by Douglas Lain
Virginia doesn’t answer but takes a bottle of sunscreen out of her purse, opens it, and rubs some on the back of her neck. “Stop looking for easy answers,” she says. “Come on, let’s go.”
Flint and Asket are drinking coffee under the parachute jump, sitting safely on a bench near the base of the structure without bothering to look up. She seems preternaturally pleased in the moment and she’s sitting close to him, laughing at his jokes, whatever they happened to be. When Virginia and I get closer I find out that they’re discussing the ’60s, talking about what the art world had been like back then.
“And somebody bought it?” Asket asked.
“He produced ninety tins of his own feces, or he said it was his feces,” Harold said. “He was charging thirty-seven dollars a can and said the price was set based on the price of gold. I don’t know how many he actually sold.”
I gesture to Harold, indicating that I want to talk to him in private, and he stands up from the bench and announces that he has to get back to the University. He has more shit to package, he says.
He takes his glasses off, turns in the direction of the subway station, and the two of us start off down the boardwalk.
“Are you going to start working on UFOs again?” I ask him.
“It’s always the same with you. No matter what’s happening, whether you have two wives or just one, whether there are flying saucers in the skies of Earth or not, it’s always about the writing,” he says. “Always about your little career.”
“That’s not fair,” I say. And it wasn’t.
After all, from the beginning it was always about the writing. That’s why he’d sought me out to begin with, and that’s why we’d remained something like friends. It was about the work, about the writing, from the start.
When I started with Flint back in 1984 I was a typical young literature professor, a product of American letters in the late ’70s. While I’d come out of Iowa, the top and most conservative MFA program in the country, I’d broken with Iowa-style realism. My nonacademic writing, what little there was of it, was purposely unreal, self-referential, and littered with the kind of political observations you’d expect from someone who vaguely remembered opposing Vietnam and who was working on opposing consumerism, corporations, unions, activism and its banalities, the university system, traditional gender roles, monogamy, the State, and, in the end, even literature itself.
All I knew for certain was that “the center didn’t hold.” “Western Culture,” whatever it was, “had arrived at an impasse” and it was my job to describe the moment and to let people know that something was crazy in America. What Flint liked, the reason he’d approached me, was a short story I’d written for the Evergreen Review entitled “Red Rubber Ball.” It told the story of a man who was preparing to be the best man at his schizophrenic brother’s wedding, and who was trying to convince his brother not to have the song “Red Rubber Ball” performed during the ceremony. The schizo brother insisted that the song should be performed because it was, despite being bubblegum pop, a holy song. He was convinced that the smell of summer, of a rubber ball and asphalt, always accompanied the music. The schizophrenic felt sure that the one-hit wonder band Cyrkle had purposefully created an incantation of youth and, beyond that, of eternal play, he thought the message of the song was the same as Jesus’s message: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Of course, the wedding was a disaster. It turned out that the woman the brother was marrying had epilepsy and that the song inspired her to seizure and rage, but being right provided the narrator very little joy. What Flint had liked about it, why it convinced him that I would be a good match for him and would understand his UFO research, wasn’t entirely clear at the time, but somehow the story had reminded Flint of what it felt like to connect. The idea that a silly pop song, that the secret meaning in the detritus of our consumer society, might redeem us even as everything seemed to go wrong, was just the kind of thing that Walker might have enjoyed contemplating.
For me, it wasn’t until I met Harold Flint, it wasn’t until I went to one of his abductee parties, that I really understood what I’d written. It wasn’t until I started working with him and saw my first UFO home movie, participated in a session of hypnotic regression, saw scoop marks, implants, and doctored or invented government files, that the emptiness and the strangeness of everyday life became something tangible for me.
“We don’t really know what’s going on,” Flint said when we first met. We were on our way upstairs to an abduction group meeting he was leading at the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village. He was talking about the saucers, but I’d been taken with the Gothic architecture of what had been a courthouse, surprised by the stained glass windows and religiously ornate doorways, that I thought he’d been speaking much more generally. “We might be lab rats for energy beings or part of a breeding program for little aliens who live on the moon,” Harold had said back then, before he’d introduced me to Carole. At the time she was just the pretty young woman he was helping out. She’d had a UFO sighting a few years earlier and she’d come to him. I remember her vividly, she had frizzy curly hair, like Virginia had had back then too, only she was maybe a bit sexier than Virginia, a bit taller, a bit older too maybe, and more aristocratic in her posture. She was an artist but not a desperate one, when she spoke she had that almost English-sounding accent that used to go along with money on the East Coast. She was waiting in the periodicals section in the purple sunlight by a stained glass window. She was reading a copy of Telos magazine and she smiled benevolently at Harold and me as we stepped up next to her, but rather than introduce me to her Harold continued with this sophomoric prattle.
“We don’t really know what’s going on,” he’d said. “We might be lab rats, or dream characters, or somebody’s idea of a joke,” he said.
Nothing has changed much since then. He’s always liked the sound of his own voice, I think, and what he’s saying to me now as we walk along the boardwalk at Coney Island isn’t very different from what he told me that first time we met. “You get confused easily,” Harold says to me. “And you get things wrong. It wasn’t the story about the red rubber ball that made me want to work with you but quite the other way around. You didn’t write that story. I did.” We’re back at the parachute jump, at the steel latticework of the old amusement park ride, and I look up at the structure and when I look back down, when I glance at Harold, I find he’s frowning. Apparently he means it. “I’ve only written a little bit of fiction,” he says, “so I remember every story very well, certainly well enough to be certain about taking credit.”
“You’re serious?” I say. “You approached me, came to me, because you admired that story. Or that’s what you said. I took it for empty flattery at the time, actually.”
“If you wrote that story does that mean that I’m the one who came up with how to recover ‘lost time’?” I ask. He’s clearly gotten everything turned around in his memory. The truth is we both worked on altering the practice of constructing a Happening that could provide a framework for an abduction or sighting, but the original idea of the Happening was from Fluxus.
While other UFO researchers were convinced that screen memories were essentially false, that these strange recollections of owls or birds, absurd memories of strange men in black suits or other strange costumes, were implanted by the extraterrestrials, Flint was convinced that these absurdities were just as real as the saucers or anything else. Rain and Mack and other researchers used hypnotherapy to uncover “true memories” under the screen images, but we took a different approach. We worked with abductees not to help them remember something new, but in order to help them come up with some interpretation, some sort of meaning, for what they could remember. If this meant that they decided that they’d been visited by an angel or a squirrel, or that they were remembering something from another life, that was all fine with us.
Our way of investigating saucer reports was to construct Happenings. That is, we’d have the witnesses reenact their UFO encounters symbolically. We’d interview these witnesses, find out about their personal history, their tastes, their neuroses, and then we’d get them to create something that summarized their experience. In Carole’s case Harold ended up helping her take her memory of flying saucers and transform the memory into sounds. She’d remembered the men descending the escalator from the saucer as being faceless. She’d remembered the aliens, blond men in jumpsuits, holding up large blank sheets of orange paper, they held them up at arm’s length and at shoulder level, so that as they approached her the rectangles of orange construction paper blocked her view. She couldn’t see their expressions, or their heads, at all. And, for her, the sensation of headless aliens had been expressed as poems first, and then as a song she’d recorded in Harold’s studio. “We need to get Asket to interpret her experience?” I ask him.
“Is that why we’re here?” Harold asks me. “Isn’t that backward? Shouldn’t she be helping us to remember? Shouldn’t we be the ones trying to interpret?”
“But, there is something going on with her and Virginia,” I say. “Don’t you think we need to start with there, with them? Maybe not with Asket only, but with both of them?”
Harold turns around and looks back at the two women who are a ways off now. They’re sitting on the bench and that’s so far behind us that I can’t tell which one of them is which. All I can tell is that one of them, probably Virginia, is braiding the other’s hair.
“You want this, don’t you?” Harold asks.
I do. I want to start working again. It’s ridiculous to turn our backs on the project, on this quest after the meaning of UFOs, now that they’re here. Why stop just when it’s all gotten so much easier?
“I understand why so many people, so many Ufologists, are disappointed. These aliens aren’t living up to expectations. The Pleidiens are tacky and sad, sure, but why should that bother us? I mean, why should you and I care about that? Did we have expectations ahead of time? Were we expecting to be inducted into the Federation of Planets or something? Did we ever think that these sightings were anything other than strange and sad? All along this appealed to you because you thought the UFO mirrored the basic mental instability inherent to humanity. Wasn’t the point to get beyond the appearance of the saucers and get to that instability?” I ask.
Harold crosses his arms and scrunches up his mouth so as to indicate that he won’t interrupt me but also that he isn’t pleased by what I’m saying. He clearly doesn’t agree. “I’ve reached the end of my side of this conversation,” I tell him. “Go ahead.”
Harold uncrosses his arms and then, surprisingly, answers me. He agrees with me.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes, the point was to figure out what was happening in people, to figure out how people were thinking. It’s always been self-referential. And, yes, I think it’s time to start working on another UFO book,” he says. “Only we shouldn’t focus on the aliens, we shouldn’t interrogate this woman who looks like your wife. We don’t need to do any of that.”
“What then?” I ask.
“We’ll start with us,” he says. “And when I say ‘we’ I mean you.”
“Me?”
“You can do it, can’t you? You can arrange a Happening for both of us? You can set that up?”
“Well, I think I have to teach tomorrow,” I say. “What day is it again?” I take a look at my digital watch, see that it’s April 12th and that tomorrow is, indeed, a Monday.
“Just find the time. Set up a Happening for us and then, after that, we’ll get started on the next book. That’s what you want, right? That’s why you brought her around, that’s why she’s still around, why she’s living with you. It’s why we ended up at the beach today. The aim of all this is to get this started again. I’m sure you can handle it, Brian. You’ve done well so far.”
I nod at this and then stop as we’ve reached a point where a few planks are missing. There is an open space underfoot, and rather than step across the gap I’m stopped by it. I pause there, glance toward the ocean, looking past the green trashcan at the edge of the boardwalk and out again at the beach, and then I look down again, into the opening. It’s dark down there, so dark that I can’t find the sand, can’t see the ground from where I’m standing.
Harold, meanwhile, has traversed this gap and moved on. I’m left behind, just watching him get smaller as he approaches the vanishing point.
“Okay,” I shout after him. “I’ll get started,” I say. “I’ll set it up for us.”
7
happenings and abductions
In Rain’s book Saucer Wisdom his descriptions of the technology onboard the Pleidien mothership give the impression that the equipment the aliens use is terribly antiquated. Published in 1978, three years after his first contact, the book describes mainframe computers, furniture made from molded plastic, transistor radio sets, and many other gizmos and gadgets that one would not expect an advanced hyper-intelligence to use. According to Rain the Pleidien computers used punch cards and magnetic tape, the various chambers inside the craft are described as lit by fluorescent lights, and the Nordic-type alien women in jumpsuits, intergalactic secretaries apparently, sit behind aluminum desks while working on electric typewriters.
Rain’s UFO experiences read like something from a B movie. Think of Gerald Mohr in The Angry Red Planet or Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s as if the Pleidiens filled in the gaps in reality that their presence created using the same stock footage from NASA or the Soviet space program that Ed Wood used to fill in gaps in the Plan 9 production budget.
No reputable person could believe anything that Rain described back in 1978. It was just too ludicrous. But now we know Ralph Reality’s mothership is real, and since it’s real there is this lingering question from those old days:
Why are our saviors using technology that our parents would have scoffed at twenty years ago?
My theory is that the machines onboard aren’t actually used, at least they’re not used in the way we might expect. The Pleidiens don’t need these machines to calculate orbital trajectories or fuel expenditures, they don’t need to worry about flight plans. What they need are props. They want to communicate the idea of modern technology and, apparently, they want to invoke a sense of nostalgia at the same time.
Nostalgia runs through the entire Pleidien aesthetic. For instance, in chapter two in his book Charles Rain describes how Ralph Reality took him to what they called the Eternity Chamber and what’s notable in this passage is that the device that brought on Rain’s first full-fledged psychotic break or, more charitably, his first “insight” was invented in the late nineteenth century. The Eternity Chamber was nothing more than a re-purposed Mutoscope from 1890. Shaped like a wheel the thing stood on an iron tripod and included a viewfinder. To operate the Eternity Chamber one stepped up to it, looked into the viewfinder, and turned a crank on the side that spun a reel of photographs inside the machine to create a moving picture.
Rain watched a Pleidien saucer appear to move back and forth across flip cards inside this device and his Pleidien minders explained what was happening. They warned him that he might experience a sense of loss as his essence was absorbed by the machine and translated into pictures. After turning the crank again Rain found the flying saucer disappeared and his own image took its place. His life was reproduced as a series of stills. His life flipped past. Rain watched it all happen again, one card at a time, and his brain’s impulses were wirelessly recorded, analyzed, and stored on the mainframe computer. They told him that his personality, his very person, would later be taken from the mainframe and transferred into the Akashic record.
“It was a spiritual technology,” Rain wrote. “The Pleidiens promised me that, when the process was finished, I would be a new person. They’d record everything, remove it from my brain and store it for me. I would
clear out the memory without losing access to it and have space in my brain for them, for their culture, their language, their ideas and insights. I would be able to speak and understand. I would be able to carry their message and prepare the world for their eventual arrival. Watching the photographs inside the Eternity Chamber flip by, seeing my mother again, watching my baby sister learn to crawl, I felt an overwhelming gratitude. I was there, on the ship, orbiting the Earth, and yet I was also far away from myself. I was reliving my childhood, and I was beyond my childhood. I felt my body dissolve and soon I was out in the stars and galaxies. I was connected to everything, no matter how small or large.”
After publication of his book Rain constructed his own Eternity Chamber. Ralph Reality and the rest of the crew gave Charles Rain permission and blueprints, but despite their help Rain’s version didn’t live up to their original version. Charles didn’t build a Mutoscope but something more like a voting booth, and inside, behind the curtain, he set up a table and a broken television set. People came for miles around in order to experience the promised spiritual transformation, to buy an epiphany made possible through alien technology, and Charles showed them static. Back in the mid-’80s Harold and I interviewed a few members of Rain’s contactee group and while they all believed in Rain, believed in his program, nobody reported anything as grand. But none of them complained. They, all of them, tried to feel something.
“The day I tried it the TV set was on the fritz and instead of seeing myself I watched a few minutes of local news. Even so, by the time my time was up, I had received a message. It was as though God was speaking to me through the weather forecast, through the curved lines and triangles on the map of United States. Maybe I couldn’t understand what God was saying, not with my mind, but I felt something. I knew God was talking to me. I knew it in my heart,” one older woman, a high school teacher from Minnesota who had grey hair that she kept up in a bun and who smelled of clove cigarettes told us. Her testimony was typical.
