The Believer, page 23
Mostly, though, there was activity, the hum of her own self calling, the refusal to give over the responsibility for her life. This is not to say that under that solidity there wasn’t always something else, too. A crack through which a chill wind blew: grief, frustration closer to strangulation as she thought of the child she could no longer protect and to whom she was becoming less real each day. The lie of the clock face laid bare as each hour came once, and vanished forever.
Lynn is in the dining hall when it all disappears, again. The steam from the line of things fried, frozen and canned. The curl of hands around cups. The squeak of rubber on linoleum. The hunch of thin and thick green-clad shoulders over plates. Evaporates, gone. Her eyes pulled towards one point only.
“Please tell me you work here,” AJ says.
Lynn can only shake her head. After more than twenty years, here they are, suddenly, in the same room. It is a page from the Book of Marvels. They will be together for the rest of AJ’s life.
39
Theories of Flight
Don & Colin
There is a silver-and-red flying saucer in the Grange.
“This is a really interesting thing, what the council have done with this area,” George says to Don as they traipse down a path towards the saucer that sits in an empty playground surrounded by the thin trunks of extraordinarily tall pine trees. “Kids love it.”
“In Roswell, we have the only flying-saucer McDonald’s in the world,” Don says, wryly.
George points out spots of interest while Don nods gravely. The direction of the Westall school, where the boundaries of the park used to be—”That’s a new toilet block,” he says. “The old one was a literal brick shithouse. They spent a lot of money on the park.”
Besides housing sleeker commodes, the toilet block is notable for the murals on its external walls. The left side features a full-color map of the planets, the Hubble Space Telescope explained in an inset at the top corner. The right side of the toilet block is devoted to the moon landing.
“It’s a very strange place in spite of all the modernization,” George says, looking at his surrounds. “It’s still got a strange feel about it.”
“So, do the trees look affected at all?” Don wonders, tilting his head all the way back to look at the tops of the pines.
“They’re bending in all directions, it’s weird,” George says. “It came behind these trees and down to the ground, somewhere in here, very close to where they put that,” he explains, pointing at the flying-saucer play structure on the tan bark.
“I was going to ask if the saucer location is significant,” Don says.
“It was more here, near the toilets,” George says. “Where the grass doesn’t grow even now.” It starts raining, so they return to sit in the car to wait for Colin Kelly.
“Some students said they saw one, some students said they saw three,” George says. “Some said there was one big one and two little ones. Others said no, the two little ones were further away. So it depends how people were interpreting what they were seeing . . .
“A week later,” he continues, “one of the students who lived on the other side of the school was talking to their parents about it and the dad didn’t believe them. They said, ‘Come, I’ll show you where it was!’ And they pointed to these trees, and they were back. A week later. They saw them again flying around this area.”
“That isn’t generally known,” Don says, somberly.
“Right! These are the stories you hear when you talk to the witnesses,” George says.
“What else do we have but witnesses?” Don asks with emotion. “Especially when you have independent corroboration. I had a doctor in Sydney, he was arguing with me—ten people can’t be describing the same thing. And that’s the point. When there’s something profound, something unusual, and they are describing the same thing. That’s what makes it all the more believable.”
“They may be describing it differently . . .” George says.
“Based on their backgrounds, their perspective, their angle—we have to take it all into account,” Don agrees, “but the point is—something is still there.”
George met his first Westall witness about twenty years back while working at a pawn shop. A woman who would come in regularly and buy their entire stock of Star Trek DVDs. He eventually learned that she had attended Westall Primary and was there on the day of the sighting, looking at the UFO through her classroom window. “She’s got an older brother who was in the high school,” George explains, “who won’t talk about it even to this day. They were told not to talk about it.”
“And there were American suits that came in after,” Don says.
“Yeah, there was a lot of military,” George nods.
“If it would’ve simply just been a balloon—” Don starts.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here,” George finishes. The rain has stopped so they pop the doors and head out for another look around.
Between 1960 and 1969, a joint research program between the US Atomic Energy Commission and the Australian Department of Supply (DOS) called Project HIBAL used high-altitude balloons to monitor atmospheric radiation levels. The balloons were silver. Each was tied to a gondola carrying around 200 kilograms of air-sampling equipment, and occasionally additional payloads of scientific instruments. And every balloon was followed by a light aircraft. Researcher Keith Basterfield writes that when these aircraft “cut down” the balloons via radio signal, the payloads would drop to the ground below a twelve-meter parachute and be retrieved by DOS personnel standing by in chase vehicles.
The balloons were colossal and occasionally unreliable. Reporting in 1962 on one that burst after an unsuccessful flight over Mildura, the Age newspaper noted that the payload of instruments “with the balloon’s one acre and three-quarters of polythene sheeting tangled about it—crashed on Para station, about forty-five miles north of Mildura.” The balloon itself was forty-five meters wide and eighty-six metres from top to bottom: imagine a twenty-six-story building suspended in the sky.
Basterfield has hypothesized that the Westall incident was the result of a HIBAL balloon being carried by the northerly winds on that day into the area: specifically flight 292, which had launched from Mildura on April 5, 1966, the day before the sighting. He notes that no documentary evidence has been located proving that this balloon was near Westall on the morning of April 6. Also that, in response to his inquiry, the National Archives reported that the HIBAL files held by DOS had been destroyed by the Department of Defense in 1996. “On the other hand,” he writes, “no documentary evidence has been found to show that HIBAL flight 292 wasn’t near Westall on 6 April 1966.”
Colin pulls up in his truck and strides over to George, who is waving at him from the playground. Nearly seventy, Colin seems younger; there is more brown than gray in his mustache. Don, folded in half inside the flying saucer, shuffles over to the edge and gladly shakes Colin’s hand before dismounting. The three men stroll towards the perimeter of pines.
“Channel Nine were definitely here,” Colin says, explaining to Don what he remembers after the sighting, how they interviewed two of his friends.
“I saw the Channel Nine news that night,” George interjects, explaining he was eight years old at the time. “I’d just read a book about flying saucers at school. And there’s these two schoolgirls saying, ‘It was definitely a flying saucer, we saw it . . .’ And then you hear this guy off-camera go, ‘Okay, this interview is terminated.’ And the camera went blank. They put it to air that way.” He remembers how annoyed he felt, wanting to see more. No one can find that footage now, he explains.
“That’s how it always works,” Don says, shaking his head. “Yup yup yup yup.” He explains an analogous situation with Roswell. “With the landing, and the depressions in the ground, and the sagebrush—it was still smoldering by the time the police got there.”
“Right,” nods Colin with interest, his hands in his pockets as he walks lockstep with Don around the grass.
“And then Hynek, my own scientific director who I worked with later, was the one who went to seize everything as ordered by the air force,” Don continues. “They took all the photographs, all the interviews, they made sure they had everything. And that’s what they do, that’s what they do.”
“Well, this is what’s happened here. I’ve always been interested—” Colin starts quietly.
“And you don’t do that for a balloon,” Don says.
“You don’t do that for nothing,” George adds.
“You don’t do that for anything except this!” Don says. “Who interviewed you?” he asks Colin.
“Nobody interviewed me,” Colin replies.
Carrying his camera and tripod, George points towards an area between the toilets and the trees where there is scrubby grass littered with pine needles. “No grass has grown for like fifty years,” he explains. “That’s the best I’ve seen it in ten years.”
While George and Don walk off swapping stories about their investigations, Colin tells me about the day he saw a perfect circle stamped in the long grass that grew where we stand, five streets away from his childhood home. “We found it on the day that the sightings happened,” he says, his rectangular Transitions dark in the afternoon glare. “It was perfectly round. Perfectly round.” There is awe in his voice.
He mentions how some have tried to argue that the grass isn’t long enough to imprint like that. “Mate, we’re talking something that happened fifty years ago. Believe me, it was trampled. The ridicule we’ve gotten is unbelievable,” he continues with a deep sigh. “They try to say, ‘Youse’ve all colluded.’”
Colin doesn’t talk loudly or for the sake of it or with hyperbole. He listens very closely. He presents as someone constitutionally unconcerned with fame. “They were here,” he says, pointing to where he saw the men in uniform swarming the land he thought of as his backyard, cordoning it off and guarding it. “Don’t tell me it was nothing . . .
“We’ve got on with our lives. Lived reasonably normal lives. We just want an explanation.”
“The first thing I always say,” Don’s voice floods the air as he and George walk back over, “is I don’t want anyone complaining about being tired. We sleep when we get home, now we work. Let’s get a shot,” he says, heading over to position himself with an arm around Colin in front of the mural on the back of the public toilets—an artist’s rendering of what a saucer may have looked like descending into the trees around us.
Walking over to a marker that’s been erected to the Westall incident, George explains that his cousin’s husband saw the UFO while working in the market gardens across from the school. When George asked him if it could have been a balloon, he replied that a balloon would have been torn up by the descent through the branches. He also said that it looked like a solid object that changed density as it descended, because the branches did not respond. “It flew past him and then when it went into the trees, it looked like it was being projected rather than being solid and physically there,” George says.
“Look, even as thirteen-year-olds, we knew what a balloon looked like,” Colin says. “It was not a balloon.” He mentions the light planes trailing the object towards the Grange, how they circled while it was grounded. “Then it just took off.” He makes the whoosh noise.
“Classic,” Don says, nodding. “The students that came towards the park, was it still here when they came over the hill here?”
Yes, says Colin, adding that he believes what those students reported—not just about what they saw, but about what happened to Tanya. “You’re aware of the Tanya story?” he asks Don. “She turned around and started running back and she was hysterical. She got back and she collapsed.”
“She disappeared?” Don asks. He’s referring to statements that after the girl was placed in the back of an ambulance, not only did she not return to the school, but when visitors went to her home soon after, they found that a new family had moved in, claiming never to have heard of the previous residents.
“I believe they know where she is,” Colin says, “but that she doesn’t want to talk.” He says that he happened to be walking near the canteen that afternoon. Saw the ambulance parked nearby, its back doors open, a girl inside.
“I’m looking, and I’m going, oh, it’s Tanya,” he says. “Somebody asked me at a later stage if I was sure it was a girl. I was a thirteen-year-old male. I was interested in sports and girls. That was Tanya. It was Tanya. And she disappeared.” He also knew the two students who tried to visit her at home only to find she had vanished. “They were just dumbfounded.”
We stand for a time looking at the marker erected by the local government. Arrows on it point towards the school, towards Moorabbin Airport. There are quotes from witnesses:
Like a thin beam of light . . . half the length of a light aircraft . . . It was silvery-gray and seemed to “thicken” at times . . . similar to when a disc is turned a little to show the underside. Andrew Greenwood, Westall High School Science Teacher
No seams, no joins . . . looked like it had come out of a mould . . . one smooth piece of metal . . . Victor Zakruzny, Westall High School Student.
We drive over to the school where the light fittings in the new building are subtly saucer-shaped to pay homage to the big event. Walk down the hall, next to the windows that the younger students pressed their faces up against that day in 1966. Colin looks glad to be back: comfortable. Even though this is where he learned, over fifty years ago, that solid ground isn’t to be trusted.
40
The Kingdom of Heaven
Anthony
Anthony Witmar emerges shyly from his office, which is also the bedroom he shares with Loisann, slightly rumpled: a little bear from a storybook cave. With his Bluetooth in his ear and a leather phone holster on his hip, he sits down next to his wife on the sofa where they lean towards each other like a pair of old boots.
Anthony did not finish tenth grade because in Myerstown you can find a good job with somebody from church without a degree. If you wish to venture farther afield, however, you need an education or a transportable skill or capital for establishing a business in order to support yourself and your family away from the community. Work is also vital for Mennonite missionaries because it brings them into contact with the people they hope to convert. But this has shown itself to be a double-edged sword. Anthony explains that in making the radical decision to move to New York City, they had to deal with some reluctance back home about establishing city missions because of prior examples of over-assimilation. Despite a lack of family approval, they held the line.
“It’s very easy to just be comfortable in your life path,” he explains. “I read the Bible and see we’re supposed to go out and make a difference in people’s lives. How do we do that by getting rich off of each other in this prosperous, comfortable community?” He understands, though, where the concerns came from. “There’s a younger generation that has a vision to get out more, and yet we have the background on what happened before. How do you bridge cultures without losing everything?”
He refers to other Mennonite churches in the city. “A lot of them would be socially progressive,” he says. “Maybe that’s too harsh a judgment. In other words, more open to the homosexual agenda than other churches. They don’t really have a foundation, so they don’t stand for anything.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard “homosexual agenda” used in conversation. Instead of sounding like raw meat being twisted from the bone, his tone is particularly frightening in its banality.
Like city life, he continues, higher education is considered to carry an unacceptable risk of assimilation. Moving here, however, meant leaving the Mennonite-owned office supply store he had worked at for ten years back home and he found himself unqualified to apply for most jobs in the city. He ended up getting his high school equivalency degree and, while it helped him secure the job he currently holds, this is not the job he would like to hold.
“We’re here to interact with the local people and I have a hard time doing that here sitting at my desk, back in my bedroom,” he says with palpable frustration.
While I never get a clear answer to the question, it appears that in the five years the church has had an official missionary presence in the South Bronx, they have successfully attracted about four consistent local members.
What he’d love, he says, brightening, is to have a shop. “That would be a great way to provide a service to the community where you would have interaction. For a while before we moved, we talked about starting a coffee shop and bookstore.”
I ask what it would take to do this.
“Number one, funds,” Loisann replies. Plus, she adds, “This isn’t really a coffee-shop neighborhood.”
“Lattes and stuff like that,” Anthony explains.
I comment that in certain parts of the city, there would be an eagerness for—and the ability to afford—the authentic Pennsylvania Dutch food that Loisann cooks. That many would admire their lived values of simplicity and non-conformance. But that the people who would come for their shoofly pie would be unlikely to stay for their religious views.
“A café at least gives you an interaction,” Anthony replies. “Especially with today’s culture. An interesting thing was—a person—that came to church. We called this person a ‘her,’ but . . .”
