by John A. Keel
“Well, about a week ago something scared my cows real bad,” he continued. “You know, we ain’t told anyone about this, Mrs. Hyre. You aren’t going to put it in the paper, are you?”
“Not if you don’t want us to.”
“Come on. Let me show you something.”
He led us into the field behind his barn. There was a thirty-foot circle of scorched earth on the hillside. I had seen several of these “fairy circles” before.
“That night our cows really acted up,” he went on. “They stampeded. They were so scared they went right through the fence over there.” He pointed toward a stretch of wire fence that had obviously just been repaired. “It’s an electric fence. Now you know that it takes a lot to make cows charge through an electric fence. Anyway, when I heard the ruckus I ran outside and I saw my cows scattering down the road. And there was a big red and white glowing thing sitting right in the field. I’ve got to say that it scared me half to death. I ran back in my house to get my gun. Didn’t take me more than a minute. But when I got outside again the thing was gone. This circle was all that was left. It took the rest of the night to round up my cows.”
“Were any of them lost or missing?” I asked.
“No.” He paused. “But Herk—that’s Hercules—my big old collie dog ran off that night and we ain’t seen him since.”
Mary had been with me when I had checked into other missing dog incidents. She gave me a meaningful glance and he caught it.
“Say, you don’t think that thing took old Herk, do you?”
“No. It was probably just some kind of electrical phenomenon,” I answered gently. “Herk will probably come back.”
“I hope so. We sure loved that dog.” He looked thoughtful. “Electrical, huh. Let me show you something else.”
He led us into his barn and showed us a brand-new circuit box.
“I had to have this put in the next day so I could run my milker. The old box was completely burned out. In fact, it was melted … like somebody had put a welding torch to it.”
“See, it must have been some kind of electrical thing,” I said lamely. I knew Ivan Sanderson had investigated an almost identical incident in New Jersey only weeks before. But in that case the cows had been in their stalls in the barn and were found dead.
“Has anyone else been around to talk to you about this?”
“No … I haven’t told anyone. Just some fellows from the electric company who turned up the next day. They fussed around with the transformer on the pole by the road. I tried to talk with them but they didn’t have much to say.”
“Did you know them?”
“Never saw them before. Come to think of it, they didn’t have a regular electric truck. Just a panel truck”
“Would you recognize them if you saw them again?”
“Sure would. They was foreigners. You know, Japs or something. Like I said, they weren’t very friendly.”
“How were they dressed?”
“Oh, you know … ordinary coveralls. I did notice their shoes, though. They had on funny shoes with very thick rubber soles. Guess when you work around electricity you need insulation.”
Mary shuddered perceptibly.
“Say, do you know these fellows?” he asked.
“Well, I saw a man with thick-soled shoes like that once,” Mary began. I cut in sharply, thanking the man, promising to keep him out of the papers, and reminding Mary that we had an appointment elsewhere.
Back in the car, Mary could no longer curb her natural curiosity.
“What do you make of all this, John?”
“The more I find out, the more confusing it becomes.”
“That’s the way I fed. That phone call … sounds like someone didn’t want you to talk to him.”
“It could work the other way, too,” I suggested. “Maybe this whole thing was set up so I would talk to him. I just picked his farm out at random. If he had just turned me away with a smile I would never have bothered him again. But when he came to the door with a gun…”
“But how did they know you were going to stop there? How could anyone have possibly known?”
“That’s the real question. How could anyone have known?”
II.
A few days before leaving New York I called Gray Barker in Clarksburg and he agreed to meet me the following Tuesday in Point Pleasant. As soon as he hung up, I dialed Woodrow Derenberger’s unlisted number and spoke to his wife.
“When are you coming to see us again?” she asked.
“I expect to be in West Virginia next week,” I replied.
“I know. I hear you’re having a secret meeting with Gray Barker on Tuesday.”
I was stunned.
“I’m meeting with Gray,” I admitted, “but it’s not very secret. I didn’t know about it myself until a couple of minutes ago, so how on earth did you know?”
There was a pause.
“Charlie Cutler over in Ohio told us about it a couple of days ago,” she finally said.
“And how did he know about it?”
“I—I don’t know. I suppose he heard it somewhere.”
When you enter the unreal world of the contactees, predictions, prophecies, and a mysterious invasion of your privacy become commonplace. Contactees seem to develop heightened perceptions, ESP, and precognition. The changes occur almost overnight. In their meetings with the entities they are served up platters of propaganda along with rumors and nonsense which they accept and repeat as fact. Many of the choicest tidbits in UFO lore were not actual events but were put into circulation by contactees who placed their complete trust in their contacters. The entities spun wild tales about crashed saucers being confiscated by the U.S. Air Force, farmers shooting and wounding spacemen, and so forth. Contactees repeated the stories to wild-eyed UFO enthusiasts and so they spread in ever-widening circles until they appeared in articles and books.
Derenberger never claimed psychic powers. He said he received telepathic messages from Indrid Cold giving him specific information. Others such as Ted Owens and Uri Geller have also claimed that their psychic abilities came from space intelligencies. Mr. Owens has racked up an impressive record predicting the outcomes of football games. Mr. Geller, an Israeli psychic, became world famous after his alleged contact with a flying saucer on a desert in the Middle East. Both men have been examined and tested by armies of scientists and parapsychologists.
I have probably examined and befriended more UFO contactees than anyone else. Usually their experiences follow certain patterns which they are not even aware of at the time. A long series of seemingly unrelated events occur prior to the first overt contact. These events can begin in childhood and span many years. Then, too, most contactees have active or latent psychic abilities before contact. People who see ghosts or religious apparitions have the same patterns as the UFO contactees. And, in fact, the apparitions described in religious “miracles” usually share the same physical characteristics as our UFO entities; that is, long fingers, dusky complexions, pointed features.
The flying saucer lore of the past twenty-seven years has been built on three main components: (1) the sighting reports, usually poorly investigated by amateurs and believers, or based entirely on fragmented and often inaccurate newspaper stories; (2) the testimony of the contactees; (3) messages received through spirit mediums and ESP. In recent years a new element has been added by the few scientists pulled into the controversy. This is the tiresome use of probabilities to explain that there must be zillions of other planets and therefore there must be uncounted numbers of inhabited places in the universe. In the early 1960s exobiology became the new scientific rip-off. Various foundations and NASA poured millions of dollars into the study of extraterrestrial life. Since there were no samples available for study, and since there is not the slightest bit of evidence that even a single planet exists in any other star system, exobiology was not an easy field. Scientists had to justify their enormous expenditures with reams of speculative papers: We
do not even have enough facts, after fifteen years of study, to form a real basis for the coveted probabilities. If Nick the Greek were asked to make book on the existence of extraterrestrial life, he would find the scientific arguments so tenuous that the odds would have to be somewhere around a trillion to one. Of the nine planets in our own solar system, only three—Mercury, Earth, and Mars—are solid, and only one of these three is infested with life. The appearance of life requires a long list of environmental and chemical conditions. For all these conditions to exist simultaneously on a single planet also requires a whole series of improbable coincidences.
Men have always gazed at the night sky and dreamed of other worlds. Four thousand years ago, Enoch became the first space traveler, visiting seven worlds or planets after being roused from his sleep by angelic spacemen. Swedenborg, the great Swedish mathematician, went wandering through the cosmos in the 1700s, and a proper Bostonian named William Denton was given a guided tour of Venus in the 1860s. George Adamski, Howard Menger, and several others visited the moon in the 1950s, preceding Neil Armstrong by more than a decade. Menger, a New Jersey sign painter, brought back some “moon potatoes” that looked like rocks … and they didn’t cost the taxpayers a cent. Adamski, a California eccentric, found the backside of the moon rich in vegetation and water. Others observed cunningly concealed underground cities there.
Still others have traveled to scores of unknown planets in distant galaxies. Planets with exotic-sounding names adopted from ancient Greek, just as most of the entities who stop lone drivers on isolated back yards claim names from mythology.
For example, on Wednesday, July 26, 1967, Mrs. Maris De Long and Michael Kisner were driving in a park near California’s Big Tujunga Canyon when they heard a bodiless voice which instructed them to watch for something unusual. There was a flash of light in the sky and a glowing disc twenty feet in diameter appeared. Soon they were chatting with “Kronin,” master of the Kronian race. He was very tall and both boneless and eyeless, and said he was “a space robot encased in a time capsule.”
As soon as Mrs. De Long reached her home after the visit her phone rang. It was Kronin. She later recorded several conversations with him in which he explained the problems of the universe. She had never heard of Cronus, the Roman god of time.
Another entity popular in occult circles for centuries is Ashtoreth, the Phoenician goddess of love. A character called Ashtar has been communicating with UFO fans for years, coming through worldwide at séances, on Ouija boards, and through mental telepathy. Ashtar is a big cheese in the Intergalactic Federation. Contactees have churned out dozens of books filled with his messages.
A woman on Long Island had an encounter with an olive-skinned gentleman in a greenish suit in May 1967 and his name caused me some problems. He called himself Aphloes. I finally figured out that it was from aphlogistic, a word derived from Greek meaning “a lamp giving light without flame.”
Woodrow Derenberger’s Mr. Cold did not fit this pattern. In fact, the name made me suspicious of Woody’s story and if I had not talked with others who had shared similar experiences on the same night, I might have rejected Derenberger outright because of it.
In earlier times, fairies, demons, and even human witches practicing their Black Sabbath rites, chose gravel pits, garbage dumps, cemeteries and crossroads for their appearances. Modern hairy monsters and UFOs select the same sites, and quite a few UFO contacts have occurred near crossroads or on highways still under construction at points where old highways once intersected. Derenberger’s first contact with Cold was on a newly completed highway yards from an old intersection.
Across the river, the vast “Indian” mounds of Ohio stand as mute testimony of some earlier culture almost identical to the culture which constructed the great mounds of Great Britain. The latter were joined by straight tracks or “leys” which formed a complicated grid system. I wondered if a similar ley grid may not have once existed in West Virginia and I studied aerial photos and old maps looking for such a system. There are tiny traces here and there, but modern farmers and builders have destroyed most of the old artifacts, just as they had destroyed a great many of the mounds, stone towers, etc., that stood on this continent when the first Europeans arrived.
Had Woody been stopped on a cross-point of some old ley network? The only clue lies in Mr. Cold’s uncharacteristic selection for a name. In his study of the British leys, The View Over Atlantis, John Michell stated:
A peculiar feature of the old alignments is that certain names appear with remarkable frequency along their routes. Names with Red, White and Black are common; so are Cold or Cole, Dod, Merry and Ley.
It would be in keeping with the twisted logic of the entities to call attention to a West Virginia ley system by staging their landings at specific points along the grid and adopting names like Cold. Apparently this is exactly what they did in 1966–67.
So far as I know, Cold and his mischievous companions never presented themselves to other contactees … or they changed their names to suit each occasion. This, too, is a break with tradition. Ashtar, Orthon, and several others with names that sound like synthetic fabrics have contacted thousands of people all over the world in the past twenty years.
In September 1973, just before the great October UFO wave, posters sprang up all over Atlanta, Georgia, proclaiming the eminent arrival of the space people. A Georgia psychic was in mental communication with Zandark, who identified himself as “a member of the United Cosmic Council; a Commander in Chief in Charge of Directing Technical Transmissions Via Mental Telepathy or the Combination of Mediumistic Telepathy Under the Direction of the Confederation of Cosmic Space Beings.” Zandark delivered the usual “We come to bring peace” message, claimed credit for building the Sphinx, the Pyramids, “and other structural phenomenas,” and complained that contactees were not being taken seriously enough, but were being “branded fools, fanatics, and personal publicity seekers.” We were advised to shape up.
Each of Zandark’s communications began with the salutation, “Adonai Vassu.” When the sitters at the Atlanta séances asked for a translation they were told it meant, “Peace be with you, and love forever.”
Unknown to the Georgia group, a contactee in Italy, Eugenio Siragusa, has been in touch with the space people for years and his contacter always signs off with, “May the light of the universal peace be with you … [signed] Adoniesis.”
Adoniesis is a manufactured word, a sort of Romanization of Adonai, an ancient Hebrew word for God; Vassu stems from the Latin vassus, meaning servant. So Adonai Vassu really means “servant of God.” Old Zandark is just another angel in disguise! Adoniesis and Adonai are not so far removed from each other. It is interesting that the same terms would turn up at séances an ocean apart.
Even more interesting is the fact that the messages received by psychics everywhere bear remarkable similarities in content, even in phrasing. I have researched obscure contactee-type books written two and three hundred years ago and have found the same identical messages and phraseology were prevalent then. Since much of this literature is very obscure and hard to find, and since many of our psychics and contactees are poorly read, it is doubtful if this is a question of fakers repeating the earlier material. Rather, it seems as if there is a phonograph in the sky endlessly repeating the same material generation after generation as if there were a crack in the record.
Author Brad Steiger interviewed scores of psychics, prophets, and contactees for his study of this phenomenon, Revelation: The Divine Fire. He found that people claiming to be in communication with God, angels, spirits of the dead, and spacemen from other planets were all receiving essentially the same information. All spoke of an impending disaster, just as Zandark warned, “The time for your planet is crucial.” But the prophets and seers of the last century were getting the same spiel.
William Miller (1782–1849) founded the Seventh-Day Adventists in the belief that the world was coming to an end in 1843. Interestingly, prophets al
l over the world and tribes of Hopi and Navaho Indians in the Southwest picked that same year. Clearly, they were all tuned in to the same “static.” Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in 1872 on a similar premise.
The messages delivered to the children in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917, also discussed the coming disaster, but phrased in obscure theological terms.
Again and again, psychics and contactees have gathered their family and friends together to sit on a hilltop and wait for the predicted end of the world. This charade has been repeated many times in the past twenty-five years with UFO contactees preparing for the wonderful space people to descend in their flying saucers and evacuate a chosen few from our doomed planet.
The world was supposed to end on December 24, 1967. Occult and UFO groups around the world got the message in every language. A Danish cult actually built a lead-lined bomb shelter and spent the holidays cringing in it, waiting for the big blast.
In 1973, a UFO contactee in Wisconsin soberly announced that the comet Kahotek was going to wreck the earth that Christmas. He was recruiting people to be evacuated by his space friends.
Zandark, Orthon, Ashtar, Xeno, Cold, and all their cronies have been leading many of us around by the noses for centuries. First they convince us of their honesty, reliability, the accuracy of their predictions, and their well-meant intentions. Then they leave us sitting on a hilltop waiting for the world to blow up.
When the world was sparsely populated and the signals from the superspectrum were not smothered in so much static from the lower spectrum, men learned to place great faith in these entities and their prophecies. Priests, scholars, and magicians achieved a marvelous understanding of the cosmos and the cosmic forces through astrology, alchemy, and the magical manipulation of matter. But as man followed the angelic dictate, “Multiply and replenish the earth,” our planet began to suffer from psychic pollution. The record on that great phonograph in the sky cracked and stuck in a single groove … single groove … single groove … single.…
