Journal of a UFO Investigator

Somewhere in Chicago, it is reported, there is an apartment house where the elevator stops conventionally at the basement level. But it also goes down, down, down to a much lower level, when the down button is pushed in a certain coded manner....

AND IN A TINY TOWN IN PENNSYLVANIA LIVES A METALWORKER named Richard S. Shaver. He receives through his welding gun—or maybe his memories—revelations from under the surface of the earth. Of beings called dero, survivors of an ancient race of space travelers abandoned on Earth when the sun turned poisonous. Its rays made the dero mad; their madness made them evil. They live underground, in a network of hidden caves. The UFOs are their secret airships. They are the devils of the ancient myths.

“From immemorial times,” Shaver was told, “the dero have had their Hells in the underworld, and it has never ceased. You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive. There have always been Hells on earth, and this is one of them.”

After lunch I left Jeff and Rosa in the Newspaper Room and took the elevator to the Rare Book Room on the third floor. “Follow the moon”—and to do that, I needed to find Jewish calendars because the Jewish year is lunar. I was told they’d be in the Rare Book Room.

In the elevator I was alone. I pressed the button marked “3.” As soon as the doors closed, I began pressing buttons rapidly and at random. I don’t remember which ones I pressed. To my relief, or maybe disappointment, I didn’t go down, down, down. The elevator car shuddered and paused. I thought I was going to be trapped between floors. Then it moved again and stopped back at the first floor. Three young men who looked like college students got in. Again I pressed “₃.”

I’d never been in the Rare Book Room before, and I was curious and a bit excited about what I might find. At the entrance was a turnstile. Just inside, to the left, were a desk with a sign saying J. MARGULIES and, behind the desk, several file cabinets. No one sat at the desk or at the large reading table in the middle of the room. Rows of books were locked behind a thick chain-link barrier, ceiling to floor. No windows; no apparent sign of life.

Framed exhibits, pages from old manuscripts and books, hung on the walls. One of these caught my eye. The page within the frame was about twelve by eighteen inches. Dense lines of writing, in a delicate undulating script that I supposed to be Arabic, surrounded a beautifully colored central picture. The picture’s focus was something that looked like a winged horse with a human face, flying through the night sky. Its rider wore a turban and ornate, flowing robes. Above horse and rider, enormous stars glared out of the deep indigo.

The exhibit to the right was also interesting. Here again was a central picture framed by the mysterious, delicate writing. A large, voluptuous woman, with huge black eyes and flowing hair, grasped the clothing of a smaller, young-looking man. The artist had dressed both of them elaborately but managed to leave much of the woman’s bosom naked.

I examined the picture closely. I read both labels. The one, of the winged creature that had first attracted me, read: MIRAJ-NAMEH, PERSIA, FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The other was labeled JOSEPH AND ZULEIKHA, MUGHAL INDIA, SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

I turned, startled, to see a young man towering over me. That at least was my first impression. It took me a moment to realize he was a teenage boy, just a few years older than myself. He was tall, well over six feet, and extraordinarily thin. He had brown hair and slightly buckteeth. He was neatly dressed, in a blue blazer, a dark tie, and a white shirt that looked heavily starched. How he’d gotten so close without my hearing him, I couldn’t imagine.

“Yes, certainly.” That was all I could say. I could not for the life of me remember what I’d come here for. Then it came back to me. “They told me this was the place to find Jewish calendars.”

I hadn’t expected the question. Could I tell him I wanted a moon-based calendar to “count the days” backward in lunar twenty-nine-day cycles? Suburban burglary . . . UFO encounter . . . and so on, back through the cycles, through the years, until unexplained events of every sort were brought into the pattern? Impossible. I’d be packed off to the loony bin for sure.

“Never mind. None of my business, is it?” He threw himself into the swivel chair that was behind the J. MARGULIES desk, spun around in it, and began rummaging through one of the file drawers. “What years do you want?”

“Ohhh . . .” I started to say, Back through 1947. That was when the UFOs first began to appear, two and a half years before I was born. But he looked up at me and frowned, suspiciously, I thought, and it seemed wiser not to ask for too much. “Let’s just try the last few. Start with 1960.”

“Hmmm.” He leaned back and stretched as he pondered this. The chair, which wasn’t in the best condition, lurched backward. “That means we need to go back to Rosh Hashanah 1959. What year is that in the Jewish calendar, do you remember?”

I didn’t. Still, it was some comfort he’d heard of Rosh Hashanah and seemed to know it falls a few months before everyone else’s New Year. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, leaning forward again. “Here’s 5723, which looks like this year. And 5722, which is last year. These are the years reckoned from the Creation, aren’t they?”

“Old saying. Tantum malorum religio suadere potuit—‘So many evils has religion brought about!’ Tribal morality, for instance. Also obscurantism, like thinking the world was created six thousand years ago. Or there’s no life anywhere but the skin of this planet. Now I’ve probably offended you. I can see it by your face. Don’t tell me you’re religious? Studying to be a rabbi, or something?”

“Yes, yes. That’s what you’re here for, the calendars. Not to listen to me chatter. Here’s 5723, here’s 5722. And 5721, which takes us back to September 1960. That’s all we have, I’m afraid.”

I gave him my card. He looked at it, looked at me. I thought I saw him nod, and that made me uneasy. He ran the card through a machine and stamped the calendars. “Building use only,” he said, handing them to me. “Give them back at any of the library desks before you leave today. You don’t have to come back up here.”

I flipped through the most recent of the calendars. It advertised a different funeral home from the calendar hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen but otherwise seemed pretty much the same. Each month was accompanied by a gaudy Bible illustration. I didn’t recognize most of the pictures. I’d loved Bible stories when I was little, but lost interest in them a long time past and mostly forgotten them. September’s picture, JACOB’S DREAM AT BETH-EL, was of an enormous shining, undulating staircase, its top hidden in distant clouds. Angels in robes climbed their way to and from the endless heights. Below it was printed: “ ‘And he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it’—Gen. 28:11-12.”

I looked up from the picture, my skin all goose bumps. “It’s just—something I remembered,” I said, trying to explain. But the memory eluded me, and what did I need to explain to this weirdo anyway? I put the calendars in my briefcase and started to go.

He shook his head. “Seems like we’re not safe in our own homes anymore. Assuming we ever were.” All the while he’d been searching through the briefcase. He pulled out the book I’d carried to Philadelphia with me. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Tell me. How is dear old Al, these days?”

I stared at him while I tried to think of an answer. Of course I had no idea how Albert K. Bender was. I didn’t know anyone who might know anyone who knew Bender. For me he was a remote, almost legendary figure, like Jacob and his angels on the shining stairway.

“And how are Al’s three friends?” the boy went on. “From the planet—Kazik, or whatever its name was? The ones with the dark suits and the dark faces and the bright, bright eyes. Their eyes shone like flashlights, didn’t he say?”

“And how about the three women in black?” he said. “Only they don’t wear black, do they? Tight uniforms, can’t remember what color. You remember them, don’t you? They’re the ones who bring him onto the spaceship. Right before the brain implant. They paralyze him. They strip him naked. They massage every part of his body without exception. Italics mine.”

“Do their eyes just make it easier for Bender to see them? Or do they see better with glowing eyes? ‘Why, what glowing eyes you have!’ ‘The better to see-e-e you with, my dear.’ ”

He gave a very effective horror movie laugh. I felt my flesh crawl. This was not a laugh, I thought, that should have emanated from a human throat. “Look,” I said. “I really don’t think we need to take Bender’s book all that seriously.”

Harold Dahl. 1947. Harbor patrolman at Maury Island, off the coast of Washington State. “The man in black,” said the boy. “Just one. The other two must have been on missions to other galaxies. He pays Dahl a visit. He tells him he saw something he shouldn’t have. Tells him word for word everything he saw. Warns him: if he loves his family, he won’t whisper about it to anybody.”

“Of course it was a hoax. Do you seriously believe a flying disk crashed into Puget Sound? Dropped slag into Dahl’s boat? Killed his stupid dog? Do you think anyone believes that?”

“Because of the people. Don’t you understand? The people involved. Harold Dahl is a man worth knowing. Before Maury Island he was in the dero caves. Fought his way out with a submachine gun. Marvelous story; vintage Harold Dahl. I’d arrange for the two of you to meet, except we lost track of him.”

“Lost track?” How strange that this boy, met by chance, should know the people and things I wanted so badly to know myself. Was it chance? I began to feel frightened; I touched my hand to my pocket. The Delta Device was still there. “You lost track of Harold Dahl?”

“Completely vanished. Somewhere in the Southwest, New Mexico, I think. All of a sudden he’s gone. Disappeared. So lost even God and the Internal Revenue Service can’t find him.”

He must have been waiting for me to ask. He reached into his inner jacket pocket and whirled out a business card. “Julian Margulies, of the SSS. And, on alternate Saturday afternoons, of the Philadelphia Free Library. At your service.”

I examined the card. A name, a Philadelphia address, and a telephone number crowded together at the bottom. Most of the upper part consisted of a sixty-degree angle, trisected, with an ornate capital S in each of its three segments. In each upper corner was a slender, pointed black oval, beginning near the trisected angle and rising outward toward the edges. If the ovals had been vertical, I’d have thought them the slit pupils of a cat’s eyes. Horizontal, they’d resemble two flying disks seen from the side. As it was, they gave the impression of being the slanted, almond-shaped, wide-apart eyes of some humanlike but unspeakably strange creature.

Whatever—I didn’t want to look at them. Their effect was hypnotic; I wasn’t ready to be hypnotized. I forced my eyes down to the bottom of the card, to the name printed there. “What’s the A stand for?” I said.

“Oh, that A. I’d forgotten. I don’t use it very much. But it stands for Arcturus. If you must know.” He looked at me solemnly, then raised his eyebrows a few times, rapidly, comically, as if doing a takeoff on Groucho Marx.

“Danny Shapiro. Of course. It was on your library card. How stupid of me. Well, Danny Shapiro, I regret that we meet under these circumstances. With me dressed so informally, that is. I do own a black suit—”

“But I only wear it for funerals. And, of course, for terrorizing UFO investigators who’ve found out too much. I haven’t yet got the hang of making my eyes glow like flashlights, however.”

I turned to leave. But then I stopped. “You know that picture you have on your wall,” I said. “The one with the winged horse, or whatever the animal was, and the man riding it. I was looking at it before you came in. It—it fascinated me.”

“Potiphar’s wife. The lady who was always trying to get Joseph into bed with her. The Bible doesn’t say what her name was. That’s the Arabs for you. They think they know lots about the Bible that the Bible doesn’t say.”

“Arabic or Persian. You’ll have to ask Rochelle about that. If she can read it, it’s Arabic. If not, it’s Persian. Or maybe Urdu. I don’t think Rochelle’s ever learned Urdu.”

“Yes, dinner. Why do you look so suspicious?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, to explain I wasn’t used to total strangers inviting me to dinner. “At our place. So you can meet Rochelle. Don’t worry, you’ll like Rochelle. You and she will have a lot to talk about.”

He seemed to find the question extremely funny. “No, she isn’t my sister,” he said, laughing, mostly through his nose. He threw himself back into his chair and laughed some more. “Not my sister,” he said again. He pushed a button under his desk; there was a loud click from the turnstile. “The phone number is on my card,” he said. “Give me a call. We’ll arrange something.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was about to put the card into my pocket but suddenly dropped it back onto his desk. There was something dangerous about that card—maybe those eyes printed on it, which I hoped sooner or later I’d be able to forget. If I took the card, my life would be changed in some way I could not foresee or undo once it had happened. “Well, see you around.”

I dashed out. The third-floor elevator was a few steps away from the entrance to the Rare Book Room. I heard him calling me; I had the sense of missing something. I was so eager to be gone I didn’t stop to think what. I ran inside the elevator and pressed the button marked “G.” I went down, down, down. From the elevator I rushed into the Newspaper Room.