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 “snowbirds,” 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.
“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 spoke 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.”
“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.”
He said he’d spoken to Thor over the phone a couple of times but he stopped answering Thor’s calls because he kept getting into his head and causing his nose to bleed. Thor, he said, was a “reptilian shapeshifter” and had been sent to Hell. Or possibly he’d time-traveled and accidentally set up a “paradox,” erasing his own timestream. Either way, it wasn’t proving a fruitful line of inquiry.
I had better luck with the organization Pat mentioned. The mysterious guild of technoshamans turned out to have a website, with pages of magical products for sale: “Aladdin’s lamps,” “spell books,” “ritual kits,” “all-purpose voodoo-doll kits.” It was like an Argos for budding Harry Potters. Thor’s fingerprints were all over it, phrases I’d heard him use: “warrior monks,” “mystery schools,” “grimoires.” There were several books previously credited to Thor that now appeared with his name taken off. There was also a whiff of Thor’s opportunism: Gas prices had recently gone up, and one of the websites was selling a disk that you could stick on to your car to improve its mileage.
“We are an ancient yet futuristic mystery school. We were the builders of Atlantis and played an important part in the leadership of that society . . . I am sure you have hundreds of questions about the above facts. Of course you do. That is your slave mind talking, questioning the real. After all, you are programmed to buy into the created history of the ‘well’-educated professors, the men of letters and science . . . There is only one answer: FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! . . . HACK AND CUT!! THIS IS THE ONLY WAY. Let the cowards fall away! LET THE FIGHTERS SHOW THE WAY!”
I sent an email asking about Thor, and received a terse reply. It said: “Hello, Sorry, we have no info on this person. We are a new company that bought rights to some old products and publications. Thanks.”
It was official: Thor did not want to speak to me.
My original question had been answered. What do you do after you’ve been Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate? Why, you found an ancient yet futuristic mystery school that helped build Atlantis and now sells voodoo dolls.
Now what? Should I phone up? Should I pretend to be an interested customer? Should I stake out his building? Until now, I’d excused myself by imagining that Thor might actually want to get together and hang out. Not that I’d given it a great deal of thought, but I suppose I imagined meeting his family and loved ones and trying to put him in some kind of social context. I had a hunch that at some level he didn’t really believe that he’d killed ten aliens, but I wanted to find out for sure, or hear how he rationalized it. I wanted to meet his mother and say, “Do you really believe Thor killed ten aliens?” I wanted to find out his real name.
But if he didn’t want to meet, where did that leave me?
One morning in Las Vegas I drove to the address listed for Thor’s outfit. It was a soulless stretch of shopping plazas and franchise outlets on the west of the strip: I counted a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, a 7-11, and a KFC, all within a block. The address in question turned out to be a “postal center” where he rented a mailbox.
So I called a number on the website, putting on an American accent, and asked about the mileage disk.
“Ah, yes,” said a voice. “You glue it on your gas tank. It works using energy rays. It changes the structure of the gas. It improves your gas mileage 20 to 40 percent. Costs one hundred and fortynine dollars.”
It was definitely him. The same self-serious intonation, the tendency to overexplain. But speaking to him under false pretenses— deceiving someone for whom I basically felt affection—didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t sure how to get off the phone.
“That sounds rather a lot,” I said, in my assured voice.
“You can send money orders. You can also send cash registered.” Thor sounded ready to close the deal.
“I don’t have a credit card at the moment,” I said, and rang off. A few weeks later, I called up as myself.
The first few moments were a little awkward. I explained who I was, reminded him of the TV show we made. He sounded shaky, as though he knew he’d been found out.
“Oh yes,” he said, recovering himself. “I remember. I’m sorry, I spaced out a little there . . . I’m not really active in that alien area any more. It just didn’t pan out for us as any kind of reality. So we’ve kind of stepped away from that . . . The major problem of our time is superillnesses. That’s where our emphasis is. There’s an amazing number of healing tools we’re trying to get to people.
AIDS, chronic fatigue, cancer. Who really cares if we’re invaded by aliens, we’ll all be dead from diseases . . . ”
I told him I’d seen websites for the Alien Resistance Movement still going on the Internet.
“They’re all a bunch of goofball jerks with either Christian fanatical leanings or kids that want to play army. I contacted them and told them, look, we own that name and logo, that’s our organization. But it was going nowhere anyway. They’re comic-book characters shooting machine guns at the sky, which doesn’t even work. I think our threats are much greater from our politicians than from extraterrestrials.”
This turned out to be Thor’s new theme: the disaster of the Bush presidency.
“Quite frankly, I’ve come to sympathize with the aliens. If they need the human crud we have on this planet to propagate, they’re welcome to it. I just wish they’d start by abducting Adolf Bush and his cronies. The guy did not win the election. If he was a president in Central America we would have invaded by now . . . We’ve got body bags coming back from a no-win war where all the people hate us. He’s a stumblebum moron. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a clone because his chip ain’t working right.”
He said he lived an hour or two outside Vegas, in Nevada, in “an isolated location,” still with Liz. He didn’t seem averse to meeting up. We made a plan to go for coffee in September. We spoke for an hour or so, mainly about politics, finding much to agree on. That I should find so much political common ground with a one-time alien hunter struck me as curious.
At the end of the conversation, his tone changed a little. “You know,” he said, “I’m surprised at the number of sites you’re on with your show. I wish we could get on as many sites, heh heh heh.
” “Yes,” I said.
“Interviews with you, talking about meeting the different characters. There were several different postings on our interview.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes I spoke about the show—well, I think in some interviews I crossed the line.”
“I liked your show. I watched it all the time when it was on Bravo.” He mentioned the wrestling episode. “You looked pretty scared when you were with those wrestlers and that psycho drill instructor. He really lost it with you.”
“I may be wrong, but you changing your name, that wasn’t anything to do with me and the exposure you got on the show, was it?”
“I don’t really want to be connected with that area. I’m trying to step away from that stuff. It loses me credibility. I can’t go in and talk to a biochemist if he says, ‘Oh, you’re the great alien hunter, ha ha ha!’”
“Right.”
“And I wasn’t in it to make money. We were a small operation. We were nobodies. If I’d wanted to get rich, I would have gone into the corporate world. But we had to make money to survive, and they were all products I believed in . . . ”
“Sure.”
“So I go by a different name now.”
Then he asked if I would keep his new name to myself.
In September I called back several times to see if Thor still wanted to get together for coffee. The calls all went to a machine. The message said: “Welcome! We’re unavailable at this time. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you when we can.” The startling thing was that the message, while recognizably Thor’s voice, was delivered in a fake English accent.
On the last night of the UFO Congress at Laughlin, still suffering with food poisoning or whatever it was, I made my way down to the closing banquet. The seating was at round tables, ten to a table. I spied Bob Short, in blue lamé shirt and matching shiny blue cummerbund, with a large pendant round his neck, obviously pleased because all the seats at his table were taken.
Seated across from me was Richard Boylan, a New Age educator from Sacramento, who looked a little like a jolly Irish priest, red-faced and white-haired. I recognized his name from the Congress’s program of speakers. Being ill, I’d missed his lecture that day on “star kids”—“hybrid children” with “advanced abilities.” But after we’d eaten, he began testing the auras of some of those at our table to see if they might be star kids.
“Normal people’s auras reach about a foot away from their bodies,” he said. “Starseed are about twelve feet.”
He offered to test me. I was a little nervous, fairly certain that my own skepticism meant I wasn’t starseed and fearful that my lack of belief would show through. I stood twenty or so feet from Richard. He walked toward me with a pair of L-shaped dowsing rods in his hands. Suddenly, they splayed out, as though butting up against an invisible force field. “Hombre! What’s that? Fifteen feet?” he said. “Yours is the biggest yet!”
When we sat down, he sketched out a vision of the society we star kids would one day create. Peaceful, just, egalitarian, environmentally sensitive. “Think of a society where everybody’s telepathic,” he said. “Imagine being a used-car salesman when everyone knows what you’re thinking.” I felt flattered to be a star kid. Though I had no doubt it was folderol (shortly afterwards Richard handed out business cards, explaining we could attend his seminars to develop our starseed potential: learn telekinesis and so on), my being included in the club inclined me to be charitable toward his unlikely vision. Later I thought how ironic it was that Richard should use the example of a used-car dealer, there amidst the mountebanks and latter-day snake-oil salesmen of the UFO world. But at the time, I didn’t think that. I was just happy to feel part of the team.
How odd, I thought, that even though I don’t believe, it still feels nice to be included. What does that prove? I wondered. That even something untrue can produce an effect; that sometimes a con is also an act of kindness.