The Mothman Prophecies (26 page)

“I am Princess Moon Owl,” she declared between wheezes. “I am from another planet. I came here by flying saucer.”

Jaye slapped a tape on a tape recorder and offered to interview her for the air. The Princess was delighted, pulled herself together, and delivered a hilarious thirty-minute monologue about life on the planet Ceres in the asteroid belt. She seemed to be familiar with all the New York/Long Island UFO buffs and eccentrics, denouncing some as “phonies” and praising others. As the interview progressed, Jaye became increasingly uncomfortable. Cerians had a problem with body odor. “She stank like rotten eggs,” Jaye said afterward. The smell was slight at first but gradually became overpowering. The Princess admitted to being “Seven Ooongots” old … or about 350 Earth years.

While the interview was in progress, I was sitting in my New York apartment and my telephone was going crazy. It rang several times but there was no one on the other end. (Until this period I had had very few problems with my personal phone.) Later that afternoon I received a call from a middle-aged woman who said she was Princess Moon Owl and that I could reach her through “contactee Paro.” The woman's voice did not resemble the voice on Jaye's tape, which I heard later.

The taped Moon Owl sounded like a man faking an Aunt Jemima accent. He was a very bad actor. I accused Jaye of a hoax and advised her not to put the interview on the air. If it was not a hoax, then Moon Owl was the victim of demonic possession (Jaye's description of the Princess's behavior certainly indicated this). Jaye aired the tape anyway and Long Island's lunatic fringe went wild with joy. At last a genuine space person was in their midst.

Once she had established her credentials on WBAB, Moon Owl began to systematically telephone all of Long Island's prominent UFO enthusiasts. They accepted her authenticity without question. What troubled me was the fact that she managed to vector in on a number of unlisted numbers, and she obviously knew a great deal about the local personalities. The most suspicious things of all were her transparent references to a major UFO convention scheduled to be held that June 24 in New York's Hotel Commodore. James Moseley, publisher of
Saucer News,
had rented the hotel's auditorium and practically an entire floor for the event and was staging press conferences and radio and television appearances to promote his investment. Princess Moon Owl seemed to fit too neatly into the publicity campaign.

Meanwhile, Jane's phantom friends were visiting her daily and helpfully giving her surprising information about my own “secret” investigations. My interview with the Christiansens of Cape May, and the details of their pill-popping visitor, Tiny, was then known only to a few trusted people like Ivan Sanderson. But on June 12, Mr. Apol and his friends visited Jane when she was alone in her house and asked for water so they could take some pills. Then they presented her with three of the same pills, told her to take one at that moment, and to take one other in two days. The third pill, they said, was for her to have analyzed to assure herself it was harmless. They undoubtedly knew that she would turn it over to me.

Two hours after she took the first pill she came down with a blinding headache, her eyes became bloodshot, and the vision in her right eye was affected. When her parents came home they expressed concern because her eyes were glassy and her right eye seemed to have a cast.

The sample pill proved to be a sulfa drug normally prescribed for infections of the urinary tract.

Two days later she obligingly took the second pill and her phone rang shortly afterward. A man with “a crude Brooklyn accent” told her he was Col. John Dalton of the air force and wanted to talk to her about “Mitchell Field.” She told him, honestly, that she didn't know anything about Mitchell Field. He insisted that he wanted to talk to her. Would she come to his office? She asked where his office was and he hesitated for a moment, then said he would interview her at her house. He didn't ask for her address and since she hadn't reported anything to the air force, she wondered how he had gotten her phone number.

At 7:45
P.M.
the next evening Jane's parents left the house for a few hours and as soon as they were gone Colonel Dalton and his partner, a young lieutenant, rang her bell. Both men seemed normal and were polite and well-spoken. Colonel Dalton was in civilian clothes … a black suit, naturally. He was about five feet eight inches tall, had brown hair, brown eyes, and “a very pointed nose.” The lieutenant was two or three inches taller, in an air force uniform, with “whitish blond hair that looked dyed” cut very short, “like a crewcut growing back in.” They flashed identification cards with their photographs affixed.

The colonel asked her what she knew about a local saucer landing and saucer occupants in the area. Jane laughed and said she didn't believe in flying saucers.

“We know all about the shenanigans in this building,” Dalton told her curtly. “A lot of funny people have been going in and out.”

“Well, maybe some of my relatives are a little strange,” Jane smiled.

Dalton opened his briefcase and brought out a sheaf of printed forms. He handed her a long, complicated form and asked her to fill it out. She took it, read it over, then handed it back.

“If you don't want to fill it out,” he said, handing her a pen, “you can just sign it.”

“Now that would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it?” Jane said.

Later she recalled that the form did not ask any questions about UFOs but was solely concerned with personal history, education, medical background, and family history. “It even asked when my grandmother died and what she died of,” Jane told me.

Finally the two men gave up trying to browbeat her and left. She saw them drive away in a blue station wagon.

Around this same time two young men visited Mary Hyre at her home in Point Pleasant. Both were wearing black clothes, and both had short white hair. “It looked so unnatural,” she exclaimed. “I wondered why such young men would dye their hair such an odd color.”

At first she assumed they were just more in the endless stream of UFO buffs, but they seemed to know very little about flying saucers. They were mainly concerned with asking questions about me, which she hedged.

“Did they use any unusual words or expressions?” I asked Mary on the phone.

“Not really. Just when they went out the door … one of them turned and said something like, “We'll see you in time' or ‘sometime.' It sounded odd the way he said it, like it was meant to mean something.”

Tom's meeting with Vadig was still six months away so the phrase meant nothing to me.

III.

On June 19 Mr. Apol gave Jane a message to pass along to me. It was a prediction: “Things will become more serious in the Middle East. The pope will go there soon on a peace mission. He will be martyred there in a horrible way … knifed to death in a bloody manner. Then the Antichrist will rise up out of Israel.”

I was shocked. But here was a statement that could be checked against future events. Apol also said the Vatican was planning to send food and materiel to Arab refugees. There had been no announcement in the press about this.

Two days later Miss Paro had an unnerving experience. A black Cadillac pulled alongside her as she was out walking at 8
P.M.
and a well-dressed man in the back seat ordered her into the car. He named a friend of hers and she foolishly obeyed him. The car headed for Mount Misery.

“There was a funny smell inside,” she reported. “Antiseptic … like a hospital. And there were flashing lights on the dashboard. I couldn't take my eyes off them. I felt like they were hypnotizing me.”

The car traveled isolated back roads until it reached a crossroads where another vehicle was waiting. A man holding something like a doctor's bag was standing there. He got into the Cadillac and waved a small object in Jaye's face, like a bottle of smelling salts. She felt her will power drain away and sat there helplessly while the men asked her questions which didn't make any sense to her. Finally they returned her to the spot where they had picked her up. The whole episode had terrified her and she called me immediately.

Was Jaye's experience merely an updated version of the Mattoon “gasser” and old Springheeled Jack?
*
Months later when I interviewed Tom in Washington I remembered this seemingly meaningless incident. Had Tom also been gassed or hypnotized the moment he stepped into Vadig's old Buick?

On October 23, 1971, the
Washington Post
published a strange “gas” story involving President Nixon's maid. The story contains some of the elements we have been discussing here.

NIXON MAID STOLE IN TRANCE, SHE SAYS

Miami, Oct. 22
(AP)—A part-time housekeeper at President Nixon's Key Biscayne retreat has testified she was put in a hypnotic daze by a stranger who told her to shoplift four dresses.

Shirley Cromartie, 32, and a mother of three, pleaded no contest Thursday and was given a suspended sentence after law enforcement officers and a psychiatrist testified they believed she was telling the truth.

Mrs. Cromartie holds a security clearance to work in the Florida White House, according to testimony. She said a woman met her in a parking lot and asked the time, then ordered her to take the items and bring them to her.

Mrs. Cromartie testified she fell into a daze when the young woman released a jasminelike scent from her left hand. “I just sort of lost my will … it was a terrifying experience,” she testified.

Mrs. Cromartie joined the Key Biscayne White House housekeeping staff about a year ago, according to FBI Agent Leo Mc Clairen. He testified her background was impeccable.

Dr. Albert Jaslow, a psychiatrist, said he examined her and found she could be hypnotized “quickly and easily” and believed she was telling the truth.

“But it wasn't the same when he hypnotized me,” Mrs. Cromartie said. “I couldn't remember anything afterwards. Whatever that young woman did to me, it was like being in a sleepwalk, only awake.”

There was no further comment on this strange incident. At the time I wondered if perhaps this was not some small demonstration for the benefit of President Nixon, similar to the power failures that seemed to follow President Johnson in 1967. (The lights failed wherever he went … from Washington to Johnson City, Texas, to Hawaii.)

IV.

Woodrow Derenberger found a new world with Cold, Klinnel, Ardo, and company. Now Jane was moving among twilight presences; Mr. Apol, Lia (the name of his female companion), and several others who mischievously adopted names from my obscure (damn it) novels! They amplified their dire prophesy for Pope Paul. He would be attacked in a crowd at an airport, they said, by a man dressed in a black suit and wielding a black knife. After his assassination there would be three days of darkness and worldwide power failures.

On June 28 the Vatican announced that a personal envoy of Pope Paul VI, Monsignor Abramo Frescht, was being dispatched to Cairo to discuss “Vatican assistance to war victims and refugees.” On June 30 it was announced that the wooden throne said to have been used by Saint Peter was going to be dug out of the Vatican basement and placed on display for the first time since 1867.

I went out to Mount Misery and hypnotized Jane. She was a good subject and after performing various tests to assure myself that she was really in a deep trance, I began to ask her subtle questions about Apol and his friends. To my utter amazement, the impossible happened. The control was taken away from me. I couldn't direct the session. Instead, I found myself talking directly to Apol through Jane. He wanted to talk about Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy. I didn't want to gossip, I insisted, but wanted some hard facts on the overall situation. Apol persisted, warning me that Kennedy was in grave danger. Where was he talking from? He said he was parked nearby in his Cadillac. He made some specific predictions about pending plane crashes, then returned to Marilyn and Kennedy.

All the while we were conducting this insane conversation, Jane's telephone was ringing madly. Each time I picked it up there was no one on the line. Finally I just left it off the hook.

The session ended abruptly when Jane woke up by herself. Another impossibility. She would have required a suggestion from me before she could awake.
*

The predicted plane crashes occurred right on schedule. I was slowly convincing myself that the entities were somehow tuned to the future.

I was making other startling discoveries. I had only to
think
of a serious question and my phone would ring and Jane would deliver a message from Apol answering it.

Other ufologists were also getting predictions from contactees. When Gray Barker arrived in New York for the convention at the Hotel Commodore he told me that he'd received a prediction that “a famous newsman in the Midwest” would die very soon. Two days later, on the evening of June 23, Frank Edwards died suddenly of a heart attack in Indiana. Edwards was a newscaster and author of the 1966 bestseller
Flying Saucers—Serious Business.

The year of the Garuda—1966–7—was only half over and I was talking to half-a-dozen entities through contactees scattered throughout the Northeast. Scores of new games were going on at once, each one designed to prove something to me, not to the contactees. The latter would never quite figure out what was happening to them or what it all meant. Like the UFO enthusiasts themselves, the contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it, why the wonderful space people had abandoned them.

On Long Island, a dozen eccentrics still sit by their phones waiting for Princess Moon Owl to call again and restore their waning faith.

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