The wise old man who now appeared as Obi-Wan in my dreams told me I needed to learn as much about science as I could, as this was an important part of my mission. Those words stayed with me, and I tried to gather as much information as possible. I would ask my father all sorts of questions that he did not have the answers for, like why the sky was blue or how birds could fly. He would often get frustrated with me and tell me he just didn’t know. Shortly after seeing Star Wars in 1977, I learned that modern scientists believed in something called the “Big Bang.” They said that the universe started as “nothing.” I couldn’t even imagine the idea of nothing ever existing—it just didn’t make any sense. Then they said that “nothing exploded,” and the whole universe was created in an instant. I felt very strongly that this couldn’t be right. I concentrated as hard as I could and willed myself to see the real answer to the questions, “What did the universe look like at the beginning? Was there ever truly nothing?” What I got back, every time I asked, was pure white light. It seemed like it could be very large or very small, and it really didn’t even matter. Size was not important; it was just light. And it seemed very friendly—actually quite joyous. It was as if it was singing in happiness.
Certain objects or places started causing me to have profound cosmic feelings that I could not explain. One early example happened after I entered nursery school, which was in a church. A weird, fundamentalist-type man came in and was talking to us about God. He felt deceitful to me, like a car salesman or my father’s boss at General Electric. He was giving us a strong sales pitch for his religion, and at the end he handed each of us a white plastic ring that was the right size to fit on our chubby little fingers. It had a cartoon bee on it that was made out of a raised, shiny red line. Somehow, when I saw this ring, I felt as if I was blown into a completely alternate reality. There was something there—something very powerful, very ancient, and very amazing. I didn’t know what it was, but the feeling was so intense that I almost fell over. I still do not understand why the ring caused me to feel this way, particularly since the man was exactly the opposite. Perhaps it looked similar to jewelry I had worn in some alternate reality. These memories were unpredictable and at times could seem completely random and inexplicable.
This same phenomenon happened again when I was playing with a wooden toy that featured a chain of train-like cars that rolled on black-painted wheels. As I pulled this toy along, I got hit again. I had flashes of the massive airport I had seen in my dreams, loaded with astonishing spaceships. Some of them seemed to have been chained together like this toy—but I just couldn’t quite remember it. Another time I rode the city bus for the first time with my babysitter on the way to a bowling alley. I was scared, as I had never ridden the bus before. As I sat on the bus and saw people in the seats, WHAM—it happened again. I felt very close to a memory of seeing a similar scene in a much more advanced craft that flew through space.
Every year, fighter jets called the Blue Angels would do stunt-flying right over my street, because we were near the military base where they did the airshow. They would fly in formation, go upside down, pass by one another closely, do barrel rolls, and in some cases fly very close to the ground. They would rehearse for the airshow for about four or five days beforehand, and I always made sure to go outside and see it. I would always get that same feeling of immense cosmic knowledge that I could not explain when I saw them—and on the few occasions when we actually went to the airshow and saw all the planes on display, I felt it even more. As a result, I got into building snap-together airplane models and had a poster of various jets on the wall in my room for many years.
Another weird example of the “cosmic rush” was when I was with my grandmother, and we went to see a friend of hers out in a woodsy area. The lady gave me a brown plastic bottle that could hold milk, like a baby bottle, but this was made for bigger kids. I was mildly insulted at first by getting this gift. The top of the bottle had plastic in the shape of a stylized, cartoonish cow face, with a red plastic tongue and black plastic eyes that were mostly closed. However, as I held this object in my hands, I had a very profound rush. It now seemed partially like Luke’s lightsaber from Star Wars, but there was something much deeper than that. This bottle looked like something I knew—a technology that might have been like the lightsaber. I had no idea what it was, but the feeling was overpowering and incredible.
Certain places could fairly reliably cause me to feel this way. Any building that was made of stone, or was castle-like, could do it, particularly if it was surrounded by trees. I may have been remembering a society that had advanced technology but was also building marvelous structures out of stone. That particular vision was strongly associated with medieval-sounding music, particularly wind instruments. Just hearing the sound of an oboe could cause this feeling to happen, particularly if it had a strong echo on it, like you hear in vintage Tangerine Dream music. Some brick buildings also had the same effect, including the house my babysitter, Julie’s, family moved into that was a little farther away from us and was surrounded by trees. However, the single most reliable source of this profoundly cosmic and wonderful feeling was the Schenectady Museum and Planetarium. I would ask my mother to take us there again and again, as every time I went, the same thing would happen. The inside of the building had a high, domed ceiling that was painted black. Some of the supporting bars were visible. The walls were white, and flowed in smooth, rippling curves. Track lights were mounted in cool places, causing the exhibits to gleam and sparkle. They changed the exhibits every few months.
They often had boring GE exhibits, such as large turbines, pictures of Edison, the original model of the lightbulb, old appliances, and panels of text explaining the history of these inventions. What really inspired me the most were the displays of huge crystals, hidden behind glass for protection. Some of the clusters were a brilliant purple. The light would glisten off them, and as I looked at them I would feel connected to something extremely profound. It was as if I had once known a world of crystal technology—but I couldn’t quite get it back. The flowing, curved walls and lighting of the museum reminded me of the inside of some kind of spaceship, like what I would see in my dreams—but even older and more powerful.
At one point the museum had an exhibit of holograms, where you could walk around them and see them animate—for example, a woman talking. They had strange rainbow colors, mostly yellow and red, and you could put your hand right into them. This probably caused the single most profound rush of energy and cosmic memories of anything I had ever experienced. It was so powerful that I almost fell over in ecstasy.
By this time, I was having more and more experiences during which I knew what people were thinking, without their ever telling me. I could sense people’s feelings very easily, even if they were trying to hide them. This was useful with my father, as I could tell when he was going to get angry before it actually happened. There were many other cases that were more peaceful than that. Thoughts would come into my mind right before someone started talking to me about them. I would think of a specific person right before they were discussed, or the phone started ringing and they were calling. This was so natural that I didn’t think anything of it, and I felt like everyone must be able to do it, since it was so easy and effortless.
My mother met some hippie guys at Hewitt’s Garden Center on Sacandaga Road and quickly found out that they lived with a group of other people at a farm they called Totem. Everyone was crammed into a single run-down house in a heavily wooded area on the end of a dirt road. They listened to weird psychedelic and technical music, such as the band Gentle Giant, which I would never have heard at home. The best way I can describe it as an adult is to say that it sounded like musical schizophrenia. So much marijuana was grown at Totem that they would dry it out in clothes dryers. The marijuana smoke was so thick that it curled around you as you walked through the house.
The first time I was there, I walked into the bathroom and was disgusted when I saw the toilet bowl. It was supposed to be white, but their well water had lots of minerals in it, and the entire bowl was stained a dark brown. I thought it was all poop, and I was horrified that they hadn’t bothered to clean it. There was no way I could use that toilet. I marched out, thrust my right hand on my hip, pointed at the bathroom with my left index finger, and shouted, “That is the most disgusting toilet I have ever seen in my entire life!” I could not understand why they started laughing—and continued to laugh, nonstop, for at least ten minutes. Some of them even gasped for breath and rolled around on the floor. I finally decided that it was cool that I had made them laugh, and went along with the joke, but I had no idea what they thought was so funny about having a toilet that was absolutely covered with “mess.”
A very frightening story emerged from this group not long after my mother started going there. A man named Lars, who was a brother of one of the guys, had taken a drug called LSD. I had never heard of it before then. This drug caused him to completely lose his mind and go crazy. They tried to keep him at the house for several days, but he was so messed up from it that they had to take him to the hospital. He ended up going into “the mental ward” and had to stay there for a long time before they finally let him go. He was never really the same again; he had become shy and scared. The whole thing was extremely frightening. My mother told me to never, ever take LSD, as it was very dangerous, and the people who used it had no idea what they were messing with. I promised her I never would. She gave me similar warnings about heroin and cocaine, saying that once people tried them they couldn’t stop, and the drugs would destroy their lives.
Totem ended up having a party called 7/7/77, which took place on July 7, 1977, as you might expect. Some of the Totem guys had formed a band, and they had a Fender Rhodes keyboard up on stage. They were playing a simple blues-rock jam and demanded my mother get up on stage and play keyboard in front of all those people. Although it was well within her playing ability to do this, she was terrified of performing in front of an audience and had never tried to play rock and roll before. She was just about dragged up on stage, but as soon as she started playing, she was a natural. The audience loved her. She was instantly hooked, and started playing in various bands that were formed with members of the group. By the mid-1980s she had become a professional gigging musician playing in wedding bands—and it all started with 7/7/77. This was my first experience with “numerical synchronicity,” in which repeating patterns of numbers reveal deeper meaning. In the future these patterns would appear in highly unexpected ways, seemingly in direct response to important, spiritually significant thoughts I was having.
Shortly after 7/7/77, the weirdest and most terrifying event of my entire childhood happened. I didn’t witness it myself, thank God, but I heard about it from my parents the next day—at great length. It all started when my father and mother were up late in bed. Dad was watching his little black-and-white TV, which he had brought back with him from Vietnam. The lights were out and the room was dark. Their bedroom was on the second floor, and they had windows that looked out onto our street. There was enough moonlight to see what was going on outside. Dad noticed some movement on the street. He looked more closely and realized that a husband-and-wife couple was walking along, side by side. They did not talk, look at each other, or move their arms. They walked like robots, almost as if they were in a trance. They reached the driveway of the house across the street, made a ninety-degree turn, walked up to the side door, opened it without knocking, and walked right in. The house was completely shrouded in darkness, outside and in.
Dad’s mind surged with curiosity and fear. He quietly but urgently alerted my mother to what was going on: “Look! Look!” They continued watching as three more married couples repeated the exact same sequence. The house was so dark inside that in order to see their way around, they would have needed something like candlelight. These were people we knew and saw all the time, including Mrs. Warner, whom Mom had me call the day she went to the emergency room. The men in each of these couples were high-ranking Freemasons, which is a secret society—but it took years for me to realize that there might be any connection between secret societies and the event my parents witnessed that night. One of the men was an Italian guy who owned a popular shoe repair store in town. The people across the street owned one of the most popular and successful car dealerships in town. Every year they would have rehearsals for the parade down at the end of the street. Since they were Scottish Rite Freemasons, they would assemble in our street wearing kilts and play the bagpipes with their haunting sound. Some of them were also Shriners and would wear the red fezzes and drive around in little go-karts in the parade. I would often see them sitting and talking together on the front porch of the house just to the right of the place they all went into that night. Thankfully, the people who owned the house across the street moved away less than a year later—but the others did not.
I had honestly never seen my parents so frightened before. They kept saying that this was just like the movie Rosemary’s Baby, which I had already heard about many times before. Mom had asked my father what they should do, if they should say anything, and Dad said, “Absolutely not. I have seen way too many movies with scenes like this. If they find out that we saw them, something terrible could happen to us. We could all be killed. Everyone in this family. And no one would ever know what happened to us. We would just disappear.” I was surprised that they were telling both Michael and me this, considering how young we were, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life. I could only conclude that these people were members of a secret group that met at night, and very likely were involved in something evil. Dad said it was very important that we act normally when we saw them, and never say a single word about what they had witnessed. Only recently did I speak to an insider who told me this was probably a ceremony known as the “Rite of Venus,” in which people wear masks and have a sexual orgy like the one in the disturbing Stanley Kubrick movie Eyes Wide Shut.
The next major event I went through was seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind after it was released on December 14, 1977. My father was dazzled by the film, said we had to see it, and brought us out to it. I was absolutely blown away, because this film was extremely similar to the dreams I was having. Seeing this movie was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I felt it was absolutely real. I very much identified with the child in the movie and felt that something like this would happen in the future on a much larger level. I had countless dreams of huge spaceships appearing over the yard, and now I was seeing it on the silver screen. Tears streamed down my face as the mother ship appeared at the end of the movie, causing such a spectacular light show. I was awed as the little ETs came out of the ship, and particularly entranced by the tall, skinny one. When the hero went into the ship to go with them, I cried even more. That was what I wanted—so much. And there it was. I could hardly believe I was seeing a movie like this.
I started kindergarten classes at Sacandaga School in 1978. The school very quickly realized that my reading ability was way ahead of most of the other kids, and they put me into a special gifted children’s program called Pyramid. The kindergarten reading book Learning How to Read had a mustard-yellow cover with kids playing on it, including one kid who was hanging on a tire that was attached to a rope in the middle. The first-grade book was called Cloverleaf, featuring a cow made out of colored paper who had a clover in his mouth. I was put right into Cloverleaf, along with a few other kids. One of them was named Eric, and it turned out that he lived just a few streets away from me. We looked somewhat alike and became fast friends. I would often ride my bicycle over to his house.
This was also when I started taking my old toys apart. We had all the screwdrivers I needed to get the screws out. I was very interested in seeing how things worked. My first major success was when our electric can opener broke. Mom was going to throw it away, because when you pushed the lever down, it wouldn’t turn anymore. I asked her to let me see if I could take it apart and fix it, and she was happy to let me try. I took out all the screws, got the back off of it, and could see that there was a lot of metallic dust inside from the cans. I scrubbed off all the dust and grime with an old toothbrush and then lubricated it with WD-40, which was in the same toolbox as the screwdrivers. I put it all back together, plugged it in, hit the lever, and bam—it worked! Both of my parents were amazed that I actually fixed it, but as far as I was concerned it was quite easy.
Although I was a good reader and could fix the can opener, I was way behind in other areas. In our first years of gym class, the teachers would just set everyone loose in the gym to run around, screaming and laughing. I enjoyed the running and thought it was amazing to have all these other kids around, shooting in all different directions. However, the teachers watched me carefully and decided that I was not as coordinated as I should be for my age. I couldn’t catch or throw a ball very well, if at all. I didn’t want to play Frisbee with my parents, because whenever they threw it at me I would get hurt if I tried to catch it. I had hardly any strength in my upper body, which was a problem when the teachers wanted us to climb ropes or do chin-ups. I couldn’t even manage to do a single chin-up; I was amazed that the other kids could do several of them. The teachers ended up putting me in a special class to help develop better coordination.
While I was still in kindergarten, sometime before Christmas, I had perhaps the single most positive and amazing experience of my entire childhood: the out-of-body experience I opened with in chapter 2. After this stunning event, I concluded that everything, not just people, must have a ghostlike existence that is separate from the physical form. I also now knew it was possible to break into this alternate reality, just as my mother had read about in the Carlos Castenada books. I suddenly realized I had been incredibly stupid for getting scared and thinking I was dying, which had caused me to snap back into my body as soon as I went from wonderment to fear. I felt terrible about missing my chance. It occurred to me that there could have been some sort of craft waiting for me outside the house like what I had seen in my dreams, and if I hadn’t gotten scared, I might have been pulled into it and gotten to meet the old man for real—not just in a dream. I started crying as I realized I had just wasted the greatest opportunity I’d ever had in my life. Every single night, for two more years, I prayed to get another chance. I knew I had no direct control over whether it would happen again or not—only “they” did. I saved the pajamas and never wore them again, and I still have them in my closet today. I also never washed them, in case that would somehow get rid of the magic that allowed them to be in two places at the same time. I ended up calling them the “sacred pajamas,” and they are one of the only things I still have left from my childhood years.
I continued having UFO dreams after this, involving the usual flying cylinders in the backyard. Now, however, something new would happen. One of the UFOs would often crash-land somewhere not too far away from where my mother and I were standing. I felt they might be in trouble and they needed our help. I would grab my mother’s hand, look into her eyes, and tell her we needed to run over there and help them. The dream always ended at this point—and I would often wake up in tears when I realized that it wasn’t real. The meetings with the old man happened less and less often, and the dreams took on more of a mysterious, symbolic quality. Every night for the next two years, I prayed for the old man and his friends to give me another chance—but it never happened. I finally decided to take matters into my own hands—but that happens a little later in our story.