Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  A door?

  I must have passed through.

  Once inside, I had no memory of how I’d got in. I knew only that this was a place of fluorescent glow, white now and not red. A wall of pure whiteness gleamed before me.

  Outside, the gunfire kept up. It sounded dim, remote. I should have heard bullets pinging against the shell of the disk. I didn’t.

  There were buttons. I knew which ones I needed to press and in which order. I don’t know how I knew. I lowered my hands; the disk shuddered. It sank into the earth.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  PART FOUR

  MOONLIGHT BAY

  [APRIL-MAY 1966)

  CHAPTER 17

  THE THIRST WAS WITH ME FROM THE BEGINNING—MORE AN annoyance at first than a torment. I had to find water, or something that could take the place of water, inside the disk. I was afraid to go outside; I delayed until I became desperate. By then it was almost too late.

  Again and again I circled the disk’s interior. I examined the rows of buttons and switches and small lights that surrounded me on every side, searching for something that might pass as a faucet. When thoughts skittered across my mind, frightening me, I calmed myself with acts of measurement.

  Not of time. That wouldn’t have been possible. My watch had stopped the instant I plunged into the earth. Weirdly, the moon was over my head. I could see it through the transparent dome at the top of the disk, always in the dome’s exact center. It didn’t budge from that spot, didn’t rise or set. Always full. Three times its normal size. Since it was the same moon I’d always known—the same seas, the same craters—that meant I had to be three times closer.

  But how could that be if I’d gone inside the earth? I had no clue; I didn’t try to guess. Instead I measured space. I paced off the diameter of the disk, and although each time I did this, I got a slightly different result, it always came to about thirty feet. I did the same for the circumference and got ninety-five feet, which was close enough to 30 x pi. This reassured me. My physical circumstances might make no sense at all, but at least the laws of mathematics still seemed to work.

  Meanwhile I was getting thirstier. Also, I couldn’t see very well. The right lens of my glasses had a long vertical crack from what the three men had done to it. Through that lens everything shifted and shimmered and wouldn’t stay in one place. When I felt too dizzy to stand, I sat on the floor. I closed my eyes. I could have sworn I had a canteen that I lifted to my mouth, tilted my head back, drank deep. I felt no relief; my throat was still dry. Then I saw what I had pressed to my lips: the book.

  The Case for the UFO. Marked up by the Gypsies. Lost, then found; rescued or stolen by Rochelle, then by me. The book that revealed all secrets. Including the ones I needed to know if I wasn’t going to die here? I started to turn the pages; I held back. I wasn’t yet ready for disappointment.

  The disk’s inner walls and floor were blinding white, the kind that gives you a headache if you have to look at it for long. No seats, nothing that might be identified as furniture, except at the center a bulky object that reminded me of a closed sarcophagus. One solid mass, white like the disk, about three feet wide and long enough to lie on. In height it came to a little below my waist; it was like smooth, hard rubber to the touch. All around the sides, about three inches below the even rectangular surface, ran a series of small protruding knobs, spaced a few inches apart. I couldn’t allow myself to imagine what they might be used for.

  I tried sitting on it. Immediately I jumped off, as if I’d sat on a red-hot burner. Yet it wasn’t hot. I just had the sense, ungrounded but very strong, that I mustn’t be there. Something awful would happen on that table—altar, it occurred to me to call it—if I didn’t get off at once. I leaped away, toward the control panel that ran all the way around the inner wall, with its oval buttons and tiny levers. I kept my hands glued to the wall, my back toward the table, until I felt safe again.

  There had to be water somewhere in there. Living creatures of some kind must pilot these disks; all life needs water. That’s why there can’t be life on the moon. The moon is waterless; the “seas” people used to imagine are vast deserts, burning under the sun, freezing in darkness—But if there was water within those strange walls, I couldn’t find it.

  I had no choice but to go outside, and unless everything I’d learned was wrong, the dero or something like them would be waiting. Not to mention that I didn’t know how to get out. The wall, as far as I could tell, was smooth, seamless. I sat cross-legged on the floor and slowly opened the book, willing myself to breathe steadily, evenly, deeply. With hands that would not stop trembling, I began to turn the pages.

  First impressions were blurred, confused. I saw intricate diagrams drawn in the spaces empty of print, which I imagined bore some resemblance to the disk’s control panel. My eye fell upon a sketch—which I hurried past, with a faint nausea—of a praying mantis and a pencil. The handwriting that framed these drawings was mostly illegible. A string of capital letters leaped out at me: “DO THEY NEVER INQUIRE INTO THE MANNER OF THE SEEDING?” In the surrounding scrawl I made out the words Baby-Girl Christ, born of a Virgin.

  Religion, I thought. All God and Christ, nothing about UFOs. Certainly nothing about the one particular UFO that I happened to be trapped inside. I snapped the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor, coming to rest at the foot of the casketlike altar. And a dreadful thought came into my mind:

  This disk is the dero equivalent of a pressure cooker.

  Placed at the surface as a trap . . .

  I wailed and howled. My mind, my body twisted together within a spinning tunnel of terror. I beat my fists against the wall. “Please, please let me out!” I screamed, to whom or what I don’t know. My brain switched itself off, and I lost consciousness.

  I must have dreamed.

  A lot like the dream that had come to me when I nodded off driving. Only a bit more detail; a sense of it lasting longer . . . Night, and I’m with my father, and he feels like a giant, because I’m small. His hand is on my left shoulder. We look through a window into the street, and it’s raining, and the streetlights and automobile lights glare off the pavement. I hear an engine start up. My father points and says, “Look, look,” and I look as hard as I can . . .

  Someone stood up beside me, squeezed my shoulder—firmly, not painfully.

  No. This had to still be part of the dream.

  Dazed, blinking, I turned toward the wall and saw a crack. Vertical, nearly three feet high. It hadn’t been there before. On the other side: blackness.

  I squeezed both hands into the crack and pulled hard, in opposite directions. Slabs of the wall shifted, slid stubbornly apart. It was like prying open a closed metal eye. Forcing a window, long rusted shut. The edges of the crack cut into my palms. At last I made enough of an opening to crawl through, to the moonlit darkness outside.

  Then I waited.

  Half crazy with thirst, I flattened myself on my stomach, raising my head so my eyes were level with the bottom of the opening. Ten minutes I watched, maybe fifteen. No motion outside, nor any noise. The silence was absolute, unlike any I’d felt before. I heard my breathing like a windstorm. I heard the beating of my heart.

  I dragged myself through the space I’d made. The wall of the disk was only inches thick—a foot at most. Yet passing through it, I felt myself half walking, half floating through a series of rooms, all of them empty, a dull white. Curtains, as though spun by spiders from ceiling to floor, waved softly back and forth in the breezeless passageway. I passed through them, or around them, without touching them. Drops of whitish liquid descended slowly from the ceiling, as though along milky threads.

  Then I was outside, struggling to my feet, leaning on the slanted exterior of the disk. To the touch, neither hot nor cool. Yet it glowed a dusky red, like metal approaching red hot; and stepping away, I saw it was the only bit of color anywhere in this world to which I’d come.


  CHAPTER 18

  ASHES. MOONLIGHT. THAT WAS WHAT I SAW WHEN I LOOKED around. Right behind me, the disk. In front of me, I couldn’t tell how far away, a shining, shimmering surface that might have been water.

  The moon, huge and ferocious, hung over my head. I kept my eyes turned away from it. My shadow, cast narrowly around my feet, was as crisp as in noonday sunlight. Under my shoes the ground was ashes, or something very like ashes. It was slippery to walk on yet crunched like snow. The squeaking t-ss-ss-t of each footstep was the only sound in a silent world. It wasn’t hot, nor was it cold. I felt no wind.

  The disk lay in a clearing, about twenty feet in each direction. Beyond, solid vegetation encircled me, the bushes unlike anything I’d seen before. They were thickly planted; they came up to my waist. They had a stunted look, as if there were too many of them, too feebly nourished. The leaves and branches were gray. Everything but the disk was gray, or black, or silver in the moonlight.

  How would I hack my way through all this shrubbery? But no sooner did I approach it, push at it with my hands than it softly crumbled into greasy dust. Faster and faster I crunched my way through the bushes, in the direction of the water. I began to run, treading branches and leaves and thorns into ashen fragments.

  That was when the pain shot up into me, through my foot.

  It knocked me off my feet, as if I’d been caught in an ocean wave. I sat down hard amid the crumbled bushes. I gave out a loud yell, which instantly I regretted. In a world so still, a sound would travel. A blackish liquid—my blood, darkened in the moonlight—oozed through my right sock, just above the ankle. On the ground by my foot, a long, sharp bone gleamed brilliant white, tipped by wet blackness.

  I’d stepped into a skeleton.

  I struggled to balance myself, squatting, on my feet. Pain washed through me—my whole body this time—and once more ebbed. I rummaged amid the jumble of bones. The remains of an animal like a medium-size dog—skull, and jaws, and teeth. Several broken ribs, one of which was the bone that had pierced me. And legs . . .

  Six.

  I counted, over and over, forgetting my thirst, until I was sure I’d made no mistake. Shakily I climbed to my feet. The zoology of this world was more than I’d bargained for. Six-legged creatures, big as dogs ...

  And where were the eight-legged things that fed upon the six-legged ones?

  I stuffed my fist into my mouth. I tried to remember what the dero were supposed to look like. Basically humanoid, I thought, but warped and dwarf-like, their faces bestial and bizarre. I couldn’t recall any mention of multiple limbs.... And I looked back toward the glowing red disk, to the white oval I’d left gaping on its edge. Anything might get in now.

  I’ll run back, I thought. It’s not too far. I’ll find a way to barricade myself inside. I won’t come out again.

  And survive how long without water?

  No choice. I shuddered and took a few breaths. One advantage of the silence: if anything alive was slithering among these bushes, I was likely to hear it before it got too close. I began again, painfully and cautiously, to make a path for myself through the gray vegetation, toward the broad glitter ahead.

  A lake, it seemed, as at last I drew near, praying it wouldn’t turn into a mirage.

  Yet it had currents, as if it weren’t a lake but part of some vast river, flowing toward a place I couldn’t imagine. Most of all, it was like a swampy marsh, with no defined edge. The bushes stopped abruptly, without first thinning, and a few feet onward the ashes of the land gave way to ashen waters. Before I knew it, I was up to my ankles. The water splashed, faintly, as I walked in it. My wounded foot burned at its touch.

  I squatted, then knelt to drink. Immediately I pulled back. The water stank of rotting flesh, as if generations of animals had come there to die. It stretched before me, unending, no farther shore in sight. Once more I lowered my face.

  Drink.

  “Who said that?” I yelled, jerking my head up. I clapped my hand, pointlessly, over my mouth. The bushes closest to the water’s edge trembled, as if in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and I thought again of the dero and wondered where I might go to escape. No voice answered. Not even an echo. The voice that said Drink wasn’t an echo either. It was a woman’s voice, from inside me.

  Drink, it said again.

  “Who are you?”

  The voice echoed back, Are you, are you, are you, and the surface of the water rippled as if something were stirring beneath.

  She spoke again: We were here before you. And the echo said, For you, for you, for you, and again the water quivered.

  I drank then, and the water tasted as bad as it smelled. I spit it back up. But I couldn’t help myself. I drank again, and again—like an animal, my face and belly in the water, the pain in my foot forgotten—sickened by what I drank yet helpless not to drink.

  The path back to the disk, which I’d cut for myself a short time before, was marked with my own outgoing footprints. They seemed soft and blurry, compared with the crisp prints I was now leaving, and I wondered why. I didn’t stop to puzzle it out. I felt ill from the water, tired, aching to lie down even on the disk’s hard floor. It was uphill from the lake, but the slope was very gradual. This was mostly a flat, level world to which I’d come.

  The gap on the disk’s side was wide open, just as I’d left it. No strange cobwebbed transit this time. One moment I was in the ash world outside the disk; then I put my knee inside and hauled myself in. Along the white floor I left an ashen trail, muddy with blood. My foot still bled and had begun to swell. I took off my shoe. Needed a bandage; an undershirt would do. I peeled off my shirt and set it aside—and stopped. My heart stopped also, for a second or two.

  An ashen handprint on my shirt.

  Tiny, not quite human. A thumb. Six fingers.

  On my left shoulder. Exactly where I’d felt the grasping hand as I drifted up from my dream.

  I heard high-pitched yelps, a whole string of them. They came from my own throat. I had to close that opening; never should have left it open. I yanked on the edges I’d separated, trying to pull them back together, join them once more into a solid wall. They wouldn’t budge.

  A dread of that empty hole in the side of the disk, such as I’d never known, came upon me. I backed away from it on my hands and feet, eyes glued to it, until I collided with the corner of the altar. Then, afraid to look into the blackness of the opening but afraid also to look away, I lay on the floor. Perhaps—surely—it was that crack in my glasses. But the blackness seemed to me alive, pulsating with multilegged, derolike obscenities that had once been inside and were certain to be back.

  Once more I wailed and howled. If I’d had the strength, I would have torn off what remained of my clothes, gone stripped and naked. I lifted up my hands, pleading to the moon-ridden heaven for release from this place, yet knew, if I couldn’t find a way to rescue myself, there wasn’t anything on earth or in the black sky beneath it that would come to my aid.

  CHAPTER 19

  I TURNED TO THE BOOK BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE ELSE to turn. I trusted books; I always have. People will lie to you, betray you, abandon you. Books—never. And this Case for the UFO, which I imagined to be plucked from heaven . . . At the beginning I wanted to worship it. I placed it on the altar that might also have been a table, squarely in its middle, there to be bathed in the moonlight that streamed through the dome above. I knew I didn’t belong on the altar, that I had no business there. The book did.

  I paged through it, looking for some note from Rochelle, explaining why she hadn’t been on the plane, where Julian had vanished to and why, how or if I would meet them again. Nothing. Only a printed book, every conceivable space—margins, blanks at the ends and beginnings of chapters, endpapers—packed with waves of scrawl in the Gypsies’ three handwritings, their three colors of ink. Here and there a drawing.

  Of a crater, for example. Like those on the moon, but with a tower jutting up from its center. A disk like a UFO rested at t
he tower’s top. Other, similar disks approached the tower, departed from it.

  Over the lunar maps and diagrams, which were part of the original printed text, there’d been drawn what looked like spiderwebs, the threads dotted with small, lopsided ellipses. The placement of these dots seemed to correlate with the patterns of buttons on the control panel, and I stood for hours by the disk’s wall comparing the two. I didn’t yet dare press the buttons.

  Then there was the praying mantis. I stared at the blue-ink sketch in a margin near the middle of the book, of the long-bodied, long-legged insect impaled on a pencil. Its head hung at an awkward angle, unendurably painful. The thick eyes almost popped out of the face. The pencil entered between the lower legs; from the back of the neck the sharpened tip protruded. Stripes, drawn across the body in red ink as on a barber’s pole, gave the impression of being wet like fresh blood.

  Anxiously I searched through the sea of scrawl by the mantis’s legs for some explanation of what the drawing meant, what it had to do with UFOs or with me. The words THEY BURNED FOR 18 DAYS, printed in block capitals, leaped out at me. No clue who “they” were, or why they burned, or what happened to them after the eighteen days were finished. On the opposite page, in another handwriting, I was able to decipher “And when the flesh is Burned shall Take Of The Fatty Ashes, and smear them upon the Altar. . . .”

  Phrases from the Bible. I recognized them; by now I’d come to know the Bible well. I couldn’t guess what this language was doing here. Yet it seemed strangely apt. I had walked amid the ashes barefoot now—the traction was better, and there was no way I could squeeze a shoe over my swollen right foot—and I’d been struck by their peculiar quality. They weren’t dry and flaky, as I would have expected. Instead they seemed greasy, saturated with fat. What kind of burning would produce such ashes?