The Call of the Weird Read online

  As my departure date approached, I sent out a few exploratory emails, more in an attempt to reassure myself that my collaborators were out there and available. For the most part, these emails went unacknowledged or came back address unknown. I glued some more labels to my Weirdness Map to calm my nerves. Then, in a bid to add some seriousness to my approach, I tried looking for common themes among my subjects. I drew up a Venn diagram showing the “Four Main Sources of Weirdness” as interlocking circles, which I identified as “Sexual,” “Racial,” “Religious,” and “Narcissistic.” Though there were some areas of overlap, I was more struck by the variety of the motivations. The militiamen of Idaho would regard gangsta rap as an end-state symptom of our godless society. People in porn generally find the idea of speaking to aliens laughable and bizarre. What, in fact, was “weirdness”? The more I thought about it, the less clear it became.

  One morning in April, I packed my last few things into the attic as a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan, such as it was, was to buy a secondhand car in Las Vegas, and work outward from there. It was later that day, somewhere up above the American Midwest, that two thoughts formed in my mind. The first had to do with the nature of weirdness. I realized that my long years of interest in the beliefs of my subjects, be they porn performers, neo- Nazis, or UFO believers, may be evidence that I—in however small a way—share those beliefs. I wondered whether taken together the weird mores of the people I’d been covering all these years might represent a negative version of myself—a shadow map of my own most secret nature.

  The second thought was about the Weirdness Map I’d made in London. In my rush to get the last things into storage, I’d left it tacked up on the wall of my study; and I imagined it there, the sole item left in that empty house, a rendering in miniature of the landscape I was flying into . . .

  1

  THOR TEMPLAR

  I was driving south from Vegas through hot flat desert in my new secondhand car, a 1993 Dodge Dynasty with 90,000 miles on the clock.

  It was a week since I’d touched down, and I’d decided to ease into my Reunion Tour via the gentle and eccentric world of UFO believers. For some reason, which may have to do with the barren other-worldly landscape of the area, or the unconventional pioneer spirit of the people who move there, the vast spaces of the American West are a popular stomping ground for both extraterrestrials and the Earthlings who meet them.

  In a way, it is a fitting continuation of the frontier tradition. Like the Old West, the UFO community is semi-anarchic, a wild frontier settled by adventurers, dreamers, and con artists. Unlike other subcultures I’ve reported on, UFO belief is less a lifestyle than a vague rubric under which adherents either find spiritual sustenance or delude themselves (depending on your point of view) and where the clerical class of lecturers, authors, and experts either minister to the needs of their fellow believers or rip them off.

  I myself have very little affinity with the idea that there are ongoing alien incursions into our airspace which the government, for reasons of greed and self-interest, is covering up. For me, the attraction of the UFO world is my amazement that people can spin detailed fantasies about alien civilizations out of flimsily accredited anecdotes and videos of blurry lights. I wonder what it tells us about human psychology that people are ready to believe something so unlikely and what their motivations might be.

  I met many odd people during a two-week trip through the UFO subculture in 1997, but perhaps none so intriguing as Thor Templar, Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate. His company was called the Alien Resistance Movement, and it billed itself as a kind of security agency for people either threatened by or under actual physical attack from hostile aliens. If you happened to have been abducted, Thor could remove your “implants,” the little devices put into humans by their captors while aboard alien ships. Thor had an entire catalog of gadgets, many of them aimed at warding off space creatures: a kind of radio that crackled when aliens were near; a “psychotronic helmet,” which looked a lot like an ordinary bicycle helmet with various knobs and pipes glued on to it, to focus your “brain energies”; an “alien mutilator gun.”

  He had come to the door wearing a quasi-military uniform— gray shirt with shoulder patches and a maroon beret. He had a neat little moustache and short hair, and stood “at ease” in the fashion of the army. Youngish, maybe forty, he was attended by a woman with short blonde hair, wearing a matching uniform, who I suspected was his girlfriend. He introduced her as Liz.

  “One thing that we want to make perfectly clear is that these are not angels, these are not superhuman beings,” Thor said. His manner was officious, a little like a fire marshal explaining a drill. “They have some advanced technology. They can be handled, they can be killed if necessary. So let’s make that perfectly clear.” He claimed to have killed ten aliens himself—zapped them with the mutilator gun to make them materialize, then dismembered them with an edged weapon. “There’s a thick gooey substance inside,” he said, sharing the detail in an offhand way. Maybe sensing my concern, he added, “These are creatures that make grown men cringe and soil themselves and they are no creatures to be respected.”

  I tried to establish some common ground, some shared understanding of how the world is constituted, but it wasn’t easy. “You have an unusual degree of conviction that this is fact,” I said. “Do your friends and family regard you as a little bit cracked?” No, he said, they’re supportive.

  You might think it would be irritating, hearing these bald claims with no backup. But I couldn’t help admiring it, almost as a piece of theater. Later when I tried to think what it was about Thor I found so fascinating, I realized it was quite simple: Despite the alien beliefs, the claims to have killed “grays,” the phantom army of earth patriots, he seemed basically quite normal.

  After that first visit, we stayed in touch by phone for a few years. His interest in killing aliens waned. “X-Files has been canceled,” he lamented. “Dark Skies ratings are down. Earth’s basically given up the fight.” He talked about the pressing issue of predatory vampires. Then one day his contact details no longer worked. He simply disappeared.

  What do you do after you’ve been Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate? What is the next position on that particular CV?

  Before leaving London, while searching Thor on the Internet, I’d made an unwelcome discovery. Among the top results were jocular comments I’d made in interviews promoting my shows, saying how bizarre I’d found him and his claims to have killed ten aliens. It was like catching a glimpse of myself in a closed-circuit TV monitor at an unflattering angle and for a moment wondering who the fellow with the big nose was—an unwelcome flash of objectivity.

  There were a few references to Thor that predated our encounter. His name turned up on a couple of websites dedicated to devil worship: churchofsatan.com and puresatan.com. In the early nineties he’d published several “grimoires” of the dark arts and a fourteenvolume collection of black-magic spells. I thought seriously about ordering one of them, but they cost hundreds of dollars. The last mention of Thor’s name was in 1998, the same year my UFO documentary aired. I wondered whether the fallout from the show and my own ill-considered remarks had forced him into hiding.

  Chaotic and spread out as it is, the UFO world is not an easy community to dip into. But once a year, hundreds of its more colorful constituents gather at a low-budget hotel-casino called the Flamingo, in Laughlin, Nevada, for the International UFO Congress. It was here that my road now tended, through miles of empty, arid wilderness, past abandoned roadside stores, houses on the backs of trucks, and signs in the middle of nowhere saying “950 acres for sale.”

  Laughlin lies in the desert, on a stretch of the Colorado River. Other than the hotels—big chintzy buildings that line the bank like knickknacks on a mantelpiece—there is almost nothing there: some RV parks populated by the flock of itinerant elderly known as “s
nowbirds,” a few discount stores, a “Jewelry Liquidation Center” where desperate gamblers can pawn the family heirlooms.

  I arrived early in the evening, a paid-up attendee of the fourteenth gathering of the Congress. The cacophony of the casino floor hit me like a wave. The out-of-phase jingles of the slot machines and the chink-chink of the payouts mixed together, reminding me a little of a CD I once bought by the avant-garde composer Steve Reich. Waitresses in miniskirts patrolled the aisles with trays of drinks on their arms. Elderly gamblers fed coins into the machines from little plastic buckets.

  The Congress is a weeklong event, comprising four daily lectures, a UFO film festival, and a couple of parties. I’d only paid for the last half, figuring that that would be more than enough time to spend captive to a worldview I found at best charmingly wrongheaded and, occasionally, a little irritating. I had arrived on the evening of the Meet the Speakers party. In a darkened banqueting room on the second floor, three hundred or so people in leisurewear chatted at large round tables. Oddly, the clientele was not markedly different than that on the casino floor—mainly over fifty, though a few of the men sported white ponytails and UFOthemed jewelry. At one table, hearing that I was from England, the talk turned to David Icke, the Coventry City goalkeeper who reinvented himself as a New Age prophet.

  “Doesn’t he believe there are twelve-foot lizard people running the planet?” I asked.

  “He believes the reptilian people have an agenda here, that’s correct,” said Darrell, a success coach from Las Vegas.

  “But lizards?”

  “Reptilians,” Darrell said.

  “We’re a prison planet,” said Jeanne, a grizzled-looking teacher from Colorado. “Have you read his books? You should! He exposes the Queen of England. She’s a reptile.”

  On another table, a “personal evolution trainer,” Michael Telstarr, was chatting to an elderly “space channel” named Bob Short. I knew Bob fairly well, having featured him in my UFO documentary. That time, he’d gone into a trance and tuned in to the prognostications of a spaceman named Korton. For the Meet the Speakers party, Bob was wearing a shiny gold lamé top and gold cummerbund. Around his neck was a bolo tie with a flyingsaucer fastener. His white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and, though it was dark, he had sunglasses on.

  Michael was also a paranormalist. He had a manic, slightly distracted air, a curly mop of hair, an overlarge suit jacket, and a spherical crystal round his neck. He was forty or so, a little overweight, though later I learned he’d worked as an escape artist for some years, using the name “Scott Free.” “I teach people how to access cognitrons and open up neural pathways,” he said quickly, looking around the room.

  I was taking notes and having trouble keeping up. “Positrons?” I asked.

  “Cognitrons. I help people access right-brain faculties. Develop psychic powers.”

  “Can you tell anything about me?”

  “I see good monies coming to you as a result of your direct efforts this year,” he said. “You were restricted, hemmed-in before. You are analytical and logical, but you are also creative. You’re taking a chance here, but you’re going to do much better being on your own.”

  I thought this was pretty good going, though Bob knew I’d left the BBC to write a book and I wondered if he’d told Michael. A little later, becoming excited at the idea that I was from the media, Michael offered to move a piece of paper with his mind. He asked me to fetch a pin. At the bar they had no pins but they gave me a tiny red plastic sword for cocktails. Michael stuck one end in a piece of cheese, balanced a small folded strip of paper on the other end, then put a glass over them. He twitched a few times, then made strange rotating gestures in the air with his hands. For ten or twenty seconds, nothing happened. Suddenly the paper began twisting first one way, then the other, as Michael conducted it. I put it down to some convection force inside the glass, or possibly static, but it was a good trick.

  Michael brushed off my compliments. “It should be spinning way more than that,” he said. “The resistance of that stupid plastic thing is crazy.”

  Keen to speak to someone less flighty who could give me a status report on the UFO field from a sober, though believing, perspective, I continued my circuit of the banqueting room, spotting Jim Marrs, author of Alien Agenda and a respected expert. Jim was short and tubby and wearing a panama hat, and working his way through a little collection of free quarter-size wine bottles.

  I told him I was checking back into UFO-logy and wondered how it had changed in the last ten years.

  “Here’s the problem,” he said, in a broad Texas accent, and handed me a half-dollar coin. “Now give it back. Now ask me for it.” I did so. Then, putting on a voice of faux disingenuousness, he said: “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have a half dollar. I never did have a half dollar. How can you prove I ever had one? You can’t prove it unless you empty my pockets. Maybe you can hold me upside down and shake me. We can’t empty the government’s pockets. And that’s the problem.”

  “How much does the government know?”

  “They know a lot. In fact, they are the reason for the embargo on UFO information. They don’t care if you know there’re aliens out there. What they don’t want you to know is that there’s alternative energies that might upset their monopolies. I mean, why are we fighting in Iraq? It’s not to spread freedom and democracy. It’s to gain control over their oil resources.”

  A soft-voiced bearded man who’d been eavesdropping said, “And because they’ve got stargates there.”

  Jim, picking his words carefully, said, “And to gain ancient knowledge of futuristic technology.”

  The following three days I did my best to get into the swing of the Congress, attending lectures by alien abductees and supposed government whistle-blowers, interviewing experts and asking around about Thor and the Alien Resistance Movement. The field, so far as it exists as a coherent belief system (which isn’t very far), seemed not to have moved on a great deal in eight years. The basic script was still that the authorities are in contact with alien civilizations; that they allow abductions of humans in return for help with technology; that the aliens are abducting humans because they are having trouble breeding and need our DNA. The one change was a subplot to do with alternative fuel sources that the aliens have shared with the government and that the government is hiding, chiming as it does with the supposed real reasons behind the Iraq invasion.

  I had thought “abudctions,” that staple of the nineties UFO craze, might be considered passé, but the conference held daily gatherings for so-called “experiencers” to interact, from which the press was banned. At the first lecture I went to, a young man from Kent, twenty-one-year-old Jason Andrews, claimed to go up in spaceships three or four times a week. He went on to say he was himself a “walk-in,” an alien in a human body. Presumably to forestall panic, he added, “I do assure you, I’m one of the good guys.” With gold rings on every one of his fingers, snaggled teeth, gelled hair, and a surly manner, Jason made an unlikely messenger of intergalactic goodwill. At the end of his talk, he offered advice to a few members of the audience. “Try without trying,” he said to one woman looking to expand her massage business. Then he appeared to run dry of New Age homilies. Another woman asked if he was a gray. “No, I’m a pink,” he said.

  I went up to him after his talk but found him grudging and mistrustful. He mentioned that since he was thirteen, he’d existed in a number of different physical locations at the same time.

  “Are you in a number of places right now?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can you tell me where else you are?”

  “Nope.”

  I asked why he didn’t take a photo when he was on the spaceships. This is the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask, but why not? “If you need physical evidence,” he said, “then you’re not ready to see.”

  To be fair, Jason was atypical in the baldness of his abduction claims. Others I s
poke to said they’d only realized they were being abducted after undergoing hypnotic regression and that the experience wasn’t strictly physical. They seemed deeply sincere about what they’d been through. A laid-back fellow from Colorado, Terry Danton, sixty or so, told me he gets picked up a couple of times a year. “Grays,” he said. “I see three little ones and one tall one. It’s mental. It’s something that comes into my mind.” Jason and his mother, also a lecturer at the Congress on the subject of her son’s peculiar gifts, seemed to have a nice sideline in paranormalism.

  They were flogging a book about their experiences and Jason was working as an “energy healer.” The good faith of someone like Terry was more troubling because it was harder to laugh off.

  I began spending more time in the vending area, where the motivations of the salespeople were reassuringly mundane. Twenty or thirty tables were set out. On sale were books with names like Listening to Extraterrestrials, Healing Entities and Aliens, Alien Log; DVDs of crop circles; fossils; and Native American–style “highspirit flutes.” You could get your “aura” photographed or have a “psychic body scanner” diagnose your ailments, buy Biomagnetic Health Insoles for your shoes or “Color Therapy Eyewear”— glasses with lenses in different colors.

  A skinny young man called Jeffrey was manning a table of “advanced longevity products” invented by one Patrick Flanagan. “He’s not here,” Jeffrey said. “He has a measurable IQ of 200. Aged twelve, he invented a guided-missile detector.”

  One of the products was a supplement called “Crystal Energy.” The bottle said it made water “wetter.”