The unhappy truth is that no one really knows what they are dealing with. They talk about treating the mind without knowing even what or where the mind is. They are really treating the brain, or trying to, and that organ is of such unutterable complexity that any tinkering with it is as likely to hurt as to help.
Which is why I get so upset with people who experiment on themselves with mind-altering drugs. It scrambles the associations so delicately balanced to produce a vehicle for consciousness in this space-time framework. Screwing with the brain with chemicals is equivalent to going at a computer with hammer and chisel, and I shudder at some of the things done under the label of medical science.
I could only guess at the confusions within Penny Laker's brain, never mind what was causing them.
Because I really did not know who Penny Laker was.
Hell, I did not know for sure who I was.
The human experience is a fragile thing. Presumably everything that we now know, that we have ever known, and that we shall ever know in this lifetime, is the result of the electrochemical exchanges within our gray matter. Nobody really knows why the neurons fire, or how, or to what ultimate effect. We fire, therefore we think. We fire, therefore we see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel. We perceive our entire reality completely within the head; that is where we meet the world, and dissect it item by item, then reconstruct it as an image in the mind. That image is knowingness, yet all we ever know is the image.
We "know" by comparing images, by relating new ones to old ones held captive in something we choose to call memory, and yet even the process of searching memory and comparing images is electrochemical and made possible by the firing neurons.
A neuron, you know, is fantastically complex.
It is much more mysterious than a flying saucer or interdimensional space. It is literally a mind within a mind, and there are many billions of them in each human brain. Yet many are specialists, designed to fire only under specific circumstances and for specific effects, and the final image we get from millions of simultaneous firings is totally dependent upon which ones fire and in which sequence.
Don't ever take yourself for granted.
You are more marvelous and more intricate than you could ever imagine. And you are not the images that appear to you. You are that which produces the images, the whole intricate, marvelous, unimaginable complex of neuronal processes that reproduce the universe within your skull.
But surely you are more than that, too. It is my considered opinion that you are that which produces the processes, but I cannot begin to imagine the ultimate implications of that idea.
So...what is it all about?
What do they want?
I am not even sure who "they" are.
But I believe that the human brain is a multidimensional space-time model of the universe. That being the case, we at least have the potential for being as smart as they. And it seems entirely likely, yes, that our origins are the same.
My mind was thus occupied when the telephone rang and Ted Bransen again presented himself to my consideration. The women had been gone for only a few minutes. He yelled, "Have you seen Penny?"
"She and Julie were just here," I replied.
"What time is it there?"
"Little after two," I told him.
"Shit, I must be halfway around the world. It's past seven o'clock here! Listen, I'm worried about Penny. I'm retaining you to protect her. I mean hire all the people you need but I want her covered twenty-four hours a day."
I said, "Ted, that's not necessary. She—"
"Don't tell me what's necessary," he yelled. "I thought she was just going fruitcake but now I don't know, I mean there's more to this than meets the eye. But I guess you know all about that, don't you. This guy you sent me to. He's a UFO expert. You knew that, huh."
"That's why it's not necessary, Ted. There's no way to protect against this sort of thing. But if it will make you feel any better, I am on the case and I am trying to figure out what is going on and why. I suggest that you just try to relax and—"
"What the hell kind of talk is that? How can I relax? This friend of yours is taking care of the paperwork for me. I don't know what his contacts are but he's already in touch with the right people. They're going to put me on a plane at ten o'clock. I should be back in there before midnight, your time. I don't know, I think I might have to go to New York first and get a flight out of there. Listen, this is crazy stuff. It's going to take me half a day to get back home. And I'm just gonna sell the goddamn Bentley. No way am I going to pay—where do those people get off with crap like this! Your friend says I'm not the first. What is this?—practical jokes from outer space? I still can't believe it!"
I said, "Well, they did get your attention, didn't they."
"I still don't know what to believe. But I am worried about Penny. I think this is some of what she's been going through. So you sit on her tight until I get back there."
I said, "Sure, sure," and hung up.
Hell, I couldn't even sit on myself.
It seemed the edge of idiocy to try to play bodyguard against alien power when even the combined might of all our armed services plus all our police agencies appeared to be so helpless in the face of it that they wouldn't even admit the problem. But since I was probably up for the night, anyway, I figured I may as well spend the test of it parked outside the Laker mansion.
If there were goings and comings there, I wanted to know about it even if I did not know what to do about it.
So I showered and shaved and made tracks as quick as I could. It was exactly three o'clock when I took the Maserati out of the garage and set off for Brentwood.
I knew exactly where it was.
All I had to do was follow the star that was hovering high above it.
Someone else, it seemed, was already sitting tight on Penny Laker.
Chapter Fifteen: A Little Cloud That Tried
It is very hard for the thinking mind to settle around something like this. Even coming into it with the mind totally open, even with considerable investigation and research behind you, when the human mind is confronted with genuine phenomena the very strong tendency is most usually to try to explain it in conventional terms. It is no wonder that the scientist becomes so closed-minded and protective of the status quo; the whole movement of mind seems directed toward preserving its own baselines and allowing the addition of new information in carefully stepped increments and with great discrimination. This is indeed the scientific method, so one bolsters the other in the effort to keep reality within closely defined bounds.
What we mean by the term "mind-blowing" is that some radical new perception is threatening the base structure of the reality-model that we carry around inside our heads. We apparently need that base structure in order for the mind to function per its design, to compare the present with the past, and make intelligent decisions based on that comparison.
When something comes along to "blow away" that base structure, then with what do we compare that event in order to decide its meaning intelligently? Right; no comparison is possible, so the natural tendency is to scale down the event to a comparative level.
That is what the normal mind does, and there are many brilliant automatic techniques built in to help us do that.
So you find yourself wondering if you really saw or heard or felt or otherwise experienced what you thought you did. You question the validity of the experience because that is how you keep in touch with your model of reality. And you can become highly creative in constructing rationalizing arguments that reduce apparent phenomena to a level comfortable for the mind.
So although I was probably ninety-eight percent absorbed into this experience, a very stubborn two percent of intellect was still trying to argue that it was not really happening. Something else was happening and I just was not seeing it in its true light. Soon, I would. Soon, I would tumble to some new explanation to make the whole thing entirely mundane and manageable.
Manageable, aha. There's the key to that whole two percent attitude. We humans like to have at least the illusion that we are in control and running things. We are a species that has come to life with the apparent ability to manipulate our environment and bring the world to us on our own terms. We feel strongest and safest when we are doing that, weak and defenseless when we cannot. That's the whole story of relationships between mankind, is it not? Who is in charge here?
If the flying saucers are for real, then obviously someone else or something else might be in charge. Many of us are not willing to relinquish that kind of power even to God.
This was my thinking as I sat my lonely vigil in the Maserati outside the Laker estate, and I give it to you here to show that I was trying to handle the problem with a thinking mind, that I was not totally subjective about the experience.
Because a lot of crazy things began happening almost immediately thereafter.
The usual morning fog was moving onshore, and Brentwood is not that far from the Pacific. Actually Brentwood is one of the posh Los Angeles neighborhoods sitting west of Beverly Hills and north of Santa Monica, sort of nestled into the foothills behind Pacific Palisades (Ronald Reagan's ex-home). There appeared to be about a fifty-foot ceiling over this particular area, with occasional drifting patches right down on the deck. I had to work the wipers occasionally to keep the windshield clear.
I had been there for nearly half an hour, parked about a hundred feet off the property, when I noticed a peculiar shift in the layer directly above the Laker house. An irregular-shaped piece broke out of the base of the clouds and gently settled toward the house. It came to rest no more than ten feet above the roof, sort of flattened out on the bottom and top, and quietly spread itself over the entire house. It looked like fog to me but I had never seen anything like that kind of formation with any fog I'd ever seen. Living at Malibu, I see a lot.
After a minute or so, the bottom edge began unraveling into long streamers that totally engulfed the house in a matter of seconds. I sat stupidly watching, and wondering what kind of environmental forces would make a pocket of fog act like that. I kept expecting it to dissipate but it did not dissipate, so after another minute or two I ventured from the car and went down for a closer look.
I have been into some pretty heavy paranormal stuff, which you already know if you've been following my cases, but I have to tell you that this event ranked very high on my eeriness meter. I could not even see the house now, although other houses nearby were clearly visible, as well as closely bordering trees and shrubs. The outer lawn in front was visible, but it and the sidewalk and the driveway extended for only about ten feet before absolutely disappearing behind the fog bank. I know that for a fact because I stepped straight along that sidewalk expecting the visibility to rise with me as I went along into it, but it did not. I stepped through a curtain of fog and straight into another world. And now I desperately needed my two-percent objectivity.
A very interesting story from World War I, which I briefly mentioned earlier, deserves to be told in detail at this point because it is a close parallel to my own experience that night in Brentwood so may help the credibility factor here just a bit.
The event was reported by numerous professional observers but dismissed on the spot and all eyewitness accounts buried in secret document files until recently when a group of surviving observers demanded on the fiftieth anniversary (during the UFO age) that it be publicly reported.
The incident is referred to as "the vanishing regiment" and it occurred in August 1915, during the Dardanelles Campaign near the Hirkish seaport of Gallipoli. The regiment that vanished was the British First Fourth Norfolk, which had been dispatched to reinforce the troops at Hill 60. The phenomenon was witnessed by twenty-two men of an ANZAC force, three of whom signed the following affidavit on the occasion of their Fiftieth Jubilee:
The day broke clear without a cloud in sight, as any beautiful Mediterranean day could be expected to be. The exception, however, was a number of perhaps six or eight "loaf of bread" shaped clouds—all shaped exactly alike—which were hovering over "Hill 60." It was noticed that, in spite of a four or five mile an hour breeze from the south, these clouds did not alter their position in any shape or form, nor did they drift away under the influence of the breeze. They were hovering at an elevation of about 60 degrees as seen from our observation point 500 feet up. Also stationary and resting on the ground right underneath this group of clouds was a similar cloud in shape, measuring about 800 feet in length, 200 feet in height, and 200 feet in width. This cloud was absolutely dense, almost solid looking in structure and positioned about 14 to 18 chains from the fighting in British held territory."
We are talking, here, a "cloud" nearly the length of three football fields, forty feet wider than one, and as tall as a twenty-story building. A "chain" is a field-surveying term of linear measurement; eighty chains are equal to a mile, so the cloud was positioned about one fifth of a mile inside the British lines. The ANZAC observers were watching as the men of the First Fourth Norfolk began their march up Hill 60 to join the fighting. But the First Fourth never got there. Ever see one of those old war movies with a proud and feisty British force marching snappily into the fray? Picture that here, please; it helps the graphics.
When they arrived at this cloud, they marched straight into it, with no hesitation, but no one ever came out to deploy and fight at "Hill 60." About an hour later, after the last of the file had disappeared into it, this cloud very unobtrusively lifted off the ground and, like any fog or cloud would, rose slowly until it joined the other similar clouds which were mentioned in the beginning of this account. On viewing them again, they all looked alike "as peas in a pod." All this time, the group of clouds had been hovering in the same place, but as soon as the singular "ground" cloud had risen to their level, they all moved away, northwards, i.e. towards Thrace. In a matter of about three-quarters of an hour they had all disappeared from view.
This, of course, from trained observers who by the year 1915 certainly knew the difference between a cloud and other things that may appear in the sky. And note how slowly the "clouds" stole away. The affidavit concludes:
The Regiment mentioned is posted as "missing" or "wiped out" [inside their own lines?] and on Turkey surrendering in 1918, the first thing Britain demanded of Turkey was the return of this regiment. Turkey replied that she had neither captured this Regiment, nor made contact with it, and did not know that it existed. A British Regiment in 1914-18 consisted of any number between 800 and 4000 men. Those who observed this incident vouch for the fact that Turkey never captured that Regiment, nor made contact with it.
Not only some eight hundred to four thousand men vanished but this was a self-contained combat unit fully equipped and prepared to fight. I leave it to your own imagination what the First Fourth encountered within that cloud, how a fully equipped army would have reacted to a bizarre situation, why they vanished, and to what conceivable fate.
I give it to you here because it makes my own incident in Brentwood paltry in comparison. I myself have found comfort in that comparison. But not much.
Chapter Sixteen: Dancing in the Dark
I still sometimes find myself wondering why I stepped so unhesitatingly into that "fog." It would seem that the natural mechanisms for personal survival would have intervened somehow, dictated caution and at least a tentative advance. In reconstructing the moment in my mind, I find no memory of fear or even disquiet although I had gone to investigate something because of its unusual character. But I stepped right into it without a qualm.
Maybe those men of the First Fourth later asked the same question of themselves. And I guess I will wonder all my life what they found inside their cloud.
I found a different world.
I experienced a temperature differential at mid-stride, one foot in predawn, misty, chilly coastal California and the other in a bright, pleasantly warm Wonderland. The scene was both pastoral and aquatic, with green-banked ca
nals crisscrossing the entire field of vision as far as the eye could see.
The sky was not blue but faintly purple. Reddish- tinged, puffy clouds appeared and disappeared in rapid sequence as though the entire sky were being projected as a study in time-lapse photography, yet there was nothing unreal about it. There was no sun in that sky—but a panoply of luminously twinkling stars, with an intensity equal to Venus at her brightest, seemed to be the light source, with an effect somewhere between twilight and high noon on a cloudless day in spring, bright but soft and no shadows upon the landscape.
There were trees unlike any I had ever seen anywhere but still vaguely familiar here and there, like viewing abstract art; the same with riotously colored fields of flowers, great bowers of flowering shrubs, towering vines climbing into the purple sky like seabeds of kelp rising from ocean depths.
I was startled by the scene but, again, not alarmed. I walked right into it. I do remember halting and looking back after maybe a dozen strides, expecting to see the fog bank behind me. Instead, I was centered in the scene and there was nothing behind me but more of the same.
I remember thinking, there's no way back, but even that came with no sense of alarm.
There was no pathway or roadway, nothing whatever to suggest a desired direction of travel, no artificial structures to indicate human presence or activity. It seemed at first to be an entirely static scene, with myself the only sentient creature within it.
I was aware of a greatly heightened sensitivity within myself, as though all my senses were extended and tingling into the contact with this strange environment. I was breathing easily and walking effortlessly; I felt light, almost buoyant; the air was sweet with odors and it seemed that I could even feel it touching my face. I felt great, almost exhilarated, and I was thoroughly enjoying my walk though I had no idea where I was or where I was going.
Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) Page 8