”
COLD PLANETS
If Shaver was insane, he also appeared correct, exampled by one such claim that the Elder Race lived on “dark, cold worlds,” away from deadly effects of space and sun radiation (exd) which carries “de, der, dir or d” ash, as compared to good matter – integrative energy – te, ter or t.
Like Zacharia Sitchin (1976), Emanuel Velikovsky (1950), Harold Jeffreys (1924), Shaver’s stories also told of cosmic catastrophe: Planets were dislodged, orbits realigned, and crash events occurred. The Elder Race feared none of this on their ‘dark planet’ of the Nortonean Race.
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THE MEANING OF EVIL
Princess Vanic and other “Elder Gods,” as recorded in Shaver’s IRememberLemuria (1948), lived on the ‘sunless Nor’: they were “Nortons” who could thrive in ‘dark space’; they were ‘Titans,’ ‘Atlans,’ and ‘Nor-tons.’ They did avoid the “black death” from the “masses of (the) poisonous particles” from any sun or star (also called ‘dis’ or ‘de’). Such poison eventually causes ‘radioactivedisease’ known as ‘‘age.’’
Nortons were protected by a “carbon shell” canopy. Unfortunately, our sun, Sol, captured Nor and over many eons, the “shell” burned away about 30,000 years ago, allowing the destructive “de, der, dir or d” to enter the surface and cause havoc, disease, and aging. A residual “exd,” or ash, pushed back causing ‘gravity’ (A lot of Shaver’s ‘formulas’, said Palmer, have been found to be eventually true).
Not only was the capture of the “cold planet” a major epiphany-event but there were cataclysmic events and collisions of celestial bodies through the solar system.
This resulted in various legends.
LEGENDS
As mentioned, some legends appeared to be copies or remnant stories of other legends: issue tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, and Shaver’s strange “Mantong” language and alphabet where each letter denoted meaning: one word could seemingly have been a complete sentence or more.
When the “gods” left earth, they also abandoned superior machinery and diseased monsters that took “surface dwellers” into their Realm as “shanghaied slaves.”
Shaver died in November 1975 (same month I was confronted with the Kafkaesque world of the multi-billion-dollar Divorce Industry, Scam, and Racket). Ray Palmer died in August 1977, just two years after his dear friend Richard Shaver.
THE VISITOR
Donald Wesley Patten referred to such a mysterious celestial body moving tremulously through our solar system as “the Visitor” (The Biblical Flood and the IceEpoch, Pacific Meridan Publishing Company, 1966, p. 139). As a professional Geographer, M.A., Patten came to believe that a number of cosmic and planetary events disturbed the evolution of earth and its inhabitants. Rather than a “carbon shell,” Patten believed Earth had a “water canopy” (evidenced by a residual Van Allen Belt around the planet). The “canopy” was destroyed by a combination of events in the solar system. This “canopy” protected the earth from radiation and space debris (referred to in the Book of Genesis in the Scriptures as “the waters above”), allowing a rather deterioration-free world. The intimate details were in Patten’s book and related works of Immanuel Velikovsky and Jim Wentworth’s Giantsin the Earth; but all theories and legends held questionable “gaps” and begged multiple queries as yet unanswered or challenged.
STORED INFORMATION DEVICES
Klarfeld answers numerous questions; I cannot say he will answer questions to everyone’s satisfaction. He examines Sumerian and ancient archeology through four categories: S.I.T – or – Stored Information Text (cuneiform tablets), S.I.Ts – or – Stored Information Tablets (cuneiform tablets), S.I.D – or – Stored Information Device (cylinder seals), S.I.Sc – or – Stored Information Sculpture (Ishtar statue, etc.), and S.I.S.t – or – Stored Information Structure (pyramids).
HANDS ON
The pyramids certainly seemed mysterious enough to be classified as possibly an actual alien “structure”: 2.3 million bricks in the Giza pyramid with a satellite view of being only two inches off at the apex. This is a tolerance of 1/1,000,000 of an inch.
But the question seemed affordable to ask: why did the Sumerians, who consorted with the Anunnaki beings and leaders, not “demand,” or, at least, query their Creators about obtaining or inventing their super-technology? They could have insisted or campaigned as so that the Anunnaki put their laser, radio, and other advanced machinery at their disposal. Conversely, the Anunnaki could have circumnavigated cuneiform tablets and cylinder-seals and ‘had given’ the Eridue superior machines.
WIPEOUT
Why is there only history of the Anunnaki in the Mesopotamian civilization? Or, did the “Nephilim” do a very good job of keeping their existence of technology completely out of the hands of the Enkidu? Why allow ‘any’ technological transfer?
(Tantalizing questions are further posed in Part II of the curiosities of the Elder Gods and the reality of the planet Niberu.)
The Psychrophiles Are Coming!
Part II
CONNECTING THE DOTS OR NOT
Klarfeld offers the mysteries of Stonehenge as another bit of evidence of ancient super-civilizations. Klarfeld says the stones were erected on a prior 285-foot-diameter circle of 56 chalk holes. The Audrey Circle, say its defenders, is an early eclipse-computer with precise knowledge of celestial mechanics. Stonehenge’s earliest portion dates approximately 2950-2900 BCE, Middle Neolithic, and having enormous knowledge about the earth’s relation to celestial bodies, enabled as S.I.D and S.I.S.t devices.
ENGINEERING MARVELS
The Uruk, Nipper, Kishilarsa, Ur, Eridu, and Anunnaki peoples left many clues: stones, says Klarfield, that can only have been chiseled and moved by an advanced technology. One stone weighs over 1,200 tons; the St. Louis Gateway Arch weighs 900 tons. Some megalith stones are found raised 36 feet above the ground and end to end.
STONES
The pyramid of Giza (and several other pyramids) still defied complete explanation by its critics of an S.I.S.t. Pyramid fascinations included: Its engineers knew of the proportions of “pi” and the Golden Mean, Pythagorean Triangles, thousands of years before Pythagoras lived. Passageways, said defenders, could not be produced with copper or bronze tools; the builders also knew the precise spherical shape and size of the Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury and star positions.
The Pyramids as a Grand Communication Tool
ATOMIC WAR
Sitchin’s legends told of the messenger Galzu, instructed by the Creator of All, telling the Anunnaki to save humanity and advance human civilization. In “The Lost Book of Enki,” Enki and Enlil debated using “WeaponsofTerror”: atomic-tipped missiles stored on earth and used in war: issue Sodom and Gomorrah, the “evil wind” (radiation fallout) which destroyed the Sumerian alien-hybrids. The Halexandria Foundation stated: “Unfortunately, Lot’s wife looked behind her, and was turned into a pillar of salt for her trouble. [6/22/06 – One reader, Paul Cilwa, had noted that ‘In Hebrew, the word used for ‘salt’ also means ‘vapor.’ Lot’s wife wasn’t turned to salt. She was vaporized. When Abraham got wind of the event, ‘he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.’ (Genesis 19:28).]”
The Vaporization of Lot’s Wife
The Foundation continued: “The aftermath was so terrifying that Lot and his daughters fled to a cave, where the natural assumption was that the human race was doomed (i.e. no men to beget children). The daughters then took the next step of lying with their father, conceived, and ultimately bore sons.
“Notice how all of the ingredients in the Biblical story account for the destruction of the cities by a nuclear blast.”
RADIOACTIVITY
Possible clues also further substantiated the atomic war. Mark Hempsell of Bristol University, based on the cuneiform symbols in Planisphere tablets of a Sumerian astronomer, postulated a large asteroid passed over the area scorching 386,000 square miles and sending out debris and shock waves. The text spoke of: “a white stone bowl being vigorously swept along.”
The cities, also known as Bab edh Dhra and Numeira, showed signs of fire from above as well as a “burn layer” at Numeira. “To this day, unnatural levels of radioactivity are found in the water of springs around the southernmost edges of the Dead Sea. One study confirmed that this radioactivity was sufficiently high to ‘induce sterility and allied afflictions in any animals and humans that absorbed it over a number of years. Further evidence of an explosion is being revealed by the falling level of the Dead Sea, which has in recent years dropped from 1,280 feet to 1,340 feet below sea level.’”
The City of Bab Edh Dhra – was it destroyed by an Atomic Blast?
ISOTROPIC
“The isolation of the fossil water body give it characteristic chemical and radioactive properties, including low values of radioactive tritium and radium and the presence of bivalent iron, which indicates a lack of oxygen. One study found that radioactive isotopes had been introduced into the surface layers and mixed throughout the water column before its stratification.”
“A strong correlation between radium activity and salinity was also evident in groundwater along the rift valley between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, as well as in groundwater from the Judea Group rocks in the Negev. The general rule is that in freshwater conditions, most of the radium remains in the aquifer rocks, while in saline conditions the radium escapes from the rocks and has high concentrations in groundwater. Other studies have established that groundwater with no oxygen also is typically enriched in radium.”
Based on evidence found at Harappa, could this not be the case at Sodom and Gomorrah as well?
“The levels of radiation registered so high on investigators’ gauges that the Indian government cordoned off the region. Scientists then apparently unearthed an ancient city where they found evidence of an atomic blast dating back thousands of years: from 8,000 to 12,000 years.”
Some artifacts are disputed, some disproven, some appeared to be hoaxes—-such as the Crystal Skulls. All in all, the accuracy of the Sumerian account boiled down to whether an inhabited planet came around our Sun from deep space.
Klarfeld says that legends title this mysterious Planet X as Marduk, The Winged Globe, Treta, Yuga, The Celestial Disk, and Nemesis.
Could molecular life as we know it have existed on “dark planets” so far from radiant heat or warmth?
Life on planets in our solar system exists because of ideal or quasi-ideal “goldilocks” positions from a heat source in the universe that “sets the stage.” Mars probes and discoveries on Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter (which has a possible 50-mile-ocean-breeding-ground) gave wonder about the tenacity of life. Internal heat from volcanism and other factors inspired us to new and fresh viewpoints.
COLD AS HADES
Rare and bizarrely exotic life existed and evolved under the strenuously cantankerous and perhaps perilous conditions. Science seemed to indicate that life “yearns” to exist, even in hostilely macabre environments. In Oymyakon in the northern hemisphere, birds in mid-flight froze because the temperatures are so cold. The Hot Spring of Sakha (“non-freezing water”) supported life in temperatures of -60-degree centigrade to -71.2-degree centigrade. Vostok, about 1,300 km from the South Pole has a low temperature of -128.6-degrees-farhenheit (and winds up to 60 mph), yet life was found. During Polar Night, in low oxygen at an 11,312-foot altitude, life abounded.
Permafrost Life- Coldest Living Organisms – Cryptoendoliths
HYDROTHERMAL VENTS
.Scientists pointed to life in Chile’s cruelly dry Atacama Desert, the 10,000-foot-thick ice plateaus in Greenland, the 750-degree-fahrenheit hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and mitochondria in a microscopic “harsh world.”
Organisms Found in Deepest Part of Ocean
COLD SHOCK PROTEINS
Antarctica flourished with bacteria living because of ‘cold shock proteins,’ said Dr. William P. McGiven, and proteins carrying metabolic enzymes that allow ‘ice re-crystallization inhibition (RI) activity.’
McGiven found that proteolytic cleavage in a creature called hydrogenophilus or chemolithoautotrophy can change the physical structure of the ice around them through “stress chaperones or stress proteins.”
PSYCHROPHILES
Psychrophilic organisms were found at -112-degrees-F; they were “psychrotolerant”: able to survive in either cold or warm temperatures. Archaea creatures were thermophiles that, contrarily, were ‘‘heat-loving,” demonstrating the wide-range of spectacular life.
Toxic cyanobacteria secreted “anti-freeze chemicals,” exopolymers, mucus that allowed insulation; yeast and nematode worms utilized trehalose sugar; and in the Antarctic Taylor Dry Valley, organisms flourished in calcium chloride in the Ross Ice Shelf.
Carol Cleland and Microbiologist Sheely Copley of NASA’S Astrobiology Institute spoke of a “shadow biosphere” wherein all kinds of “weird life” intersect and thrive on earth, some in symbiotic relationships, but all suspended in diversified and “staggeringly” cooperative and competitively strange and harsh life.
Tardigrades Survived Cold Outer Space
We must consider: what about life on distant worlds?
THE ROSWELL GREYS
One can only have speculated that in billions of years in crossing space to, briefly (several hundred years out of thousands), pass a sun in its orbit, as to what type of life could evolve on a “dark planet.” Obviously, life would be unique, to say the least, for it would not depend on the traditional “goldilocks” mechanisms we’re usually assumed.
Pharaoh Akhenaten may have had Extraterrestrial Heritage
Gravity would be quite different, due to the individual planetary terrain. There would not be the Sun’s “constant” harmful radiation; perhaps such a planet might itself be an “organism” enveloped in some ‘cloud’ or ‘shell’ causing surface evolutionary mechanisms. Such ‘shields’ may become threatened by eventual catastrophe causing the inhabitants to search out artificial survival morphing.
One could envision large, almost “pupil-less” eyes to allow as much light in as possible; thin, elongated features due to odd gravity strains, and inner organs much reported like the artist conceptions in the alleged, famed “humanoid grey creatures” of 1947, Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash.
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Humanoid depicted at Roswell, New Mexico, 1947
GOLD FOR HEALTH
According to Sitchenites, the Anunnaki created Enkidu-type hybrids to mine gold from the bowels of the earth because Anunnaki had a medical and ecological need for it. Sitchenites speculated: gold dust or salts have anti-inflammatory uses or the ability to reduce arthritic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, and tuberculosis. Gold, also, has a use in radioisotopes and electrical conductivity.
Obviously, as a basis for our legends, the Anunnaki may have had a “broken” ozone layer or damage to their “cloud-shield.” Gold, as various solid and dust forms, may have been used as an aid or protectant (we see our ‘modern chem-trails’ being sprayed by humans today).
BREAD OF LIFE
Researchers speculated about gold’s anti-cancer properties when induced as nanoparticles to fight “cellular deformations.” It may fix strings of DNA and regulate the hormonal functions of the human endocrine system.
Gold had electrical aspects as a “superconductor.” Metallurgy and chemistry were still progressing into the monoatomic reality of elements. Theorists talked of arranging the atoms into singular atoms causing very little deletion of energy input, as a superconductor, and enhancing the body brain-power and memory, even acting as a time-machine in some ‘monatomic optimum.’
“Sitchen’s scientifically liberating work is filled with poor scholarship, poor translations, and poor science.”
The Seal VA/243 was later described, by Roger Westcott, professor emeritus of Anthropology and Linguistics at Drew University, as merely ‘stars.’ Michael S. Heiser, M.A and Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Semitic languages at the University of Wisconsin lambasted Sitchin’s translations of the texts as grossly misleading and inadequate.
Astronomers of similar style and rank, said Ferrante, have failed to spot Nibiru in its approach into our domain. Such critics pointed out that Akkadian and Sumerian texts were, supposedly, actually talking about Jupiter as the god Marduk (Nibiru). They “frowned” on the idea of a planet “frozen solid” being capable of supporting life; that out of a 3,600-year-orbit, only 153-years would be in sunlight and supposedly life-supporting: if, if, if………
AMIDST A CONFLUENCE
Despite these threads of contention, facing a magnanimous universe, final answers were hidden in the midst of infinite questions; confluence guarded the darkest secrets of the great beyond. Only in the never-ending search, will we finally know if Sitchin, Patten, Velikovsky, Shaver, Palmer, John Keel, and others in this matrix of inquiry, will be found correct: sicitor ad astra(“Thus one goes to the stars”, Aeneid, Virgil).
Statue of Akhenaten – Akhenaten ascended to the throne as the 10th Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty in 1352 B.C. He is depicted in paintings and carvings with an elongated skull, which some ancient alien theorists see as a sign of extraterrestrial heritage.
“The storied tower of Birs Nimrud counts seven of these quadrangular platforms painted in seven colors, black, white, yellow, blue, scarlet, silver and gold, and in the same order sacred to the stellar gods, Adar (Saturn), Ishtar (Venus), Merodach (Jupiter), Nebo (Mercury), Nergal (Mars), Sin (the Moon), Shamash (the Sun).”
Universal phylogenetic tree of life based on 16S rRNA sequences, emphasizing the domains of Bacteria and Archaea. Orange branches indicate hyperthermophiles that grow at ≥90 °C; purple branches, groups that contain known (cultured) psychrotolerant strains; and blue branches, groups that contain known psychrophiles. Note that the (uncultured) marine Crenarchaeota are colored purple because degree of cold adaptation is not known.
Extremophilic microbes are a wild bunch. They can be found thriving in some of the most hostile environments imaginable – swimming in near-boiling water, eating rocks, lounging in sub-zero temperatures, and hanging out where radiation levels rival nuclear reactors.
The benthic zone includes the entire sea floor. About 200,000 species of plants and animals live here. They live on the continental shelf and continental slope. Hydrothermal vents discovered in 1977 are also teeming with life. These plants and animals do not need sunlight to exist.
Tardigrades are a class of microscopic animals with eight limbs and a strange, alien-like behavior. William Miller, a leading tardigrade researcher at Baker University, says these creatures are remarkably abundant. Hundreds of species “are found across the seven continents; everywhere from the highest mountain to the lowest sea,” he says. “Many species of tardigrades live in water, but on land, you find them almost everywhere there’s moss or lichen.” In 2007, scientists discovered that these microscopic critters can survive an extended stay in the cold, irradiated vacuum of outer space. A European team of researchers sent a group of living tardigrades to orbit the earth on the outside of a FOTON-M3 rocket for ten days. When the water bears returned to Earth, the scientists discovered that 68 percent lived through the ordeal.
Palmer was hit by a truck at age seven and suffered a broken back. At nine, a failed spinal graft left him a hunchback who never grew past four feet. He immersed himself in science fiction, moving quickly from fandom, to fan zine publication, to editor at Ziff-Davis. He published a wide array of magazines over the decades.
He also turns up in many of the key UFO connected conspiracy events of the mid 20th century such as the Maury Island Incident
Ray Palmer’s series of Amazing Stories on the Hidden World
Jellyfish species Diplulmaris Antarctica floats with the current just offshore of McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica. This species is generally found in Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula near the surface in continental shelf waters. It’s colorless umbrella can be up to 18 centimeters in diameter and its diet consists mainly of copepods, euphausiid larvae, medusae, ctenophores, fish larvae and molluscan pteropods.
The Shaver Mystery is part of the history of Amazing StoriesMagazine, but it is certainly not considered one of the magazine’s shining moments. Barry Malzberg touched on it briefly in his blog post. In a nutshell, the Shaver Mystery was the “UFO phenomenon” before the actual UFO phenomenon.
(Hit List, An In-depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFKAssassination, Richard Belzer and David Wayne, Sky horse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, N.Y, 10018, info@skyhorsepublishing.com, 337 pages, 2013, $26.95.)
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Steve Erdmann, 1980s photo
Part I
AVOIR PEUR DU NOIR.
The book opened with this stentorian statement: “In the three-year period which followed the murder of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, 18 material witnesses died: six by gunfire, three in motor accidents, two by suicide, one from a cut throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks and two from natural causes. An actuary engaged by the LondonTimes calculated the probability that at least 18 witnesses would die of any cause within 3 years of the JFK assassination as 1 in 100,000 trillion.” (Quoted in the promotion of the 1973 film ExecutiveAction.)
Authors Belzer and Wayne actuallysaidtheodds weremuchhigher: ‘‘The obvious counter-attack to that will be that there weren’t really 15 ‘true’ deaths of witnesses – we have verified that there were actually more than 15…The numbers get even worse, moving forward, because witness deaths increased dramatically at the time of the 1977 Congressional Investigation”; the authors quoted Richard Charnin in “JFK – RelatedDeaths” and “JFKAssassination: AProbabilityAnalysisofUnnaturalWitnessDeaths.”
“In the 14 years following the JFK assassination, there was a minimum of 70 unnatural deaths out of approximately 1,400 witnesses. The probability is 1.40E-33 or 1 in 714,705,498,316,173,300,000,000,000,000,000.”
ASTRONOMICAL
The authors further quoted Richard Charnin: “That number is greater than all of the stars in the universe and grains of sand on earth. There are an estimated 300 billion trillion (3E23) stars in the universe. That’s three followed by 23 zeroes: 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are an estimated 700 thousand trillion (7E17) grains of sand on earth or 7 followed by 17 zeroes; 700,000,000,000,000,000.”
In an email to the authors, dated December 4, 2011, Charnin stated emphatically, “I have proved mathematically what many have long suspected: the scores of convenient JFK unnatural witness deaths cannot be coincidental.”
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1978) may have revealed even further “witnesses”: “Some of the documents are still sealed; scheduled to be released at a future date. It was basically what is known in intelligence parlance as a ‘limited hangout’; they admitted it was a conspiracy but slammed the door on delving deeper into it.”
RISING BODY COUNT
The authors portrayed further suspicious deaths. For example, six high-level FBI officials connected to the investigation of the JFK assassination died during a six-month period in 1977 shortly before testifying before the Congressional Committee. Charnin described such “bizarre series of events” as “mathematically impossible.”
The authors contended that ultimately the deaths should have included additional witnesses to the crime, reporters investigating the case, U.S Intelligence linked to the matter, mafia linked to the crime and/or to the U.S. Intelligence. In that matrix, the authors selected fifty classic deaths in which they presented their case, typical “witness deaths” that ranged from Officer J.D. Tippit to Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
(In-depth analyses invite all of the readers to go beyond this review where the readers can examine the cases up close and at their leisure: The reader will have to review Hit List and its sources to determine the situation for their personal conclusions.)
SOME TYPICAL CASES
The death of police officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963, paraded as the lynch pin to proving the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald, proved the opposite upon a close examination of the evidence by the authors.
J.D. TIPPiT
The authors speculated that both Tippit and Oswald were Intelligence operatives. “Lee Harvey Oswald was operational with U.S Military Intelligence.” (Tosh Plumlee, a former pilot for the CIA and a Military Intelligence veteran in under-cover intelligence operations.) Both Oswald and Tippit had somehow operated in support of “broader US intelligence operations.” One of those operations, unbeknownst to Oswald as a target, was that of being “sheep-dipped” as a possible “patsy” in the assassination. According to Oswald’s New Orleans girlfriend, Judyth Vary Baker (Me and Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Harvey Oswald, Judyth Vary Baker, 2011, Trine Day), Oswald began to trace the assassination plans and told Baker that he would do something to abort it. Until he could have accomplished that, Oswald faithfully followed operative orders, and he believed he was gathering covert intelligence and implementing operative plans. Tippit also was available for any “intervention.” (pp. 20-21)
One: Oswald was seen by his landlady at a bus stop at Tenth and Patton at 1:04 p.m. Tippit was shot a mile away at 1:08 p.m.: that was a ‘mile’ away, and Oswald was waiting for the northbound bus and headed in the oppositedirection.
Two: Eyewitness testimony described a man talking to Tippit that did not fit Oswald’s description. Six witnesses saw not one, but two men involved in the shooting of Officer Tippit. Mrs. Acquilla Clemens described two men; one man was “short and kind of heavy…kind of chunky.” Warren Reynolds and Domingo Benavides were further witnesses.
Three: A jacket discarded by the suspect/murderer at the Tippit crime scene was not Oswald’s jacket, as testified by Marina Oswald.
Four: The Revolver taken from Oswald at the Texas Theater was not the gun used to kill Tippit. Oswald’s revolver had a defective firing pin that completely prevented it from firing a bullet. The bullets in Oswald’s revolver were never conclusively linked to the four bullets in officer Tippit.
Five: James Files, the bodyguard and driver to Chuck Nicoletti, identified Gary Marlow, a highly professional cold-blooded killer, whose mission that day was to murder Oswald to preventhis further involvement: Something obviously went wrong.
Six: A fake wallet deliberately left at the crime scene with the name “Alex Hidell” – Alex Hidell was a “floating alias” that was used by many operatives as an operational covername.
Seven: James Files believed Oswald was on his way to meet his Controller at the Texas Theater (Files said that may have been David Phillips).
LEE BOWERS
View from Lee Bower’s Train Station
Bowers was a Tower Man with the Union Terminal Company and stationed in his 14-foot tower directly behind the Grassy Knoll on the day of the assassination. Bowers observed strange automobiles and persons near the wooden stockade fence.
On August 9, 1966, driven off the road by a black car, Lee Bowers was killed when his car crashed into a concrete abatement in Midlothian, Texas. He told the ambulance people that unknown culprits at a coffee shop had drugged him.
Bowers told his friend, Walter Rischel, that he had specific information that was more cogent, and was afraid to “go public.” He had disappeared for two days. “…one of his fingers was missing on one of his hands, which his brother, Monty, could not trace to any hospital, clinic or doctor’s office.” The mysterious auto accident shortly followed that incident. Bower’s widow confessed: “They told him not to talk.”
Charles Good, a former member of the Texas Highway Patrol, investigated the incident: He concluded that culprits forced Bowers off the road.
MARY PINCHOT MEYER
A killer shot Mary Meyer to death on October 12, 1964.
Mary Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a CIA operative and principal handler of OperationMockingbird, an infiltration of major U.S media. The Meyers were also close friends with James Angleton and his wife. Angleton was head of Counter Intelligence at the CIA.
Meyer filed for divorce in 1958. Following that, she felt under surveillance and unknown culprits invaded her apartment. She blamed James Angleton.
Mary also had a rather serious love affair with President Kennedy; they shared many intimate details (as well as marijuana and LSD; page 145). Legend speculated that Mary learned quite a bit from James Angleton. She was upset about the “absence of authentic information” in the Warren Commission. She felt that it was a “whitewash.”
“Mary left her home on the morning of October 12, 1964, to go out for her morning run. Someone shot her twice at direct range with a .38; the first shot was toward the back of the head and the second shot was to her heart. She died instantly.”
A Raymond Crump was set-up to take the ‘fall.’ It was a smear job. The trial was a sham. The CIA and President Lyndon Johnson (as well as President Kennedy’s “power circles”) were topics that were “never allowed to be spoken of in the courtroom.” Hidden was the fact that “Mary appeared to be killed by a professional hit man.”
Ben and Toni Bradlee confronted James Angleton at Mary’s apartment, all looking for Mary’s diary – a diary that disappeared. A bloodstained sweater also disappeared.
Peter Janney summarized in Mary’s Mosaic (Skyhorse, 2012) that William L. Mitchell (an alias) was a member of the “Army special forces – the order was given to ‘terminate’ her.”
GARY UNDERHILL
Gary Underhill was a veteran CIA agent. His alleged suicide was on May 8, 1964, but Underhill was right-handed “and it would be extremely awkward – not to mention totally pointless — for a right-handed person to commit suicide by shooting themselves behind the left ear.” (p. 112)
Underhill left no doubt that someone was after him: “This country is too dangerous for me. I’ve got to get on a boat. Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It’s too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They’ve killed the President! I’ve been listening and hearing things. I couldn’t believe they’d get away with it, but they did…a real violence group. I know who they are…they know I know.” (Paul Golais, April 8, 2001, The Citizen’s Voice.)
Underhill confided to a friend. The friend said, “Underhill said that he knew the people involved (and that they knew he knew) and he fled Washington for his life…a small clique in the CIA was responsible…” (Gary Richard Schoener, “A Legacy of Fear,” May 2000, Fair Play Magazine).
Depiction of Executive Action-type Ghost Sniper Team
The authors speculated that the highly secret CIA and military Intelligence Unit named Executive Action had turned against Kennedy and killed him. (pp. 113-114)
OSWALD, RUBY, BANISTER
U.S Senator Richard Schweiker, Co-Chairman of a U.S Senate Subcommittee to investigate the JFK assassination in 1975, said in 2007 that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 as part of the False Defector Program. Author Joan Mellon confirmed the Top-Secret CIA/ONI False Defector Program. Oswald infiltrated the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Alpha 66 anti-Castro Cubans, simultaneously joining pro and anti-Castro groups. Oswald strongly denied having shot Kennedy and said he was set-up as a “patsy.” His recorded words subjected to new voice analysis technologies that showed that he was actually telling the truth. Mobster Jack Ruby, who seriously hooked up with just about everybody suspected of playing a major role in the assassination, shot Oswald. (p. 29)
Jack Ruby, the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald, maintained throughout his incarceration that a product of bio-weapons experimentation at his time would murder Ruby. A well-known MK-Ultra expert was to perform the murder. Ruby died of cancer on January 3, 1967.
Jack Ruby’s Gravesite
Ruby knew the entire key “players” who visited him at his jail: MK-Ultra was the Top Secret CIA program to control an individual’s will, even in the assassination drama, including Chicago mobsters, anti-Castro CIA agents, and the three top mafia bosses. Ruby and Oswald shared connections to the CIA and the mafia as well as also experiences in the Cuban crisis in the USA.
Part II
“Ruby was clearly in fear for his life,” said the authors, “both before and after the shooting of Oswald….he was not safe in a Dallas jail. He pleaded with Chief Justice Earl Warren to take him to Washington, D.C…” where he could testify.
Ruby was suspicious of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and he said he had knowledge of conspirators in high places. He told psychiatrist Werner Teuter that the assassination was “an act of overthrowing the government…I was framed to kill Oswald.” Ruby told the Warren Commission: “…I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country…”
Jack Ruby Speaks at His Trial
Guy Banister ran a detective agency at 531 Lafayette, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Banister had been involved with far-ranging and under-bellied patina of anti-Communist and Castroist party-liners. Banister’s mistress and employee, Delphine Roberts, said that both Oswald and David Ferrie frequently associated with Banister. Banister’s private investigator, Jack Martin, said that Oswald and Ferrie were part in the Kennedy scenario. Martin told District Attorney Jim Garrison: “The problem is that we’re going to bring the goddamned Federal government down on our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get killed – and so could you.”
Culprits ransacked Banister’s office and some files disappeared after his death.
MANY DEATHS
“It has become pretty obvious at this point that Oswald was set-up to ‘take the fall’ for the assassination of President Kennedy,” said the authors, “even though he was set up as a component of the conspiracy to all the players in the drama…the perfect patsy. From that perspective, it all makes perfect sense, and that scenario also explains the National Security cover-up that followed the assassination of JFK.”
Lee Harvey Oswald continually stated his innocence, including “I am just a Patsy”
Gary Revel, assassination researcher, under the banner of Truth IsAll (“Closes the Book on theWarren Commission Apologists”, April 18, 2013) totted praise of the book: “This book is a unique and welcome addition to the massive trove of JFK Assassination literature. There is no conjecture here, just the facts concerning fifty mysterious witness deaths presented in an easy-to-read format. Warren Commission apologists are reduced to irrelevancy; the proof of conspiracy is overwhelming and beyond any doubt. The authors cited my probability analysis in the background information presented in the beginning of the book. The calculations are fully explained in my blog post: http://garyrevel.wordpress.com/.”
REVEL REVELATIONS
Revel summarized the mathematical statistics: 1400 JFK-related witnesses, the probability of at least:
– 15 unnatural deaths within one year of the assassination: 1 in 167 trillion. – 33 unnatural deaths within three years: 1 in 137 trillion, trillion. – 70 unnatural deaths from 1964-77: 1 in 714 million, trillion, trillion. – 40 homicides from 1964-77: 1 in a billion, trillion, trillion, and trillion.
Five hundred and fifty two Warren Commission witnesses: – Exactly 10 homicides in three years: 1 in 31,000 trillion. – Exactly 14 homicides from 1964-1977: 1 in 4,000 trillion.
Posted by Gary Revel on September 19, 2013, at 11:08 a.m.
Revel went on and said about the 34 – 39 deaths mentioned in the book by Belzer and Wayne that six top FBI officials linked to the Kennedy assassination had died in a six-month period prior to their scheduled testimony. Gary Revel was also a Special Investigator commissioned for the official investigation into the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination: Revel said he had continually tried to unravel the bizarre happenings of that year (1977). Revel’s brother, his cousin’s husband, William Sullivan, and five other FBI agents or former FBI officials, who could have been valuable to his investigation, died mysteriously or killed that year. Revel said that the deaths of these FBI Special Agents could have been more significant than realized because all six of these FBI SAS identified to Revel as being ‘important witnesses for the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ (Hit List, p. 206).
(Gary Revel was the creator of Dream Killers, the series co-written with French Screenwriter, Jordan Tate, of Don’t Stop Dancing: the true-life story of Michael Jackson. He was also co-writer [with Frank Burmaster] of the screenplay Polka Red Dot Dress, the thriller/mystery that investigated the assassination of Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy.)
“What bonded the victims together?” asked Samantha Reba (6/20/2013). Reba answered: “The Truth! All of the victims knew the truth and they knew that the people who did it knew. The victims had been able to put two and two together. But before they could go to court and testify, they were silenced forever. All documents from the victims that may have contained the truth or anything evidence have disappeared from this Earth. The JFK assassination is a conspiracy whose truth will never come to light. Those who knew: knew too much.”
Mark Alfred said on July 15, 2013, “If that ‘lone nut’ killed the President and was bumped off by an over-reacting Kennedy family sympathizer (Jack Ruby), why would this cause the switching out of the rifle originally found for the one history now accepts as ‘the murder weapon’? Why is there evidence of somebody pretending to be Oswald running around Dallas at gun ranges and taking test-drives (Oswald could not drive)? Why was evidence messed up and switched?
“If it was only a crazy guy with a rifle how could that ‘truth’ have caused the government’s own photographs of the autopsy to NOT MATCH UP with the government’s own x-rays supposedly taken at the same time, of the same head with the same wounds?
“This is a valuable book, and it’s put together well. It synthesizes years and generations of findings to make the point that things should not have happened the way they did, and certainly not with help from some bad men. The fact that some of these bad men tried to justify their murders by justifying them with spy babble or face-saving rhetoric only makes their personal foulness and depravity stink even more. People who had not been given the right — they decided to change the government of our country. How dare them! Amos 5:24: ‘But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’”
“I’ve found you don’t have to make anything up,” Belzer said. “Reality is so complex and fascinating and horrible and beautiful. I’ve been studying this case my whole adult life, and I’m still finding stuff about the case because, over time, things come out…People say you can’t keep a secret. Well, you can. But after 50 years, the secret starts coming out.”
As for why they killed Kennedy, Belzer said it was primarily due to Kennedy’s interest in pulling America out of Vietnam, which caused threats to the Elite with those looking to profit off America’s venture abroad. Belzer explained why the cover-up occurred, Belzer said: “I believe a lot of people, for noble, patriotic reasons, covered up the real story because we didn’t want the world to think we’re a ‘banana republic.’”
“We’re at the height of the Cold War, and the president’s head is exploded in broad daylight, so they had to get this patsy who was clearly set up. That’s common knowledge that Oswald was a fake defector and was a patsy…Ninety percent of the American people believe there was a conspiracy involved in the assassination of the president. The other 10 percent work for the media or the government, probably. The public knows. Most people believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone at the very least.”
Belzer’s fascination with the story was because “the Kennedy assassination is one of the ghostliest parts of our history.”
Award-winning photojournalist, Gene Barnes shared his life and times as a camera operator for NBCNews during the radical 1950’s and 1960’s. His stories were in-depth and thought-provoking actions and comments that we still talk about to this day. He was in Dallas on that day that killers shot Kennedy. Early news came over the wires. Multiple questions gripped the minds of the reporters: Who was Oswald? Had Oswald connections to the mob? Eventually, answers seemed to come slowly and laboriously: Oswald seemed to have been a CIA operative who had fronted as a communist, worked out of New Orleans, establishing his connections; but why would he want to kill Kennedy? Others speculated that Castro was involved. Speculation had built up.
Newsman Gene Barnes
Barnes followed leads as swiftly as they developed. Barnes was thankful that many of the leads were unsuccessful, for if successful, he said, they would have drawn them deeper into the web of danger. One incident was when Robin MacNeil and Barnes went to Jack Ruby’s apartment to photograph and see what we could uncover. He said he recalled Ruby’s sister as being at the apartment and she yelled obscenities at them through the open apartment door. She ordered them to leave. Barnes said he later felt protected that they did not stay: people associated with Ruby or his apartment seemingly died in assorted fashions. Network Chief Bill McAndrew warned them that their investigative reporting endangered them and ultimately would lead to their demise.
At the time, NBC was the only news agency that seemed to mention David Ferrie’s name. Ferrie’s background revealed that he was a flagrant homosexual (with heavy dark painted eyebrows), and was an airplane pilot. A daisy chain of information concerning Ferrie soon developed; some from the news desk, some from fellow cinematographers, and some from neighborhood gossip, but it all eventually untangled in scarce, spooky, mystic fashion. There was talk about the possibility that Ferrie was allegedly involved with a plan to fly two or three men out of Dallas right after the assassination from a secret site. Later, Barnes heard that Ferrie turned out to be the pilot who flew Mafia boss Carlos Marcello back to New Orleans from Puerto Rico. Robert Kennedy had Federal agents dump Marcello in Puerto Rico because Marcello kept insisting he was Puerto Rican, not Sicilian.
One of the Clay Shaw’s Parties
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison launched a conspiracy trial involving Clay Shaw whose secret lifestyle involved macabre people sporting leather, whips and chains, and bizarre homosexual paraphernalia. Ferrie was to be his first witness: Investigators found David Ferrie dead in his apartment the day before. The headlines concerning Ferrie’s death did not surprise Barnes; Barnes speculated that it seemed that anyone connected to the Kennedy assassination in almost any fashion contributed to the growing dead-body-count.
The Harvey Oswald Funeral
INTO THE ABYSS OF DARK THINKING
Robert Reckmeyer, Consultation Services, as a reformed criminal of marijuana sales, had long ago paid his debt to society and reemerged as a solid citizen now dedicated to combating High Priority Criminals. His hard-earned-life-experiences have allowed him to gain penetrating insight into the criminal mind. He applied that insight into the JFK assassination:
“Many can speculate on who was responsible for the planning and execution of our young President on that fateful day in Dallas Texas. In my view, since that November day, one can see quite clearly, that those with a Nazi philosophy have been ascending and the liberal democrats have been in decline. The Nazi goal to take over the world has not been diminished, and, in truth, the New World Order is upon us.
“We know what we know and we know what we don’t know…we know that John F. Kennedy was gunned down, by more than one shooter and the lone gunman theory is the least plausible theory of all, in fact, it is impossible. We know there were more shots fired than one person could possibly get off, in the few seconds available, and the kill shot came from the front. We know, without a doubt, that it involved a well-planned, well-financed conspiracy and they had help from the highest levels of our government, i.e. Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, and many others who have gone on and played a pivotal role in our current American history.”
“The Zapruder film haunts our consciousness,” said Joseph McBride, a film historian (and the author of Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy andOfficer J.D. Tippit). “The maze-like element of the assassination can become a wilderness of mirrors. When you begin to understand something, it opens up a whole different way of looking at it. It can become dizzying.”
Phil Butler is editor-in-chief of Everything PR and senior partner at Pamil Visions PR: his summation sentiments the thoughts of millions:
“I’ve always known JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. Even as a kid I never believed a lone gunman, the weaselly looking Oswald, capable of downing the most powerful man on Earth. Nobody really believed such, let me tell you. Seeing the chaos that ensued, remembering the tall figure of a leader coming to us through our radios and TVs, telling us to ‘ask not,’ living in the promised land of shiny Cadillac’s and miraculous devices, with a whole planet blossoming into a potential Utopia, there was just no way. We smelled something really, really wrong, nobody needed CBS’s Walter Cronkite to reveal the ‘the’ killers, his early reporting of the events, they were noise in the background of a word of mouth utterance by a whole society. It’s one still faintly heard. ‘Who killed the Kennedys? After all it was me and you,’ as the Rolling Stones song goes.”
The authors quoted the late District Attorney Jim Garrison that our society had evolved into a proto-fascist state, emerged from prosperity: “It’s based on power and inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state.” Garrison spoke of Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial-Complex…which now dominates every aspect of our life…what happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.”
District Attorney and Investigator Jim Garrison
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Steve Erdmann – Independent Investigative Journalist
Left to right: unidentified man, Robert Brannon (in overcoat), Fritz Paul, Clay Shaw, Jeff Biddison and party host Wynn Pearce (kneeling). Print courtesy of David Blackburst.
Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and films are notable for their memorable villains and henchmen. Each Bond villain has numerous henchmen to do their bidding.
There is typically one particularly privileged henchman who poses a formidable physical threat to Bond and must be defeated in order to reach the employer. These range from simply adept and tough fighters, such as Donald ‘Red’ Grant, to henchmen whose physical characteristics are seemingly superhuman, such as Jaws.
(Copyright 2016, Steve Erdmann-All Rights Reserved)
<Edited by Robert D. Morningstar>
(Permission to quote for review and educational purposes granted)
“Thomas Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval ‘…a totally ‘free’ market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive government of old, could transform America ‘until the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automations of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in Omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.’” (p. 63, The Crash of 2016)
(The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America – and What We Can Do to Stop It, Thom Hartmann, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017, 2013, 291 pages, $28.00.)
Thom Hartmann, no stranger to writing on the “abusive states of man,” takes us on a trek of those “stages” where “in the real world, humans must confront both nature and other humans” (p. 63)
THE ROYALISTS
Hartmann takes us on a trek through the formative years of the American Revolution and how the colonists conducted what could be termed “corporate vandalism” (which included the famous Boston Tea Party) against Britain and against political factions such as John Adams’ Federalists and Congressional Acts and the Alien and Sedition Act to lock up political dissenters that were called “the rabble”—Hartmann, comparing a faction known as the Royalists, speaks of a 1786 letter in which Thomas Jefferson gave “his most explicit warning about this threat from plutocracy within, and advocating unwavering vigilance against it.”
Hartmann gives multiple examples of how The Royalists (in the form of the East India Company, the North and South expansion in the American Civil War, the crash of 1893, others) exploded and grew. Hartmann quotes President Grover Cleveland in 1888:
“Corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the peoples’ masters.”
In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt passed the Tillman Act which banned corporate contributions in political elections, which was quickly countered by two dark eras of economic Royalist Rule by “Corporate behemoths” which resulted in a Gilded Age after the Great Crash of 1857 and the Civil War.
Hartmann explains the stages in which economic “bubbles” arise and how they interact with war, market crashes, the Economic Royalists, and the Great Forgettings. Teddy Roosevelt acknowledged what had been referred to as the “Robber Baron Economic Royalists.” President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936:
“Here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”
CO-CONSPIRATORS
Gerald MacGuire and General Smedley Butler spoke of a “Business Plot” to oust FDR to maintain Royalist Rule. In testimony before the house Un-American Activities Committee, co-conspirators were named, ranging from the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Morgons, the DuPonts, and the Remingtons.
“In the 1960s, a solid middle class had emerged,” says Hartmann, “the Royalists were horrified. The conservative intellectual base, such as Russell Kirk and W. F. Buckley, genuinely feared that if a middle class grew large enough___and politically and economically powerful enough___it would inevitably lead to social chaos.” (p. 29)
Lewis F. Powell, Jr., as a Supreme Court Justice, wrote a Declaration of War “memo” on behalf of the Economic Royalists against both democracy and, what they judged to be an overgrown middle-class. The “confidential” Powell Memo, urging the courts to be used as a “social, economic, and political instrument,” aimed at the Chamber of Commerce and other Royalist-controlled-so-called ‘free market’ systems, and the instilling of “pro-plutocratic perspectives.”
The Economic-Royalists continued in spades in the Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the George Bush’s, and assorted Presidencies and associations. FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights (which included eight “Rights.” One of which said there should be “the Right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment”), but it never came to fruition. The Wagner Act of 1935 guaranteed Americans the right to form a union and bargain collectively with their corporate employers. These new protections allowed the middle-class to thrive. Unfortunately, at times, “even attempting to unionize in the workplace,” says Hartmann, “would get you fired, at best. At worst, it could get you killed.” (p. 70)
CUNNING POLITICAL STRATEGY
In 1981, the national debt was a bit under $1 trillion; Ronald Reagan tripled the debt to about $3 trillion: more than any single president before him and one of his stated, biggest regrets. President George H. W. Bush added a trillion dollars more. George W. Bush added more than $6 Trillion to date, and nearly $16 trillion has been added to the actual debt. Most politicians promised to lower deficits and reduce the national debt.
“This could be written off as run-of-the-mill political-flip-flopping and pandering,” says Hartmann, “but it’s not. There’s a cunning political strategy behind it.”
Jude Wanniski
Hartmann describes economist Jude Wanniski as a “Republican strategist/faux” in which Wanniski patterned the “Two-Santa Claus Theory”: Democrats concentrating on ‘gifts’ such as Social Security and Medicare, and the Republicans centered on “massive tax cuts.”
It was a double-edged sword, in which Republicans would Santa Claus their way into tax cuts and eventually force the Democrats to reverse roles, “play Scrooge, and eventually shoot Santa Claus.”
In the matrix of the ideologues, it was Democrat President Bill Clinton, besieged by Royalist Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs) and Alan Greenspan (Federal Reserve), who signed in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (upholding the fraudulent myth of the ‘Welfare Queens’), and disregarded Ross Perot and allowed America to grow from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion in 2012.
“A Democrat just elected to the Presidency made no difference to the shadow government of lobbyist, corporate-funded think tanks and political fund-raiser,” says Hartmann. “Clinton chose political expediency. He chose to carry the Royalist agenda forward.”
Clinton signed the free-trade death warrant for the middle class. The Democrats turned into Eisenhower Republicans, as the Republicans turned into something completely different: they stepped up their assault, they culled a no Leisure Society; instead, just a “cataclysmic crash.”
PSYCHOPATHS
Hartmann quotes economist John Kenneth Galbraith about the on-going psychopathic “madness”: “The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole…is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent…in a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live…to speak out against madness may be ruin those who have succumbed to it.”
Thom Hartman
Hartmann quotes journalist Chris Hodges who described such modern-day oligopolies as Worldwide Royalists: “It’s similar to the age of the Robber Barons but in fact worse because there is no loyalty to the nation-state. The corporations are actually hollowing the country out from the inside…we’re creating a kind of neofeudalism” (p. 98)
Hartmann speaks about the tentacles of this worldwide, growing control and the looting of America by Global Psychopaths:
“American transnational corporations have historically cavorted with nations whose interests were similarly opposed to the United States – morally, at least.”
In Jeff Bercovici’s article for Forbes (“Why (some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs,” June 14, 2011), Jon Ronson is quoted on millionaire psychopaths: “The way that capitalism is structured really is a physical manifestation of the brain anomaly known as psychopathy.”
TO BE CONTINUED in Part II
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(In the following continuation, Thom Hartmann continues to delve into the fatalistic madness of our politicians and economists who mask themselves behind hidden agendas. We also explore what Hartmann’s critics say and how he defends his beliefs).
(Copyright 2016, Robert Hastings – All Rights Reserved)
<Edited by Robert D. Morningstar>
*******
When CNN live-streamed my UFOs and Nukes press conference in Washington D.C., on September 27, 2010, I assumed—far too optimistically as it turned out—that the mainstream media would react with sustained interest and finally begin to ask hard questions of less-than-candid government officials.
After all, the seven U.S. Air Force veterans who participated in the event had just divulged still-classified information about UFOs shutting down large numbers of nuclear missiles, hovering over nuclear bomb storage bunkers, monitoring still-unfinished ICBM silos, and other incredible incidents during the Cold War era.
The press conference was the culmination of years of investigation into such events that I had begun in earnest in 1973, when I started interviewing U.S. military veterans regarding their involvement in cases where UFOs had demonstrated an obvious interest in nuclear weapons sites.
The UFO Digest Spotlight on …
The National Press Club Conference On “UFO’s & Nukes”
By 1981, it was clear to me that the situation was very real and ongoing and, I concluded, needed as much exposure as possible. Consequently, I went out on the college lecture circuit to attempt to inform the American public, as best as possible, about the dramatic developments that had been kept from them for decades.
UFOs & Nukes Researcher Robert Hastings Refutes Debunker – 2011
In addition to my speaking engagements, my 600-page book, UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, published in 2008, has gradually captured an ever-larger, worldwide following over time.
Nevertheless, it seemed to me, the largest possible audience would be generated by producing and distributing a documentary film that presented the hidden history of nuclear weapons-related UFO activity in a fast-paced, visually-engaging manner, hence the creation of my documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, which is now available at Vimeo On Demand.
While the film has only just been made accessible, initial reviews are very favorable. Gary Heseltine, editor of the UFO Truth e-zine, called it “The best UFO documentary I’ve ever seen.” Frederik Uldall, of the Exopolitics Denmark group, wrote that the film is “Absolutely brilliant! Definitely one of the top five UFO documentaries of all time.”
To watch Robert Hastings Interviewed on “Larry King Live!”
The UFO Spotlight On... 
