"That was when you were in the open field?"
"Yes, sir."
"What was it doing when you first saw it?"
"Well it just jumped across the road and started wiggling at me."
"Wiggling?"
"Yes, sir, like standing still in the air but bouncing side to side."
"I understand. Then what happened?"
"Well see, I was—there was this woman—I came around the bend and saw this woman in the middle of the road, had to slam my brakes to avoid her. And off to the side, off the road, I could see these eyes reflecting my headlights as I swerved around trying to avoid the woman—you know like deer's eyes reflect in the night? —only these were like big round bug eyes, I mean several pair of them, and I could see movement in the bushes, and..
"What was the woman doing?"
"She was just standing there in the middle of the road."
"How was she dressed?"
"I don't—I believe she wasn't dressed, or not very. It all happened so quick—but I'm sure I saw a woman in the road, that's why I braked."
"And then?"
"Well I was... really thinking about the woman, I guess. But even before I got the car under control, this thing jumped up at me—like you described it, sir, that's the same thing I saw. And I saw these little figures scurrying around outside of it, and then it just leapt up about twenty feet off the ground and started dancing at me. I was—listen, I was scared to death and I don't mind saying so. But I feel like an ass now because..."
"Because what?"
"Well because I was going to the woman's aid. I mean that’s what I had in mind, and it's what I should have done. But then the damn thing just lured me away from her."
"You're sure of that, huh."
"Thinking back on it, yes sir, I'm sure of that. It started off real slow, just dancing along. I jumped back in the patrol car and went after it. No matter how fast I went, it just hung out there about fifty feet ahead. All the way through the canyon like that. And my headlights kept going off and back on again, my engine was losing compression, and my radio was crazy with static even with the squelch all the way up. Kept losing the steering. Hell I wanted to stop but I couldn't stop, it was like I was hypnotized or something, I just kept right on after it even though that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do."
"You wanted out."
"Damn right I wanted out but they wouldn't let me out."
"They who?"
"They the bug-eyed bastards in the UFO. They finally dropped me in the middle of a field."
“Dropped you?”
"Yes, sir. My wheels weren't even on the ground the last mile or two."
"That's uh, pretty far-out, isn't it."
"I don't care how far-out it is. That's what happened."
Poor guy was getting all worked up. I patted his hand and left him sitting there with his eyes twitching, stopped at the nurse's station and again consulted his chart, handed the chart to the nurse with a meaningful look, and told her, "He's almost due for his medication. Better do it now."
She replied, "Yes, Doctor," with hardly a second look at me.
It was the psycho ward.
But at least one patient in there was as sane as anybody. The danger now, as I saw it, was that maybe he would not be sane for long. Close encounters have a way of jangling the mind. I had to wonder why that was so. Was there something buried in genetic memory, something terrifying and horrible, that was activated by these experiences?
I happened to know, because I'd been keeping on top of it, that a whole new school of medicine was arising around these unfortunate contactees—and I knew a man in Washington who was the unofficial dean of that school.
So I went to a phone booth right there at the hospital and gave him a call. "Is this about the California flap?" he immediately asked me.
"It is," I replied, and I told him about Grover Dalton. "Can you swing some help his way?"
"I can try," he said wearily.
He needed to try. Police officers are especially vulnerable to the UFO Depression Syndrome. The experience often blights their careers and changes their lives forever. Again, I had to wonder why.
And I had to wonder, also, why the insane governmental secrecy was still the order of the day—and why so many esteemed men of science kept stonewalling the UFO question and ridiculing reliable eyewitnesses and contactees when what these people needed most of all were sympathetic comfort and reassurance.
I don't wonder so much about any of it anymore, of course. I don't have all the answers, but I have a lot more now than I did then.
And I'm still scared.
Chapter Six: Through Other Eyes
I made two other stops while I was in town. A friend works at one of the major radio stations serving the area. He showed me a "situation room" where two people were doing nothing but reviewing and plotting the reported sightings of the night before.
"It's a major flap," he told me. "We already have two hundred reports on the board and they're still coming in."
"How are you handling it for the air?" I wondered.
He looked a bit embarrassed as he replied, "We're still skulling that question."
"Meaning?"
"Well... we're sort of playing it cool right now, just tracking it and, uh, watching the reaction."
"How can there be a reaction if everyone in the media is just sitting on it?"
"That's the reaction I'm talking about. We don't want to be the only ones out there with egg on our faces."
I said, "That's gutless."
He said, "Sure it is. But we're not here for guts. We're here for revenues."
I understood that language. This was not a rock station with news headlines on the hour, it was a station whose stock-in-trade was news and commentary, and it depended on public confidence if it was going to attract advertisers. If it did not attract advertisers, it did not stay in business—and not staying in business was tantamount to cataclysm for these people. They could not afford to become a laughingstock.
It seems that there is always quite a lot to laugh at in every UFO flap because it is a phenomenon that feeds on itself. It brings out all the pranksters and gypsters and fringe lunatics who apparently cannot pass up an opportunity to climb on the bandwagon. That is the major problem for serious UFO investigations, besides which it provides all the raw meat necessary for those who prefer to ridicule serious concern.
I also looked in on the sheriff's department. If your image of a sheriff is a rawboned guy with a big hat and a star pinned to his shirt, then you do not live in Los Angeles County. This sheriff sits astride not a horse or a jeep but one of the largest and most sophisticated law-enforcement organizations in the world. His turf embraces four thousand square miles of mountains, deserts, beaches, and forests, property valued at more than 250 billion dollars, and eight million people living in or around nearly a hundred incorporated cities.
But I was not surprised to learn that all UFO inquiries were being handled by the public-information office.
They were cooling it, too.
I could get absolutely no information regarding the incident in Malibu Canyon, not even an admission that an on-duty officer had been involved.
But I did manage to see a guy I had met once socially who is a staff psychologist for the department. I told him that I'd talked to Grover Dalton.
He lifted both eyebrows at me and quietly asked, "When?"
I replied, "Little while ago. Are you working with him?"
He said, "Not yet."
I jotted down the name and phone number of my psychiatrist friend in Washington and handed it to him. "You should," I told him, and left him staring at my jottings.
My next stop was at the Brentwood home of Ted Bransen and Penny Laker. It was by now early afternoon. It's a sprawling ranch-style house positioned around a swimming pool and tennis court. I'd been there before. Between pool and court is a lanai that projects from a small room filled with bodybuilding equipmen
t. Bransen is one of those who thinks health and physical culture but gets around to it only when it's convenient, which means probably a couple of hard workouts per month—but I guess that's better than nothing.
I couldn't get a response to the doorbell so I scaled a five-foot brick wall behind a breezeway to the garage and dropped into the backyard.
A young Oriental man dressed in domestic white was fiddling with a buried lawn sprinkler. He looked up with a start but said nothing as I nodded to him and went on.
Someone was doing laps in the pool—a female someone, it appeared, but I couldn't be sure from the angle I had.
Julie Marsini sat at a small table on the lanai, her attention riveted to some reading matter, clad only in a string bikini. Scratch everything I said earlier about "gray people" and understated beauty. In this light and attitude, the lady was worthy of full masculine attention. She did not hear my approach but also did not seem startled when I sat down across from her.
"We expected you before this, Mr. Ford," she told me with a cool look that came from somewhere in the stars, it seemed. Very, very dark eyes.
I said, "Me, too. But I had to check some details first. Is that Penny in the pool?"
"Yes."
"She seems to have recovered well."
"Recovered from what, Mr. Ford?"
"Why don't you just call me Ash."
"Recovered from what?"
"Her ordeal of the night."
"Was there an ordeal?"
She was fencing. I said, "Looked that way to me. She was staggering along a deserted road in a remote area far from home and stark naked, bombed out of her mind with something or from something. I'd call it an ordeal, yeah."
Julie stared at me through an unblinking moment, then dropped her gaze and said, "Do you have to tell her about that?"
I replied, "Doesn't she know?"
"I hope not."
"Does this happen often?"
She again raised her eyes to mine. "Does what happen often?"
"Her blackouts, memory gaps. Has it happened before?"
She was speaking so softly I was almost reading her lips as she told me, "It has become almost routine. Can you help her?"
"She needs a doctor, maybe."
Julie shook her head in a firm negative. "She wouldn't hear of it. And it is not a medical problem."
"What kind is it, then?"
"She has... visitations."
"From where?"
That face was a total blank. I could read absolutely nothing there as she replied, "I don't know where."
"Aliens?"
She shivered slightly but still there was no reading on the face. "Who are the aliens," she said quietly, and it was not a question.
I said, "Exactly. Who are they?"
"Maybe they are us," she murmured.
"Do they look like us?"
"Sometimes."
"What does that mean?'
"They can look like us. Maybe you're one." Another shiver. "Maybe she is one."
I was feeling a bit reckless so I asked the deadpan young lady with alien eyes, "What is the meaning of the golden triangle?"
She immediately looked away, eyes focused somewhere far off, pulled up a leg, and absently scratched a shapely ankle, said to me in a barely audible voice: 'Time."
“Time?”
"Yes. It is time."
“Time for what?"
Her gaze fell to the ankle. She massaged it delicately with an artful hand, said nothing.
“Time for what, Julie?"
“Time for them."
"What does that mean?"
“Time to time, they come. This is their time to come."
"For what?"
She shrugged delicately, an almost imperceptible movement of glistening shoulders. "Fulfillment, I guess."
That was as far as we got with that.
Penny had come out of the pool and was walking toward us with a large white towel draped about her. I had the strongest feeling that there was nothing beneath that towel but flesh. She pulled out a chair and sat down, lit a cigarette, totally ignored my presence there, said to Julie: "The water is perfect. You must try it."
Julie replied, "You know I never swim in sunlight."
I simply was not there.
"Such a bore. Your skin will not melt, my dear. We must get a dolphin. Have you looked into that? Wait, a pair of dolphins. Every soul must have its mate."
"Mr. Bransen says no dolphins. The problems are immense. The authorities require impossible standards. They would never permit dolphins in a residential swimming pool."
"Mr. Bransen is no longer an issue. We shall enlarge the pool, remove that ridiculous cement slab for bouncing balls. Call the engineers. Meet the standards. Then we shall have the dolphins."
I tried to edge in there: "You're looking great, Penny."
Zilch.
"Mr. Bransen is very much the issue. And he grows more strident with each passing day."
I mean, I was wondering who'd written these lines! Talk about stilted dialogue!
"Cut off his funds. That will tame him."
"I'd love to screw your brains out, Penny. Yours too, Julie."
"That has been deemed inadvisable. But we must devise a rational approach to the problem."
"Ashton Ford shall solve the problem."
"Ashton Ford could become the problem."
"You are using my name in vain, ladies. I am in no way involved in any of this. Yet."
"This is an interesting man."
"Yes, but also a potentially dangerous man."
Penny abruptly got to her feet, dropped the towel—confirming my suspicions—and stubbed out the cigarette as she capped that conversation. "There are no dangerous men."
She went into the house, then, without a glance at me —that divine body jiggling in all its feminine freedom, leaving me with mouth agape and tumbling emotions.
Julie smiled brightly at me and said, "What did you say?"
I growled, "I said I'd like to screw your brains out."
Those great eyes fell but the smile hung in there as she replied, "That could perhaps be arranged." Then she seemed to notice for the first time the wet towel draped across the chair Penny Laker had just vacated. Her gaze darted to the pool, then around the area, in some confusion.
"She just went inside," I said quietly.
"Oh," she said.
I said it too, but silently to myself.
Either I was being conned by the slickest act in the business or...
"When would you like to attack my brains?" Julie was asking me in a playful tone.
"Entirely at your own convenience, ma'am," I replied, trying but probably failing entirely to match her mood.
"I'll let you know about that," she told me.
"When you let me know about the golden triangle," I suggested.
But she was already off her chair and moving swiftly into the house. She did not even look back or wave as she disappeared inside.
I picked up the stubbed cigarette and smelled of it, decided it was plain tobacco with no exotic ingredients added, then retreated the way I'd come in.
The little guy in the white suit was staring at me from poolside. "Great job you've got, kid," I told him amiably in passing. I was wondering if he liked dolphins as much as naked ladies.
But he gave me no clue, no clue whatever.
And I had to wonder if he was really Oriental. Or if he even knew what a naked lady is.
Chapter Seven: Time, Place, and Circumstance
I long ago came to the conclusion that there are no absolutes. That makes "reality" a bit easier to handle. It seems that truth is always entirely relative to the moment in which it is perceived, and "phenomena" is phenomenal only from a particular point of view—which is to say that something is true only in its own time and place, and something is phenomenal only if it is extremely unusual, extraordinary, or highly remarkable in our time and place.
So just how phenomenal are
flying saucers?
But let's tackle "truth" first because it is easier to grab.
If I say, "It is hot today," and I am seated beside you on the burning sands of a great desert at high noon in summertime, then you recognize my statement as truth. Of course you could reply: "Not as hot as yesterday," but that is just another angle on relativity. If you are seated atop an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and I am communicating with you telepathically from the desert, you'll have to wonder where I'm communicating from before you can decide if I am telling the truth for me. You already know it is not the truth for you.
Or if you have been inside a climate-controlled building for a week and I come inside with my hot-day idea, you'll either have to check with the weatherman or step outside yourself to get at the truth.
Some philosophers and even some scientists are going to want to argue with me too, when I say that truth is always relative. They will insist that some truths are absolute. Yet all their yardsticks are temporal. As much as I respect Albeit Einstein and the other brilliant minds that have defined our present reality for us, none have been entirely truthful with us because none have ever possessed the entire truth, and those who know the most are the least inclined to declare absolutes.
Einstein's entire approach was to say that every event occurring within time and space is always relative to the time of the occurrence and also always relative to the observer. So what does that mean? It means that total scientific objectivity in the human reality is impossible. That may sound like an absolute in itself. If it is, then it still could be a relative absolute—relative only to the human reality in time and space.
So we can never know the absolute truth about anything. Not even about ourselves. We observe ourselves (if we do) as a continual process in space and time, an organism undergoing constant change under the stimuli of unseen and largely unimagined forces, struggling feebly to adapt and persevere in the face of continual adversity. Isn't that what life is? Does a rock struggle to exist? Does it even care whether it does or not?
Descartes, widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, proved himself to himself by the simple statement: "I think, therefore I am." (Even more succinct in its original Latin: "Cogito, ergo sum")
Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series Book 6) Page 3