Pleas to the Pleiades
Chapter 15: THE MEMORIES OF MEMNON

The lost memories of Jimmie Memnon returned in waves like Ragnarok.

First, he remembered why he had come to the strange Chatterquot reptilian research facility in Florida and its famous music recording studios deep in the swamps. He had come to record his first album, but was soon drawn into investigations of a series of disappearances that had probably been murders.

Few musicians were allowed into Chatterquot to record, and most who had been in there never wanted to come back. All the bravado of the worst rock and roll bad boys wilted when those huge Mexican rattlesnakes rolled down their chute into the stomach-shaped studio. Jimmie had been chosen not so much for his unique guitar playing and songwriting, but for his mastery of yoga and the meditation techniques of taoist alchemy.

Jimmie had not known, he had had no way of knowing, that Candor’s cousins on Earth had been watching him his entire life. The dragons had that ability to monitor the thoughts of every person on Earth from their underwater computer centers off the coasts of Bimini and Okinawa and elsewhere throughout the world. The monitoring systems were automatic; only certain key words and concepts triggered closer scrutiny.

So The Prince of Candor had given James Memnon back his own master tapes, all those recordings of long scrutiny now made digital, fresh, but not as disorienting as the events that had originally happened.

The first part of the experience was an interlude, turning delicately in the total mystery, twisting deliciously …

… into the risky stories of military brats on electric guitars..

That kind of scrutiny had perhaps started in Morocco, when he was three years old. Drawn away from his parents near the Casbah in Casablanca by the hypnotic music of Sufi dervishes, Jimmie had been kidnapped by an Arab to be sold into slavery.

“The guy had crooked fingers. I’ve always been suspicious of people with crooked fingers after that. Yeah, I was almost kidnapped among those tall white minarets with the same fresh smell as Florida.

“But an elderly Sheik rescued me. Ah, that early memory, one of the first, when I the little three-year-old boy was sitting in the arms of a white-bearded elderly mystical man. I thought the Sheikh was Santa Claus!

Why had such a sweet childhood memory been stolen from him?

Because it had held the seeds of reconciliation among world religions, the voice of Candor acoustimorphed in Jimmie’s mind, So my cursed cousins erased that memory recording ... but they could not erase the music that you absorbed that day, and that has influenced your music ever since.

Then Jimmie remembered many details from his military childhood, things that Grandma Osie had always warned him about. Osie was patriotic, but wary. She considered all soldiers shell-shocked from the start.

Osie, though blind from hereditary macular degeneration, had known well enough that the visit of Candor with Jimmie had been in a spacecraft. How had she known about these things? Osie just knew about those kinds of things. Big silver cigars in the sky had seemed to follow the family for generations. Her brother, Jimmie’s uncle Al, had served with distinction as a pilot with the Flying Tigers and then with the Army Air Force as a glider spy pilot.

Piles of beige-turning maps had littered Uncle Al’s floor in Amarillo, and now Jimmie’s memories came through in another flood of cartography of the Sahara Desert. There were also memories of those scuttlebutt conversations with Uncle Al and his war buddies about the Philadelphia Experiment.

They gathered around the hot grid furnace in the bottom of the North Texas wood floor of the brick and wood house of Osie.

“Oh, and what it did to the sailors on board, tell you whut.“

“What?“

“Whut? Tell you whut. Them there sailors done got caught electro-gravitationally gut-sucked into the bulwarks, the metal of the boat. They were dead. But then there were just a few, just a few, just plum-dadburn-durn crazy. Then there was that Roswell crash and what it did to the emerging Air Force.”

The wildest story that Uncle Al had told that day was that he was soon to go on a mission he couldn’t talk about.

“But you’re talking about it, Uncle Al,” Jimmie had said.

“All I’m agonna tell ya is that those Sahara maps tell where underground bases are, bases that helped Hitler.”

“But Hitler lost, Uncle Al.”

“Not completely, Jimmie. Jimmie, you’re young and bright. Let’s go outside and catch horny toads.”

They had gone outside into the west Texas plains outside the house where Osie had lived when she was young.

“See these here fire ants, Jimmie? Horn toads eat ’em for lunch. They gobble ’em up faster than french fries. We can eat ants too, if we squeeze ’em to death first so they can’t bite us.” Uncle Al grabbed an ant and crushed it before it could bite, then popped it into his mouth and chewed. “Tart and tasty!” he beamed.

Jimmie did the same. “Yeah, they do taste all right. Might take all day to make a meal though.”

“Jimmie, don’t tell any one. I’m going to places in northern New Mexico and Arizona, places where there are underground bases. I’m still working for the Army. They’re asking me to check on these bases.

“Reports say there are giant ants in those bases, and these reports ain’t

loony. There’s also supposed to be reptile-type creatures down there.”

“Uncle Al, you’ve never talked crazy like this before.”

“It’s not crazy, Jimmie. Keep it under your hat, don’t tell anybody. I just wanted you to know, in case I don’t come back.”

Jimmie gulped.

A horn toad seemed to decide it resented Al’s encroachment on his ant hunting. The spiny lizard squirted blood out the corners of its eyes the way horny toads do when angry. The blood spattered on both the guys’ legs. Jimmie laughed. Uncle Al did not.

It was the last anyone in the family had ever seen of Uncle Al.

Dry quadrangles of Amarillo, where Jimmie and his brother had already dottie-bapped up the snap every scorpion, tarantula, horn toad, fire ant, Gila monster, and diamondback.

The memories kept coming, like the mighty Mississippi through a broken levy, and many of the memories hurt worse than red ant bites.

Jimmie’s mother had gotten him started musically. She had loved to watch and listen to Liberace every day when they lived in Blytheville Arkansas, surrounded by acres of cotton fields and groaning harvesters.

Somewhere there were old photos of Jimmie listening to Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky when quite young, what had happened to those old vinyl discs and the turntable? Mom had played piano quite well, and she had constantly begged Jimmie’s father to get lessons for him, but that had never happened. Jimmie tried as best he could on his own, struggling through basic pieces, trying to emulate Mom’s dances with sugarplum fairies. He quickly learned that if he played only black keys, F sharp minor pentatonic, he would hit no sour notes.

He remembered the music, but he couldn’t remember where it had come from. His blind grandmother Osie had helped him bring some things back to consciousness, but most of it would not come back. Now he could remember everything. He even remembered when Osie had first looked down to him and he had looked up into her face, in the hospital where he had been born, just off the legendary Route 66.

Jimmie remembered singing loudly in sixth grade, dominating the school chorus. The vocal instructor had asked him to join the school band. Maybe she simply wanted him out of her responsibility, because he was hopelessly improvisatory. Many music teachers really fear and loathe improvisation. Jimmie would burst into yodeling glissandos without provocation.

So there he had landed in the Amarillo School Band, where he played trombone and baritone horn. The band teacher had terrible breath. Jimmie used to dread the teacher coming over and playing his horn, and bought an extra mouth-piece so he could switch to it after he used the first one. The teacher was as bored with the pep rally football game

tunes they played as Jimmie was, so they played swing tunes such as “String of Pearls” and “One O’Clock Jump” and Jimmie improvised quite a bit, which irritated the instructor, who constantly reminded Jimmie that he was second trombone for a reason.

The memories all had importance, if not by causality, then by emotional impact. Jimmie had a crush on a cute clarinet player who sat on the other side of the band’s semicircle. Later, he could never come to love any woman who was not a musician or artist. The band played very beautiful Brahms concertos with Jimmie on his baritone horn, finally earning a bit of praise from the halitotic teacher. Mozart’s “The Magic

Flute” overture was also a high point, and Jimmie’s family’s happiness at hearing the public concert was heartening to him.

Jimmie only liked romantic classical and big band swing. All his older relatives despised Elvis and all those other badly behaved early rockers, and so did Jimmie. When the Beatles and the Rolling Stones hit the airwaves in the early 1960s, arguments broke out on the school softball field as to who was better, and girls divided themselves into camps as well. Jimmie was uncool to prefer classical and jazz, so he decided to favor the Dave Clark Five, perhaps because they had a saxophone. He had actually begun to also like blues, but at that time it was virtually a forbidden form of music for white people. He remembered hearing Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley on the radio and being put into ecstasy by that bompitty-bomp beat that made him squirm in his seat.

Why all these innocuous and charming memories erased? What was the key?

Then another memory surged forth, a vision of angels in a Jacksonville Florida Methodist church, with Jesus of Nazareth in the center ... but the Moroccan Sufis were there too. In rapid fire there was then the memory of Jimmie Memnon’s first meditation near goldfish in a Buddha-sculptor’s pond in Futenma Okinawa, and then the lightning’s

near-strike in Cherry Lake Florida. The lightning bolt had struck the ground like a huge hammer of solid light about five meters across, and then the ground steamed with dead insects. It was beginning to make a little sense why these memories had been erased, even if it did not make sense to anyone yet but Jimmie. The lightning had struck only three

meters away.

Of course these memories of enlightenment’s early stages had been wiped away, and especially because they had all been so universal in nature.

One summer he worked as a cowboy and ranch hand for another uncle, and heard one of the big dark muscular black guys play slide guitar during one of their breaks. The black guy’s name was RC, and he played well. Jimmie learned that RC was a local legend in the juke joints of Madison County Florida - where Ray Charles grew up. This

“race music” became Jimmie’s new love, and he began to beg his parents for a guitar. They preferred Jimmie’s enthusiasm for Stephen Foster, and as there was a diorama museum on the Suwanee River nearby, the family visited it regularly, and Grandma Osie finally moved near the Suwanee River. But his parents would not buy him a guitar.

On Okinawa there had not only been the huge bronze Buddha with the pond of koi goldfish outside the sculptor’s hall and the meditation bench. Okinawa was also where the caves on the east side of the island went deep down to islands offshore, where local Shinto legends said the first dragons had hosted the first civilization of humans on Earth. In these seas east of Okinawa, the waves stood more than ten meters tall when seas were calm, and much much more in storm. Underneath those seas and south of the island, huge stones were cut into rectangular forms that were obviously manmade, but aeons ago.

By now, Jimmie’s father had been promoted to a higher sergeant’s rank, and Sergeant Memnon and then-Captain Wood used to take Jimmie fishing out in the Dragon Triangle, and scuba diving in the coral reefs that surrounded the ancient island of Okinawa. Jimmie’s dives to these immense perfectly planed Dragon Triangle stone shelves of Yonaguni, and later to rock walls beneath the sea near Bimini, all these memories had been erased, because at the time of the erasure, Jimmie was just barely

beginning to put it all together.

When the Memnon family had moved to Okinawa again during the Viet Nam War period, he had begun to appreciate the ethereal sounds of the Mamas and the Papas and the Byrds. He had rather liked the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, especially “Norwegian Wood” with George Harrison’s sitar playing. When he saw the video clips of “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields” on television, he was enthralled. He had begun to listen to

Ravi Shankar, and Paul Horn’s flute playing with classical Indian style accompaniment.

So, upon moving to Okinawa, he was attracted to studying sitar and samisen, which he was able to do to a limited extent. Guitars were cheap there, and he managed to buy an acoustic guitar, which had such a poor action and intonation that it was well suited to conversion to a higher-action slide guitar. He also added a second string at the G

position. He bought a couple of harmonicas and what is called a Jew’s harp, and later managed to buy a cheap electric guitar, which he blew up trying to copy Pete Townsend’s theatricals.

He also blew up a stereo system because he had not yet learned about the impedance differences between electric guitars and home stereo systems. Although home sound system sources can be played through guitar amplifiers, the sound will be weak; if an electric guitar or synthesizer is played through a home sound system, there is danger of overloading the speakers and blowing them up.

Jimmie blew up his guitar when he devised a cheap trick for the band he was trying to put together for the Naha Air Base Teen Club. Jimmie was still primitive in his playing, but he had just recently managed to learn barre chords and swing his entire arm in an arc like Pete Townsend used to do in “I Can See For Miles.” He applied a thin stream of model airplane glue along each string except where his fingers formed the chords. Then, wearing a flamboyant billowing-sleeved Jimi-Hendrix-style shirt his mother had sewn (Jimmie’s father hated it), he swung his plectrum-wielding picking hand in a climactic arc, bearing a flaming zippo lighter. Six streams of fire shot up the guitar’s neck from his right hand toward his left, as the home stereo system speakers blew up with a terrible crunching sizzling sound, and drops of flaming glue fell onto the plastic pick guard that held the electric pickups in place. Then the pick guard and the entire guitar burst into flames that smelled like burning napalm and plastic. His bedroom filled with acrid vile smoke, and his billowing purple shirt sleeves caught fire as well.

His father burst into his bedroom yelling as Jimmie calmly put out the fire and tried to act like nothing had happened. Fortunately, his teased-out halo of hair and long sideburns had not caught fire. Jimmie wished he had filmed the event. What a memory.

The erasure of some of these memories could have made a kind of sense. Maybe General Beauregard Wood, having known the Memnon family for generations, knew more about how and why those memories of Okinawa had been erased. Ah, General Wood, the general who had been an officer on Okinawa, had always given the impression he was giving orders he did not like giving. General Wood was Sergeant Memnon’s commanding officer on Okinawa, and it had been Wood who had approved Jimmie being given a security clearance so that the youth could work on the Air Force flight line. Could that be reason for the memory erasure? A lot of rules had been bent in the Viet Nam War, and maybe General Wood or others higher up had needed to cover their tracks.

Jimmie worked as an assistant aircraft mechanic on the Naha Air Base flight line one summer, then as an Army truck mechanic the next one, to buy a real guitar amplifier that would not blow up ... but his dad would not let him bring it back to Texas when they left the island. The heavy amplifier exceeded their weight allowance. But, to his credit,

dear old dad helped Jimmie rebuild his guitar, although later it, like many other things from Okinawa, mysteriously disappeared. The acoustic guitar with original art work of flaming “God’s Eyes” on it disappeared, as did many copies of almost all the early Rolling Stone and Teenset magazines, and the family harmonium, on which Jimmie had composed his first serious song “The Last Church of End,” a recording of which also

disappeared.

Or could the memory erasure have had something to do with his acquaintance with Jim Morrison? Or with Art Bell, the Okinawa disc jockey who was to become a major figure in UFO investigations?

“Light My Fire” was on the airwaves of the Naha radio station KSBK constantly. Jimmie recalled having met Jim Morrison at poetry readings in Florida near MacDill Air Force Base, and he disliked him intensely. Jim Morrison, the Lizard King he later called himself, got all the girls’ attention, and the worst thing was he was an Admiral’s

son. The rivalries between the kids of officers and of enlisted men was very intense, and Jimmie was forbidden to date or even dance with the daughters of officers. Military families have produced many notable musicians, in particular those who attended Kubasaki High School on Okinawa, whose alumni are called Dragons. Jimmie had not even known that when he first heard Janis Joplin singing “Piece of My Heart” on Okinawa radio station KSBK, it was fellow Kubasaki Dragon Sam Andrew on lead

guitar with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Jimmie used to go upstairs to the KSBK studio and hang out with Art Bell, who always had the latest late-60s songs.

It was pleasant to retrieve these memories. Many of them hurt, particularly the unrequited love for officers’ daughters, and the ever-present proximity of death that goes with war, but clear memory gives confidence. Memnon’s memories were far from over though.

The Memnon family came back to north Texas, home of Jimmie’s mother’s family, and of her brother Al, whose mysterious disappearance was a topic about which Jimmie’s father forbade discussion.

It was the summer of 1969. The Viet Nam War reeled on like a sacrificial animal that would not die. Jimmie had gone through special training on Okinawa. He had learned all the arts of a paratrooper, Uechi Ryu karate, and had placed highly in marksmanship, all at the age of sixteen. That explained a lot about the missing memories. Not only had

Jimmie had unexplained musical talent, but martial arts skills as well.

His cousin, Uncle Al’s son and a soldier, had been killed in Viet Nam.

By this time Jimmie had had enough of military life, and maybe he had even begun to want to forget the traumas that came with it.

One day in school in Wichita Falls, Jimmie went blind. He was slumping in his desk, letting the back of his head bear down onto the hard ridge at the top of the chair, when everything went silver. It was like a motion picture theater screen with nothing on it. Jimmie just sat there and prayed. Would he ever get his vision back? He reflected about how ugly so much of the world was, and that it was a relief not to have to see much of it. Better to lose sight than hearing, he thought. He knew which way his feet should go, and that was enough. He made his way home, acting as if his vision was only disturbed, when in fact he was absolutely without the sense that most people consider most important.

His vision came back in three days, pretty much as the doctors had predicted it would. But then one night on Sheppard Air Force Base, a most incredible thing happened. Jimmie was feeling despondent. He was completely worn out from his military childhood and the constant travel. His social life had been stunted. He could not form any semblance of a youthful romance, because his family relocated so frequently, often twice a year. In this state of despair, he prayed for hope for a more stable life. Into his bedroom came two shimmering columns of light like is portrayed on science fiction television shows. The two visages had something like heads and bodies but no discernible features. They spoke

with him telepathically.

“You de wa-wa,” they said simultaneously.

What was this? “What is this?” Jimmie asked without words.

“We need to keep you alive and well. You will do great things.”

“What if I don’t want to do great things?”

They chuckled, or rather shimmered. “You cannot change what you are. Even though you may change much, you still cannot change what you are. It is dangerous for us to come here. We cannot stay long. Candor has sent us, and we must leave now. We give you hope, and that will become the substance of faith. You de wa-wa.”

“Alright already, I’m the wa-wa. Could be worse I guess.”

Jimmie felt much better. He went outside to see what he could see, and sure enough there, in the night sky close by, hovered a strange semi-transparent thing, about the size of an aircraft. This was on an airbase, but this was not an American aircraft. It was shaped rather like a horseshoe crab. rounded at one end, and tapering slightly at the

other. It became more and more transparent, then zipped away in an instant toward the north.

The family then moved to north Florida, home of the Memnon family. North Florida, and Gainesville in particular, has probably spawned more great rock music talents than any other place in the world. Jimmie often thought that was due to the fresh water springs, rivers, and lakes that filter through the lime rock of the Suwanee River region. It must have been the water, he thought.

He had grown longer hair and longer sideburns and was the high school genius, graduating with honors and earning nominations to West Point and Annapolis, but he did not care. It was unrequited love again and again for him, and he did not feel like having a military haircut and going to Viet Nam. It was obviously a war that was not going to be

won. His high school art teachers stole his paintings and ceramics, and that further eroded his confidence in the “system.”

Was it all connected, all these thefts of his creativity, and finally the theft of his memory itself?

He went to six different high schools. He was always the star student but could rarely get a date. He had the reputation of a hippie but actually had not yet used any drugs of any kind except for a couple sneaks of his grandmother’s paregoric, and he was still a virgin in the era of free love. He strongly disdained alcohol. He immersed himself in the yoga and meditation practice he had learned on Okinawa, and read several books a week - Shakespeare (he had played the role of Julius Caesar in both Latin and English on Okinawa), the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Lao Tzu, novels, and advanced physics. He gardened, and spent many hours in the forests and swamps and canoeing all the rivers

of Florida. It seemed that only the outcasts in high school high society would befriend him.

At least some of these people were good musicians, and Jimmie learned much from playing with them. He had no idea some of these players would become famous. In Lake Mary Florida, not far from the Memnons, lived old Air Force friends from Okinawa, and they introduced Jimmie to the former recording engineer for Les Paul and Bela Bartok. These memories were sweet. Fragrances of orange blossoms and jasmine filled

the Florida air, where greenhouses and aviaries were full of orchids, and a home with old reel-to-reel tape decks and a harpsichord that Jimmie played for a bit.

Jimmie turned down his military academy nominations, much to the chagrin of his father. Instead the youth attended Santa Fe College, taking classes in Applied Cosmology, music composition, and psychology. The psychology classes led to becoming the subject a yoga physiology research project, and many more psychology research projects ranging

from sensory deprivation - which Jimmie actually enjoyed, dolphin communication, sleep cycles, yoga, and meditation. That was what had eventually led to the experimental facilities at Chatterquot, hidden deep in the Florida swamps.

Jimmie could tell that the resurgent memories were fast coming to the point in time when they were erased. He had become a popular yoga teacher in Gainesville with thousands of students, but he was not a guru follower. He didn’t like anyone kissing his feet. His meditation practice became deeper and deeper. He had learned the Trans-Himalayan school meditation methods and mantras as taught by Yogananda and Anandamurti, coming from the lineage of Babaji, Yukteswar, and Lahiri Mahasaya.

Jimmie spent almost half his waking hours in meditation, and mastered every aspect of tantric yoga.

During this time, one evening during meditation, he withdrew his awareness in stages through the chakras in the process known as pratyahara. Upon withdrawal of consciousness to the third eye point, his entire body filled with white light. How long had this formless union of samadhi lasted? He could not remember, even after recovering his

memories. All he could remember about it was the preceding withdrawal process, the taste of nectar that dripped down the back of his throat, and the internal sound. Whereas the earlier blindness had been silver like a theater screen, this time it had been more blinding white than a blizzard.

Jimmie had gone through an education that has no diploma. He learned to fly Outside of his body, through whichever chakra he chose, and learned that coming out the top of his head was freedom, whereas through other chakras was not. At a gathering of meditators, he had another incredible experience: levitation at a group dharmachakra. He

actually rose above the floor for an extended period of time, but like the white light, he could not remember for how long. Both experiences were like an eternity unto themselves.

One foggy evening during meditation, a buzzing crackling sound descended over the house and continued for an hour or so. Jimmie stayed firm in his meditation. He had long become used to unusual experiences. After his meditation of forty minutes or more, he went out the front door onto the street where dozens of neighbors had gathered, looking up into the buzzing low-lying fog. No one ever figured out what it was, but Jimmie felt it was the same horse-shoe shaped craft he had encountered before.

Having heard of Jimmie’s reputation of being a magnet for the unusual, someone introduced him to a guy who had had some parallel experiences. Symington Bimms claimed to have been abducted, something that had never happened to Jimmie Memnon. Bimms said he had been taken to a vast underwater base near Bimini that held digital records of all humans on Earth. But Symington Bimms had soon mysteriously disappeared from his Alachua county laboratory with its oscilloscopes and pyramids,

and the pyramids and Tesla coil that Jimmie had constructed also were suddenly disappeared during this time.

The same Tesla coil design that he had used to build his engine on Mars in Hesperia. Now he knew from where those designs had come. Jimmie had given up everything, he had renounced all human attachments, sold his house, guitars and all, and moved to an ashram in Colorado. All he cared about was meditation.

One evening a fellow aspirant in the ashram said, “Let’s go see the Dalai Lama. He’s appearing in Boulder tonight.”

“What for?” Jimmie asked. “I am already in touch with all the enlightened ones. And he’ll just have the usual entourage of spiritual materialist guru groupies.”

“Aw, come on, Ramakrishna,” for that was what Jimmie had come to be known.

“Ok, Shambu, just for you.”

So the two buddies went to Boulder, and entered the lecture hall where His Holiness the Dalai Lama stood in the middle of the room alone. Ramakrishna Jimmie strode right up to the saffron-robed Lama, extended his hand, and said, “Howdy.”

His Holiness answered with a beaming smile, “Howdy!”

Ramakrishna Jimmie conversed with Tenzin Gyalpo - for that was what the Dalai Lama said he could be called - for some time as Shambu held back in awe.

“You are a simple person. Most people try to make things too complicated,” the famous Lama said to Jimmie.

When the Dalai Lama gave his talk, he began simply in English. Then, or so it was heard by Jimmie, the talk changed to Sanskrit and Tibetan, and a detailed description of how to exit the body at the time of death or during daily meditation was given. Jimmie knew most of this already, but not in such an elegantly simple way. After the talk, the

audience mingled and talked.

“Did you hear and understand the talk?” Jimmie asked the nearby people, because he assumed most of them did not know Sanskrit or Tibetan.

Indeed, Jimmie himself did not know these languages as well as he found

he had this special night.

“Yes, he spoke about compassion,” everyone agreed.

“Right. I mean the part after that in Sanskrit and Tibetan, about the Bardo Thodol, how to choose one’s reincarnations, all those things,” JImmie replied.

Everyone looked at him quizzically, until one said, “He did not talk about those things. He only spoke about compassion, and it was all in English.” So much for another deliciously interesting memory.

Jimmie wound up attending a Kalachakra sand painting ceremony in Los Angeles a few years later, but this time His Holiness was surrounded by the usual wall of fame. Jimmie was given some of the sand from the Kalachakra - The Wheel of Time - and he duly took that sand and scattered it to the four directions of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, northern lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico.

All along the way, sightings of spacecraft kept happening. In the 1980s, when Jimmie was recording music in north Florida, there were the well-known Eglin Air Force Base sightings, seen from Newberry, numerous witnesses alongside him. The spacecraft showed rapid, right-angle flight that conventional aircraft could not perform. There was the re-entry of debris shaped like a right angle, spinning from over Eglin toward the

south. The pinpoint light craft, at least three or four of them, zipped all about, then their flight was toward the celestial north of the Big Dipper, then toward the Pleiades, as if to avoid the dust clouds of interstellar space and the dangerous radiation of the variable star

Algol. Many people reported landings and contact near the abandoned quarry nearby that was full of water. It seemed the spacecraft had come for water.

In 1992 there were Topanga Canyon sightings by many people, and later strange incidents in the sky before the Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake. In 1998, Jimmie was in San Luis Obispo, where he saw the strangest thing of his life. A big silver cigar-shaped object hovered silently over the Atascadero area a few miles inland. It had to

have been a couple football fields long, maybe more. It was surrounded by a half-dozen or so USAF fighters, and was making emissions of smoke or vapors that seemed to aggravate the USAF aircraft that swarmed like bees. A nearby woman appeared to be the only other witness, where had she come from? She seemed to be in a state of shock and disarray, and she would not talk with Jimmie. Then Jimmie was really amazed - by the

completely instantaneous disappearance of the huge craft.

Then, the memories came to their finale, as Jimmie remembered what he had written while working at the Chatterquot Facility. It was the last thing he remembered from that time, and it really hurt, because it was not only about the strange experiences both bitter and sweet, but also about his perpetually unrequited love.