"I'll call you sometime, Ashton. Thank you for a lovely evening. I'll tell Penny that you looked in on us."
I said, "Julie, for God's sake, cut it out. Let me help."
"Oh you've been most helpful. Thank you so much. It's okay now. Thank you. I'll call you."
That's the standard kiss-off in this town. Nobody ever calls when they say "I'll call you." It means "Don't call me." It means "Farewell and fuck off."
I said good-bye to Jambalaya and Crawfish Pie and went out through the carport.
Just for the hell of it, I touched the hood of the Maserati to verify that it was still warm. It was.
I got in and hit the starter but the engine would not crank. I was cussing under my breath with the decision that I would have to raise the hood and check the battery cables but something else stopped me before I could get a foot on the ground.
The "something else" happened inside my skull, between my ears but not through my ears: "It is all right, Ashton Ford. The vehicle shall function now. Try again."
That "voice" sounded familiar, yeah, but I couldn't be sure. I turned the key in the ignition again and she kicked over immediately with a smooth purr.
I muttered aloud, "Thanks, Ambudala."
"You are quite welcome, but it is not Ambudala. Nor is it Jambalaya. We are called Sinjasan and Marbotisun. Your reality is now our reality. May we be friends?"
I replied aloud, "Sure, sure. Welcome to my reality, kids. But I think you were probably much better off with your own."
So much for affirmations and mind-vents.
I cut the ignition, locked the car, and went back across the street. It was time, I figured, to talk turkey to a couple of dolphins. Or maybe just to talk old times.
Chapter Eighteen: Poor Fish
I can relate this story to you only in terms of the subjective experience that unfolded in my own consciousness, along with whatever objective commentary I may use to dimension or explain or rationalize that experience to myself. You should bear in mind, as I have tried to, that a respectable school of professional thought regards all UFO phenomena in purely psychological terms. Of course it is often impossible to reconcile certain manifestations of the phenomena with the psychological theories, such as the actual physical movement of objects and people from one location to another, physical imprints upon terrain, and actual physical effects (radiation poisoning, etc.) suffered by contactees.
Such physical effects apparently do not deter those who insist upon the psychological syndrome, who invariably find a way acceptable to themselves to dismiss such evidence from their studies. I regard that as an interesting psychological study in itself, since it shows how far even a highly educated and intelligent professional can travel to accommodate his own bias while studying the "delusions" of others.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by that. The "Midwest flap" occurred during early August 1965. An area of some several hundred square miles was subjected to strange "nocturnal lights" which appeared on three successive nights. Police officers and various other reliable witnesses across several states reported the phenomena. The Air Force's Project Blue Book, the only official UFO investigatory body, received direct reports from other Air Force commands as the thing was going down. Those reports were logged by the Blue Book duty officer, a Lieutenant Anspaugh, who made the comprehensive report reproduced in part below.
1:30 a.m.—Captain Snelling, of the U.S. Air Force command post near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called to say that 15 to 20 phone calls had been received at the local radio station about a large circular object emitting several colors but no sound, sighted over the city. Two officers and one airman controller at the base reported that after being sighted directly over base operations, the object had begun to move rapidly to the northeast.
2:20 a.m.—Colonel Johnson, base commander of Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called Dayton to say that the commanding officer of the Sioux Army Depot saw five objects at 1:45 a.m. and reported an alleged configuration of two UFOs previously reported over E Site. At 1:49 a.m. members of E Flight reportedly saw what appeared to be the same formation reported at 1:48 a.m. by G flight. Two security teams were dispatched from E flight to investigate.
2:50 a.m.—Nine more UFOs were sighted, and at
3:35 a.m. Colonel Williams, commanding officer of the Sioux Army Depot, at Sydney, Nebraska, reported five UFOs going east.
4:00 a.m.—Colonel Johnson made another phone call to Dayton to say that at 4:00 a.m. Q flight reported nine UFOs in sight: four to the northwest, three to the northeast, and two over Cheyenne.
4:40 a.m.—Captain Howell, Air Force Command Post, called Dayton and Defense Intelligence Agency to report that a Strategic Air Command Team at Site H-2 at 3:00 a.m. reported a white oval UFO directly overhead. Later, Strategic Air Command Post passed the following: Francis E. Warren Air Force Base reports (Site B-4 3:17 a.m.) a UFO 90 miles east of Cheyenne at a high rate of speed and descending—oval and white with white lines on its sides and a flashing red light in its center moving east; reported to have landed 10 miles east of the site.
3:20 a.m.—Seven UFOs reported east of the site.
3:25 a.m.—E Site reported six UFOs stacked vertically.
3:27 a.m.—G-1 reported one ascending and at the same time E-2 reported two additional UFOs had joined the seven for a total of nine.
3:28 a.m.—G-1 reported a UFO descending further, going east.
3:32 a.m.—The same site has a UFO climbing and leveling off.
3:40 a.m.—G Site reported one UFO at 70° azimuth and one at 120°. Three now came from the east, stacked vertically, passed through the other two, with all five heading west.
I go to all this trouble merely to show you how far others are willing to travel in order to deny the evidence before them. And I quoted official Air Force sources—men in high positions of responsibility who are entrusted with the defense of the nation—to show you that no one is immune to the treatment.
The entire Midwest flap of 1965 was totally dismissed by the official explainers as "stars seen through inversion layers." How far can we push credibility to suggest that scores of highly trained professionals whose business it is to distinguish between optical illusions and threats to the security of the nation went into a near panic produced by optical illusions?—and, if it is true, how secure can any of us feel that our national security is in good hands?
I don't really worry that much about the latter consideration because a Cal Tech astronomer laughed when I asked him about it. It is possible, sure, he said, for thermal effects to produce some small perturbation of stars; parallax effects are quite common, sure; but it would require atmospheric temperatures into the thousands of degrees to produce a show like the Midwest flap, and of course we'd all then be too fried to notice.
But the psychological espousers eat it up. I still hear this thermal inversion theory advanced to debunk hard-to-debunk reports of aerial phenomena.
The so-called Condon Report, a supposedly scientific study commissioned by the United States government and rubber-stamped by the National Academy of Science, has been revealed as an out-and-out con job on the American public, who funded that study. Condon, a professor at the University of Colorado, obviously set out in the beginning to ridicule the whole thing and succeeded in doing so by concentrating his conclusions on the most ridiculous reports he could find while ignoring the baffling ones or disposing of them under such tags as "anomalous propagation," his way of explaining away radar contacts.
The reasoning goes something like this:
a)All UFO reports are produced by deluded individuals who believe they have seen something that could not exist, or by pranksters or charlatans;
b)Objects that have no physical existence obviously cannot be detected by radar;
c)Radar has been known to display targets when no physical targets are present, the result of anomalous propagation of the radar signals;
d)Therefore any alleged radar c
ontact suggesting impossible flight characteristics of a physical object is the result of anomalous propagation.
It does not seem to matter if the anomalous blips are describing the same aerial movements as those sighted with the naked eye by hundreds of reliable witnesses, including base commanders, fighter pilots, and other trained professionals, but the debunkers eat it up. That's okay. Let them. Just be aware that I am paying no homage to such people when I mention a possible psychological content to some of the things that I have experienced. Actually I would be surprised if there were no psychological content because a lot of this stuff is simply too bizarre for the human mind to handle in raw form. So we probably do "process" it just a bit in the attempt to assimilate something essentially alien to our mental models of reality.
I mean, even my mental models, which have been expanded quite a bit through the years to accommodate all manner of bizarre experiences, were taking quite a beating. Please be aware of that. I am trying to give you the real thing here. But I can give you only what is real to me.
I have to confess that I was only slightly more than half convinced of the reality of any of it as I left my car for the second time that morning and retraced my steps onto the Laker estate. And now it is time to give you a feeling for the neighborhood. It is in that section of Brentwood that is most exclusive and most seclusive, above Sunset Boulevard in canyon country. It probably would not conform to your idea of a Los Angeles neighborhood. In fact it is pretty wild up there, a jumble of canyons and serpentine roads and country lanes; it can get very rugged in spots.
Penny Laker had chosen one of those latter in which to plant her California roots. There were few neighboring structures; none at all close enough to feel really neighborly about. I guess she had several acres but only a third of it was flat enough for any practical use and the house itself took up quite a bit of that. The road was black-topped but narrow and winding; it dead-ended about a quarter of a mile beyond the Laker place and there were no more than three or four houses on that stretch.
The atmosphere up there was still quite misty but the base of the coastal layer was now too high to discern in the darkness and the surface visibility was okay except for occasional small pockets of drifting fog.
I went back through the carport and again scaled the wall to drop into the backyard. The lanai was still lighted but the pool was not and there was no sign of my two new friends from another reality. I walked all the way around the pool looking for them. Dolphins are required to surface for air every few minutes, so I figured they'd have to show themselves pretty soon even if they were now feeling shy, but a ten-minute vigil at poolside did not reveal so much as a ripple on the surface—so if they were in there and breathing air like all the dolphins I know, they were being very quiet about it. I was wondering why they were evading me, knowing they could do so in the darkness with stealthy movements—and wondering also why I could not reestablish telepathic communication with them. But of course I was also wondering with the other half of my mind if there ever had been any dolphins in that pool and if I had somehow hallucinated the whole thing.
But the new pool was still there and it was even harder to accept than the presence of dolphins within it. On an impulse I knelt beside it and gathered a sample of the water in my hands and tasted it. It was salt water. From the Pacific?—no less than three miles distant, as the crow flies? Or was it being processed somehow from the freshwater supply?
I went looking for the answer to the salt water and found more than that. From the moment the question was raised, it became evident that I had overlooked an even more basic question: Where was the filtration system? None of the usual stuff was in evidence—pumps, pipes, filters, none of that. I found it in an underground vault beneath a manhole cover that was emplaced twenty feet behind the pool. A circular steel ladder dropped me into the vault at the same level as the bottom of the pool. I knew that because I could see the pool from down there, or at least a goodly portion of it, and nothing was separating me from it but a wall of glass.
The vault itself was maybe twenty by forty feet and it was crammed with equipment and pipes.
A series of perpendicular glass tubes about three feet in diameter were attached to the glass wall, or maybe they were part of the wall because they were filled with water except for a small air space at the top.
There were ten of those, and there were tubes and wires and other umbilicallike devices running from each of them to various items of equipment.
There was a dolphin in each one. They looked dead, but I knew that they were not.
They were, I surmised, being prepared for their new reality...whatever that may be.
Chapter Nineteen: A Question of Time
I later learned that two new items had been added that morning to the bulging file of "crackpot" UFO lore. A commercial fisherman out of Morro Bay and two of his crewmen shamefacedly reported to the Coast Guard an incident involving their boat two miles off the California coast. All three requested polygraph tests as verification of their report, but the news item indicated that their story was not taken seriously enough to warrant any attempts at verification.
According to the skipper, his boat was dragging a sea anchor in heavy fog, all his navigation lights were showing, and he was sounding the required fog warning signals while the craft stood dead in the water, when a cement swimming pool filled with water and complete with diving board and slide descended slowly from the overcast directly above them and settled into the ocean beside their boat without a splash, as he and his crew gaped from the deck.
Little wonder, is it, that nobody thought it necessary to hook these guys up to a lie detector—except maybe the seamen who filed the other "crackpot" story. In roughly that same time frame and less than fifty miles removed from the scene of the other report, two crewmen of an oil tanker proceeding toward Santa Barbara reported seeing a vertical column of water rising from the surface of the ocean and disappearing into the low overcast. Both men emphatically insisted that they saw several dolphins swimming up the column of water.
Those two reports were among the most laughable to be seized upon by the press during the California flap.
I did not laugh when I read them.
In fact, I would have paid hard money for those reports if they'd come to me at the time. Because the stuff was really beginning to pile up around my ears, and the more I experienced the more I wondered about my mental health.
This new "pool" in Penny Laker's backyard was obviously a scientific laboratory of some sort. The "equipment" in that vault was definitely alien technology unrelatable to anything in my experience—various cylindrical-shaped objects of shiny metal, some larger than me, others as small as a softball—piping made of some kind of very hard but not metallic material—spaghetti like bundles of stuff that could be wiring or anything.
I could see nothing that would make me think of direct-read dials or gauges but a large panel emplaced on the far wall could conceivably be a control panel. It had "eyes" in it shaped like Donovan's, many of them, and I convinced myself that I could see subtle movements deep within them.
The dolphins looked like ordinary terrestrials to me. But if they were alive, they were in a comatose or suspended state; they were absolutely motionless; they could have been wax figures.
Each was six or seven feet long, obviously adult; I could not determine sex.
That section of the pool visible through the glass wall was apparently recessed from the main area and not visible from above because I had seen nothing earlier to suggest such a setup below.
I was trying to get a better look at the comatose dolphins when Donovan's voice spoke to me from the panel I mentioned earlier.
"They are quite healthy, Ashton."
I turned slowly to gaze at the panel, which stood about twenty feet away. "Glad to hear that," I replied. "Maybe you should tell them that."
I had already begun moving toward the panel and I was trying to home in on the precise source of the
voice as Donovan responded to my little gibe, but it was a futile attempt. The voice was just "there" somewhere, evidently issuing from behind the panel yet clear and distinct. "We would not interfere in any life process without permission."
I said, speaking to the panel at large, "That's nice to know. Now how about defining 'we' for me."
There was a trace of amusement in the response. "Would you understand if I told you?"
"I'll sure try," I promised.
Then I saw him...in the panel, through the panel, somewhere...as through a glass darkly, just from the chin up. He was smiling as he said, "In good time, my friend. For now, just try to stay out of trouble. Will you do that?"
I was a bit irked by the tone, that of a father chastising a small boy. I said, "You know, Donovan, you've got a hell of a nerve. I don't know what you guys have in mind for this planet but I have to tell you that your methods don't always make a lot of sense. I presume there is some universal standard for good sense."
He was still having subtle fun with me as he replied, "Which universe?"
I growled, "How many are there?"
"How many would you like?" he asked.
I said, "See? You're treating me like a puppy."
The face and voice became very sober as he replied to that. "I beg your forgiveness. You are entirely correct. Superior technology does not necessarily equate to superior wisdom, does it. Take the dolphin."
I said, "Yes?"
"He is very old and very wise. Yet your superior technology allows you to exterminate him to the point of genocide. I have the nerve, Ashton? I have not slaughtered you, my friend. Yet you have reduced virtually every life-form upon the planet to serve your comfort. If you cannot eat it or skin it or otherwise process it for your comfort, then you exterminate it. How say you now?"
I replied, "I was about to say that I do none of that. But I guess I do, in many subtle ways."
Donovan said, "And in some ways not so subtle. But it is our fault, not yours. We brought you here and abandoned you here to shift for yourself, charging you only to subdue the planet. It appears that you have very nearly succeeded in that."
Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series Book 6) Page 10
