The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Ten

The Mindstorm
Chronicles:
Chapter Ten

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

 

Flashbacks. There were always flashbacks. About some world that I passed through where evil was everywhere, as if you'd just seen too much, and somehow your mind refused to let go of any of it. There was no real understanding it all, there was just going over it again and again in an effort to make sense of it. Every little detail, no matter how excruciating.

 

There would be no good way to describe it. Sort of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it didn't seem as though I were living in another world, it just seemed like all of a sudden everyone that I knew was living in some other world. Everyone was always hinting about something or another, but nobody would come out and say what was on their minds. But if I ever thought to ask them they had no idea what I was talking about. Later they wouldn't even remember the conversation, as if I'd been speaking to someone else entirely. Back then I didn't know very much about remote mind control weapons, I thought that they were probably all hypnotized by the media or something. Maybe it was both. No way would I ever have thought that these mind control people could just come into your home and dominate everyone. No way. But they did. As crazy as it sounds, as crazy as it seems, that's precisely what had happened. The government had synced my enviornment to my head. That's what I called it. Sometimes I called it mindsync.

 

Maybe it was that I really was insane ever since I was a kid. Maybe It was all really much crazier than I was admitting to myself. It was one thing to talk to the president in your head or the military men, or even with aliens for that matter. Back then it had gotten just as crazy as I allowed it to get.None of it was forced on me, but crazy was the only way to put it. Since aliens were such great telepaths, and since they could even connect you with anyone... well, being just a kid I wanted to talk to everyone. Why not?

 

Why not?

 

Why...

 

So, here I was after talking to the man from Tavistock, thinking about how there were Nazi spies and traitors in our government and such, and, well, I thought that maybe we could use all of the allies we could get... and so forth... So what did I do?

 

So I decided to talk to the Queen of England. It wasn't like I really took it all that seriously, until she was right there in my mind. And her presence felt just as real as if she were right in front of me as I sat on the ground behind our house in the mountains. Being only seven, I didn't really know too much about protocol or anything, but if she had actually been there I would have known to bow, that's about it. I wasn't sure what to call her, and she seemed at first to be absolutely stunned at this sort of shared vision we were having, and also very uncomfortable telling me what to call her. So I asked that somebody please tell me, and then a man entered into the conversation and informed me that the Queen was referred to as "Her Majesty". "Oh, yeah!" I thought. But then I didn't know what majesty really meant, except I thought it must mean really beautiful because of the American song we sang in school about "purple mountain's majesty". To this day whenever I think of Her Majesty I think of those purple mountains.

 

It was very difficult, you know. I had never talked to a Queen before and hadn't really ever thought about it. And she was just being very quiet, but I could tell that she was sort of shocked that this was happening. I didn't mean to make her uncomfortable or anything. Anyway, I think the man told me that I should ask permission to speak, which Her Majesty "granted", meaning that it was ok, I guessed. Well, I told her all about the Nazis in America. And said that we might need help here, and wanted to know if England would still be our ally. I tried to explain the best that I could. That I had talked to the man from Tavistock. And then I asked Her Majesty if she knew much about how the Nazis really were. She said that she was a young girl when all of that happened and didn't remember that much about it all. "Oh." I said. Maybe I should talk to someone older. Her Majesty said that she would do whatever she could, and she even granted me permission to work for her, in a kind of way, I guess. So that I would have friends there as well. After that I talked to the Queen's Mom.

 

The Queen's Mom, mmm, Queen Mum, the man said, seemed even more stunned by all of this than Her Majesty herself. You know, I hadn't really thought about that older people gave up thinking that leprechauns were possible a long time ago. And being only seven I didn't really know what adults thought about aliens. The more I tried to say anything to anyone the more I realized that my Mom was right, that I was never really as smart as I thought I was. There was just too much to know. Adults never seemed to think about it, but I was just amazed at how much they could remember.

 

The Queen Mum and I spoke about the situation for a little while. Her Majesty's Mum was very nice but didn't say much. In my mind I just saw a look of real surprise on her face, I was feeling a little bit guilty about that. Her Queen's Mum told me a little about what the war was like and how bad Nazis had been, and how dangerous they were. I asked her if she thought that I could trust the American government and she had a look on her face that just said "No way!" When this stuff happens, it was all new to me at the time, but when this stuff happens you can sort of feel what people are feeling. Anyway, some of the stuff that we talked about... it would be better if Her Majesty and Her Majesty's Mum told you, because it sounds even crazier than what I've told you so far. Really crazy. And I wouldn't want to get in trouble with Her Majesty and Her Majesty's Mum because they were so nice. I could tell by the man who was helping me say the right things that people in England take these things very seriously. I wish I could remember who he was. At first I thought he was a butler, but I think that he wasn't dressed like a butler. But he was a little upset by all of this. I didn't blame him. In a way, so was I. I decided to think about these things more before I jumped into them after that. It wasn't anything like playing pretend. Not even!

 

If all of that hadn't been enough, well, I mean, how often does a kid get to talk to anyone that he wants? That's when I became aware that the voice in my head who had been there right then wasn't an alien, but somebody named Michael. He said that people called him an angel, but really, seeing as how he was also like from another world, he was sort of like an alien, because, really? People didn't know much about angels. Well, I didn't either. But, you know, the President, the aliens, Her Majesty... why not? At the moment I was still wondering about kings and queens, and for some strange reason we began to talk about emperors too. Well, as long as I already sound this crazy, Michael let me talk to an Emperor that was from a long time ago. But it was really neat because he was about the same age as me. He was in China. He was so friendly, and he was really smart. He told me a lot of things, and he believed in reincarnation just like my Mom and me did. But he knew a lot more about that than I did. He even said that one day he would be me. That just made my head hurt. He was telling me all of these things that made my head hurt. A lot of it was very interesting but a lot of it was too much for me. Anyway, we had a great talk, he wanted to talk some more but I told him that I had to go lay down because my head hurt. But I couldn't stop thinking, even though I wanted to.

 

So I went in and laid down on the couch and Michael was sort of laughing and telling me not to worry so much, that I wouldn't be crazy or anything, and that he was going to show me more things and that everything was alright. I wasn't in trouble or anything. That's when I thought about angels, and how I really didn't know anything about them. He said that was ok, because, really, neither did anyone else. He was a sort of leader angel or something, so he got to do these things. Not all angels did these things. So, and I don't know why I thought this, but I asked if I could talk to God. He said that he'd be right back. A few minutes later he said that I could. But then I started thinking about that. I didn't know how to talk to Her Majesty, let alone God. Maybe I'd better wait, I thought. Michael thought that was a good idea. But I wanted to make sure that someday I could. He said that I could, and asked me when that would be. I said, well, whenever I was ready, and whenever I could make God proud of me. You know, God knows everything. And I fibbed sometimes. Michael just laughed. So does everybody else, he said. Sometimes it was ok. You know, like when you just didn't want to hurt sombody's feelings.

 

I guess I never really thoughtseriously about God before. Not like that anyway. It was a little scary. I wanted to think about something else for awhile. So we talked about something else for awhile. Cars, I think. And television. We didn't have a TV and I wanted one. But Michael told me that sometimes it was better to spend your time thinking, and I would be glad that I did. He finally convinced me. He said that a lot of things are how they should be if people only thought about it. He gave me some examples that I forget. But he was right. So I didn't ask for a TV, even though it was my favorite thing. My auntie said that I was watching TV before I was out of the... What do you call that thing? Baby seats. She put me in front of the TV in the baby seat when I was a new born baby and I couldn't stop watching. I even remember that. The man on the cooking show was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't understand what because I didn't know how to talk yet. I didn't know that the man was talking to everyone. But I don't think that he was really, because he stopped cooking and came right up to the camera and started talking away, and some woman came and took him by the arm and made him stop. Then they did a commercial. I think Michael does those things. It's not like he's being sneaky. It's just that, well, if he had to stop and explain everything to everybody all the time he'd never get anything done. That's what he told me. He just does a whole lot of things really fast, that's all...

 

That's... all?

 

Oh, man. Seven is so heavy. How did... Never mind. Yeah, Crazy. Sounds so freaking crazy. I don't like to think about it. If people ever found out that I used to think like that... How could I ever explain these things? Seven. My "little" alter. Mind control splits you up. So many different mes now. What's weird is that they weren't programmed mes. They happened spontaneously in a moment of crises. In a way. In a way some of them happened long before mind control. I remember it plainly. There I was, seven years old, sitting on the back steps of the house up the hill, telling this story to everyone from the future. I have too many alters to count anymore. And most of them are time anomalies. And Seven is the most powerful of all of them.

 

 

End Chapter Ten

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Nine

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Nine

 

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

 

Older now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were all those hippie years when life was wonderful. It was all an adventure then. When did life turn sour? Oh yeah. 1987.  Always the same answer.

 

How did all of that start? Geeze, you know the memory isn't what it used to be after all that I've been through. Somehow all of this was meant to happen, I guess. Did it start with meeting JFK in my head? Did it start on that disturbing day when the military men were all upset? I don't know. Couldn't say. in a way, I always think that it started a few years before 1987.

 

Paintball is a stupid sport in a lot of ways. Oh, God. No, don't talk about paintball. Well, but that's where it began, in a way. There, where I began to meet new people. It was after that when things went sour at work, and for no real good reason. Nothing that I could ever put my finger on.

 

When we first started our team there was another team that was doing well at the field. No losses for six months straight, and I considered it our challenge to beat them. That was the only real measure of success, that was the only goal worth having at the time, was to rise through the ranking system at the field, You know, all of that stupid youthful macho exuberance. A young man with something to prove.

 

No easy challenge. These guys were a class act, unlike any other team there. They all owned their own guns, had their own T-shirts, and they hada newsletter. The captain of their team was brilliant. He did his own artwork and most of the writing for the newsletter, and was just freaking brilliant. I subscribed partly because I considered it like intelligence, I wanted to get to know our opponent. Partly I figured we could learn from their success. Partly, I was an enormous fan. I read the newsletter over, and over and over each month until the next one arrived. There was something about this guy. He was agenius of some sort. And his editorials were revealing in ways that I hadn't expected.

 

This guy knew how to be a team. Teamwork and communication were his specialties. And no wonder. He was former Green Beret, and had survived countless incursions behind enemy lines in Vietnam. Wouldn't have guessed it. He was the friendliest guy that you ever met. Great sense of humor. And had a certain humility to him that was completely disarming. He had become a cop when he got out of the service, and somehow ended up with paintball as a serious hobby.

 

There was something really familiar about him. But I could never place it. Even his name seemed familiar. And there was something magical about him. Probably why everyone called him the Wiz. Not to be outdone I started our own newsletter, which led to a whole lot of back and forth, all in good fun. Jabs, propaganda, and mutual back slapping. Great fun, but I found myself really admiring the man. He was somebody I began to see as a role model in my life. I doubt that he ever really new how much I had taken to him as a mentor.

 

And it really was very magical, as if we could read each other's minds. It's one thing to just feel that way, or to think such things. But every month when the newsletter arrived I saw proof of it. For some reason we knew each other. As far as I know, he saved my life. He must have. It must have been that he got wind of what was happening to me when my life began to implode in 1987. The cops weren't going to help me, but the sheriffs showed up, even though they were from the next town over. Did he put in a call to someone? I don't know to this day. But what was apparent was that, for reasons unknown to me, he knew more about my situation than anyone else. He told me all of these things in that metaphor sort of way that just had everything to do with what was happening in my life. I never even new how or why, but those little things that he said kept popping up in my mind over and over again as I wouldsit and recall every detail that I could trying to figure out how I ever got into the extreme mess that I was in, or how to get out of it. But by then it was as if a truck had run over my head. It was a wonder that I could still think at all.  

 

Somehow, I had just been struggling so hard with all of the deliberate illusions being forced upon me in some covert psychological war against me, that I seldom allowed my mind to wander to anything more extraordinary than was absolutely necessary to understand how or why they were pulling this war off. The last thing I needed to worry about, I thought, were the voices that I used to hear in my head when I was a kid. Especially alien voices, for Christ's sake. My number one goal at that point in my life was to remain sane. And alive.

 

Finally, after a year and a half, when my marriage was over, while I was losing the house that my father had built and that I had grown up in, sitting there without any utilities and no food, and being threatened by some CIA guy who I identified from previous encounters, George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just become president, I think, I started looking for a way out. And I was no longer in a position to be picky. I prayed to God, I even talked to aliens.

 

That's when they began to remind me of all that had happened before the mind control tank ran over my head. And that's when I remembered this Wiz guy. The first time that I met him. He was the soldier in Vietnam who I had told to expect help from the "Martians". That was part of the plan at some point. That I would meet this guy and get to know him. And he would be there in my life when I most needed someone to be there, at a time when it was already getting hard for me just to sign in at the paintball games because I couldn't remember the year and had trouble even remembering my name anymore.

 

I thought about all of those years ago when I was seven or eight laying down in the back seat of the family car on the long drive to Lil' Miss, about how he had told me that he had problems with the CIA, and how for some strange reason I said that the "Martians" would help him. And how the songs on the radio would talk to me, in a way. Tell me when things would be alright. "Near the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight." My problem had been all along that I couldn't believe how serious things were getting.And every time I thought about that, they were even more serious than I dared believe. Somehow though, eventually something would come along to fix by broken believer. But full well I knew that every time that happened I was being drawn into a world of other "nut jobs" who had no way at all of proving what they believed. Rather than become so marginalized, I justcontinued to compartmentalize mythoughts, and live a double life. As lonely as that was, it was still a life that would allow me to carry on.

 

There were other songs. One meant that things were getting heavy. "C, CC Rider, now see what you have done". Where would I be without the music?

 

 

End Chapter Nine

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles Chapter Eight

The Mindstorm
Chronicles:
Chapter Eight

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

By the time I entered into Junior High School in our conservative little town I was already aware that the world was often an unjust place. It was just that, apart from the occasional bully, or the time I saw our sixth grade teacher grab a student and hold him against the wall with his feet dangling beneath him, the world had been pretty fair to me. All that was about to change in the seventh grade.

 

The first time I sat down to a picnic table in the quad for morning break, a teacher came up behind me, grabbed my hair and jerked my head back and said, "Get a haircut, Liberace!" Mind you, my hair was just a little longer than anyone else's by today's standards, but those were the days when the dress code said that your hair was never to touch your shirt collar or your ears, and had to be above your eyebrows. Him and his flat top haircut walked off and I thought, "At least I grow my hair on the outside of my head!" For the whole rest of my time at that school I was getting in trouble for my hair. My English teacher was especially fond of sending me to the office. But she was one mean woman anyway. One of those teachers who you know hates their job, should have been famous or something if the world had appreciated her true gift, which as far as I could tell was being mean.

 

Like so many schools, people banded together in one way or another because there was safety in numbers. The bullies over on the side of the quad next to the snack bar, and a sort of descending order to the opposite side where my friends and I hung out. Some of us knew each other from elementary, and we were slowly going from being mod to being rockers, even if we were the sorts who actually read books and had long philosophical discussions about what was wrong with the world. I guess it was because we were so accepting of people that wewere slowly surrounded by other nerds of every type. You know. People who were different because they were smart, or short, or fat, had some handicap or were just insecure about the world. It probably didn't look as though we would fight, but looked as if we could, and that was good enough for them. Anyway, besides safety in numbers there was laying low and being inconspicuous, which worked at least until one braved the watering hole known as the snack bar. God help you if the bullies gathered for a feeding frenzy. That's when a dozen or more would surround you, humiliate you, push you around and then walk off laughing.

 

There were two friends of ours who always hung out together. One was the biggest and most heavy set guy, and the other was the smallest guy in school. I learned good lessons from both of them. One day the bullies came up and picked the little guy up and dropped him in a trash can. But rather than getting mad he just folded his arms and stood there saying, "Cute. Cute." Which even made the bullies laugh in a more good humored sort of way. Once I saw him get up on a picnic table and dance for the whole school when he was being picked on. Everyone cheered and he was a success. The bullies never could match his wit. His best weapon was his sense of humor.

 

Our other friend came to my rescue one day in a lesson about courage that I never forgot. The bullies had me surrounded, a much larger crowd than usual, and for the first time I saw the big guy, who never even stood up for himself, go into action. All you could see was his bright red hair tossing bullies from behind this way and then that, and he stood in front of me and informed them that if they wanted me they were going to have to go through him. After that the bullies never bothered him, or me, whenever he was around.

 

By the ninth grade, the smaller guy and I conspired to put Shakespeare to the test and see if the pen really was mightier than the sword. His dad owned an old fashioned printing press, and we went to work on our own underground newspaper. We denounced bullies for their homophobia, a thought which was way, way ahead of the times. None of us were gay or anything. Well, not at least as we knew, anyway, but being different was sure to get you called all sorts of things. But why couldn't they keep their hands off of us unless they were gay, we asked. We also ran a slander column that poked fun of teachers.

 

Bullies would be reading the paper in class and nervously looking around as if guilty of something. Some of the teachers devoted the whole hour to denouncing it. But after that, the bullies stopped bothering everyone like it was magic. It worked so well that we never even came out with a second issue. And we had massive respect. Nobody wanted to be the subject of the second edition. Shakespeare had been right.

 

One day in drama class, the teacher, another fairly mean woman, passed out a poem and we were told that we were to recite it. If we memorized it we would get at least an A regardless of performance. If we performed it well, but didn't memorize it, the best we could hope for was a C.  Then a few of us in class happened to notice that the poem was blatantly bigoted towards blacks. The girl who sat next to me, with the really long straight black hair and John Lennon glasses, who always wore white, I don't know, panty hose or tights or something, the ones with little red apples all over them because she had to wear a dress but didn't shave her legs, became outraged and denounced the poem as racist propaganda. After a short discussion the teacher told the class to raise their hands if they objected to the assignment and that they would be given a different one. Right away, I smelled a rat.

 

Well, the girl with the John Lennon glasses raised her hands, along with another guy in class, and I just looked at them, "It's a trap!" I wanted to say. But then she looked at me and shouted, "Raise your hand!" And so I did. Not that I needed anymore suspensions right then. But as I suspected, instead of new assignments we were reported to the office. But the school counselor let us off and called in the teacher because the students stories were identical.

 

The next day we were issued new assignments, but quickly found them to be much like the first except that they picked on different minorities. Did I mention that our school was almost entirely white? We all thought it would be pressing our luck to ask for still another assignment. So when the day came that we had to perform our poems the girl with the glasses and the strange stockings, or whatever you call them, got up and read hers in a disinterested monotone and received a "D". When it came to our friend, he did the same thing, and for the same grade. But I wasn't satisfied with that. So when I read mine I was as dramatic as I could possibly be, screaming at the tops of my lungs as if I were the irrational bigot carrying on about "savages". I received a standing ovation from the class at the end, who were shouting at the teacher that I deserved better than a "C" even if I didn't memorize the poem. The only hard part was that the girl with the glasses was laughing hysterically all the way through my reading, and it made me want to laugh too.

 

Our little town was changing, no matter how slowly. I remembered when I was new to the first grade a black kid came to our school. A bunch of other little boys started beating him up, and when I told the teacher on playground duty she just looked away. I was nearly in tears going back to class after the bell rang. I thought about how he must feel, but what really did me in was thinking how his Mom would feel that this happened. Throughout most of my life when I was there, the only black people one ever saw were getting a ticket by the side of the road. For some reason, neither my Navajo or Hispanic friends ever had such problems.

 

Every once in awhile I would talk to the voices in my head. Now I remember that I talked to an alien when I first entered that school. He pretty much said that the whole world was this way, not just the school, and he didn't seem to know why either. But there was a chance that it would all change someday. Especially if we could think of ways to help it change. It was a possibility, at least. Pretty much I didn't feel qualified to say any such things, and told him if ever I came up with something he could try it out on people who knew more about such things than I did. Things like having a press that took up for the underdogs, like the value of humor, like using the right to say no to stupid stuff even if it meant being sent to the office. Somehow though, I just knew that I was headed into some kind of confrontation with the powers that be. But at that time I just had the strange feeling that I would keep getting suspended for the rest of my life.

 

 

End Chapter Eight

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Seven

The Mindstorm

Chronicles:

Chapter Seven

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

The world always seems like such a vast and confusing place to a child. You start out learning the basic differences between right and wrong, and end up wondering just how adults seem to have forgotten such lessons. At some point you wake up and realize that there is so much hypocrisy going on about everything that you increasingly begin to take on a sort of cynicism, the world is in the hands of so many fakers and snake oil salesmen that it makes you stop listening, you begin as a preteen to form a sort of existentialist view. The world is quite insane. Though you figured that at a much younger age, by the time that you have some knowledge of the world the proof is everywhere. Everything seems absurd. And it really is.

 

Somewhere along the line I had become socially conscious, slowly, too slowly to have recognized that this was happening to me. It was partly, I suppose, the sort of times that we lived in that made me so. I was always a curious kid, and I'd run across some of my sister's more liberal books about the civil rights movement, was forming my own opinion about Vietnam from various papers that I'd read, watched as charges of injustices such as police brutality dominated at least some headlines. Every once in awhile I'd stop and say something to the voices I always felt were still listening somewhere, and on rare occasions I would talk to someone, a politician of some sort or another. After which I would embrace my custom of talking to some entertainment types so that it made me feel better somehow. Like we were doing something, if not very much at all. Though quite often the results of those dialogs produced results which exceeded all expectations.

 

Not that I'm at all comfortable talking about those things. You know, when you're just sitting alone in your darkened living room talking to the voices in your head, and not really knowing how they feel about any of this, and not even being sure that you're not just crazy or something, it doesn't seem like much at all. But later it seems like too much if the thing we talked about really took on wings. Then it would look as though you were trying to gain something by being associated with something famous and all, even if the fact was that you were just a kid whiling away a few hours now and then. And had just hoped that you weren't dooming them by asking for something so different.

 

We talked about all kinds of things and would sort of think them through together. Those voices were still so helpful in answering my questions, you know, why the world was this way or that way, what did they see happening from where they sat and so on. One time I asked someone why, if rock and roll music was so powerful, didn't anyone try to use it to do something useful in the world? And the voice said "Like what?" And I had to think about that for awhile. And I thought, well, you know, find some things that we all know are true, things that all people should believe in, and sing about those things sometimes.

 

I remembered President John Kennedy saying something which I later learned was quoted from another president, that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. During the course of the evening I began to wonder just what he'd meant, and how many ways that was true. Someone had said that some people hated some other people because they were afraid of them, and really, they didn't even know those people. They were too afraid to even get to know those people in the first place. Some rich people liked it that way, but most normal people suffered because of it. So, I thought that, well, maybe someone should try out some songs about all of that and see if people would like them enough that they still bought the music.

 

I tried to just stay with what I thought I knew for sure, things that made us all better people, things like I'd been learning from those other voices in my head. We shouldn't be fearful and hateful. We shouldn't be ignorant. We shouldn't be silent. We could do anything if we just put our minds to it. Those sorts of things.

And right then the voice in my head, who I'd all but forgotten about said, "How should it go?" 

 

So I made up a little song about it, and I could see the man, who I had always thought to look much different than he did right then, writing down the words. He was from England and I thought about the man from Tavistock who I spoke to many years earlier, and I wanted an English approach to the song. Then, as happened sometimes, I began to get pictures coming into my mind's eye that there would be a whole lot of satellites connected for the very first time for TV, and I thought that if the song turned out to be good enough, well, that maybe it would inspire musicians everywhere to use the power of their music to once in awhile say something that made people think instead of just going along with whatever the rich people had to say, or just so many songs that were far less meaningful. Then we just started talking and talking, but I've probably said more than enough about all of that already.

 

With some other person I talked about alien contact quite a bit, because that had always been an area of interest to me. I seldom spoke to the aliens anymore, or if I did they didn't feel it necessary to tell me that they were aliens. After my president was shot I was never as accessible to voices. Not for a long time anyway, though sometimes we'd still talk about one thing or another. But I hated the feeling that maybe I might have gotten him into a lot of trouble, and that I could get someone else into trouble. All the same, you know, I had to leave it to God and to adults to figure these things out. Well, and the aliens, who were adult aliens even if they were only five years old. The world was just a very serious place. Could be, anyways. But it always made me feel good when something popped up in the media about which I'd been some small part.

And it seemed sometimes, well, as though the whole universe wanted me to be happy, and that I was just the luckiest kid in the world, even if these other things were so difficult to go through.

 

Lil' Miss was a wonderful place, our nursery and our landscaping made it seem like a tropical island somewhere, and we were always playing at such things. There was a public swimming pool just down the street and we'd spend a lot of time there in the summer, which always put me in mind of Tarzan movies and the like, going from the jungle to the water that way to swim, being an imaginative kid and all. In Lil' Miss, us kids, tadpoles the old folks called us, spent our summers in no more than a pair of cutoff jeans and underwear. We didn't wear shoes or shirts, we were just like Tarzans and Bomba the Jungle Boys and what not, climbing trees, throwing spears made from tree stakes, climbing trees and all. We hadn't had a monkey for a long, long time, but my dog was still my best sidekick, and after a long day of swimming I'd come home to that same old familiar scolding, "Ahrooo, rooo, rooo! Ahrooo, rooo, rooo!" And all that went with it. It was sort of like my Tarzan call.

 

I used to love that summer afternoon time of day in Lil' Miss. The way the light danced upon the water at the pool, the way it filtered down through all of the trees as the day began to cool off. I'd come down the path past Granny's shed, where we stored materials, share whatever was left of my treats which were purchased with whatever change was left with my dog Laddy and than go straight to my room to rest and to watch television with my bloodshot and blurry eyes. Laying there exhausted from the days swim, smelling of sunburned skin, I would usually hear some little remaining pool water drain out of my ear just before I went off to sleep for a little while. For all the world, at that age, I couldn't have imagined a better life for a kid.   

 

 

End Chapter Seven

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Six

The Mindstorm

Chronicles:

Chapter Six

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You Decide.

 

 

There were conversations I had with a good number of important people. Not that I really understood how important or how famous they were at the time, or why they would listen to anything some kid would have to say anyway. But I was slowly becoming more socially conscious, even if it was in my own clueless kind of way. People took time to explain things to me. And I took the time to tell them what I thought about such things. I didn't know if they were all tat interested, or just being polite because I was a kid.

 

For whatever reason, one night I was talking to the president again, and somehow we started talking about civil rights, something that was on his mind right about then. He explained to me what civil rights were, and why some people were having a hard time just having their civil rights because other people were prejudiced. And then he had to explain to me what all of that meant. He said that one of the problems was that black people couldn't get jobs because they were discriminated against. And after he told me what all that meant, I had an idea.

 

I told him that maybe it was just like he said, people just didn't really understand each other, and that if he could prove that black people were worth hiring by employing more black people, that because he was the president, people would learn more, and follow his example. That seemed to sort of surprise him, and he said he didn't know how to go about it, and did I have any ideas. So, I thought, well, you're the president. Don't you have policemen that keep you safe all the time? Then he told me that he had Secret Service people around all the time to keep him safe. And I said, well, that would be just perfect, because if people knew that you trusted your safety to a black person, that would be a lot of trust. That seemed to really surprise him. He began to tell me why it wasn't just so simple, how sometimes the bad people got really upset about things like that.

 

Now, it's not as though I'd put any great deal of thought into any of this, but being a kid there was just right and wrong to think about. And so I told him that, well, if the president couldn't see fit to do something just because it was right, then I guess nobody could. And that was pretty distressing, and how now I had to go and think on that for quite awhile. And that I just didn't want to talk about it anymore. But that's when he said "Wait! Wait! Come back!" and we talked some more. And in my minds eye I saw him in his office with his brother, and both of them seemed surprised and more than just a little amused, but I couldn't have said why. But that's just the way grown ups are with kids anyway, though I never knew why. They always seemed to laugh at us whenever we said anything at all, if it had to do with anything much at all.

 

So we talked a little bit more about civil rights, which I was learning was a very simple subject that was also somehow so complicated that I couldn't understand it. Partly because it seemed so simple to me. So I said that I should go and find out more about these things, and he referred me to some preacher who he said knew all about these things. And I thought, well, that's good. So I started to learn some things from him, but they were very disturbing things which I never would have thought, and it just seemed to me that the whole world was crazy, and I didn't know how it was that I would ever survive being an adult in such a world. And I wondered why adults taught us kids one thing, but lived to some entirely different standard altogether. Then I had to learn about laws, and all kinds of things that they didn't talk about in elementary school that I knew of.

And it seemed like I was just all wrapped up in such discussions with a good many people for the longest time off and on after that. But it had me thinking all of the time, especially when I was listening to one of the two radio stations available at night, my favorite was a black gospel station. I could do without the preaching, but I loved the music, and during the day all we could get was the elevator music on the other station. I knew all of those songs already.

 

Then one day I came in from outside to hear that someone had shot the president. I couldn't have imagined such a thing was even possible. I suppose I went into a sort of shock, like the whole world didn't seem real anymore, and I wondered if I had caused it to happen by asking too much of him in a world that I didn't understand. I went straight to my room and cried, and became depressed for quite awhile, even though the alien was trying to comfort me and explain some things about it, which I was just in no condition to hear, or to understand right then. After that, I just didn't want to talk to any voices in my head anymore.

 

As the years went by I kept learning more and more about the world. My mother's MS, which is why we'd had the house up the hill, had improved and so before I had finished the fourth grade we'd rented the house out on Fox Farm Road to someone else and moved back to Lil' Miss in Downey.  By that time I really wasn't talking to aliens or anyone else via telepathy very much anymore, just a little now and then, sometimes about the future. At some point in time I had just decided that it was always too much for me, and I was still worried about it all making me seem too crazy. So we sort of agreed, the alien and I, that they would always be around, and if I ever wanted to talk to them all I had to do was think about them and they'd be there. And sometimes I would, though we didn't talk about aliens very much at all or much else for the longest time. But it had become a habit that whenever things bothered me, or I just had a thought about something that I wondered about, that we would talk about things like music, television and the movies. And it was amazing that they could seem to get those ideas to some people that made things happen, which I could never even hope to explain, and would never have admitted to for fear of seeming, well, just too crazy.

 

My childhood was pretty typical for that time, I'd guess. The usual things, learning about girls and bullies, having friends, and whatever else school taught a person. It was a good time though. As was typical of the other boys at that time, we were always finding our heroes in the movies or on TV. The spy genre was big when I was in fifth grade, and so I took to dressing all in black, which was a stark contrast to the lime green shirts and lemon yellow pants that my mother had bought for me in fourth grade. The following year my friends and I went Mod, and began to really discover clothes, music, and girls.

 

For some strange reason, I just had to have a unicycle. And I learned to ride it while listening to even newer kinds of rock and roll music as I tried and tried until I could finally make my way down the driveway and back without falling. All the music seemed really good, and really interesting, but my favorite was a song by Janis Joplin. It was like something I used to wonder. What would it be like if that black gospel music was done like rock and roll. It was like the best of both worlds. And it just seemed so funny to me when that song would come on and she'd sing what sounded to me like, "I'm a hill man when I cry, and baby, I cry all the time..." It made me remember the mountains. And President John Kennedy.

 

Life for me in the sixth grade was just one wonder after another. Walking down the street one day I even saw the Monkeemobile parked in a driveway, and each flap on the drag chute was signed by one of the Monkees themselves. Later I learned that the guy who designed it lived there. I think that he also designed the Green Hornet's Black Beauty and the Batmobile. I'm pretty sure that I saw the Black Beauty there once.  Anyway, except for when my Granny passed away that year, I hadn't a care in the whole wide world.

 

My Granny had been dirt poor down in Mississippi, meaning that they were so poor that the floor was made of dirt. She was always so kind to me, but she always talked to me in those southern sayings, and never much at all in any other way. "I see said the blind man as he bumped into the wall", "Hambone, hambone, where you been", and then she would just go on writing letters or knitting, or preparing food. She was very religious, but she only took me to church one time when I was about three or four. That's because when they started to sing I didn't want to stand out and not sing just because I didn't know the words, so I thought I'd sing the only lyrics that I knew, which unfortunately was from a beer commercial. "From the land of sky blue waters!" I sang loudly. That was the last time that I went to church for years, and years, and years.

 

And Laddy and I settled fortaking daily walks with him on a leash. He sure loved city smells though, and having so many other dogs around. And we would still just be sitting around bored and wouldn't you know it, we'd exchange those familiar old glances now and again. "I'll wear you out!" "Oh, no you won't!" And start chasing each other and wrestling all over again, just like no matter what else changed about the world, at least we'd always be the same.

 

End Chapter Six

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Five

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Five

A work of fiction? A work of non-fiction? The work of insanity?

You decide.

 

As I was saying, my dog was enough company for me most of the time. Well, along with my mother, of course, who had just as much time on her hands as I did, and didn't mind spending it with me whenever I wanted to learn something, or whenever I was just bored. Growing up a farm girl, she knew more ways to entertain your mind than anyone else that I ever knew.

 

She knew every kind of riddle and puzzle, all kinds of jokes and card tricks, and she allowed her thoughts to be all her own, profound and deep, even if it would only be years later that I understood how exceptional she was in that way. For all I knew all mothers were like that, and I suspect that a good many really are. She respected me enough to let me think about things which most grown ups wouldn't have bothered teaching to someone my age. So, I suppose that there is something to be said for boredom, that it often leads to things like creativity. And discussion.

 

One night we were talking about telepathy and I challenged her to prove that she could suggest things to people that way. She said alright, then wrote down something on a piece of paper and said that I would do it. She said is was something that I never, ever did, but that she wished that I would. So I sat there intent on not doing anything at all just to see. But wouldn't you know it, after awhile I became restless and fidgety and the first thing I did was put the top back on the ketchup bottle, just as she said. That's what was written on the piece of paper.

 

Not that she would do that kind of thing alot, just whenever she wanted people to go home.

 

Before we had moved out to the old fox farm in the hills there between Moonridge and Big Bear City, we'd rented a cabin in 'Bear City that belonged to a Polish family that had seven kids. They became our good friends, and if you can imagine what it was like to go from just me and the dog to the nine of us whenever they'd visit, well, you'd think the circus had arrived in town. They were great people, very kind, very thoughtful, and very smart. One of the two girls was about my age. And I had my first crush on her.

 

One night, when they had visited us at the cabin that we had rented there, before moving out to Fox Farm Road, the mother of the seven kids from who we had rented the house began to tell my mother about having been in a concentration camp during the big war. She was just a young girl then, and the Nazis had come to their town and rounded up all the young women and took them away to make prostitutes of them, not that I would have known what that meant, but later my mother told me enough about it, something like that they were forced to be wives for people who didn't have wives, sort of thing. Because she was a nurse and had medical skills they put her to work in a concentration camp. She had tried to escape with some other girls by swimming across a river, but she got caught up in what she thought was some sort of sea weed or something, only to find out that she'd become entangled in human intestines. They caught the girls who had tried to flee.

 

She talked for hours and hours about all of that, as if she could never say enough about it. About how she was forced to watch them do cruel things to people but couldn't do anything about it. And about how they didn't know that any of this was going to happen, how they just ended up on a train going somewhere and were taken into the camps. That's when she showed us the numbers that were tattooed on her arm. All of that was as horrifying as it was interesting to a boy who wasn't even six years old yet. I didn't sleep so well that night, I was experiencing emotions I had never had before, and had no idea just what to call them. But I tried not to think about it too much, except that I finally remembered who Nazis were from the old war movies that I'd seen. And I was proud as could be that my country fought against such things.

 

So I didn't come to all of this Nazi spy business without any understanding at all, though like most folks I had no idea how anyone could ever be so mean in the first place. I had an older brother, so I understood mean. But I didn't understand about, nor had I ever even heard the word cruelty. Maybe I had heard it in the movies, and from my sister, but truth be told, there were a lot of words that I didn't understand in the movies.

And lots of words that my sister said that I didn't know what they meant. She was much older.

 

It wasn't until we moved to Fox Farm Road that my mother turned up one day with a Tricolor Collie puppy which I wanted to name Laddie, just because I loved the movie "Lassie", which I'd only ever seen in black and white. And everyone in those days would say, "Oh! You have a Lassie Dog!" And I would correct them by saying no, we had a Laddie dog. My mother thought that he might be part wolf because of the way he sort of hung his nose over the edge of his water bowl when he'd take a drink. Anyway, we were practically inseparable from the very first day. And as he grew we found him to be really smart. Whenever our flatland friends would come up for the weekend, often with other members of our family who were still living in Lil' Miss, my Dad would take us all out to hike in the woods somewhere, and that dog would liked to have worked himself to death running up and down the line, keeping us all together. Up to the front he would go and grab the lead persons sleeve and gently tug to slow them down, and once that was accomplished he'd run to the end of the line and hurry up the slower ones.

 

He was a great bodyguard as well. If ever anyone ever began to play fight he would separate them. All you would have to do is hold up a fist like you were going to punch somebody and you were going to have to deal with that dog first. But being as I was the youngest, and the closest with Lad, he always listened to me first. My brother was quite a bit older than me and all I ever had to do was say, "Get 'em, Lad!" and that dog was all over him whenever he tried to pick on me. Of course, Laddie always listened to my Mom, as well. After all, she fed him more often than we did. He learned all of the usual dog tricks, but never seemed to feel too obliged to perform them either. Sometimes I thought that he was every bit as smart as anyone else, and maybe even smarter.

 

Sometimes in the summer we'd go down the hill and spend some time in Lil' Miss. The suburbs were noisy and smelly, but full of action everywhere. I'd catch up with my best friend and neighbor, who was Navajo, and along with all the otherkids who were coming by tosee us we'd go out into "the jungle" nursery and play Army and get as dirty as kids could ever hope to get. My sister was fond of taking me to movies and reading me stories at night, she introduced me to A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six when I had just turned that age. She was always protective of me and stood up for me every time. Being high school age, she didn't have much use for the mountains, all of her friends were in Downey, and so she stayed there with my Dad and Granny, and sometimes my older brother, who seemed to be content in either place, but ended up liking the mountains more than the flatlands. Our folks let us decide in which place we would like to live, but I was always going wherever my Mom went, and so did Lad.

 

The city was a much busier place and I didn't have time to worry about aliens or Nazi spies or any such things. Only once do I remember when I was a kid the elder alien trying to speak with me when I was there. But I was too busy enjoying the business of city dwelling, all my friends and family, catching up with the TV and so forth, and I didn't want to become worried right then about anything, and the once that I did try and set apart some time for a discussion kept getting interrupted by one person or the next, and so whatever it was would just have to wait. Besides, I was just a kid, and something about being a kid in the city just made me feel so much less important than I did in the mountains where one could hike all day and not see another human being anywhere. So I would usually tell them that, well, if it were really important they should talk to my Dad, he would know better than I did anyway. To which the alien, once again, in my minds eye, just seemed perplexed. And in fact the alien came back to me and said something to the effect that my Dad didn't really understand, but I would have none of it at that point. I thought it would make me seem crazy to go having these silent conversations right about then when everyone seemed to want my attention.

 

To be clear about all of this, my father and I never discussed aliens in my whole life. There was once when I was much older when the subject came up and he gave me a very serious look, but no talk about aliens. And when he passed away everyone was wondering if he had worked for the government or something. People had little stories about mysterious calls, limousines, getting things past airport security, the things he used to know and so on. But although to me he seemed to know so much more about the world than anyone else that I knew, he never mentioned anything to me about such things, although some times it was if between us there were things unspoken about something going on. For all I knew, his only involvement with anything of the kind was when he was a SCUBA diver repairing war torn ships in Pearl Harbor, or that he was a deputy sheriff so that he could perform Civil Defense duties during the war. But folks were right, that he had a mysterious side to him. Somehow, he could even carry his gun on a plane. But I'm not sure to this day what any of that was really about, although I've heard some interesting things via telepathy, but at a time when, quite frankly, I was just overwhelmed by everything, and can't be entirely sure about what I'd heard.

 

I have a really good memory. You know, when I was just two we had a monkey who used to steal my lolly pops from a string of them tied to my high chair. But I didn't know about monkeys, so I thought that he was an older brother or an adult or something, and that he knew what he was doing, I didn't. But I'll never forget the guilty look on his face when he would do it, or the day my mother caught him at it.

 

End Chapter Five

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Four

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Four

A work of fiction? A work of non-fiction? The work of insanity?

You decide.

As far as I knew, all kids had such experiences. It didn't seem to me to be so highly unusual at all, but often made me think about how special kids were that they had imaginary play mates, or could play pretend about anything at all. I thought that, should anyone ever discover anything really unusual or interesting it would have to be a kid because grown ups just didn't think this way. All the same, the telepathic conversations I was having always seemed to be very real to me, in part because people said things that I just didn't know anything about, which although it was depressing and even frightening at times, was also highly educational. Whenever somebody said something about which I knew absolutely nothing, and it was important, I had to excuse myself and spend some hours just learning about that. And, well, there were so many things that I didn't know, that I had to just keep on learning and learning. Even if it did make my head hurt.

 

Telepathy itself had been that way for me. My mother had always said that she was telepathic, but I don't think that she meant it in the same way as these conversations, I found out later. She saw images, and didn't really hear words or have conversations the way that I did, apparently, though I never told her about these meetings I was having with an alien and all the other people. So, for me, telepathy was just a fact of life, even before I began to experience it the way that I was. It certainly didn't seem so unusual. Even if what we talked about did.

  

There was some odd feeling that I would get sometimes, a feeling like someone was watching from far away, and at those times my thoughts began to drift back to the conversations with the alien and the others, which for the most part I was content not to have to think about very much. But there was something just very ominous in the air, something that seemed very important. Now, bear in mind that these memories come back in flashes, and while I could always remember just where I was when these things happened, remembering just when they happened wasn't always as easy. You know, just which conversation came first, although I had a pretty good idea which year it happened.

 

Now, after the first time that I talked to president John Kennedy, I became a huge fan. My brother had told me all about the book "Profiles in Courage", which had too many big words for me to read. I was such a fan of his that I started wearing my hair like his, now that I was really paying attention to how presidents looked and what they did and all. He seemed like such a nice man when we talked the one time, and I was just sure that he was a very good man as well. Years later my Dad painted a portrait of me from an old photo from that time, and so people got to see my president Kennedy haircut for years and years, and I never tired of telling people that's what sort of haircut it was supposed to be.

 

As if all that I'd been through up to this point hadn't been strange enough already, the alien was telling me that something very serious was happening. After he explained that I wasn't in any trouble, always my first concern, you know, I told him that I really didn't much want to have any discussions right then, that I felt like I really didn't know enough to be much help, couldn't understand why these people wanted to talk to me, and was not wanting to be depressed again over the sheer enormity of the world's problems anyway. But wouldn't you know it, he said the one thing to me that made all the difference in the world. He said that the president wished to speak to me. But at that point these things seemed so real to me, and I didn't really feel worthy to speak to a president, but the alien said that it was very serious. Back then the only thing I understood about serious is that you never wanted your parents to get that way, because it meant that you were in trouble.

 

But, well, if he was sure that he wanted to speak to me, well, he was my president and all. He didn't say a whole lot right away, I got the feeling that all of this made him just as uncomfortable as it did me for some strange reason. But then he got right down to matters, and said that our military was going to invade Cuba and he needed some thoughts on what to do. Nothing like this had ever happened before to me, and suddenly I was having images flash through my mind about some big island far away, and a bunch of soldiers waiting in boats. He told me briefly while these images were happening, or rather the images were happening as he told me briefly, that they had expected the people there to rise up against their communist leader and all, which just started me wondering what communism was. It seemed familiar, as if it had come up before, and I wondered how in the world adults managed to ever remember so many things about the world.

 

He waited for some sort of reply, but I was still sort of lost and didn't really know what to say. I heard the alien speaking to him, but I was too lost in my thoughts to hear them. And then after a moment of silence, I had to ask, what did he want to know from me? That's when he told me that he had just received a phone call from Russia, and that they said that they would shoot some of those super bombs at us if we invaded the island.

 

Until that moment, I had no idea that anyone else had those but us. And then the strangest and most frightening thing happened. Suddenly I thought about our home in the suburbs, and then I saw a man standing somewhere else, and a huge orange flash just came and swept him away. That's when I began to say, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" and was just very shaken by what I'd seen. He seemed to want to know more but I couldn't tell him much at all at that point, just that it wasn't good, and I believe I even described what I'd seen. I didn't recognize the man that I saw swept away by the orange light, not until many, many years later when I finally saw a photograph of a man who looked just like him, a photograph of a much younger George Herbert Walker Bush.

 

Anyway, the whole conversation was over nearly as soon as it began. I was torn between going to lay down and rest and not knowing what to do. I suppose that it was the first time that I ever began my lifelong habit of pacing when I was worried. The alien assured me that everything was going to be alright, but up to that moment I'd never had to be really serious in my whole life. Later that night I would think about the word "serious" in a whole new light.

 

I can't remember if it was the same day or the next day, or a few days later, that I decided that I just needed to know a whole lot more about everything. And that I was just going to have to bear down and go through it, and try to remain as unperturbed as possible. I even talked it over with the alien, who just seemed to be still wondering about me, and possibly why I never wondered more about him, or about aliens. He had let me know not to worry about things too much, that he was going to be like some sort of security for me, and we discussed how very difficult this was on me emotionally, and what sorts of things I thought would make me feel better about it all. He was very generous in that regard, and allowed me to carry on quite a spell about such things as grown ups wouldn't have wanted to hear.

  

There was first and foremost on my mind that there were spies in the government. And for a kid my age, and of that time, there were three things in the whole wide world that one would never, ever want to be, because all of them were the worst of very bad things, and would likely get you killed or worse to be those things that all boys my age hated; Spies, traitors and torturers. You know it was one thing when people did honest battles and such, but being any of those things was about as dishonorable as anything anyone could think of, something about which one could only be ashamed. But of course, that wasn't entirely right, either.

 

As I paced the alien began to sort of help me to think about how sometimes it takes a spy to capture another spy or a traitor. That's just the way those things were done. Now, I had never really thought of that. And it's not like the alien was telling me so much as I was just understanding somehow, visuals came to mind with a certain kind of understanding, but not necessarily from the alien himself, either. And that's when I noticed that this was from a different alien altogether.

 

Whereas I would have said the first alien was like a younger man, this other alien seemed to be older. But when I asked him how old he was he said that he was seven years old. Now at this point I spun out on that very thought, thinking surely my imagination did get the better of me and now I'm just going to go plum crazy. He tried to reassure me that aliens are just different and live and think faster than we do. Still, the thought of seven year olds flying spaceships was just more than I could bear. They didn't have names, either, because they were telepathic in a way where they just knew each others faces, which was also more than I could bear. But at least now I felt completely justified. Just as I expected, it wasn't going to do me to much good to be asking questions about these aliens, all along I was afraid that whatever they would tell me, well, that first of all I wouldn't understand it, and secondly, it would probably be more than I could bear. The second alien then began to look upon me with the same sort of perplexed wonder as the first. Or at least it seemed so. So I sort of shook my head and moved on to other business.

 

Now, about these spies in our government, I wanted to know, whose spies were they? And in my minds eye I saw a whole bunch of men in business suits having a good time, government people of some type, I reckoned, and I could see that several of them were spies. More like I just got that impression somehow.

At this point, however, I didn't really feel like asking the alien any more questions, which would lead to still more confusion on my part, so I did something that was up to that point fairly unusual for me. I stopped to think this all over before deciding who I should talk to next. But somewhere along the line I got the distinct impression that these were Nazi spies. I had no idea how such a thing could be, but just the thought of it was pretty scary.

 

So I began to think about what little I knew about such things. First of all, if there were Nazi spies in the government, it was going to be difficult to avoid running into them somewhere along the line, or at least that would be a constant concern. Then I thought about friends, and I remembered from old war movies that the British were our allies and our friends, and it struck me as being a good thing to have some friends outside of our compromised government looking in. Then, for some strange reason, I decided that I should be speaking to British Intelligence. Maybe they could help, I thought.

 

The next thing I knew I saw a middle aged man's face, who was from somewhere in England called Tavistock. English stuff was often spelled funny, often sounded different, and I wanted to know just how it was spelled so that I could remember it. And what do you know, I had it about right, there was no "L" in Tavistock, and it was spelled with one "a" and one "o" not two "a's". I was pleased to have guessed something right after all this time. He told me a little about the Nazi's, and about how they kill children that they use for telepathy, but how Tavistock didn't kill the children that helped them. Right then and there I had another brief panic, thinking that the Nazi telepaths might catch on to all of this and be hunting me down anytime now, but the alien was, just like the other one, very reassuring that they just weren't going to allow such a thing to happen. Now if you believe in the premise that all of this is actually happening in the first place, there seemed to be no reason to doubt the alien about that any more than the rest of it, all of which certainly seemed quite real to me, even if it was all just the strangest thing that a body could imagine. 

 

Now, as if all of this wasn't hard enough to describe or explain, what happened next surprised all of us quite considerably. I just began to carry on and on about all kinds of things, saying that they should do this and that, and that something or other was going to happen, and because of those things I was going to need this and that, as if I really had some idea what I was talking about. Not that I really did, mind you, not at all, just that whatever was coming out of me was all so very interesting, and not a little exiting. In my way of thinking, this seemed like a really wonderful story of which I was becoming a part, and it seemed to me that I had somehow stumbled upon my life's purpose, right then and there. But I had a lot to learn. And being that I didn't want to get into trouble with anybody, I was thinking that I would have to avoid the usual thing where I would be meeting with spies in dark alleys and so forth, and thought that they would just have to teach me in other ways. School wouldn't do for these things, I couldn't wait until High School, I had to start learning right away! And so I recommended the source of most of my education to that point in time, television, radio and the movies. And as I got completely carried away, and carried on and on, I saw in my mind's eye teams of writers taking down notes.

 

The temptation here is to ask myself how and why these things ever happened to me at all, but whenever I thought about that too much I was just sure that I must be going crazy. So I endeavored not to think about it any more than absolutely necessary, which for the moment meant not at all. And I went off exited about the prospect of being a part of something good, something exiting and worthwhile. After pacing around the old dirt driveway for awhile I went inside to rest, but this time it didn't seem depressing at all, just wondrous.

 

The next few weeks had me stopping to think once in awhile about aliens, and about everything else. My mother told me that animals are naturally telepathic, and I sometimes sat by the porch and tried to communicate via telepathy with my dog. On the question of aliens and whether or not he knew about any of this, he just rolled his eyes up, head between his paws, as if to simply say that he did, and they were out there somewhere, and I got the distinct impression that he thought of them as some sorts of birds because they knew how to fly. But his little brown eyebrows on his face betrayed him to have the same sort of wonder about it as did I.

 

I'll never know, I suppose, how my dog managed to meet me at the end of the long dirt road that descended from our home every single time I got off of my school bus. My mother figured that he just knew the sound of school bus number eight, but I didn't know why it didn't just mean that he was telepathic, I guess it could have made sense either way. But every time I got off of that school bus, he came running down that old dirt road kicking up dust behind him all the way, hollering and howling as if to scold me for having been away all day. We would greet each other with a sort of happy dance, playing around as I imitated his howls. "Ahrooo, rooo, rooo! Ahrooo, rooo, rooo!" And then we would hike up the old dirt road to the house and both of us drink up a lot of cool, clear mountain water.

 

After that we would sit and rest for a little while before the inevitable happened. I would begin to look at him and he would look back with an expression that said, "I'll wear you out!" And I would be thinking, "Oh, no you won't!" And pretty soon we'd be wrestling all over the living room and chasing each other 'round the house until we were both winded and sucking up water again.

 

Despite the fact that the mountains of Big Bear had so few people then, all of us up there sort of hillbillies in our own way, my dog Laddie was most often all the company that I ever really needed, and I felt as though I was one of the luckiest kids in the world to have such a friend. After all, he had saved my life twice, for all I knew, and at the risk of his very own.

 

By now I guess you can tell that my dog helped me to not worry too much about all of this crazy stuff, I could just begin to slip in and out between these two worlds, one of which I was sure was very real, the other seemed so. Later in my life, you know, dogs don't live as long as people do, it would be something else, like music, or girls, which would help me put all of these worrisome things completely out of my mind. And...

that's about all I have to say about that.

 

End Chapter Four

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Three

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Three

 

A work of fiction? A work of non fiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

 

It's hard to say precisely all of the factors that come into play over a lifetime that lead up to how someone thinks. Growing up in the mountains, with the nearest neighbors a couple of miles away, one learned to occupy their time with matters of imagination, more than anything else. So I began to pretend all kinds of things all of the time, building secret little fantasy worlds the way that kids sometimes do.

 

On the long trips back and forth between the mountains and the flatlands, we would be listening to the radio, playing with the -out the window, palm of the hand- aerodynamics as kids do, which led me into pretending that our little bug of a car was surrounded going down the road by some sort of tiny body guard aircraft from one of my childhood fantasies. But sometimes, once in a while, I thought of them as aliens, which wasn't the premise of my fantasy at all, but somehow felt fitting. And somehow reassuring. No big deal, just now and then my mind would wander that way for a few moments, only to begin to make my head hurt for not really knowing much about aliens. Well, or a whole lot else, which made me think about taking school a little more seriously. The prospect of going to school for years and years in order to really know anything at all seemed entirely daunting. Perhaps it was that thought that made me more observant of adults, and not only the things that they knew, but some of the things that they didn't know. Things about which having an education was no guarantee of knowing.

 

The old fox farm on top of the hill where we used to live was a surreal place. Besides the house, we had a barn, attached to which was aroom with a potbelly stove and a vault for storing the fox furs. There were empty steel and wire cages outside, quite a few, that extended about a half a block out the back way, and for about a square block the other way. In the middle of the cages and fox runs, there was an enormous pine tree, and way, way, way up there was a tiny tree house that actually looked like a very tiny house with a shingle roof and  a potbelly stove in it. From there, we supposed, a guard used to watch over everything at night. There was a big chopping block next to the room with the vault, which seemed a bit gruesome, but the room was useful for repairing rental toboggans in the winter time, and we would find new uses for the vault. It became our own little bomb shelter when the Cuban missile crisis was going on.

 

The Cuban missile crisis. Oh, God. We practiced duck and cover in school every day, sometimes. Twice a week usually. Well, at any given time everything was just over. That definitely had an impact on how I perceived the world. The world was crazy. One day, it could be, we would just see a bright light and everything would be over in a flash.

 

Then there was that thing that happened before the missile crisis. A bunch of dialog, come to think of it.

 

WWII had ended, the teacher said, when America developed a super bomb of some kind. She didn't go into too much detail about that, understandably, so neither did I. It was just a known fact that we had bigger bombs and that was all that I really knew. When I was talking to some of the voices in my head, and I didn't always ask who they were, I'd become curious about such things and would have to understand that, really, maybe I was just to young to know about such things. But I found out a whole lot more anyway, eventually, owing to explanations about why bomb shelters needed to be a certain way, and the kinds of problems that we might actually be facing. Somehow, crazy just didn't seem to be a strong enough word to describe the world.

 

But even at that time it seemed to me that, in essence, everyone was confused about war. One of the other kids did a display for a school project which had a very graphic battlefield slaying up close on it, something from some old war propaganda, and the teacher was a bit perturbed, and was telling the class how killingwas terrible. She seemed to stop and take inventory of our perplexed little faces before continuing, that it was also sometimes necessary. She looked around a bit more as we all sat silently looking on with tilted heads, then she continued to expand on those thoughts, much to my interest. I learned that not everybody agrees about war, and that at any given time, how the most people felt about a war would make all the difference in whether or not people wanted them, or thought they were necessary.

 

One day while I was just hanging out in the old barn (I always remember just where I was when these things happened), and I began to think about war very seriously, and had what was a really upsetting exchange which I don't really remember all that well. The aliens seemed to be of the firm opinion that all wars were fought for the money. And that disturbed me very deeply, it wasn't something that I would have thought. I couldn't have imagined such a thing in second grade.  So we decided to have a meeting with the military and get right to the bottom of this. It was my idea.

 

Some military people were sort of saying, yeah, but if other people fight wars for money, somebody has to fight against them. The alien not only seemed unconvinced, but told the military people that they had intelligence problems that they weren't facing. The military people went nuts, the alien remained firm. I decided that I needed fresh air, and left the shady barn.

 

Really, at that point I was just tired of having these things happen to me. I was realizing how great it was to just be a kid and not to have to be a grown up yet. But the alien was reassuring, even if the military types were much less so, who I didn't really want to hear anymore and so I didn't, at first. Then I guess we decided to talk to them for a little while longer, and the military men were trying, at least, to be more civil. My position was that, if anybody would know what they were talking about it would be telepathic people, like these aliens, and that they should listen to them. At least listen and then find out what they could. They seemed to understand, even if they weren't exactly happy about any of this. In my minds eye, in a way that I couldn't really describe at all, I saw the military men all seated in a row at some table or something, and I saw one alien who was sort of standing, well more like hovering next to me. You know, like when something isjust really, really clear in your mind. Very real looking. Not like anything I'd ever experienced before.

 

These sorts of events became very depressing sometimes. I think I spent another three whole days being depressed over this one, to some extent or another. But by the end of the third day, I was always thinking about more pleasant things, things like comic books, or music, which was really beginning to capture my imagination because my older brother had just brought a bunch of new albums into the house with his new record player. The alien was still there, and we'd "think talk" about such things as I lay awake in the lower bunk, trying to forget how serious a place the world really must be. And he let me talk to all kinds of people, some of them were music people.

 

After those sorts of days I would begin my usual routine of long hikes with my dog, Laddie. And probably out of sheer boredom I began to ask myself questions about the forest, questions which eventually, even as a kid, had me in a state of wonder about how all these natural processes had combined to bring us such diversity of life itself. It was a wonder to me, for example, that nature never seemed to really waste anything.

Leaves didn't pile up because they became food for trees. To me, that explained more than I could really take in at the moment.  

 

As time went by discussions often continued to get more serious, and I began to meet a whole lot of people telepathically. Though I had already convinced myself that speaking of such things wasn't in my best interest, I also thought it best to think about such things sometimes, but not give it too much importance either. It was all just too upsetting sometimes.  But that didn't stop me from thinking about these things altogether. Eventually I would ask myself about that intelligence problem that the military was having, and the alien was never very far away if I ever wanted to talk about such things. And could put me in touch with anyone, apparently.

 

I don't really know how to describe the alien. In some ways he seemed like a really, really smart kid. In other ways he was very grown up, he wasn't at all afraid of standing up to those military men when they were upset and coming out of their chairs and using words that I never heard before.And insome ways, he seemed to really wonder about me more than I wondered about him.  But I couldn't say why. I guess it was because I was both curious enough to want to know everything, and so unable to bear all of that that I generally avoided talking to him too much because it always led to things for which I was absolutely unprepared.

 

All the same, I was such a curious kid that I marveled at everything. Even small things, like how my dog could snap up a passing yellow jacket and spit him out without getting stung and then he would look curiously at the results. He was a great dog. Twice he saved me from rattlesnakes while we were headed out to hike. And in the very same spot.

 

We were just out the door and around the house when a rattler coiled right in front of me and was making that dreadful sound. I screamed bloody murder and my dog was all over that snake. The snake and the dog lunged back and forth at each other I don't know how many times. Back and forth, back and forth, while I continued to scream. My mother came out of the house and grabbed a shovel and after allowing the snake to strike at the shovel a few times, took off it's head. It happened twice in the same spot because, as we found out later, the snakes had made a nest in the little wooden box stuck in the ground that held some sort of valves for the sewage tank tank outside in our yard, and Lad and I just happened upon them as they were returning to their nest.

 

What a thing, I thought, that the my dog had risked his life for me. And I decided right then and there that I would do the same for him, if ever I had to. I was so relieved that he hadn't been bitten in the exchange, and so deeply respectful of his courage, and love, that our relationship grew considerably. The dog had won my love long before that, but now he also had my really profound appreciation, and my deep, deep respect.

 

My mother grew up on a farm, and she told me all about snakes. About how once when she was a little girl, she was walking in the corn field and stepped on one barefooted! She told me that it was a good thing that she was scared stiff, because she had put her foot down right behind the rattler's head, and had she moved she would have been bitten. She screamed and somebody came out with a shovel, and that's how she knew just what to do. She even knew how to skinthe snakes, and so twice I had the best things to bring toshow and tell. I kept those Diamond Back skins and rattles for years and years inside one of those plastic cases that protect cigarettes.

 

Living in the mountains could sure be boring. But some days were much more interesting than anything that happened in the flatlands, including TV. Like snakes. Or aliens. Or the true nature of dogs.

 

 

 

End Chapter Three

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy

The Mindstorm Chronicles: Chapter Two

The Mindstorm Chronicles:

Chapter Two

 

A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?

 

You decide.

 

 

Being like any other childhood memories, these things came back in bit and pieces. And really, bits and pieces is how it all happened from the beginning. Just here and there, these voices that eventually led to longer and longer discussions. Always at my own discretion, but just as often about worrisome things that would very much hold your interest as well your attention. But there was always the self imposed restriction about telling anyone about all of this. How could anyone have explained any of this, let alone a seven year old child in 1962.

 

It occurred to me sometimes that I could find myself having slipped off some deep end somewhere if I entertained these things too much. But it was also stimulating. Even as a kid. I was learning a lot about the world, and as if to be kind, the voices would begin to speak of more pleasant and wonderful things, would ask me my opinions about things. The conversations would usually begin with something important, something really important like when they began to talk about spies in the US government. And while all of that was deeply disturbing to a 2nd grader, the voices would slowly lead my thoughts towards more pleasant, even wonderful things. We even talked about comic books. Until comic books, I was a big fan of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Aesop's Fables. When you live in an isolated cabin in the mountains without TV and very little radio, you find yourself reading, and thinking a lot.

 

Glimpses, really. Sometimes these meetings I had with the voices returned more as if I'd remembered them by topic than in some sequential order. And sometimes they all seemed to come rushing back in bits and pieces, a blend of the highly disturbing and thedownright wonderful. I suppose it helped me to keep my balance about things. But as often as not, it was like one of those web pages where things were linked by some other order of appearance than when they first appeared.

 

One night, riding in the back of our families Volkswagen, laying down in the back seat on what seemed the long, long drive back to the suburbs, back to Lil' Miss, listening to the radio, I was thinking about Army men. You know what a thing little boys have about Army men, and about real ones. And a war somewhere that I knew absolutely nothing about. And I wanted to speak to an Army man who was actually in the war there, and of course, I wanted to speak to someone I could trust, a good Army man. And one of the best. The next thin I knew I was talking, apparently, to a soldier in Vietnam, a Green Beret. Which to me was most interesting because at that age, most all of my knowledge about Military affairs was about WWII, and had mostly come from old movies. I didn't really know anything about the Green Beret.

 

Basically I had been asking myself a very simple question. If war wasn't good, why did people fight wars? And here was an opportunity on this long boring drive to ask somebody who was actually fighting in a war. We talked a little bit first about why we were in the war, and he seemed very curious about, and a little disturbed by this telepathic voice exchange. At some point in the conversation he told me that sometimes the military gets sold out for money, the people who handled all the spy stuff were people who couldn't be trusted all of the time. He told me frankly, that some people thought that the war where he was fighting was against a communist threat. But that other people said it was all about the money. He didn't seem to know what to think. But he was still concerned about "spooks".

 

Now, here I was in the back of the car, and just starting to wonder, so I asked who he was, he told me his name and his rank, and then I began to wonder to myself just how it was that I was speaking to this particular man. Before I could say anything he said "They said that I should talk to you." Now, to be clear, after what had happened before, I began to realize how serious all of this really was, and how far out of my understanding the whole world was. But here was an honest soldier that needed help with a problem. And, well, it only made sense that the problem was too big for a kid, but it seemed like same people who could arrange these sorts of meetings via telepathy could help. And I suppose they volunteered, because the next thing I told the Army man in that was in Vietnam was "The Martians can help you."

 

It was at this point that an exited voice began to quickly explain that they weren't actually form Mars, they were from some place with some very scientific sounding name... I didn't understand that, it was so much information so fast, and then a picture of stars came into my mind. But I didn't know how anyone could remember such things, how stars looked, so many and all, and I didn't understand why it would be important anyway. I was feeling tired from the trip, I guess, and I just said, "Look. I don't know about all the planets. I know about Mars. So I'll call you Martians. It just means that you're from a different planet than this one, ok?" The voice just went quiet and it was as if I sensed his wonder at this moment. It was as if all three of us went silent, thinking about the prospects of such things, and just what might all this mean.

 

I didn't know it at the time at all, but I would be talking to the soldier again sometimes throughout the years to come, and little did I know just how much impact that he would have on my life when I would meet him face to face about twenty years later. But at that moment I was feeling positively overwhelmed again. And considering how very real this kind of thing was beginning to seem, I began to feel not a little bit unsafe, remembering that this was a world in which sometimes the Army killed children. Not to mention spies, who I heard were the worst.

 

So I let my mind sort of drift into the music on the radio, and wished that I felt safe about all of this. The ... not-exactly- a -Martian voice reassured me that all would be well, and we discussed reassurances for a little while, and I thought that I was probably going to need more support this way than the average kid "if they were going to talk about this junk."  So listening to the music, and drifting off, I heard a song that always made me feel safer, and wished that I could hear it whenever I was worried and things were going to be alright. And I drifted off to sleep while listening to the song that would always seem to come on the radio when I began to worry about staying in the city for a little while. In my mind I was thinking of the Army man and the grass huts while listening to "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight... In the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight... ". And I felt as if everything was going to be ok for me and the Army man on the other side of the world, there someplace whose name I could barely remember. And I took some comfort in the idea that that the Green Beret were, in my child's eyes at least, the best. And they would be on the side of us kids.

 

The return to Lil' Miss was always wonderful after the isolation of the mountain cabin that once was a fox farm. In our place in the suburbs we lived on a kind of nursery, where there was an enormous variety of plants and trees. There were the beautiful cycads, tree ferns, tupidanthus and sheflerras, azaleas, philodendrons, podocarpis, every type of exotic ornamental I guess, at one time or another. And there were fruit trees, berries, grapes, everything grew like crazy there in the soft downey soil that had formerly belonged to the orange groves. And it helped enormously that I had my tricolor collie with me, dog and boy quickly reclaimed their other stomping grounds. And nobody seemed to mind much except the cat. And even he seemed to have a sense of humor about it, as if he had been bored as well, and had actually missed picking on the dog, who he dared swat from behind at every opportunity.

 

Most of the time I didn't worry about the voices, I was just too busy being a kid.

 

 

End Chapter Two

 

Tags: Alien, Aliens, Alien Contact, Ufology, Unknown, Telepathy