One year ago
to the day as I write this is when the following took place. In and of itself –
the original journal entry – it is a dry thing, expressed in a dry language,
but what it points to is rich, verdant, confusing, a jungle in liminal twilight.
What makes it into something worth telling is the context; otherwise it truly
is just a nuts + bolts description, which is of little interest. Part of the
wider context is an emotional recurrence of my state of one year ago. I don’t
understand the significance of this yearly cycle – I mean, yes, of course,
anniversaries are not an alien concept, but it seems important that I find
myself returning emotionally to the conditions of that time, almost exactly and
to the date, though circumstances now are different – exactly, or maybe just
slightly different – still, they don’t seem to add up so that I can say this caused that and so I feel such-and-such about it. The emotive conditions
are fundamental, and apparently cyclic, and the circumstances constellating
around them appear almost as accidents. Or maybe I make them happen. Or maybe
they don’t relate at all.
I’d set up
an appointment that afternoon for a session at a later date by phone with Anya Briggs, a psychic whom I’d heard interviewed on Mike Clelland’s Hidden Experience podcast (and have subsequently heard on several others) and felt
immediately drawn toward. Circumstances of my life at that time last summer had
become again sufficiently confounding that a session of some sort with somebody
had come to seem appropriate, and I’d been sitting on the fence for a while
regarding her – mostly because I felt slightly intimidated about meeting
someone I’d come to regard as whip-smart and walking some wild edge of the
weird. The same things that drew me to her were what frightened me as well, but
I’d wanted, apart from her intuitive consult, very much to understand something
of the experiences she’d described of being unwillingly involved in covert operations,
particularly the labyrinthine twists and counter-twists of mind control and
psychic fragmentation, things which by their nature defy an objective viewpoint
and stories so utterly bizarre on the face of them, but that she spoke of with
the palpable sincerity of somebody in possession of a suitable compass by which
to find her way and maintain her own equilibrium. The subject of military or
covert human involvement in the UFO phenomenon was (and is) something that had
opened in me some few years previous a wellspring of imaginative associations, dark,
dizzying – and without making any particular claims for its veracity as literal
fact (though I don’t doubt that it occurs as fact, whatever a ‘fact’ exactly
is), it is the subject and incidental setting of the novel I’m currently
writing – that is, currently re-writing from the draft I was working on at the
time – The Anonymity of the Solid Ocean.
I’d hoped to osmose, by association perhaps, some understanding, less of the
particulars than of the difficult and complex emotional states involved, which for
reasons I’ve never quite been able to put my finger to, I felt that I’d somehow
and in some measure shared, in some way already knew.
So having at
last found the guts to approach her (I’m such a chickenshit at heart when it
comes to interpersonal stuff, however willing I am to stand at the edge of the
Abyss when it comes to my safety and sanity), there was kind of a lot roiling
around in my own intra-psychic headspace in anticipation of our phone
conversation, scheduled for some days later. When, that evening after dark, I
stood out on my back deck which overlooks the water and saw some blinking
lights approach from the north, from the direction of the naval air base some
twenty miles off, it didn’t at first strike me as anything so unusual – just a
jet airplane with some running lights, albeit running lights in an unusual
configuration, starting at the nose of the craft and flashing in sequence out,
symmetrically, along the length of the wings, first center, then tip; nose,
center-wing, tip, etc. A little unusual, it caught my eye. Then I realized that
it was not nearly so far away, nor as high in the sky as it seemed – I’d judged
it higher, assuming it to be larger and further away, when in fact it was
perhaps less than three miles off when I’d first noticed it, and now seemed to
be coming, from an altitude less than a thousand feet, directly at me. Again, this is not in itself so unusual, as the
house where I live is along the flight path of a practice landing strip used by
jet fighter pilots in training, and they will typically fly over my house at a
few hundred feet – one crucial difference being that these aircraft make so
much noise as to entirely pulverize a human nervous system, whereas this thing
– as it approached, its boxy, nose-forward cockpit stood out sharply in vivid
red, interior light, defying my astigmatic-blurred distance vision with its
sharp clarity – this craft was completely silent. It flew low and slowly, and
it didn’t make a sound, and as it passed directly overhead, it revealed a dark,
triangle shape with no surface detail visible to it at all. The only sound was
of a small, single-engine aircraft passing nearby in the transverse direction,
not visible, but by its engine noise moving from east to west, while the
triangle went north to south, although both sounds converged directly over my
head (which struck me as curious, and still does).
I did not at
the time think that I’d seen anything all that exotic, or beyond human origin. What
this struck me as was something military, only that it was a little in advance
of anything I’d ever seen before. It’s overall size and what I could see of its
shape suggested a B2 stealth bomber, except that I have seen those up close and
in the air, and while relatively quiet, they make real noise. This thing, to characterize it, to give
it a sense of intention – and I am perfectly aware that these are connections
that I am making, that may exist no further than my own skull-space – seemed to
make a point of the fact that it was silent. It also seemed to want to cast
doubt in my mind, using the small-aircraft engine sound (coming from another
direction) to confuse the issue of its silence. But most of all what I thought,
what I imagined, was that this aerial somebody was telling me they had noticed
now and their eye on me. This seemed like something straight out of Anya’s
story, not mine.
