Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (67 page)

“Jesus… how’d you find out about all this stuff?” Gordon asks Lloyd. “I mean, assuming you’re not just making it up.”

“Yeah, have the aliens been stuffing a greasy electro-genital stimulator up your big ol’ fat butt, too?” Jimmy asks. He laughs and then ducks as Lloyd takes a hand off the steering wheel to reach into the backseat and swat at him. Gordon steadies the wheel as the Bentley starts to swerve.

“Come here, you damnable little squirt!” Lloyd swipes his sausage-like fingers at Jimmy’s nose, but intentionally misses. He’s not really mad–it’s all in fun. When he returns his attention to the road, Lloyd glances to his right and decides to pull off into a parking lot alongside a weather-beaten red general store. Two grimy blue Chevron gas pumps are out in front and seven wooden block letters with peeling white paint are nailed to the roofline of the store, spelling out the word:
Cholame.

As the car slows, Jimmy hops out over the door and goes running toward a large, leafy tree surrounded by a stainless steel sculpture–even though he knows he’s not in trouble. Lloyd follows him in the Bentley and parks beneath the tree’s spreading shade.

The sculpture is a monument to James Dean. Seeing it sends an icy twinkling of sparks up Gordon’s spine as he recalls being chased by James Dean in his dream. “What are we stopping here for?” he asks.

“I thought we might buy some sodas and get out to stretch our legs,” Lloyd says. “Do you have a better plan?”

“No. I was just wondering what was up with this monument to James Dean.”

“He died here,” D.H. says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“I guess not,” says Gordon. “Is this tree where he wrecked his Porsche?”

“That happened back up the road, at the highway junction we just passed,” Lloyd informs him. “On October 11th, 1955–as you can read there on the memorial–a young man with the oddly appropriate name of Donald Turnupseed was making a turn in his black-and-white Ford Tudor from Highway 46 onto Highway 41, heading home toward Fresno. Without even looking, he pulled right in front of James Dean’s speeding Porsche Spyder and they crashed almost head-on. Dean was killed on impact, but Turnupseed survived with barely a scratch. And thus another bright flame was offered up for the Lam to energetically consume. It’s all passed into American legend now, another gaudy tale of impassioned youth designed to lead people astray.”

“‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,’” D.H. quotes.

“Exactly. A more useful slogan might be: ‘Pay attention, grow old, and try to acquire some wisdom, or
Gnosis
, before you leave–or you’ll just keep coming back.’ But, of course, that’s just not the American Way.”

They all get out of the Bentley and stand around the circular concrete bench that surrounds the memorial. Gordon sees a bronze plaque set into the concrete with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince
:

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

It strikes Gordon as a particularly loaded phrase, given all he’s been told recently.

He wonders if Saint-Exupéry knew about interdimensional entities and the Implicate Order. He gets a little melancholy as he thinks to himself:
Didn’t he die in a plane crash, like my dad? Or did he just walk off into the desert and get bitten by a snake, like the Little Prince?

“You were asking earlier how I knew so much about deep politics and our alien ancestors,” Lloyd says, sensing Gordon’s sadness and trying to distract him from it. “I’ve been peripherally involved with SRI’s remote viewing project almost since its inception.
That’s
how I know,” he says.

“So how’s that work? If you’re a remote viewer, do you automatically get all the dirt on aliens, the CIA, and Vice President Bush?” Gordon asks half-facetiously.

“If you’re a remote viewer, it’s likely you’ve already
had
an alien encounter or two. All of the best remote viewers have reported UFO sightings, near-death experiences, or episodes of severe trauma in their lives–sometimes all three. Take Uri Geller, for instance. When he was four years old, an inexplicable urge led him to a deserted Arabic garden in Tel Aviv. Looking up, he saw a shining disc in the sky. A beam of light from the disc touched him and he found himself standing next to a tall, thin figure inside a luminous tunnel. Then he lost consciousness. There was an episode of missing time –”

“– And when he woke up, he was able to bend spoons, right?” D.H. doesn’t sound like he’s convinced.

“It sounds better coming from him,” Lloyd admits. “But there’s also the example of Joe McMoneagle, Remote Viewer 001 in the Army’s Project GRILL FLAME, who experienced radiation burns after seeing a UFO one night above the island of Eleuthera. He also had a near-death experience four years later, in 1970, after someone deliberately poisoned him in a German restaurant. And there’s Ingo Swann, who’s had multiple alien encounters. Ingo even had a conversation with an alien in the middle of the produce section at a Los Angeles supermarket.”

“What about Pat Price?” Gordon asks.

“Pat Price was the only accomplished remote viewer I knew who didn’t have a personal story to tell about aliens,” Lloyd says. “I never trusted him because of that. He was also the only remote viewer who could psychically read words and numbers, which I always found suspicious. And I should have mentioned this earlier, but on the day after Patty Hearst was kidnapped, the Berkeley Police Department was so desperate for leads that they phoned up SRI to ask for some psychic guidance. Pat Price volunteered his help, so he and Hal Puthoff got in a car and drove down to the Berkeley police station together. Price hadn’t thumbed through more than ten pages of mug shots before he put his finger down on one of them and said, ‘Here’s the leader!’ It was a picture of Donald DeFreeze, of course. It took the detectives almost a week before they could verify that Price had been right, but any CIA insider worth his salt would have known that DeFreeze had been tapped for months by the MKSEARCH program to organize and lead the Symbionese Liberation Army to its preordained destruction.”

Lloyd pauses to clear his throat, briefly puffing out his fatty neck like a soulmate-seeking bullfrog in mid-croak: “So now I suspect that Pat Price was a mole for the CIA, being fed information so he could spy on the other remote viewers. That five-page report that got him the job at SRI was just a little
too
good. Unfortunately, I’ll never know if my hunch is right, because Pat Price died in Las Vegas under mysterious circumstances in 1975. No autopsy was performed. Some think he either faked his own death and continued his work for the CIA, or he was murdered by the KGB.”

“Why would the CIA send in a mole to spy on a program they were already paying for?” D.H. asks. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“The CIA has secrets even within its own ranks,” Lloyd says, “and for those who have secrets, remote viewers are their worst enemies. There’s no doubt now that remote viewing works–not with 100% reliability, but with far greater accuracy than standard CIA guesswork. People who think otherwise just haven’t done their homework. The CIA must have been terrified that the SRI program would start operating beyond their control, getting too close to secrets of the medico-military-occult complex that they would prefer to keep hidden. So a mole like Pat Price would be one way of keeping tabs on whether the really genuine psychic spies like Ingo Swann were about to crash their party.

“Let me give you an example of just how accurate remote viewers can be. It might interest you to know that Ingo Swann has proven he can remote-view other planets. In April of 1973 he participated in an experiment called the ‘Jupiter Probe’, in which he remote-viewed Jupiter four months before
Pioneer 10
made the first flyby of that planet. The raw data from Ingo’s session was sent ahead of time to the CIA, to astrophysicists at JPL, and to over a dozen other prominent researchers. One of those reports even ended up in the hands of a journalist and was widely published. When
Pioneer 10’s
collected data was sent back to JPL, the confirmation of Ingo’s observations was impressive. But what was truly mind-boggling was that Ingo claimed to have seen a band of crystals, like the rings of Saturn, very close within Jupiter’s atmosphere. The
Pioneer
probes didn’t see it, and Ingo was mocked, but in 1979 as
Voyager 1
passed close to Jupiter it reported back exactly that
.
The Jovian Ring was one of the larger surprises in astronomical history, and Ingo had seen it six years earlier.”

“Lucky guess,” says Jimmy.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Lloyd says. “Remote viewing works–at least for Ingo Swann and those he’s taught. Let me tell you another story… one in which I was more intimately involved. Sometime back around 1975, Ingo got a call at home from his close friend, the U.S. congressman, Charlie Rose. Charlie asked Ingo to do him a favor. He had a friend who was in need of a remote viewer’s services. This friend could be trusted and Ingo would be paid a great deal of money, Charlie assured him. But for security purposes the friend would be using a pseudonym–
Mr. Axelrod
–and he requested that no information about the assignment be divulged for at least ten years.”

“Then how do
you
know about it? It’s only been eight,” says D.H., who’s good at math.

“I have my sources,” Lloyd harrumphs. “So as I was saying… Ingo accepted the assignment and followed Charlie’s instructions to stand on a Manhattan street corner in front of a certain museum. Two men in a black limousine picked him up and blindfolded him, then drove him several hours out of town. When the blindfold was removed, Ingo found himself in a secret underground compound. Everyone there was in civilian clothes, so he couldn’t be sure if it was a government or military installation. Ingo was swiftly introduced to Mr. Axelrod, who then led him into a windowless room and provided him with a list of coordinates. They were lunar coordinates. Near the top of Mr. Axelrod’s list was latitude 37.3˚North and longitude 171.2˚West–the coordinates for Parsons Crater, named after our old friend, Jack Whiteside Parsons. Ingo was being asked to remote-view the dark side of the Moon.”

“Hey, I just thought of something!” D.H. interrupts. “Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
came out the same year that Ingo Swann started remote viewing for the CIA–in 1973. Trippy, huh?”

“Trippy indeed…” says Lloyd, humoring him.

“So what did Ingo see up there on the Moon?” Twinker asks Lloyd.

“That’s where it gets somewhat strange…” Lloyd says, as if remembering it all over again. “He saw towers and bridges and large platforms and domes. He saw tractor-like machines going up and down hills, and saucer-like vehicles stored next to craters, or sometimes alongside long, smooth roads in what looked to be airfield hangars. There were also many obelisks and pyramids that seemed to serve no apparent purpose. Much of what Ingo saw was lit by high banks of bright lights mounted on poles–like the lights you might see in a football stadium. There was a lime-green mist or fog everywhere–some sort of atmosphere. And perhaps most surprising of all, a crew of naked men (human or otherwise, he couldn’t tell…) were busy at work, digging into hillsides and zipping around with heavy machinery.”

“Awesome!”
Jimmy roars. He couldn’t be more thrilled.

“Nude Dudes on the Moon! Whoo-hoo!”
Skip chimes in.

“Ingo said he couldn’t quite comprehend all that he was seeing,” Lloyd continues, “but one thing was certain: whoever was in charge up there was hostile toward us. He said to Mr. Axelrod, ‘They’ve somehow got you by the balls, haven’t they? That’s why you’re resorting to psychic perceptions… they are
not
friendly, are they?” Before the session was over, the entities somehow sensed Ingo’s presence and they warned him in no uncertain terms to stay off the Moon.”

“Just like they warned Buzz Aldrin!” D.H. says, making the connection.

“Hey, I meant to ask you about that…” Gordon says to Lloyd. “How come Buzz Aldrin told you we were warned off the Moon when he’s never said anything like that to the press? Whenever someone brings up UFOs, he and Neil Armstrong just seem to get pissed.”

“Would it surprise you to know that Buzz Aldrin is a 33rd degree Mason?” Lloyd says, giving Gordon’s arm a sly thump. “He even received the Knight Templar Cross of Honor in 1969. So, of course, Buzz is going to feel safe sharing certain intimacies with me that he would never dare share with the general public, for obvious reasons. Did you know, for instance, that Buzz was carrying a Masonic flag with him on
Apollo 11’s
flight? That flag was used to claim Masonic Territorial Jurisdiction on the Moon for the Tranquility Lodge in Waco, Texas. It now hangs in the Library Museum of the Scottish Rite Temple located in our nation’s capital, within walking distance of that enormous obelisk–or Osirian phallus–known as the Washington Monument.”

“You Masons are so fucking weird…” Gordon says. “That flag business almost sounds like a frat boy prank.”

“We take such things very seriously,” Lloyd says. “Maybe too seriously, I’ll grant you that…. But according to our beliefs, the Moon now belongs to The Great Architect of the Universe and the Texas Masons. And Texas, it so happens, is the only state in our nation that legally allows its residents to cast absentee ballots from space. So presumably, those unfriendly ‘Nude Dudes on the Moon’ could be skewing election results.”

“Weird. And what about that Mr. Axelrod guy? Was he a Mason, too?”

“He was me.
I’m
Mr. Axelrod–or at least that’s how Ingo Swann knows me.” Lloyd can’t help but grin. “And now I suggest we all go get some refreshing Coca-Colas.”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Entering the Cholame General Store, Gordon, Lloyd, and the others duck under a neon-lit Coors sign hanging from the splinter-furred rafters of the exposed ceiling, then they tread the creaky wooden floorboards past racks of marshmallows, Cheetos, Twinkies, prophylactics, and pop-top tins of Spam and Vienna Sausages.

Lloyd hasn’t stopped talking: “When NASA shut everything down in 1972, three launch-ready Saturn V rockets for further manned Moon missions had already been built at enormous taxpayer expense. Their total cost had been well over half a
billion
dollars. A consortium of private investors approached my company, wondering if they could buy those rockets on the cheap. They wanted to mine the Moon with their own clandestine space program. Specifically, they wanted to go after an isotope called Helium-3, which is very rare on Earth, but abundant on the Moon because it’s deposited there by the solar winds. Helium-3 fusion energy is an ideal fuel source: extremely potent, non-polluting, and–unlike deuterium and tritium–it produces virtually no radioactive by-products.”