Excerpted from "Stranger in a Strange World," Extraordinary Times Magazine, July 1999, by 'Jack Bleak', underground journalist.
This is your last chance.
Whatever brought you to this moment, where ever or however or in whatever form you've found these words, this is your last chance to turn back. Toss the magazine in the shredder. Close the book and put it back on the shelf. Log off and erase the history list from you browser. Do this, and maybe -- maybe-- you'll be able to go back to the life you used to live. I can't guarantee that. But I can guarantee that if you don't stop now, if you don't give up on the idea of seeing things you're not supposed to see and learning things you're not supposed to learn, you're bound to reach the point of no return. You'll reach it sooner than you expect, too. The you won't be able to live in the same worlk that everyone else does. You'll want to -- God, how you'll want to-- but it won't be possible.
This is your final warning.
All right.
You didn't listen.
So let's get down to it.
If you've come this far, it's likely that something happened to you recently. Something lifted the veil from your eyes for just a few moments and now you want to know more. If you're determined to poke your nose where it doesn't belong, I basically have two things to tell you. The first is something you already know. Something you've know all your life, something we all know, but don't want to admit.
We're not alone.
You knew it when you were a kid, didn't you? You felt their presence in you bedroom late at night. You saw the from the corners of your eyes as you drifted off to sleep.
Every culture in history has known this truth, that there are others in this world with us, other intelligences, other "beings." They have a thousand names: spirits, gods, giants, angels, devils, faeries, ghosts, ghouls, saints, archons, magicians, monsters. Every human society since the dawn of man has insisted that there are things keeping us company, things with their own agendas, things not afraid to enforce their will when we get in their way. Even the Bible mentions them, with its talk of giants on the earth, angels on the road, witches in caves. And did you know that there are dozens of Renaissance paintings hanging in the Louvre right now that display metallic, lenticular objects floating in the skies over Italy?
It's only in recent times that we humans - at least some of us living in industrialized "modern" countries- have decided that we stand alone at the top of the food chain. It's only now that we've decided that centuries of wisdom should be ignored. discounted, or ridiculed. But try as we might, the truth has a way of forcing itself to the surface. The people of Point Pleasant, West Virgina found that out. In 1966, their ordeal began with the sighting of a huge man-like creature with glowing eyes and insect-like wings. Over the course of a year, hundreds of people reported seeing the so-called "Moth Man" -ordinary, credible witnesses who had no previous history of making outrageous claims.
Globally, there are countless reports of cratures with mixed human and avian characteristics, from biblical angels, to the kikiyaon, or "soul cannibal," whose capture was reported by European explorers in Gambia as recently as 1939. At first glance, it's tempting to put the Moth Man into this category as some sort of supernatural creature or undiscovered animal. But then, what are we to make of the lights in the sky over Point Pleasant, again reported by multiple witnesses throughout 1966? Or of the stories of strange "men in black" who appeared in town and sometimes warned townspeople and reporters not to talk about the strange things they saw? What of the odd behavior of these strangers - their odd accents, their musical voices, their unfamiliarity with common idioms or everyday objects such as a pen or a fork? It's almost as if two or three different stories came together in Point Pleasant, mixing into each other and making one simple explanation impossible.
I visited Point Pleasan five years ago to write a piece on the Moth Man incident. I talked to a woman who had opened the door of her backyard only to be confronted by a pair of huge red eyes. When she broke away and backed into the house, she found that three hours had passed. I talked to the former chief of police, who had recived a series of phone calls, always between the hours of 2 and 3 am, urging him to destroy the reports he'd filed. When he taped the calls, he realised the caller's voice was identical to his own.
I left point Pleasant with some strange stories, but nothing that hadn't been reported before. And that would have been that. But the second night I was home, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I heard a recording of a discussion I'd had with my editor just 12 hours earlier - complete from beginning to end. The next day I was taking my car to get the oil changed when my cell phone rang. I found myself listening in on the middle of a conversation. Two men having a discussion about - I quickly realized- me. They mentioned my name, my street address, the magazine. The point of the conversaton was hard for me to understand. Aside from the details of my own life, their statements were all very vauge and filled with euphemisms that had no meaning to me. "The process." "Weak space." "Seven kingdoms."
It seemed obvious to me that I was the victim of a clever prank, probably by a colleague from the magazine. A few days later I left town to work on another story, and took some extra time off for a bit of a vacation. All told, I was gone for three weeks. The day I returned home to my apartment, I ran into a neighbor and mentioned that I was glad to be back. He acted puzzled and said he hadn't realized I was away. When I said I'd been gone for three weeks, he looked at me strangely, then referred to an evening just two nights earlier when I'd supposedly stopped at his place, had a few beers and watched a ball game with him.
When I got into my apartment, I found three weeks' worth of mail on the table near my door. It shouldn't have been there, since I'd arranged to have my mail held at the post office. But there it was. Everything had been opened and sorted, exactly in the way I usually did it. in my kitchen, food that had been left behind unopened was half eaten. Other food that I'd left behind was gone, and there were several packages I had never set eyes on before.
I phoned my landlord, who informed me that he hadn't seen any strangers in the building lately, certainly not on my floor, and that he hadnt seen anyone entering my apartment. Except for me. He recalled seeing me several times each week that I'd been away. I called a few of my friends. One said he'd had lunch with me just a few days before. Another said he'd run into me on the street the previous week and insisted that we chatted for 10 minutes or so.
Then I called my mother.
She told me I'd had dinner with her twice in the past three weeks. At her house. I'd been there for several hours each time. And no, I hadn't acted strangely, not that she could tell.
Someone had been living my life while I was away.
Presuming these things really happened, you have to wonder if there's a connection between this strangeness and my investigation into the Moth Man. But what could such a connection possibly mean? That someone was trying to scare me from writing about it? Who? The government? The people of Point Pleasant? The Moth Man himself? And why? I'd unearthed nothing that hadn't been described dozens, if not hundreds of times before sicne the events of 1966. The closer you look, the less sense it makes. Surely whoever was behind it all would realize that throwing these mysterious tactics at a journalist would only raise his interest, not squash it. Someone wanting to keep the whole thing under wraps couldn't have done more to pique my interest.
It was a clumsy startegy for a governmet cabal or extraterrestrial conspiracy. The more i thought about it. The more I came to belive that this was a type of reverse psycolpgy. Someone of something wanted me to keep looking, keep investigating. Either they wanted me to get to the truth, or they had no fear of discovery at all and found it amusing, like a sort of game. Not long after I came to this conclusion, I was visited by the doll-like beings who continue to maintain a presence in my life today. Since then I've seen or glimpsed 17 distinct types of winged humanoids. After witnessing the first, I decided to break contact with friends and family- for their protection- and started filing stories from undisclosed locations.
The Moth Man is a product of mass hysteria, but somehow it leaves hard evidence in the real world. The Moth Man is a secret government experiment in advanced technology, yet the agents sent to suppress knowledge of its existence have bizzare accents and no social skills. The Moth Man is an extraterrestrial, but aliens who can travel across space can't figure out that they look wierd to ordinary human. Take your pick. The closer you look, the more you realize that the peices of the puzzle don't fit. The more peices you find the less of the puzzle you can understand.
I've come to realize that there are no answers, only more questions. Finding the truth is not a reasonable goal. The best you can hope for is to achieve some sense of how much you don't know. And that's the second thing I have to tell you. You think you're searching for hidden truths. But you will never find the truth. You won't. Each mystery will only lead to more mysteries. It's a labyrinth with no exit, and the door you entered isn't there anymore. It goes against every instinct in the human brain, but if you want to survive, you have to make peace with the fact that all your questioning and searching and attempts to make sense of it are doomed. The best you can hope to do is record what details you can, and wonder at them.
Each shadow conceals only more shadows.
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