Part 9 (1/2)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

A SAUCER FULL OF SECRETS.

In which we plan our departure, I encounter a flying saucer, and theories sprout like mushrooms as we return to Berkeley.

The ELEVENTH OF MARCH was a full moon. It pa.s.sed uneventfully enough after the adventure of Dennis and the mission bell, meaning that I can now recollect little of what happened. I remained ecstatic, certain that all was for the best, certain that some definitive tipping of the hand by the thing we were dealing with was about to occur.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Ev walked out from the river house to see me. She invited me to return with her to the river and for all of us to have dinner together. She showed the strain of what we had all been going through. There was no doubt that whatever had happened was pus.h.i.+ng us to the limit of what we could a.s.similate without wanting to move against it. As we walked back across the pasture, the atmosphere seemed to be even more alive and active than usual, with sp.a.w.ning clouds and drifting mist. Ev pointed to the southeast, where a black, stratoc.u.mulus ma.s.s was seething and boiling up to great alt.i.tudes. We watched for a few

moments, and it became like a vast mushroom cloud-the aftermath of a thermonuclear blast. The impression was very startling, and Ev recalled to me Dennis's words with regard to Stropharia cubensis. He said that it was the mushroom at the end of history. To him the shape of the atomic cloud was a physical and biophysical pun on the transformative powers of the Strophariad and its eruption into human history.

As we watched, suddenly Ev gasped. From the seething base of the cloud what looked like a column of light emerged. The column was sustained, not merely a bolt of lightning.

It was hard to see how it could be a shaft of sunlight, since it was late afternoon and the sun was in the west, while the cloud was in the southeast. We watched it for perhaps a minute. Then it stopped abruptly. Ev was quite shaken. Even more than the frozen appearance of the river, this occurrence was of an empirical order different than anything that she had experienced at La Chorrera.

Arriving at the riverside campfire we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission with Father Jose Maria talking on the radio to the bush pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst. The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency. He promised to return in a few days to fly us out. I was unhappy with these arrangements. I knew that we, the gringo strangers, would lose face with the local people when our need for this airlift became known. Also, I did not have Vanessa's faith that all Dennis needed to return to normal was to check into the world of modern psychiatry. But there was nothing to be done for it, and so we dined in silence, each lost in unshared thoughts.

The next day we were to pack all our equipment and move it to the river in preparation for a flight that could come unannounced at any time. Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex at La Chorrera.

The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis evading Vanessa's wardens.h.i.+p and slipping away from the river house sometime during the previous night to go and sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas, who awoke to find him there as una.s.suming as a piece of furniture. As the story died away, the unspoken dimensions of it returned to move in each of our minds.

The next day was March 13. The camp in the forest, the hallowed-seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred, was dismantled. All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Witoto huts were tucked away, and it was returned to its native anonymity. Outside, in a pile, we left quite a cargo trove behind us, for our forced evacuation by airplane left precious little room for any gear; some insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras, the notebooks on the experiment-that was it. The things that we left would be swiftly a.s.similated by the tolerant Witotos who owned the site of our attempted probe of hyper-s.p.a.ce.

We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear. Everything seemed to be moving forward of its own accord. We swam in the river and sat on the rocks, scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian. Thus the afternoon pa.s.sed, with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room out the window to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else.

Around four o'clock, I was lying on the river bank about twenty feet back from the river's edge. I was thinking about a walk to the river I had taken two days before, when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts. From out of nowhere I remembered an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses: ”Poetry is made at the edge of running water.” My recent experience at water's edge had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it. Vanessa and Ev were was.h.i.+ng in front of me at the river bank. Directly across the river from us was the southeastern sky in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with the shaft of light just twenty- four hours earlier.

I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow, a place low in the sky near the horizon where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum. After a few seconds, I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow across the river. They glanced across the river for only a moment and said that they saw nothing. I did not persist, but instead watched the sky in that spot. By this time, I had stopped forcing my opinions on people. I was already

regarded as nuts, not incoherent exactly, but not to be trusted or relied upon because I believed such odd things. That was my flaw.

I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify. I became extraordinarily interested. In this pastoral setting, it seemed to me that a great revelation was brewing. I watched and I saw the colors deepen; the bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in one spot was very definite. Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river. Again the light glance. And? Wonderful!

”Yes, we see it. Not much of one is it?”

The clue-scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant.

Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light; now a spot of spectrogrammatic color in the same spot in the sky. I had the strong sense of the eye-in-the-sky drawing close to my thoughts and watching with satisfaction as I understood the importance of the southeast, and of watching and focusing my attention on that spot. In my mind, the teacher said, ”This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here.”

I said nothing to anyone, but I formed the resolve to not spend that sleepless night as I had spent the others: wandering the fields like the fox-spirit or meditating at the chorro.

Rather I would sit here where the lake emptied and the Igara-Parana resumed its languid course. Here at the boat landing, seventy feet down a steep mud bank from the river house, I would sit through the night and watch.

And so, all night long, I sat reviewing the things that had pa.s.sed, seeming to divide my consciousness and send it both backward through my family tree and forward into the future. I seemed to see all the years still ahead; I saw some technique emerging from this contact, our careers pursued across s.p.a.ce and time, and finally vindication as the world realized the truth of the transdimensional nature of the Stropharia visions and the true nearness of the worlds that they had thrown open. For it had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien species was beginning

for humanity. It seemed that out of the long night of cosmic time the novelty of novelties, the moment of contact between minds on utterly different planes, was beginning.

We were among the first to achieve contact with this Other species. It was the real thing.

We had come to the equatorial jungle to explore the dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy, and there, in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon, we had been found and touched by this bizarre and ancient life form that was now awakening to the global potential of a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p with technical humanity. All night long strange vistas and insights poured through me. I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales inconceivably vast. Time, agatized and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living super-fluids inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure and super cold. And I saw the plan, the mighty plan. At last. It was an ecstasy, an ecstasis that lasted hours and placed the seal of completion on all of my previous life. At the end I felt reborn, but as what I knew not.

In the gray of a false dawn, the wave of internal imagery faded away. I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky was clear, but it was still very early and stars were still s.h.i.+ning dimly in the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention had been focused, the sky was clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon only a few feet above the tree tops on the other side of the river, perhaps a half mile away. As I stretched and stood up on the flat stone where I had been sitting, I noticed that the line of fog seemed to have grown darker, and now seemed to be churning or rolling in place. I watched very carefully as the rolling line of darkening mist split into two parts and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart. It took only a minute or so for these changes to be executed, and I was now looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row and slightly above the horizon, only a half mile or so away. A wave of excitement swept through me followed by a wave of definite fear. I was glued to the spot, unable to move, as in a dream.

As I watched, the clouds recoalesced in the same way that they had divided apart, taking another few minutes. The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining, and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size, lent the performance an eerie air, as if nature

herself were suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency. As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even darker and more opaque. As they all became one, the cloud seemed to swirl inward like a tornado or waterspout, and it flashed into my mind that perhaps it was a waterspout-something I still have never seen. But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched, ululating whine come drifting over the jungle tree tops, obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.

I turned and gave one glance at the river house seventy feet behind me and up the steep hill, gauging whether I had time to run and awaken someone to get confirmation of what was happening. To arouse someone I would have had to go hand-over-hand up the slope and consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching. In the s.p.a.ce of an instant, I decided that I could not cease observing. I tried a shout, but no sound came from my fear- constricted throat.

The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch, and in fact, everything seemed to be speeding up. The moving cloud was definitely growing larger rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was. I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly. For the first time, I truly believed in all that had happened to us, and I knew that the flying concrescence was now about to take me. Its details seemed to solidify as it approached.

Then it pa.s.sed directly overhead at an alt.i.tude of about two hundred feet, banked steeply upward, and was lost from sight over the edge of the slope behind me. In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it and saw it very clearly. It was a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly, with un.o.btrusive, soft, blue and orange lights.

As it pa.s.sed over me I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of science fiction flying saucers.

My emotions were all in a jumble. At first I was terrified, but the moment I knew that whatever was in the sky was not going to take me, I felt disappointment. I was amazed and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible. Was it real in the naive sense in which that question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs? No one else saw this thing as far as I know. I alone was its observer. I believe that had there been other observers, they would have seen

essentially what I have reported, but as for ”real,” who can say? I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet-studded aircraft of some kind. Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination? Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic plants. Yet curiously this last point can be interpreted in my favor. I am familiar through direct experience with every known cla.s.s of hallucinogen. What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery I am familiar with.

Yet also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail that seems to render the whole incident absurd. It is that as the saucer pa.s.sed overhead, I saw it clearly enough to judge that it was identical with the UFO, with three half-spheres on its underside, that appears in an infamous photo by George Adamski widely a.s.sumed to be a hoax. I had not closely followed the matter, but I accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end-cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But I saw this same object in the sky above La Chorrera. Was it a fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been? My stereotyped, but already debunked, notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky. By appearing in a form that casts doubt on itself, it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.

It was, if you ask me-and there is no one else really that one can ask-either a holographic mirage of a technical perfection impossible on earth today or it was the manifestation of something which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine, but which could have appeared in any form, a manifestation of a humorous something's omniscient control over the world of form and matter. It was not a mirage of the conventional sort. Years later it occurs to me that perhaps it was a kind of mirage still unknown to us-a temporal mirage. The ordinary mirage is an inverted image of water or a distant place. The cause is the distortion of light by alternate levels of hot and cold air. Outside Benares, in India, I saw a triple image of the city suspended over the surface of the Ganges River. But a temporal mirage is another matter; it is a lenticular image of

a distant time and place. Cause unknown. What makes the ordinary and temporal mirages members of the same cla.s.s is that both types of mirages require the intercession of the human mind in order to exist. Certain areas of the world have local conditions which make them mirage p.r.o.ne; might the same be true of temporal mirages? Or perhaps the temporal mirage is a natural phenomenon, and the UFO is an artifact resulting from the temporal mirage being used or experimented with by some future technology?

I believe that this latter comes close to the mark. The UFO is a reflection of a future event that promises humanity's eventual mastery over time, s.p.a.ce, and matter. We, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, were able to coax nature into throwing out this great, burning scintilla of pure contradiction from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium. That we were able to do this is full of import. It meant to me that we were on the right track; the Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity.

At La Chorrera I had only the isolated personal conviction that our approach would be vindicated; now, as our ideas are finding a small community that share these intuitions, I am yet more sure that the answer to all of the mysteries that disequilibrate our view of the world are to be understood by looking within ourselves. When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

The UFO encounter marked for me the culmination of our work at La Chorrera. My contact with the saucer took place at dawn on the fourteenth of March. The following morning at eleven, March 15, the airplane arrived, unannounced but not unexpected.