After the Saucers Landed Read online

  “Maybe you’ve seen him on television?”

  That isn’t it apparently. I can’t quite tell what the difficulty actually is or what’s troubling her because, well because everything is so immediate and present to me in this moment that I can’t quite predict what will happen next, but if I had to guess I’d say that her sense of déjá vu hasn’t subsided.

  “It’s gotten worse.”

  “It isn’t stopping. Everything that we do, it’s scripted out.”

  I tell Virginia we should just leave, escape out the emergency exit and leave Harold brooding over his coffee, but she’s reluctant. She points out that the door is connected to an alarm, for one thing, and she says she needs to talk to Harold before we go. She wants to say goodbye.

  “Actually, it seems to me that there is something I ought to be talking to Harold about and I’m missing it,” she says.

  “You want to have it both ways,” I say.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Is everything scripted or have we forgotten our lines?”

  “Both,” she says. “Maybe both.”

  3

  onboard a saucer

  Since the landing the Pleidien saucers are always on the horizon. They serve as floating billboards for the new age as well as constant invitations to join what I still think of as the Rain cult. The discs over Earth are open for walking tours 24/7 and admission is free. The Pleidiens are dedicated to transmission, to communication, and to enlightenment.

  “Isn’t this what you always wished you could do?” Virginia asks Harold. “Remember the first abduction case you investigated? If you’d been able to see the saucer that Deliah encountered, go back with her to the craft and see it again, talk to the people onboard, wouldn’t that have been something? Wouldn’t you have wanted that? Didn’t you wish you could’ve been there?”

  This might be the wrong approach to take with Harold because he’d been convinced that Deliah, his first wife, hadn’t been visited by people from outer space at all, but that she’d been evolving. When he’d first written about the saucers he’d thought they were a symptom. Deliah’s visitations were byproducts of her coping with a world that wasn’t making sense. She’d needed to imagine space people in order to deal with the trauma of her childhood. Not that something so terrible had happened to her when she was a child, not that she’d suffered actually in the world. The problem had been the way technology, the way urban life under electric lights and in front of a television set, had denied her any sense of concrete reality. Patricia didn’t have an ordinary sense of space, of location, because she’d watched Rocky and Bullwinkle before she’d learned to talk. Her mind worked by imagining flat surfaces and by making unlikely connections between images that, a hundred years earlier, would never have been presented to her so rapidly: a coffee can and a mountain range, both of them the same size, or a cartoon stick figure man wearing a top hat followed by the explosion of an atom bomb.

  The three of us, Virginia, Harold, and myself, are in the parking lot of the Quality Pie looking up at the light show from the saucer and thinking it over. Harold takes a drag of his cigarette, then tosses the butt into an oil puddle near the yellow line. “This won’t reveal anything new. I know what they’re about, I’ve read the book. Some of it, anyhow,” he says. “I read it fifteen years ago. What I remember is the advertising copy: ‘Saucer Wisdom presents spiritual truths and a sense of wonder. Rain’s story of adventure, his insights on the phenomena of flying saucers, tells the secret that’s been hidden from humanity for centuries. He tells us who we really are.’” Virginia pulls on her sweater dress, trying to cover her legs with it by stretching it out a bit, and then takes my hand. “We should go in, go up there,” she says.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “It’s been a long time since I read Saucer Wisdom. How did it turn out? Who did we turn out to be, Harold?”

  “Book club members, mostly,” he replied.

  The saucer over Quality Pie is lit up like a Christmas tree, covered with steel bubbles that looked just exactly as if they’d been soldered on by an incompetent New Yorker and hoaxer. I’m getting a headache looking at it. My teeth ache as I consider the idea of facing all the pretty smiles, all the cheery illustrations and graphics, all the messages of hope and love.

  “Kitsch,” Harold says. Then he mumbles something under his breath, something about Christianity or Christ. My wife puts her hand on his back, petting him reassuringly, but pushing him forward too.

  “Who are you, exactly?” Harold asks.

  Virginia doesn’t answer his question, but gestures with her head toward the saucer. “If we enter the vessel the déjà vu will stop. Help me out.” She reminds us that we were moved, that we jumped from point A to point C without stopping off at B.

  “You just experienced it,” she says. “You’re abductees, right? That’s what Missing Time means? And the aliens are right there. You don’t have to wonder, or try to figure it out. You can march right on board and ask them.”

  “Who are you?” Harold asks.

  Virginia just points up at the spinning disc over our heads, asking us to follow her gesture and consider the ramp and lights and aperture. We are invited, she tells us. We are all three of us invited.

  And walking up the ramp it does feel like it. That is, I feel as though I am being abducted. Somehow this journey on the extended escalator, being taken up mechanically into the saucer, stepping off at the entrance into a room that is lit by track lights, carpeted with well-worn dark red acrylic fiber, it all has a fatedness to it. It is decidedly odd. My wife is behaving strangely, my mentor—the man whose biography I ghostwrote—is going along with it, completely out of character, and there is a man in a sequined jumpsuit behind the front counter. He’s ready to tell us all about reincarnation and space travel and behind him, on a television monitor, there are flashing geometric patterns. Red triangles, orange circles, lots of little squares, all of this fills the screen as he welcomes us and asks if we’d like to know who we used to be. “The regression lasts twenty minutes and it is entirely free,” he informs us as he hands us little red paper tickets. “Although donations are accepted and suggested.”

  Everything aboard the saucer has been kept clean: the rack of brochures and leaflets is well ordered, and the television monitor above the front counter is in good working order. It’s a quality picture. But, despite this there is something of a low-end quality to the whole affair. The inside of a Pleidien disc is something more like a penny arcade or a dollar theater than it is like a museum or gallery. There is a smell of Lysol and sweat in the air, and the loud speakers are turned up a bit high.

  “The Pleidiens are happy for this contact,” the narrator says.

  We’ve stepped away from the front counter. We’re in the first exhibit, watching footage of their space fleet in action, watching them out there amongst the stars, when a man in a sequined jumpsuit steps comes around the corner to collect and tear our tickets.

  “We want to ask you something,” Virginia says to the man.

  “Me?” The man in the sequined jumpsuit has a bit of a potbelly, his hair is thinning, and his sequins are green. I realize that he is not, in fact, a Pleidien, but is a human employee. “You or whoever is in charge,” Harold tells him. “We were abducted. Just now, or maybe a few hours ago. We’ve had an experience of Missing Time and we want to talk to someone about it.”

  “Missing Time,” the man says. He’s thinking it over. “I think I know how to help you.”

  The usher takes us through the front exhibit and then leads us through a round metal door that slides open silently and down a hall with rounded walls that are painted a bright yellow. There are no windows or portholes, but plenty of light coming from clouded glass panels overhead, and I think of George Orwell. There might not be day or night inside one of these saucers. The light is probably always on.

  The usher takes us to an exhibit room and then scuttles off before we can object. We wait for a while, thinking he�
�s gone to get somebody to talk to us, but when several minutes pass we find ourselves taking in the computer screens, posters, and plastic models. This exhibit tells the history of alien visitations on Earth. There is a recounting the Charles Rain story of course, but there are also several other famous UFO cases on display, cases that were quite famous before the landing.

  Betty and Barney Hill, for instance, are shown on one of the monitors. The smiling middle-aged couple is pictured on their living room sofa and he’s holding a newspaper. Barney is pointing to the headline “New Hampshire UFO chiller” and he looks a bit proud.

  Using a dingy computer mouse (the white plastic is now grey) Harold moves through the catalog of images. There is Major Marcel holding debris from a crashed weather balloon, a stage photo that he would later claim had no relation to the debris he found on the Brazel ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. There is a publicity photo of D. B. Sweeney as Travis Walton in the film Fire in the Sky, and there is a photo of Whitley Strieber on Larry King Live, and the movie poster from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Virginia moves on to the next monitor as Harold plays a short video of an interview with Jacques Vallée and François Truffaut, and after this there is a video of Ralph Reality who explains that Spielberg unknowingly worked with Pleidien movie producers at MGM. The Space Brothers were apparently quite pleased with how the movie turned out.

  “Too many stories about us reflected the lower-level spiritual development so prevalent on Earth. The films about us were, up until this point, filled with fear and violence,” Ralph Reality says. For some reason he has a British accent in this clip, and that seems new. I’m thinking he sounded like an American when he landed on the White House lawn. “We were elated when Spielberg was so amenable to telling a different kind of story about humanity’s interstellar future.”

  Harold takes my shoulder as I click the mouse to switch to the next video.

  “What’s happening here?” he asks.

  I tell him I don’t know and I wonder where Virginia has gotten off to, but I’ve misunderstood his question.

  “They’ve gotten it all wrong. Where’s Budd Hopkins?” Flint asks. “Where’s John Mack and David Jacob?”

  Harold thinks this history lesson from our Space Brothers leaves too much out. Harold starts to fill in the gaps with a running commentary as we move on to the next computer monitor. “It’s a reader’s digest version,” he says. “They don’t even mention Kenneth Arnold or Allen Hynek.” They’ve left out a lot, but it becomes clear why the usher brought us to this exhibit because the third monitor presents a list of clickable items on the subject of Missing Time and abductions.

  “These dark human fantasies were, in fact, only a psychic reaction to our presence on Earth. Humanity’s collective unconscious was aware of us, aware that we had contacted Charles Rain and that we’d passed on our understanding of cosmic consciousness to him. These spiritual gains made by Rain and his followers threatened the symptomatic reality of the rest of humanity, and thousands around the world psychically materialized their worst fears as a reactive response. While these night terrors were delusional they did occur on the level you consider most important. These were real physical events that you, the people of Earth, orchestrated in an effort to restage the contact in terms you could, in that moment, understand. As you were stuck, collectively stuck, in the intermediary realm between consciousness and spirit, you needed the Greys. You needed the fear they brought with them. But, if you’re willing, the possibility of moving beyond this stage is now open to you,” the narrator said. The voice sounds a bit mechanical.

  Another Pleidien flying saucer appeared above the holographic projector. The hologram saucer was circling around the top of a Douglas fir. We were watching one of Rain’s old hoaxes, the wires holding up the saucer were especially visible in this three-dimensional rendering, but the narrator made no mention of them.

  “Along with Rain there were many others who helped decode and explain our presence on Earth. And even when they focused on humanity’s own delusions, even when they worked with fear rather than light, many tremendous contributions were made by what was known as the UFO community.”

  Next is abduction researcher John Mack. Mack is a Harvard psychiatrist who wrecked his reputation on UFOs and in the promotional hologram Mack is sitting on a panel at some convention or other. Judging from the quality of the video to hologram transfer—floating artifacts, bits of static rendered as three-dimensional balls of blue and red and yellow light make me think of foo fighters—I figure the footage is to be from the ’79 MUFON conference in Seattle. Mack is talking about the mix of the subjective and objective while Harry Flint nods at him. Yep, it’s Flint there with Mack and the Pleidiens take up a minute or two outlining Flint’s work.

  “Harry Flint’s approach to the sightings, to the question of our presence, was of particular interest to us. His insistence that people consider the UFOs as a philosophical problem, rather than as science fiction phenomena, interested us greatly. His work along with the work we were doing with Charles Rain, the advancements we made with him during our visits to his ranch in the Catskills, gave us the confidence to make open contact with the human race.”

  Flint nudges me and points away from the display, directing me to pay attention to Virginia who is standing at the center of a star map and swaying back and forth with a look of spacey consideration on her face. She’s got her thumb pressed against her front teeth and clearly isn’t really looking at the constellations that are swirling about her. She’s standing on a round platform marked with a string of LED lights, surrounded by holograms, with her thumb in her mouth and her other hand pulling down on the bottom of her sweater. She might be singing karaoke in some dingy club but for the fact that the music has been replaced by a prerecorded lecture about star children and the hierarchy of souls. She turns a bit as a meteorite takes shape in the interference pattern that is the hologram, moves with it and reaches out as it spins past her. She lets go of her sweater, stands on her tiptoes and the wool knit sweater is pulled up. Her bare skin, her pubic hair, is visible for a moment as she turns. The fact of her nakedness along with the length of her sweater dress seems wrong to me.

  “She’s not dressed,” I say.

  “Do you recognize the sweater?” Flint asks.

  Now Virginia is standing under a holographic flying saucer covered in what look just like Christmas lights. The wires aren’t visible but the image is laughable nonetheless. The saucer hovers there over her head, and then zips away toward our solar system. The saucer zips toward a three-dimensional rendering of our solar system and as the flying hubcap approaches the planets grow bigger. In an instant Virginia is standing where the sun would be and the planets are revolving around her, around the platform.

  “Brian,” Flint says. “That isn’t your wife. I don’t think that’s your wife.”

  I don’t respond to Flint but just wave back to her. She’s noticed us staring and she’s gesturing for us to join her on the platform. She’s still chewing on her right thumb and she’s beckoning us with her left hand when she really ought to be continuing to pull on the bottom of her sweater with that hand. I make my way to her quickly, taking off my tweed jacket as I move between the lines of LED lights on the orange carpet.

  Virginia is right there in front of me but as I step closer to her, put my hand on her hip, get close enough to smell her, I can’t be certain. It’s not that she smells wrong so much as the fact that my familiarity with her physical presence is clearly untrustworthy. Putting my hand on her hip is something I’m doing and what is really familiar isn’t her skin, her looks, her physicality, but my desire for contact. When she puts her arm around my waist in response, touches the small of my back, I’m even less certain.

  I’m standing next to my wife inside the Pleidien flying saucer, standing there in the light show while Harold stares at us skeptically, and it seems like my knowledge of her, of this kind of moment, has turned around
on me.

  All of it, the cheesy holographic display, the LED lights, the smell of stale air and unvacuumed carpet, it’s all familiar. I feel as though I’ve done all this already, like I’ve lived through this before.

  “Your déjà vu is spreading,” I say. And, of course, I feel dread as I wait for her response. I feel dread because it seems to me that I already know what her response will be, if only subconsciously.

  She takes her hand away, turns to look at me, and her smile falters. “Don’t let him take me away from you,” she says.

  Only Virginia isn’t saying anything, not out loud. She looks at me with her big blue eyes, runs her left hand through her sandy blond hair, and tugs at her sweater dress. And in my mind I’m thinking about rain. I’m thinking about what it’s like to sleep outside, in the streets, on the cold concrete outside a First Unitarian church, or next to a fire hydrant. I’ve got this impression of cold, wet air and of being invisible. The picture that I’m thinking about, that she’s projecting into me, is of a woman sitting by a concrete wall and holding a mirror between her legs. The woman’s whole body is hidden behind that mirror, and she is looking down so that only the top of her head is visible.

  “Ufology is dead,” Harold says to her. “You landed and there is no need for it now.”

  “Take me home now,” Virginia says. I’m not sure if she says it aloud or not.

  Harold steps up to her, tries to make her look at him. He leans in closer and explains further, “I am not interested.”

  “This was a mistake,” she says. And I’m still not certain if she’s talking out loud or not even though, this time, I can see her lips move. “This isn’t working out right,” she says.