Journal of a UFO Investigator (38 page)

How Rochelle and I found each other—well, I'll get to that in a minute. First I need to tell you this. My hat is off to you, that you didn't let your father and his gabby fiancée send you back here this summer. When you came last year, you were on a mission, something only you could have accomplished. This summer you'd be one more tourist among the crowds of tourists, and I'd be delighted to see you, but we wouldn't have one damned thing in common except UFOs, which you've stopped believing in even though you don't know it yet and probably won't for a long time.

I also need to say congratulations on that kiss.

Do me a favor. When you head off to college, don't forget to take Sandra's address. Write to her. Sooner than you write Rochelle, sooner than you write me. Yes, I know, she's got a boyfriend, a college man. But you'll be a college man yourself in a couple of days. And boyfriends are not always forever.

Only what we carry in our hearts is forever.

 

One morning, just about four weeks ago, the phone in our barracks rang, and it was for me. I think it must have been the exact same time you had your dream about the three men. Remember, the sun rises earlier here than where you are. It's morning in Israel, while back in the States you're still in dreamland.

It was Dr. Zeitlin from Hadassah, the one who treated your baby. Who found for her the healing none of the others could. He said: “Go across the old border that isn't there anymore,
borukh Hashem
, thank God. Find Dr. Saeed Talibi.” And he gave me the address of Talibi's office.

I said: “Why? You want me to bring him a message?”

“No message,” he says. “Just go. Find him.”

Probably you can guess the rest of the story. Who should I find in the good doctor's office with him when I get to Salah ed-Din Street in East Jerusalem? You already know. You already can guess—part of it.

Talibi and Rochelle, just beaming, delighted as can be. And there's a third person with them. A fourth, counting me.

This is what gives me hope. An impossible hope, a hope that shouldn't be there. I think, if I hadn't seen that little girl with my own eyes—

A toddler, I would have called her. Except she could barely toddle. Hardly had the strength to walk; couldn't do it at all without Rochelle's helping, holding her hand. She breathed hard every step she took. But just her walking was a miracle.

She shouldn't have grown so much since you flew with her in the disk. She wouldn't if she were a human child. But their physiology is different; Talibi kept insisting on that.

Her eyes are still enormous. Rochelle has to put huge sunglasses on her whenever they go outside, so she won't attract attention. Talibi seems to think they'll shrink as she grows, in proportion to her face, so eventually she may be able to pass among human beings.

She speaks.

She held out her hand to me and said, in perfect English: “You must be Julian. Mama's told me so much about you.”

Who she meant by Mama, I don't know. I don't think it was Rochelle; she knows Rochelle's not really her mama. I shook her hand, very gently. I said to her, in Hebrew, “
Koreem lee Yehoshua
,” I'm called Yehoshua.

She answered in Hebrew, “
Naeem me'ohd
.” Pleased to meet you.

I couldn't believe it. I had to plop myself down into one of the office chairs, I was so flabbergasted. Talibi's belly shook from laughing, he must have thought I looked so funny.

He said: “Arabic too.”

French also, Rochelle tells me. Those are all the languages we have among us, so we don't know how many she knows. All that are spoken on this earth, I suspect. And even beyond.

She had a message for you.

She said to tell you she loves you. She doesn't blame you for what happened; she knows it wasn't your fault. She said, when you thirst, she will always dip her finger in water and cool your tongue. I don't know what she meant, but that's what she said. Even if there's a gulf between you and her the size of the galaxy, she said, she'll find a way to bring a cup to your lips—

Why, Mr. Shapiro! You're crying!

I KNOW I'M CRYING. I CAN'T STOP. MY TEARS SPILL ONTO
the paper, onto Julian's letter, onto the pen through which his words pour out. By the dresser my suitcase is packed, my journal inside, though I'm leaving all my UFO books here in the bedroom of my childhood.

“Danny!”

It's my father. He knows I'm not Danny anymore. Sometimes he forgets. I don't say anything. It's hard, but I wait him out.

“Dan!”

“What, Dad?” I call back.

“Ready to go!”

So this is good-bye. I won't live here anymore. All summer I've looked forward to this, getting out of his and Mrs. Colton's hair, living in a dorm, going to bed whenever I please. Leaving this soiled, tattered cocoon behind me. But now—

“Five minutes, Dad! OK?”

“OK. Five minutes.”

I said five minutes; I meant five minutes. That's all it'll take.

It's a bright, blowy day, warm for September. The windows in my bedroom have been open until now, when I shut them. I go to the bookcase over the bed to say good-bye.

One by one I touch them, the odd, disreputable books that shaped and consoled my teenage years, kept over my bed so I could reach for them when sleep wouldn't come. Albert Bender,
Flying Saucers and the Three Men
. Charles Fort,
The Book of the Damned
. And of course M. K. Jessup,
The Case for the UFO.

I pull
The Case for the UFO
down from the shelf. I flip through the pages. Plenty of annotations. All of them mine.

No Gypsies passed this book hand to hand, writing into it the secrets of UFOs and invisibility. Maybe that wonderful book, that special copy, really exists. Maybe someday I'll find it. But this isn't it. Just an ordinary book, by a UFO investigator with fifty-nine years of loneliness behind him, more than three times my seventeen. Who finally couldn't face any more years. So he went to his car, ran a tube from the exhaust pipe into the window, turned the ignition ...

I shudder. My fingers curl, as if to grasp at a chain-link fence. I promise myself: never again.

It may be better at Carthage; it may be worse. I will never let myself come near that again.

 

I close my eyes. Once more I feel myself climbing the wall from the Well of Souls, toward the entrance of the tunnel that leads from death into life. I hold the book tight, so it won't fall from my hand. Below me are jagged rocks; if I slip, all my bones will be shattered. Amid the rocks I can see the bursting bubbles that are the souls of the human generations—

One of them my mother's.

I clutch hard at the book, so I won't start up again with the crying. But it's too late; they're already flowing, those tears—

“Danny ! Dan!”

—and in the act of clutching I swing out from the rock wall and nearly lose my grip. I don't think twice. I let go the book, grab on to the wall. The book falls with a splash into the waters below, scattering the crowd of departed souls—

It tumbles onto my bedspread.

There I leave it.

I hurry out to the car, on a windy autumn day, clouds blowing across the empty blue sky.

Many have helped me along this road. First and foremost, my wife, Rose Shalom Halperin, my earliest and in many ways my best reader, who saw the first sentences of the first draft (long since discarded) in January 1997, and said, “It's good. Keep going.” And I did keep going; and when I grew discouraged with the length of the journey and its difficulty, she was there to encourage and sustain me. This book, and my life as a writer, I owe to her.

My friend and former colleague, Professor Yaakov Ariel of the Religious Studies Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, read an early draft and gave me encouragement and valuable suggestions. He drew upon his experience growing up in Jerusalem, in the Abu Tor neighborhood along the old border (before the 1967 war) between Israel and Jordan, to show me how I might handle the end of what is now Part Six; his comments inspired me to locate a crucial scene at the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu. Novelist Lee Smith, with the warm generosity that has always been characteristic of her, read part of that draft and gave me her feedback and encouragement, along with my first guidance into the unfamiliar world of the publishing business.

Several years later, novelist Ann Prospero read part of a later draft that had been much revised and tightened but was still far too long. She said, “You've got two stories here, and they keep getting in each other's way. The UFO story is the more exciting of the two. Keep it; get rid of the rest.” I did as she suggested. Thus was born
Journal of a UFO Investigator
in its present form.

Novelist Peggy Payne was “book doctor” to an early draft, and I'm indebted to her for the care and sensitivity she poured into this task. I am indebted to the writers' group established in 2001 by Charity Terry-Lorenzo, which has helped me over the years with one novel after another. The membership of the group changed over the years; those who worked with me on
Journal of a UFO Investigator
were Mike Brown, Vicki Edwards, Sylvia Freeman, Bryan Gilmer, Jessica Hollander, Jennifer Madriaga, Susan Payne, Dave VanHook, and Robin Whitsell. I'm grateful to them all, and most especially Bryan and Dave, who, even after we were no longer in the group together, generously read complete drafts of the novel and gave me their invaluable criticism and warm encouragement. So did novelist Joyce Allen and my friends Elaine Bauman and Jonathan Tepper.

My current writing group, under the incomparable leadership of novelist Anna Jean Mayhew, has given me the most immense help with this and other projects. Its members have included Gabriel Cuddahee, Ron Jackson, Deborah Klaus, Kathryn Milam, Susan Payne, Elizabeth Schoenfeld, and Sarah Wilkins. Special thanks to Gabe, who gave me the title for Part One, for which I'd searched for many months.

Danny Shapiro's story owes a great debt to the mythmaker extraordinaire of Clarksburg, West Virginia, Gray Barker (1925-1984), and his forgotten 1956 bestseller
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers
. The “three men in black” may not have been Barker's invention—there probably is a nucleus of fact in the story of Albert K. Bender's frightening brush with mysterious visitors in the fall of 1953. But it was Barker who gave the legend its powerful and enduring formulation. He did much the same for the “Shaver mystery” that unfolded through the second half of the 1940s on the pulp pages of
Amazing Stories
magazine, with its “Elder Gods” and “dero” and underground caves. A few years after the publication of
They Knew Too Much,
Barker moved on to promoting the legends surrounding the death of Morris K. Jessup (1900-1959) and their link to the ever elusive Philadelphia experiment.

(The second of the two quotations at the beginning of chapter 4 is adapted from Shaver's story “Thought Records of Lemuria,” in the June 1945 issue of
Amazing Stories,
the first from a column of Barker's in the June 1957 issue of
Flying Saucers
magazine, reprinted in 2003 by Rick Hilberg. The “Shaver” quotation on page 73 is in fact Barker's formulation of Shaver's ideas:
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,
pages 62-63. The passages quoted by Rochelle and Julian on page 63 are from an actual letter sent to Jessup in 1956 by the eccentric drifter Carl Allen, and the description of the moon-tower picture on page 125 is inspired by a cover illustration drawn by Albert Bender for the November 1953 issue of Barker's
The Saucerian
. Other details of the “Gypsies' ” book are my own invention.)

The best exploration to date of Barker's enigmatic life and tangled motivations, his real sincerity and freewheeling approach to truth, is Robert Wilkinson's brilliant 2009 documentary film
Shades of Gray.
Barker's papers are housed in the Gray Barker Collection of the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library. There, doing research for this book in September 2004, I was welcomed and given every possible assistance by curator David Houchin.

Danny's experience in the Philadelphia Library, in chapter 5, draws upon an incident reported by folklorist Peter Rojcewicz in
Journal of American Folklore
, vol. 100 (1987), pages 148-161. Others who've inspired this book's treatment of UFOs include the late Karl Pflock, whose
Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe
(2001) is the definitive account of the Roswell legend, and Jerome Clark, my friend from the distant days when I was myself a teenage UFO investigator. In his magnum opus
The UFO Encyclopedia
(1990-96, second edition 1998), Jerry has gifted us with an inexhaustibly rich source of knowledge, which no one with the smallest interest in UFOs or UFO belief can afford to do without.

 

The North Carolina Writers Network, through its annual conferences, helped me learn that literary agents are not necessarily figures of dread. Through its critiquing service, it allowed me to make use of the “book-doctoring” of poet and short story writer Ruth Moose, who gave me the right feedback at the right time.

And speaking of agents ... I'm lucky to be represented by one of the finest, the supremely savvy and sensitive Peter Steinberg. Not only did Peter find a splendid home for my book—it's his genius, for taking a story and making it better, that I have to thank for three plot alterations that raised the novel to an entirely new level. For all the good things that have happened to this book, I'm deeply grateful to him, his wonderful assistant Lisa Kopel, and his overseas colleagues at Intercontinental Literary Agency (Sam Edenborough, Tessa Girvan, Nicki Kennedy, and Jenny Robson). Also to Bill Martin and Beverly Swerling Martin of Agent Research and Evaluation, whose expertise first guided me in Peter's direction.