15 - Misery on the Mount
 

I.
Daniel Drasin was about eighteen when he filmed a riot in New York’s Washington Square, titled it Sunday, and won a number of motion-picture awards. Now still in his mid-twenties, handsome, quiet-spoken, intelligent, and perceptive, he was well into a promising career in the film industry. The West Virginia UFO documentary was an important break for him and he plunged into the project with a mixture of awe and enthusiasm.

As I was on my way to Washington, D.C., from Point Pleasant, he was headed in the other direction with a skeleton crew hoping to get some authentic movies of those funny lights in the sky.

When I reached Washington I parked my car on Connecticut Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares, in broad daylight for a few minutes. Some of my clothes and camera cases were in the back seat so I carefully locked the doors. While I was gone someone smashed in the vent on the side window and robbed my car. They left behind my clothes and some of my cameras.

They took my briefcase, tape recorder and all my notebooks, exposed films, taped interviews with witnesses, cheap telescope and other items with little or no value to anyone except me. Strangely, they had removed my irreplaceable address” book from one of the cases and left it on the seat. I called the police. When they finally arrived their attitude was not very sympathetic.

Anyone who would leave anything plainly visible in a locked car at 2 P.M. on a main street in Washington was plainly a fool, or so they suggested.

My problems were minor compared to Dan’s, however. He was seeing plenty of aerial lights but his battery-powered cameras malfunctioned when he tried to photograph them. Finally, he thought he had managed to get some footage. Then the precious films were later accidentally ruined in a processing lab back in New York. Members of his crew began to have troubles with their telephones, and a female production assistant was awakened one night in her apartment in Brooklyn by a loud beeping noise. She got up, looked out the window, and saw a large luminous sphere hovering directly outside her building.

During his second visit to Point Pleasant Dan uncovered some Mothman witnesses I had missed. And he also came across some more baffling Men-in-Black-type reports. People up in the back hills had been seeing mysterious unmarked panel trucks which sometimes parked for hours in remote spots. There seemed to be several of these trucks in the area and the rumor was that they belonged to the air force. Men in neat coveralls were seen monkeying with telephone and power lines but no one questioned them.

A woman living alone on an isolated island north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, had two curious encounters with the same kind of beings. She had moved into a tiny one-room cabin on Keats Island in October 1967 and was soon seeing UFO lights nightly. On January 29, 1968, following a close sighting of “a long dark body with dim red and yellow lights at both ends,” she was surprised by two visitors. Both wore “neat, dark coveralls” and claimed to be employees of the hydroelectric company. They offered to help her put up a stovepipe.

The younger of the two climbed on the roof of her cabin while the other handed him the pipes.

“I could hear the man on the ground directing him and the one on the roof would answer, ‘Yes, Master.’“

After the pipe was installed, the pair joined her for tea. They seemed “a little stiff.” When they left she wondered how they had known she was there because “the cabin couldn’t be seen from the road [and] the stove was out when they arrived, so there was no smoke from the chimney.“

On May 2, she again encountered two men.

“One was the ‘boss’ Hydro man in his neat coveralls,” she reported. (1)

 

“The other was a different, younger man of about 19-20. As I entered the path, the boss man indicated with his hand for the young man to get behind him. They got well off the path and waited for me, the young man a little behind his boss. The fellow stared at me as if I was some kind of freak ....“

[1] Canadian UFO Report, #13, 1972-73.

This time she didn’t invite them for tea. One odd thing she noticed during both meetings was their slow, careful way of walking. They looked at their feet and stepped very uncertainly.

The next day a jeep came along the road, containing four men inspecting lines ...

“carelessly dressed, workaday men, none in coveralls. The boss wasn’t obviously so. They expressed no surprise at seeing me there, no concern or any particular interest. I told them two of their men already had been around the day before, inspecting the lines. They assured me yesterday’s men weren’t Hydro men, that somebody had been ‘pulling my leg.’“

Somebody was also pulling a lot of legs on cosmopolitan Long Island. In West Virginia I had heard some stories about three men who looked “like Indians” and were accompanied by a fourth man, more normal-looking and very shabbily dressed in contrast to the other three. So I was nonplused when I heard identical descriptions from people on Long Island.

An elderly woman who lived alone in a house near the summit of Mount Misery, the highest point on Long Island, had received a visit from this quartet in early April 1967, immediately after a severe rainstorm.

“They had high cheekbones and very red faces, like a bad sunburn,” she told me.

 

“They were very polite but they said my land belonged to their tribe and they were going to get it back. What frightened me was their feet. They didn’t have a car ... they must have walked up that muddy hill ... but their shoes Were spotlessly clean. There was no trace of mud or water where they walked in my house.“

That same week another visitor came to Mount Misery. This was a woman with striking white hair who claimed to represent a local newspaper. She carried a book “like a big ledger” and asked the witness a number of personal questions about her family background. When I later checked ‘with the newspaper I found they employed no one of that description.

The local Mount Misery expert was Miss Jaye P. Paro, a radio personality then with station WBAB in Babylon, New York. Miss Paro is a dark-haired, dark-eyed young lady with a soft, haunting voice. At that time she conducted an interview show, largely devoted to the historical and psychic lore of the region. Soon after she reported some UFO sightings around Mount Misery she began to receive all manner of crank calls, both at the station and on her unlisted home phone. Metallic voices ordered her to meet them on “the Mount” (she didn’t go).

Through Miss Paro I met several local UFO witnesses and contactees. Long Island, I discovered, was crawling with contactees of all ages and both sexes. One of these was a lovely young blonde, whom I will call Jane, who lived near Mount Misery with her family. Jane was not illiterate, but she seldom read anything other than the comic strips and “Dear Abby.” She knew nothing about UFOs and cared less. She was a “fallen Catholic,” having abandoned religion when she reached adulthood.

She was a very sensitive woman, more ethereal than sensual. There was almost something mystical about her appearance and grace.

Mount Misery is a heavily wooded hill with a few narrow dirt roads slicing through it and a number of large mansions set back among the trees. The late Henry Stimson, secretary of war during World War II, maintained a lavish estate on the summit. For decades the Mount was known as a haunted place, the site of a number of mysterious deaths and disappearances. In the spring of 1967 young couples necking on the back roads began to see low-flying UFOs, particularly around a field that was used as a junkyard for old cars.

Others claimed to see a giant hairy monster with gleaming red eyes.

After Miss Paro began to broadcast reports of what was happening on Mount Misery, the usual mobs started to cruise the area nightly to the consternation of the scattered and snobbish residents. Jane and her boyfriend Richard joined the stream of cars one night in early May and eventually found themselves alone on a back road near High Hold, the old Stimson place.

Richard, who was driving, suddenly complained of feeling unwell. He stopped the car and a moment later slumped over the wheel unconscious. Jane was terrified. But before she could focus her attention on him, a brilliant beam of light shot out of the woods next to the road “like a floodlight.” It dazzled her and she fell back in her seat unable to move.

The next thing they knew, they were driving along Old Country Road at the base of Mount Misery.

“How did we get here?” Richard -asked her, baffled. “What happened?“

“Let’s go home,” Jane choked.

They never discussed the incident again until I arrived on the scene.

A few days later, on May 17, Jane answered the phone (she had her own phone in her room) and a strange metallic voice addressed her.

“Listen carefully,” it said. “I cannot hear you.”

It instructed her to go to a small public library nearby and look up a certain book on Indian history.

She did as she was instructed. On May 19 she went to the library at 10:30 A.M. The place was deserted except for the librarian, who struck Jane as being unusual. The woman was,

“dressed in an old-fashioned suit like something out of the 1940s, with a long skirt, broad shoulders, and flat old-looking shoes.“
(Remember, this was in 1967, long before the 1940s styles became popular again.)

She had a dark complexion, with a fine bone structure, and very black eyes and hair. When Jane entered, the woman seemed to be expecting her and produced the book instantly from under her desk.

Jane sat down at a table and began to riffle through the book, pausing on page forty-two. Her caller had told her to read that page.

“You won’t believe this,” she told me, “but the print became smaller and smaller, then larger and larger. It changed into a message and I can remember every word of it.“

‘Good morning, friend,’ it began. ‘You have been selected for many reasons. One is that you are advanced in autosuggestion. Through this science we will make contact. I have messages concerning Earth and its people. The time is set. Fear not... I am a friend. For reasons best known to ourselves you must make your contacts known to one reliable person. To break this code is to break contact Proof shall be given. Notes must be kept of the suggestion state. Be in peace, [signed] A Pal.‘

“The print became very small again, and then the normal text reappeared.“

As soon as Jane left the library she became quite ill and vomited several times during the next two days. She approached Miss Paro with her story and was advised to get in touch with me. Her experience on the Mount, her phone call, and the remark about “autosuggestion” all stirred my interest. In those days none of the UFO enthusiasts knew anything about these factors and a hoax seemed very unlikely. And, unknown to Miss Paro and Jane, I was in touch with a distant contactee who was communicating with “Apholes.”

The signature “A Pal” seemed close enough to Apholes to take seriously. I suspected that Jane had been programmed for a set of special experiences and I kept in constant touch with her in the months which followed, maintaining an extensive record of her experiences.

In early June, Jane began to see the “librarian” wherever she went. On June 6, while wandering through a local department store, the woman appeared behind a dress rack. She wore the same old-fashioned clothes and tried to speak to Jane in “broken English”.

There was something wrong about her speech and movements.

 “It was as if ... she were dead,” Jane said. When asked if she lived around Babylon, the woman laughed in a strange hysterical way, “like an emotionally disturbed person.” (This weird laugh has been described by many contactees.)

 

“Is there any A-U here?” the woman asked.

Jane didn’t know what she meant. Just that week I had been pondering the significance of gold in UFO and religious lore. Gold is the seventy-ninth element and the chemical symbol for it is AU.

Jane offered to give the woman a lift but she declined and wandered off.

Unable to sleep at night, Jane got up at the crack of dawn the following morning and went for a walk on an impulse. The dark-skinned woman stepped out of an alley and approached her shyly. “Peter is coming,” she announced.

This statement shook Jane. She remembered that Catholic lore predicts that the final pope will be named Peter.

“Why are you interested in our Mount?” the woman continued, then repeated, “Peter is coming very soon.“

Next a large black Cadillac came down the street and stopped next to them. It was “brand-new, very shiny and polished,” Jane recalled. The driver was an olive-skinned man wearing wraparound sunglasses and dressed in a neat gray suit, apparently of the same material as the woman’s clothes. The rear door opened and a man climbed out with a big grin on his face. He was about five feet eight inches tall, with dark skin and Oriental eyes. Jane thought he looked like a Hawaiian. He had the air of someone very important and was dressed in a well-cut, expensive-looking suit of the same gray material that was shiny like silk but was not silk.

He solemnly shook hands with the girl, “his hand was as cold as ice,” and stared at her steadily with his jet-black eyes, grinning all the while.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. “I am Apol [pronounced Apple].“

The Cadillac pulled away and drove off, leaving the three of them standing on the street. Apol produced a piece of folded paper and handed it to Jane.

“Wear this always,” he told her. “So ‘they’ will know who you are.“

“Who’s they?” she asked.

“They are the very good people,” he answered.

The paper, a piece of very old parchment, contained a small metal disc about the size of a quarter. As they talked they walked slowly toward the center of town until they stood in front of the post office. Jane impulsively announced she was going to mail the disc to someone. She went into the post office, got an envelope, and sent the disc and parchment to me special delivery. The two strangers smiled broadly at each other.

When she came out of the post office, Apol told her a number of things about her childhood that no one could have known and advised her to avoid iodine. (She had a minor health problem which required her to avoid iodine in her diet.)

The car reappeared and the two people got into it and drove off.

“I felt very strange while I was talking to them,” she recalled. “I was whoozy ... like I was in a daze or something.“

If it hadn’t been for the metal disc I would have classified the entire episode as hallucinatory. The next day I received the special delivery envelope and was very disappointed by the contents. The disc looked like a blank identification tag similar to those that come with flea collars. The parchment seemed to be the remnants of a very old envelope. After examining it, I put the disc back into the paper exactly as I had received it, then placed the whole thing in a small envelope which I sealed with Scotch tape. I put this into a larger manila envelope and mailed it back to Jane special delivery.

She phoned me the next day.

“Why did you bend the disc and tear up the paper?” she demanded.

She had just received the envelope and found that the parchment in the sealed inner envelope had been ripped into three pieces. The metal disc was bent, as if it had been folded double and then unfolded again. It had also turned charcoal black and smelled like “rotten eggs.“

The implication was clear.

Someone had the ability to intercept the U.S. mails and tamper with things in sealed envelopes!
 

II.
While Jane was holding clandestine meetings with Mr. Apol and his mysterious lady friend, Jaye P. Paro was being entertained by the redoubtable Princess Moon Owl, a character who would become a legend on Long Island by the end of 1967. At 3:30 P.M. on June 11, 1967, Jaye entered the studios of WBAB and found a very weird woman waiting for her.

She was at least six feet tall, was very dark (Negroid), with large, glassy eyes, and wore a costume largely made up of feathers. She was gasping and wheezing, having great difficulty breathing.

Jaye thought she was having a heart attack.

“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.

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 to 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?

[*] Springheeled Jack was a tall, caped phantom with a bright light on his chest who appeared in England in the 1830s. He was able to leap great distances and he spewed a nauseous gas into the faces of surprised witnesses. Although he was the subject of a massive manhunt, he was never caught or identified. A black-garbed phantom terrorized Mattoon, Illinois, in the 1940s, spraying a noxious gas into bedroom windows.

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 his cayne 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 hiscayne 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.)

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 prophecy 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. (*)

[*] In comparing notes with psychic investigator-author Brad Steiger, he told me he had similar experiences with hypnosis; that is, the control was taken out of his hands by some other intelligence.

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—1966-67—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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