The Believer, page 27
“Now post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t appear in someone unless they’ve been removed from their reality. You don’t get that easily from a nightmare or a drug experience. It doesn’t happen. And it’s a generational thing. If it’s happened to them, it’s probably happened to their parents or could happen to their children.”
The Leonarder house is under a flight path and the muffled drone of passing planes wove a sonic thread through all our hours of wide-ranging conversation.
“One of the problems we face now is the homogenization of news and data,” Jaimie said when I asked about the dismissive response to UFO accounts. With so much information accessible, we have collectively lost the ability to identify or care about things that are of deep concern.
“We have defense department footage that’s been declassified in the public domain showing objects that are not drones moving at a high velocity, stopping at a point which would kill anyone in them and destroy any civilian or military aircraft that were doing that. And it’s just seen as like, The Truman Show: ‘Oh, that’s just great, what’s happening on the other channel?’
“And it’s incredibly consistent globally which puts it out of the league of being debunked as some mental aberration or some falsehood and yet it’s not being seen for its value. It could, in a way, deconstruct our notion of cultures and walls and we all start to think in terms of human beings. It’s an unfortunate thing.”
“Can’t have a unified planet, jeez,” Aspasia said.
“It’s all perception management,” Jaimie said a little while later. “And we’ve ended up in a world with so much distraction that we’re not seeing the wood for the trees. Ufology is just one example . . .We’re just embedded in so much distraction. Alvin Toffler wrote a book in 1970 called . . .”
“Future Shock,” Aspasia said.
“It was about the fact that we will end up very soon in an information-rich environment without the ability to actually navigate and use that information in a constructive way,” Jaimie said. “And so, to me, the only satisfaction I really get is in trying to push myself beyond my desires and get a bit altruistic or to create an environment where I’m creating and not consuming . . .
“Philosophically,” he continued, “it’s really important that we think outside of the square. We talk about not bullying people and being accepting of different cultures and religious ideologies. So why is there so much ridicule attached to the topic of ufology?”
Jaimie finds the abductees’ perspective on life quite astounding. “They’re people that actually have fought, against the system, to see the world in a different way.” This is why he takes issue with the word “belief.” The semantics are not unimportant, he said. “It’s supposition to assume that governments have made us reach this point, but there’s a lot of evidence. The Central Intelligence Agency decided that, when it was print and television and film media, on the end of the word “conspiracy” should be placed the word “theory” to devalue anyone doing investigative research. So that instantly weaponized that word and took the value of what we’d call investigative journalism into the realm of the tinfoil hat. It’s a semantic ballet. Language engineers thought, creates its own neural pathways and it blocks our ability to expand on our imaginations . . .
“You know, television is not called programming for no reason,” he continued. “All of us are aware that looking at a computer screen or a television screen you slowly descend into a very submissive, trance-like state. You forget what’s around you. And that’s the ability of advertising to be so effective in those mediums.”
“Children’s mental health,” Aspasia said. “Kids are killing themselves, kids are anxious all the time.”
Jaimie commented that the idea of private media was something that was sold to us. “Now it’s the myth of the individual,” he said.
“They want us at home, on our own, consuming,” Aspasia said. “How do you entirely destroy somebody?”
“Isolation,” Jaimie replied.
The taxi driver who dropped me here today used a Sydway map to find the place, pulling the soft brick of it out from under his seat, saying he preferred it to the GPS. I think of him on my way home, as the Uber driver punches the airport address into his phone, follows where it takes him. And of Jaimie and Aspasia, what it means to be in your early sixties and late fifties. How, over the span of their lives to date, LP records disappeared and then cassettes. Reel-to-reel, Beta, VHS. Carbon copies, typewriter ribbons. The black tongue of film inside a camera, every frame precious. Phone booths. Boom boxes. Unfilled time. The direct gaze of the analogue world, faces replaced by pixels.
On their recommendation, I will get a copy of Future Shock. Read how Toffler defined the term as the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. Too much change in too short a time. To survive, he wrote, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves. “For all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family or profession—are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.”
A few months later, Neil, a mortician in his fifties who owns a funeral parlor on the outskirts of Sydney, sits drinking tea at the Leonarders’ kitchen table and discussing the Valentich disappearance while Jaimie warms up pumpkin soup for Aspasia. Neil explains that he was once a pilot, though he later lost his license for failing to meet a physical flexibility requirement. That’s how he heard the original Valentich radio transmission.
“It was classified, wasn’t it?” Jaimie asks.
“My flying teacher had a copy of it,” Neil replies. “We all sat there—about twenty pilots and apprentice pilots—listening to this tape that he had.”
Neil asked his teacher what he reckoned happened to the plane. “And he goes, ‘A hundred percent that was some type of object.’ Because apparently he’s seen them since he’s been flying.”
“Once something goes over a certain speed,” Jaimie explains, “they’re not going to be seen by radar. Nine times out of ten it’s the transponder; it’s not actually the craft that they’re bouncing the radar off.”
“That’s right,” Neil says.
“That’s what happened with MH370,” Jaimie continues, setting a plate of cookies between Neil and me.
“He described it as a long object,” Neil says.
“Cigar-shaped,” Aspasia says, tapping at her computer nearby.
“There is a history in Bass Strait dating back hundreds of years,” Jaimie says, “you can go back to the early days of the settlement and find that people in boats there were bombarded by these green, thermoluminescent lights. There were a couple of eyewitnesses to a green object over the Cessna. Even though they remained anonymous, there are credible researchers that have done the research on those eyewitnesses. There also was a photographer that took a series of photos. There’s a very interesting photo out there of an object that virtually at the same time appears to have come out of the water.”
Neil nods, he’s familiar with it.
Neil has a wife, three children, a good sense of humor, a messy car, a preference for dobermans and long gray hair that used to be longer and black. He explains that his father was Cherokee, from Arizona. And like his father before him, Neil explains, he has been repeatedly abducted by aliens over his lifetime.
“It all started when I was around four years old,” he says, explaining that he always insisted on having his curtains open at night, loved gazing up at the sky and the object resembling a squashed racing car that he would see floating there.
At around eight years old he woke to discover his first scoop mark: something that resembled a mosquito bite on his arm. He rolls up his sleeves to show me how it compares with a mark on his other arm where he had a melanoma removed.
“They’re quite unique and very consistent,” Jaimie pitches in, rolling up a pant leg to show his own scoop mark, which he discovered one night in the 1990s after finding himself falling back onto his bed with pain in that leg. “It looks like something’s gone underneath the epidermis and removed subcutaneous tissue without scarring. I think they just took one out of me and said forget it,” he says drolly.
Neil only remembers bits about what he experienced during his abductions. But rather than feeling traumatized, he felt connected to the aliens as he had not to other humans. “I used to say to Mom when I was young, ‘I don’t belong here.’ I’ve always had that separation.”
“But you’re great social company,” Jaimie says, warmly. “You’re a great speaker, really clear recall. You’re very pragmatic in the way you go about approaching this subject.”
“I never used to be like this,” Neil replies. “I was diagnosed when I was about seventeen as a sociopath, a person who can’t get on with society. And I was like that. I never used to like anyone sitting near me at school, I was very antisocial. I couldn’t function in this society because it was so alien to me, so backward, so not understanding that people could think differently.”
“If I can interject here,” Jaimie says, lighting a cigarette, “in all my dealings with you, you don’t tick one of those boxes. Because you have empathy. You have a conscience. I don’t think many sociopaths would be able to work in the funeral business, to begin with.”
“I’ve never looked at the world the way people looked at it,” Neil says. “I look at people and say, ‘You poor bastards, here you are, going to school, which is crap, going to high school, going to uni, and then you just want to achieve in life. Achieve what?!’ When I finished my engineering I never did it ever again. To me it was just crap. Surely life is not just going to work and dying.”
Everything changed for Neil when he moved to a farm near Tamworth. At 2:00 AM on a Monday morning near Christmas, he was standing at his fridge enjoying a drink of juice ahead of a drive to the city when he had a strong urge to look out the window. Seeing two strange yellow lights in the sky, he walked outside to get a better view. Because there was no noise, he figured it was a twin-engine airplane that had run out of fuel, looking for a place to land. So he turned on the spotlights, started to guide it in.
What landed was an enormous craft with aliens inside. On seeing this, he asked them silently in his mind, “Are you one of our creators?” and immediately felt the most intense love he’d ever experienced. “It was like we are part of them. We are part of the trees, the planet, the stars, we are all interconnected. That’s how I got the empathy,” he explains. “That encounter just completely changed my view of the world.”
Neil told them that they were welcome to return, no one would harm them. The craft took off, slowly following the valley into the distance. Six weeks later he saw through his lounge-room window four or five crafts landing on his property. This continued for years. He was never tempted to take photos, or get a closer look, and he never felt scared.
Neil says that he met his wife in a flying saucer, though they didn’t realize it until ten years later. He believes that this is where genetic material was extracted from them to make human-alien hybrids, and that he has two children in space, whom he has visited. “It’s really sad because they cling on to you and won’t let you go because they need that love,” he says.
“They take eggs from women and sperm from men,” Aspasia explains. “They bring them back to get them to interact with the children.”
“Well, we’re dealing with numerous hypotheses here,” says Jaimie, who is more cautious on the subject.
“I know,” Aspasia says, “but this is a consistent thing from so many different people.”
Neil says that he was told in his encounters—not verbally but in mental pictures that appear like slides—that there are benevolent alien species and ones that are evil, the latter using humans as a food source. He notes parenthetically that many people go missing around the planet, never to be found. Jaimie recommends a number of books on this topic. The aliens told Neil that they are creating a new race of humans. “Because our race is obsolete,” he explains, “we’ll be replaced by this new race which is more intelligent, more kind to the planet.”
47
The Kingdom of Heaven
Prayer Meeting
The only indication that the building is inhabited is a few windows below street level, dirty rectangles glowing gold, throwing light at the dark. The church holds evening prayer meetings twice a month. Like family worship, the meetings open with a hymn which tonight is “Living by Faith”:
Living by faith in Jesus above,
Trusting, confiding in His great love;
From all harm safe in His sheltering arm,
I’m living by faith and feel no alarm.
Three of the church’s four families sit in chairs arranged in a circle around the room used for children’s Sunday school. The Kreiders and the Witmars are here with their children, as well as the newest and youngest family, the Weavers, who married here a couple of months ago. Rachel is too ill to attend, has stayed home with her husband, Eldon, and their children. There is Oscar, a recent member who also cooks for church events, and the two elderly Latina women. Also a man named Junior who has a mustache like a brush and a trucker cap with an American flag on it.
“How many people around the world haven’t heard the gospel,” Anthony begins, handing around printouts from an organization called The Joshua Project, which is “a research initiative seeking to highlight the ethnic people groups of the world with the fewest followers of Christ.” They do this because “accurate, updated ethnic people group information is critical for completing the Great Commission,” given that the Book of Revelation describes how people from every nation, tribe and language will stand before the Throne.
Later, on their website, I will decline to download their Unreached of the Day app but will be entranced by their “Ethnic Peoples Tree,” which provides the following human taxonomy: Arab World, Deaf, East Asian Peoples, Eurasian People, Horn of Africa People, Jews, Latin-Caribbean Americans, Malay Peoples, North American Peoples, Pacific Islanders, Persian-Median, South Asian Peoples, Southeast Asian Peoples, Sub-Saharan Peoples, Tibetan-Himalayan Peoples, Turkic Peoples and Unclassified. Each group is further broken down according to language or culture with a one-pager addressing how best they might be converted. For example, missionaries to Iran should “pray that Iranian Arabs would see the Jesus film and hear Christian radio.”
Anthony notes that in places like Papua New Guinea and Iraq there are people who have never seen a Christian Bible. “I don’t have time to read all the statistics they have—how they get all these numbers, I don’t know, but anyway—some sixty-five to seventy percent of the world live in religiously restricted countries,” he says, peering into the page. “There are four hundred and fifty-eight villages in India with no Christian presence . . .”
Anthony’s lesson reminds me about the story of the Tower of Babel. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. After the flood, the united human race built a tower tall enough to reach Heaven. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. God then confuses their language so that they cannot understand one another’s speech and scatters them across the earth. What is this? Cautionary tale against hubris? Lament? Excuse? Nothing more that can be done . . .
Later I will wonder if I should have brought it up with them—something I admire about the religion into which I was born, the concept of tikkun olam. The Hebrew phrase means “repairing the world.” I understand it in social justice terms. But the sixteenth-century Kabbalists had a more esoteric take, situating it in their creation story, which begins with God contracting the infinite light of the divine to make room for the material world. He proceeded to decant the divine consciousness into one beam of light which contained within itself everything that would ever exist and which then exploded everything we know into being, scattering it everywhere in the process. The undifferentiated fragments of this paroxysm are called sparks—they contain the true meaning of each thing, its voice in the great symphony. Each spark, however, is trapped in the shell that hardened around it during that originating chaos. Our job, Tzvi Freeman writes, is to see past the shell to the spark within, and to relocate that spark to its rightful place. Once a critical mass of sparks have been reconnected, the entire world is liberated. It becomes a different world, the one it was meant to be.
This is not so different from what Anthony believes he is doing. But I wonder what it might actually look like if our individual lives were arranged around a truer conception of repair and reunion. Where that would actually start.
Chief among Freud’s major discoveries, Vivian Gornick writes, was that:
from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions—anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate—yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.
However they hurt us, our tidy and sclerotic stories—about ourselves, others, the world—are something certain. A railing we can cling to like a bird on a perch as we climb the staircase of our days convinced we will slip off at any moment and fall forever.
