by Tony Peluso
The box contained her childhood collection of stuffed animals. She’d packed them for storage since she wouldn’t take them with her to Texas A&M University.
“Holy shit.” I said, as I walked over to the box and examined it. “This is not fucking possible. The odds are incalculable.”
“What are you babbling about?” my friend Bill asked, sipping his beer.
“Look at this shit, Bill.” I picked up the box and turned it so he could see the logo on the front.
“Shut the front door,” Bill said.
In 1975, Gretchen’s dad had obtained the box from a liquor store on Galveston Island. He needed several boxes to prepare for his retirement from the Army, which coincided with Gretchen’s decision to attend TAMU in College Station.
This box had once transported liquor from Italy. The winery shipped it to America sometime in 1975.
The logo read: Giordano. Under the logo, the Giordano Company listed their products. They sold acqueviti, liquori, spumanti, and vini. However, it wasn’t the logo with my family name that caused the stir. To the left of the Giordano logo, the high school girl had written her first name to identify the contents as her property. She put her name on that box at least ten years before we ever met.
The words Gretchen Giordano appeared on the front of the box containing her stuffed animals in that sequence and proximity.
Be honest. How many women named Gretchen have you ever met? I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of a Giordano. In the entire Milky Way galaxy, there is precisely one Gretchen Giordano.
Calculate the odds for yourselves. They are beyond miniscule that a high school girl in Texas would write her own first name on a box next to a logo that was also a rare Italian surname—and that logo would turn out to be the last name of the man that she would meet and marry in Virginia ten years later.
No one who’s ever seen the box can explain it. An atheist friend suggested that it was mere serendipity. Sure it is.
Encountering that box was another epiphany. Of all my life and near-death experiences, the Giordano box—and its cryptic message predicting my marriage to Gretchen—convinced me that everything happens for a reason.
In 1990, as a Lieutenant Colonel, I received an assignment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa to help the feds prosecute a munitions fraud case. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. Attorney asked me to stay. I’d served 20 years on active duty and was almost retirement eligible. He sweetened the deal by hiring Gretchen, too.
By the 1990s, I had a new dream—to litigate long, complex, criminal cases in Federal Court. The U.S. Attorney gave me a chance to show my stuff. Over the next 16 years, I had the time of my professional life.
At home, I mentored my sons, Tim and John, as I watched them grow. Raising two boys proved to be fulfilling and rewarding. Though I missed the Army, someone very wise wanted me to leave my military life with the endless trips, deployments, commitments, and challenges. My job was to focus on my boys, be a good example, and teach my sons how to be better men than I could ever be.
I’m a lapsed Catholic. I never obtained an annulment from my first marriage since I have two precious daughters. The Church would not sanction my marriage to Gretchen. Despite this serious difficulty, I chose to raise my sons as Catholics. They attended Incarnation Elementary School and, much later, Jesuit High School in Tampa. They were top students in both places and established themselves as first-class leaders. Both of my sons turned out to be excellent football players.
I wanted Tim and John to have the same educational advantage that the Jesuits gave me. My sons are now practicing attorneys. They agree that their time with the Jesuits was the best education they could have gotten anywhere.
In 1998, the new U.S. Attorney directed me to help prosecute the biggest health care fraud in American history. By May of 1999, I prepared for a ten-week contested trial.
In the spring, I had been finishing up the motions practice and organizing my portion of the trial-on-the-merits, which was really basic, like identifying and marking exhibits. Since our case involved thousands of documents, it was tedious. The Secretary of Health and Human Services assigned clerical personnel to help out.
One of the very best clerks was a female HHS college intern—a strikingly attractive black woman named Yvette. Like many hip college girls, she wore a small nose ring. I always thought that it detracted from her otherwise stunning appearance.
Yvette was wicked smart and analytical. In short order, she grasped my situation and helped to modify a Microsoft database into a unique resource for tracking, sorting, and illuminating the thousands of exhibits. During the trial, this database proved invaluable.
I tried to convince Yvette to go to law school. She declined. She wanted to be a criminal investigator. She thought the FBI would be a good fit, but she was willing to work for any of the other federal agencies that employed special agents.
Once, as we catalogued evidence, she mentioned that she was an Army brat and that her dad was near retirement. After learning that, I made a point of asking after her father on those occasions when we worked together.
In May 1999, after her graduation from UT, she stopped by my office to tell me that HHS had hired her as a special agent and criminal investigator. They’d agreed to assign her to Los Angeles so that she could be closer to her mom and dad. I wished her well and asked where her father had decided to live after retirement.
“Oh, they’re already there. They took terminal leave. They moved to Arizona.”
“Really? I grew up there. Where in Arizona?”
“They moved to Sedona.”
“Have you been there yet? It’s so beautiful.”
“No. I’ve flown over Arizona on the way to California. I’m looking forward to seeing this place. Mom and Poppa think it’s awesome.”
“It is. I spent a lot of time there before Vietnam. I went there once after the war. I’d finished up at ASU on my way to law school in Texas. When you go out there, you have to see the Chapel of the Holy Cross.”
“Is that the one that’s built into the mountain? Mom sent me a postcard with a picture of the chapel. Very impressive.”
For reasons that I can’t explain, I launched into the first description of my close encounter in 1966. I’d seen Spielberg’s movie decades earlier. The term close encounter conveyed the substance of my experience.
Yvette listened. Halfway through my story, she sported a look of complete incredulity. Dan Ostergaard’s common sense warning for me to keep my mouth shut had come to fruition.
“You look like you think I’m crazy,” I said. “I know it seems hard to believe. I sometimes wonder myself. Nothing like that has happened in the last thirty years.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Why the look then?”
“Tony, I spoke with Poppa last Sunday. He’s a squared-away guy. Like you, he was both enlisted and an officer. He also retired as a light colonel. He’s down to earth, all business, no nonsense. He told me about an experience that he had hiking between Bell Rock and a place called Courthouse Butte.”
“So what’s the connection?”
“Other than the different site, his story is identical to yours,” she said.
“No shit?”
“None.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Bell Rock and Court House Butte are four miles south of the chapel,” I said.
“In galactic terms, that’s a bull’s eye,” she said.
“Who says that this is other worldly?” I asked.
“You think it’s something secret? Where’s Area 51?” she asked.
“What do you know about Area 51?”
“Just stuff on TV.”
“Area 51 is northwest of Sedona. Must be a couple of hundred miles. Maybe they’ve got something now that could do the things that I saw, but in the mid-sixties? I don’t think so.”
“Nice theory, but my close encounter predates my Army service.”
We left the issue at that. We exchanged pleasantries and promised to keep up. We never did. I didn’t have contact with her until 14 years later.
Chapter Four
June 4, 2013, 11:30 PM
1908 Port Colony Way
Tampa, Florida
I’d retired from the Department of Justice in 2006. I went to work for the local Sheriff. Since my youngest son, John, had recently graduated from a top tier law school and because I maintained an expensive mistress—Gretchen—I had no plans to retire and live out my golden years in peace and comfort.
It had been a miserable day. I’d been wrestling with the unresponsive bureaucracy of the Social Security Administration. To calm myself before I went to bed, I sought out a soothing video on YouTube.
It had become my habit late in the evening to watch something placid and soothing. While I watched, I would pray on a special rosary. A friend had purchased it for me from the gift shop at the Chapel of the Holy Cross on a trip she’d made to Sedona. Since I’d encouraged her to go see the red rocks, she bought the rosary as an unexpected present.
Praying on this rosary in the quiet of my empty nest comforted me. I don’t go to Mass anymore. The Sedona rosary has been my connection to the Divine Spark.
I carry the Sedona rosary with me everywhere. I also have a gold St. Michael the Archangel medal. St. Michael is the patron saint of Paratroopers and police officers. Twenty years earlier, I had a jeweler engrave the designations of the three Airborne units in which I’d served on the back of my medal.
I’m a klutz beyond the imagination of Inspector Clouseau. I’m hard on the things that I carry around. Sometime in late 2010, I lost the Christ figure from the little wooden cross on my rosary. I felt horrible.
I chose to keep the Sedona rosary, rather than replace it with a newer one. At the time, I didn’t realize that the loss of the Christ figure wasn’t an accident, but a foretelling of my future.
Despite its importance to this story, there’s nothing miraculous about my rosary. I view it as a cell phone for talking to God. Atheists will claim that my use of the rosary is an act of desperation by a man beyond middle age. I don’t care.
You’ve heard my story so far. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve seen too many things that convince me that there is far more than we mere mortals can fathom. I don’t pretend to know what lies beyond—but there is something.
I opened YouTube that night and searched for a soothing video. I found one that used photographs of special sites around Sedona as the backdrop to new-age music. I noticed an interesting video on the list to right of the one I’d played.
That video led me to a link to an extraordinary article written by an Anglican Bishop from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sedona. The author, the Right-Reverend David McMannes, had written a bizarre tale about the history of the Christus and the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which is now part of St. John Vianney’s Roman-Catholic Parish.
This should be good. The Anglicans are writing an expose about the Roman Catholics, I thought. While the Anglicans and Catholics have similar beliefs and rituals, they can be very competitive.
The article, dated in 1997, began as a recapitulation of the genesis of the chapel and the phases that followed. It described the motivation of its benefactor, Marguerite Staude. It cataloged the work of the architects and the sculptor of the Christus, including the original controversy surrounding the grotesque appearance of the Christus.
I would have dismissed it as another interesting piece on the Internet had it not dropped a nuclear revelation: the compelling and grotesque Christus figure had disappeared without a trace. It no longer hung on the mammoth stone cross inside the Chapel.
According to Bishop McMannes, sometime in the late ’70s, the Christus vanished. No one knows how or why. There are theories and speculation that range from the mundane to the macabre, but no facts. More intriguing, the Anglican Bishop revealed that the Roman Catholics stopped having religious services at the chapel at the time it disappeared.
The local Catholic parish built a gift shop in the old priest’s quarters in the chapel’s basement. The gift shop did brisk business selling Catholic artifacts, like my rosary, to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who now flock to see the chapel every year.
I couldn’t believe that anyone would turn this mystical place into a cash cow. I wondered what they were thinking in the Diocese of Phoenix, the Catholic principality that has assumed control over the chapel from the Diocese of Gallup.
It struck me as more than a coincidence that the Christus had disappeared around the time the Catholics stopped having religious services at the chapel. Being an attorney over four decades has made me morbidly suspicious.
It was inexplicable that the Anglicans would address this mystery—and not the Catholics who suffered the loss and stopped the services. Why would that be?
Over the next few weeks, I searched the Internet. I gathered all the data that I could about the chapel, the Christus, the benefactor, the architects, and the rumors of the disappearance. I found no article, paper, report, explanation, equivocation, clarification, rationalization, denial, or justification from any Catholic source that would illuminate any part of this mystery. Utter silence.
“Dad, you’re obsessed,” my son, Tim, said as we chatted on FaceTime a month later. I’d finished my latest report to him about my research. Tim and his wife, Heather, live in Washington, D.C., where he practices law in a K Street bluestocking firm.
“Tim, that’s harsh. I’m on a quest, an investigation into a great mystery.”
“Dad, you remind me of that guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You know. He saw a UFO, got sunburned, became obsessed, and built a replica of a Wyoming mountain in his basement.”
“I’m better looking than Richard Dreyfuss,” I said. “I’m not obsessed. It’s a coincidence that I constructed a scale model of the chapel on the lanai and sculpted a replica of the Christus from five hundred pounds of stainless steel,” I joked.
While we talked, Tim’s comment about the aliens jogged a memory. As soon as we ended the call, I went on the Internet and found a clip of Spielberg’s movie. I also watched independent videos that embellish the story that Spielberg told in his film.
Some of the other videos focused on the physical appearance of the aliens in Close Encounters. Several of these depictions seemed eerily similar to the Christus, though the Christus appears quite a bit taller and a little thinner. You can see these aliens for yourself on the Internet and compare them to the picture of the Christus in the McMannes article.
This new discovery caused me to double my efforts. Over the next week, my wife became concerned about my behavior. She’d begun to worry about my obsession, which she attributed to the not-so-early onset of dementia.
“Tony, we need a vacation,” Gretchen said. “You’re consumed with this Christus. We need to get you away from computers. We haven’t had a bona fide holiday in years. All of our trips involve moving furniture to college dorms or attending law school graduations.”
“Yeah, I’d like to get away,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of leave.”
“We could go to one of those all-inclusive places in the Caribbean or in the Bahamas. I’ve never been to Bermuda.”
“How about a cruise?” I asked. “Alaska, the Rhine River?”
“A cruise doesn’t blow my skirt up. Not enough to do.”
“You’re afraid that I’ll get you alone on a boat,” I said with a sly smile.
“Maybe, but I’d like to do something different.”
“Let’s go to Sedona,” I said. “You’ve never been there. You’ve been promising that you’d go for twenty years. I’m calling you on it.”
“Tony, I’d love to go to Arizona. Mom adored her trip there with Dad—but I don’t want to enable your addiction. If we go, it’s to have fun, enjoy the experience, and have some time together. It’s not a search for evidence of alien invaders. OK?”
“Sure, I promise. You do understand that we have to go to the chapel, right?”
“Fine,” she said in the superior way women use to dismiss their men.
“Will you make the airline reservations?” I asked.
“Yeah, I will—as always. I’ll tell you what; I’ll get a round trip ticket for me and a one way ticket for you, just in case.”
“In case, what?”
“In case you get abducted, silly.”
Chapter Five
11:15 PM, August 21, 2013
Room 549, L’Auberge Resort & Spa
301 Little Lane, Sedona, Arizona
You’ve already guessed that my primary motivation for this Sedona trip was to gather information about the missing Christus. I admit that I promised Gretchen that I’d put my obsession on hold, but she knew that I was lying. I wasn’t being honest when I said it. You knew that I was insincere when you read it.
I’m not a dishonest man. I’m a realist.
No marriage survives 30 years without liberal fabrications by both spouses on a full spectrum of topics. Wives lie about the finances that they control.
“This little old thing? Honey, I’ve had it for years,” they’ll deceitfully claim when you spot a suspicious new dress or pair of expensive Italian high heels.
Women mislead their men about their sexual interests. And they exaggerate their satisfaction with performance when they do interact intimately. I didn’t say that wives were cruel, though they can…well, I’d better stop there.
Husbands exaggerate and lie when the topic is their prior achievements in sports, military service, hunting, fishing, and romance. Wives know this. They tolerate the aberrant behavior because it’s expedient.