The Call of the Weird Read online

  “Does that mean anything?” I asked Jeffrey.

  “Yeah, it drops the surface tension so it feels more solvent in your mouth,” Jeffrey said. “He learned it from the Hunza people of the Himalayas.”

  A few tables along, a husband and wife team from Washington state, LeAra and Dan Clausing, were selling “M-genic medal-lions”— little stone rings on cords to enhance your immune system— at the specially discounted price of forty dollars. The Clausings were followers of the rogue Croatian-born scientist Nikola Tesla. “We made them from stone quarried in China and then put them in a black box with a Tesla coil,” LeAra said.

  Dan wanted to demonstrate the effects of the medallion. He ushered me behind his desk and, as I stuck my arm out, pushed down on it with two fingers. My arm held firm. Then he handed me a small packet of artificial sweetener to hold against my chest. He pushed again and this time my arm went down easily. Was he pushing harder? It was hard to tell. But Dan had his own explanation. “That sweetener is creating chaos in your energetic field!” he said. “It’s poison!” As the final part of the demonstration, he had me hold the sweetener and a medallion. My arm held firm again as Dan pantomimed a great strain of exertion (actually making groaning noises). “The medallion is canceling out the harmful effects!”

  Feeling indebted, I bought a medallion and put it on. “You’re in your cocoon now,” Dan said.

  “You can put that medallion under bad wine and it’ll make it palatable,” LeAra said. “It completely removes the bad stuff.”

  Safely inside my cocoon, I attended a lecture by Charles Hall. He was a heavyset man, conservative-looking in a suit, about sixty years old. He said that from 1965 to 1967 he’d worked as a weather observer in the desert at Nellis Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. He’d had extensive contact with a community of tall white aliens, who, with the knowledge of the U.S. military, operated a top secret “deep-space landing area” for their craft. They spoke English and made frequent trips to Las Vegas, where CIA agents would chaperone them. “They liked to go for entertainment in casinos,” Charles said. “They’re just like we are.”

  In its favor, you could say of the Congress that it was a “nonjudgmental environment.” But there was something exhausting and ultimately futile about this community where unverifiable stories piled up, with no resolution. UFO research showed signs of being a vast database of fantasy—which I suppose I already knew, but I resented myself for spending time in a place where I was struggling to find admirable qualities. I felt cranky and intolerant. I took a break and had dinner at the casino diner, ordering halibut with a baked potato, the only item on the menu that looked vaguely healthy. I’d taken my medallion off by this time. It just didn’t feel like me. But I’d left it under a bottle of wine I’d opened the day before that had tasted a little fizzy. That night, arriving back from a “skywatch” with Michael Telstarr and a couple of others, I tried the wine. It was fractionally better, but I put this down to it “settling down” naturally.

  Several hours later, I was heaving my guts into the toilet bowl. I threw up six or seven times that night, spouting Cabernet-colored bile through my nose. Most of the next day I lay in bed, aching all over. I felt as though I might be dying. Whether it was the halibut or the wine, or a negative reaction to my cocoon, it didn’t say much for the medallion. When I finally made it back down to the Congress, I bumped into Michael Telstarr in the vending area. He speculated that I was experiencing a reaction to the collected energy of the gathering. “That’s a lot to handle if your body’s not used to it.”

  As for Thor, the Congress was a washout. Almost no one had heard of him or the Alien Resistance Movement. His name drew blanks everywhere. In fact, I realized, though his wild claims of encounters might seem to make Thor no different from many other UFO experts, there was an important respect in which he didn’t really fit in: No one else claimed to have killed aliens. The very idea ran counter to one of the few points everyone else agreed on: that they are superhuman beings and their civilization is millions of years in advance of our own. This was the aliens’ raison d’être—to make us feel like younger brothers in the cosmos. Claiming to possess the technology to decapitate grays as Thor did stretched the credulity of even these believers.

  With no leads on Thor, I decided to pay a visit to Bob Short, the space channel, at his home in the tiny Arizona town of Cornville. If I couldn’t put Thor on the couch, I could at least have a crack at Bob.

  He was one of the last survivors of the earliest generation of UFO enthusiasts, a strange crew of mystics called the “contactees.” Their heyday was the 1950s, when they published books telling of their meetings with beautiful human-like “space brothers” in the desert. The aliens had arrived from planets in our solar system. Speaking idiomatic English, they warned of the dangers of nuclear testing. Though couched as fact, the accounts had the flavor of an American vernacular religion. Putting a generous gloss on the phenomenon, the writer William Burroughs once commented: “These individuals may be tuning in, with faulty radios, to a universal message.”

  Forty years on, Bob’s story was largely the same. His space friend was named Korton, and lived in a parallel dimension in a planetary system called Koldas. This allowed him to see into the future, and for a fee Bob would channel Korton and answer questions in a booming robotic voice punctuated with lots of “ums,” a little like a fortune teller.

  During my first visit, for the documentary, I’d spent a matter of hours with Bob, most of which was taken up with the channeling session. Bob’s hair was teased and combed up like a sporing dandelion. He sat on a small throne in the corner of a little chapel behind his house and wheezed and gurgled and shook from side to side for several hours in the semi-darkness. For my own part, while I didn’t believe that Bob was in touch with a real physical being on another planet, and I took his claims of Korton’s oracular gift with a pinch of salt, I didn’t view him as a con man either. It was plausible, I reasoned, that he might be in some kind of self-induced trance and really not know what was coming out of his mouth. Still, I wondered about the exact measure of his faith. Did he ever experience doubt?

  Having made an appointment by phone (he sounded a little disappointed when I said I wouldn’t be bringing a TV crew with me), I drove down from Las Vegas and met him in front of a local grocery store. I’d noticed an odd-looking fellow in my rearview mirror. Then suddenly, in a vaguely paranormal fashion, he appeared by the side of my car. He was dressed head to toe in black, with a black cowboy hat and dark glasses, and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  I followed him back to his house, an old, pale yellow building at the end of a red dirt road, cluttered with Egyptian statuary and pictures of Native Americans. His air-conditioning was down, so we sat in the heat in his front room. I told him I was curious about his life, how he came to be a space channel, what his family thought about it. Before I knew what was happening, he had embarked on a long anecdote about the editor of the book Bob had just published. The anecdote took several sharp turns, picking up random details like a bus with no clear destination; the miraclehealing of a man with colon cancer was mentioned; somebody’s mother who was a Franciscan nun; Bob’s meeting with a spaceman named Sutku in 1958.

  More stories followed. I was having trouble getting a toehold in the conversation, and by the time we were in his car on the way to dinner, I was starting to worry that our whole time together was going to consist of unending, unverifiable anecdotes about his close encounters of various kinds. I complimented him on his car, a sturdy Chevy utility vehicle. Bob mentioned that Korton had told his wife Shirley what kind to get, down to the mileage and the color. “And my wife walked into Larry Green’s Chevrolet. This was the only one on the lot.”

  “Do you ever wonder if it’s real?”

  Bob huffed. “Doesn’t anybody? Sure, you know, I’ll even ask my wife, Shirley. I’ll say, ‘Shirley, did this really happen when that’. . . She’ll say, ‘Robert, you know it did, because
we have it documented.’”

  “Have you ever had your confidence shaken? Have you ever thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m just kind of a con man’?”

  “No no no no no,” Bob said. “If you’re going to set out to do that, you might as well forget it to begin with! Because what you’re doing is assailing your own person with self-doubt. Okay? You’re assailing! You’re putting yourself down. That’s what you’re doing. You’re assailing yourself with negative doubtful situations. Okay?”

  I hadn’t meant this as a provocative question. I’d thought he might say something about the inner tensions of faith, his own struggles with what he was doing, how he had resisted becoming a mouthpiece for a space prophet. It seemed obvious that anyone would doubt his sanity if called upon by unseen voices to announce himself as the bearer of a message from another dimension. But Bob felt that merely to entertain the possibility of fraudulence was self-sabotaging and dangerous. I suppose, if I’d been looking for evidence of bad faith, I’d found it here, in his defensiveness. It suggested a fragility on Bob’s part that he wasn’t more open to skepticism.

  For dinner we drove twenty miles up the road to Sedona, a New Age haven of crystal shops and healing centers. The Mexican restaurant Bob had in mind turned out to be closed, so we settled on a UFO-themed diner. Bob talked about his past lives—as a “fisherman-philosopher in Bora Bora” and a Chinese librarian who died chasing a butterfly over a cliff. Half an hour after I’d finished my Veggie Reuben, Bob had yet to touch his chicken sandwich. “I need to think about turning in,” I said. “I might buy a bottle of wine if there’s a liquor store on the way back.”

  “Well, don’t bring me with you,” Bob said. “I don’t want to go anywhere near one of those places,” and resumed a story about Steven Spielberg, whom he met around the time of “Third Encounters,” as he called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  That night, I worried that Bob and I weren’t getting to know one another after all. Our agendas appeared to be at loggerheads: his was to expound the many times he’d been privileged with supernatural predictions and sightings; mine was to find out about his day-today existence. I began to doubt my idea of a Reunion Tour. In getting to know Bob better, I found his outlook stranger and more maddening than I had on my first visit. Here and there, I’d picked up details about his life. He’d mentioned a son and a daughter, both the offspring of his wife Shirley by her first husband—and neither one keen to be interviewed, so he said. He said he used to work nine-to-five jobs, as a waiter and bartender in Joshua Tree, California, and more recently stacking shelves in a grocery. But overall, Bob seemed more interested in his life as a Chinese librarian.

  The frustration, both mine at Bob’s loquaciousness and Bob’s at my tendency to interrupt or lose the thread of his stories, continued through the next day. By four o’clock, our appointed channeling time, Bob seemed frazzled and I was grouchy. We retreated to the chapel behind his house, furnished with folding chairs and odd bits of UFO memorabilia. On the walls there were framed certificates and devotional paintings of angelic-looking aliens. There was a filing cabinet with the bumper sticker “I’d rather be channeling.” In the corner of the room stood an old electric organ with switches labeled “cornet,” “French horn,” “vox humana.”

  In pride of place, in a gold frame, was a painting of an androgynous man with long blond hair and blue eyes and a large square pendant.

  “That’s Korton,” Bob said.

  “He looks a little bit like, maybe, Jesus might look,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Bob said, and laughed lightly. “That’s something I can’t prove one way or the other.”

  Bob put on slippers and rested his feet on a cushion. The lamps in the room were off and the only light came through the edges of the blind, which had been pulled down. Bob closed his eyes and wheezed with a sound like a car skidding on gravel. He rocked in his chair and snorted and gurgled and twitched from side to side.

  Bob’s vocal chords gave voice to several distinct personalities, operators working a kind of interdimensional telephone exchange. One of them, called “Addy,” spoke in a tremulous old voice with his head cocked to the side. Korton, the headliner, declaimed in a booming monotone with rolled Rs and posh Yankee vowels.

  “THIS IS THE HONORABLE KORTON REPRESENTAH- TEEVE CALLING YOU ON BEHALF OF THE PLANET YOU CALL JUPITER!” Korton said.

  “What will happen in the upcoming election?” I asked.

  “MANY WHO ARE INCUMBENTS WILL, UM, BE TURNED AWAY,” Korton said.

  “I was wondering about George Bush and the . . . ”

  “AN HONORABLE INDIVIDU-ILL BUT THEN, UM,” Korton began, and spoke for several minutes about oil cartels and the invasion of Kuwait.

  Trying a different tack, I asked about my relationship with my dad. Oddly, Korton seemed to think he was dead. I assured him he was alive and well, whereupon Korton said, as if to excuse himself, that he was “ADVANCED IN AGE.”

  “Well, he’s sixty-three.”

  And so it went on. Korton said he couldn’t give out information about the pop star Michael Jackson because of certain “LAW CODES,” that my car’s electrical system needed updating and that I should check the “TREADWEAR, UM” on the “AS YOU TERM IT, TIRES”; advised getting my eyes tested; and when asked generally about my journey said I interrupted too much in my interviews.

  “IT IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR INDIVIDU-ILLS TO, UM, PROVIDE INFORMATION, UM, IN YOUR VERNACULAR, UM, IN ANY THUMBNAIL SKETCH.”

  In spite of myself, and somewhat unreasonably, I found myself feeling irritated with Korton and/or Bob. Little things bothered me like his accent slipping and bouts of coughing. Intending to make it my final question, I asked whether I might have the right stuff to be a space channel myself. Korton said possibly, but that I would have to “CHANGE A GREAT DEAL” in my “LIFESTYLE.” He explained that at the moment I drank too much and smoked too much pot.

  “WE WOULD INVITE YOU TO SEEK OUT, UM, THAT WHICH YOU TERM ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AND/OR NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS, IS THAT UNDERSTOOD, UM?”

  I took issue with Korton on this, and the session ended in something close to an argument between myself and the honorable representative from Koldas.

  When it was over, Bob snorted with his face in a towel. I wandered round the chapel, examining religious icons and newsletters, pamphlets by people describing their adventures in outer space. Unaccountably, I was feeling a little cheated. I say “unaccountably,” because, after all, what had I been expecting?

  “Korton had me down as a pothead for some reason,” I said.

  “He doesn’t tell you anything unless it’s really true,” Bob said. “If it’s given, it’s given.”

  I sensed that Bob could tell I’d been disappointed in the channeling. The subject of the paranormalist Uri Geller came up. I said I doubted his ability to bend cutlery with his mind. Bob went and got a bag of gnarled silverware and flung it on the table. The forks were so mangled that each tine was splayed out and twisted. He seemed pleased with this coup de théâtre.

  “You can’t sleight of hand that,” he said.

  “You do that by twisting it.”

  “No no no no,” Bob said. “You hold it and rub it and it gradually begins to melt.”

  “Well, could you do it now?” I said this softly, because I was aware I was challenging him and I didn’t wish to sound rude.

  “I’m NOT GOING TO DO A DEMONSTRATION FOR YOU, LEWIS! OKAY? I’m a little bit tired, getting a little bit irritated, so just be careful, okay? I’ve got some things I need to do here.”

  On the way back from Arizona, driving up to Las Vegas, I reflected that there was a lesson in my encounter with Bob. Just because I wanted to know someone better didn’t mean they wanted to be known better. Because I myself am literal-minded and perhaps a little self-doubting, I assume other people are happy to examine their contradictions. But it wasn’t so. And in many cases those whose faith was most important to them—like Bob—were those least able to
hold their beliefs up to question. (Later, I sent Bob a book about crop circles and a written apology and we patched it up.)

  With Thor, I felt on safer ground. I had him pegged as hardheaded— a profiteer. This was what I’d sensed about him and liked on the first visit, I realized—there was a kind of healthy-mindedness behind Thor’s bad faith. I was fairly sure he was no longer in the UFO field. He’d left so little impression on that world that I had to assume it hadn’t worked out for him and he’d moved on. But to what? Then in late June, I made a breakthrough. I discovered he had once collaborated on a book by a hypnotist friend of mine named Ross Jeffries. Ross said he’d only met Thor twice, briefly both times, but that Thor sometimes went by the name James Templar. A search on that name revealed a number of books for sale on the Internet of which he was coauthor. I found an email for one of his collaborators, Pat Ress, in Omaha, Nebraska.

  Pat is an expert in time travel. “I have written four books on time travel and researched it extensively,” she wrote. “It happens! There are slippage points all around and with an electromagnetic push—walla! Off you go!” She went on to mention a mysterious secret guild of “technoshamans” to which Thor had once belonged. She put me in touch with a man named Steve Gibbs, an inventor of a time-travel device about whom she’d written a book. Thor had apparently sold copies of Steve’s pamphlet about the device. According to Pat, Steve claimed Thor was himself either a warlock or an alien. “Don’t ask me how he would know that!” She gave me Steve’s number in Kansas.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Steve seemed somewhat mentally troubled when I reached him on the phone. If the believers so far fell somewhere on a spectrum that ran from fragile/sincere to hardheaded/unscrupulous, Steve was skewing heavily toward fragile. He said he’d time-traveled back to 1986, but that his friend Carl traveled to the 1600s and got thrown in jail for wearing a T-shirt. “They thought he was making fun of the king.”