Forbidden Thoughts on a Taboo Topic: Are We Already Conquered by Interstellar Invaders?

14 October 2023

 (Revised 14-16 July 2026, with added photos, links and updated text.)

Premonitions -- photographic collage by Loren Bliss (C) 1968, 2026 

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By Loren Bliss 
HERE ARE EIGHT of the present-day horrors that endanger us all. What if they've been weaponized to "cleanse" the planet for conquest by some extraterrestrial species? 

Covid-19 – a lethal virus possibly engineered for biological warfare. Regardless of the pandemic's origin, the fact it mutates too rapidly to be controlled by immunization makes “herd immunity” a clever euphemism for deliberately inflicted genocide. Statistically, most victims are members of the working class, aka the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal question: who (or what) is served by the resultant extermination of millions of humans?

Climate change – a modern apocalypse inflicted on our species by patriarchal sociopathy and now deliberately, continuously worsened, allegedly by political paralysis imposed by capitalist greed and plutocratic bribery, but in terrifying truth by our masters’ definitively ecogenocidal choices. Pivotal questions: why are the owners of this planet destroying its ability to support life as we know it? Who (or what) benefits from Earth’s reduction to lifeless twinship with forever-barren Mars?

Abandonment of infrastructure – a modern crisis that seems to have begun in the USian Empire but has since metastasized throughout the globe. Typically dismissed as the unavoidable consequence of “neoliberal austerity,” it is the cause of soaring fatalities due to train wrecks, structural collapses and other such disasters. Pivotal question: why are the world’s governments –  the executive agencies that serve the de facto owners of these properties (i.e., the ruling class) – abandoning their investments? Why are factories abandoned and left to rot when many such structures could be modified to ameliorate the genocidal housing shortage?.  

Unprecedented escalation of warmongering – the risk of our species’ extinction by chemical, biological and radiological (CBR)  warfare is at an all-time high; indeed, its terrifying magnitude may be taken as the ultimate declaration the global ruling class now considers itself well-enough bunkered to survive whatever ecogenocidal horrors it inflicts on the rest of us. Pivotal questions: why is this happening now? Apart from the smirkingly bunkered aristocracy, who (or what) benefits from such an ecogenocidal event? 

Replacement of humans with robots and artificial intelligence – the skyrocketing replacement of workers with machines is creating an ever-expanding “surplus” of unemployed workers who have no real possibility of ever again finding living-wage jobs. Pivotal question: why do our masters so despise humans they are literally sentencing millions of us to death by poverty, disease, homelessness and starvation? How do the aristocrats benefit if there are no (enslaved) humans to serve them? Is replacement of humans with robots AI's  true purpose? Is that also the ultimate purpose behind the computer and its technological descendants? 

De-educating the working class – aka maliciously “ignorancing” the citizenry. Astronomer Carl Sagan defines the problem, and Psychiatrist Niall McLaren analyzes its deliberately toxic economics. Pivotal questions: why do our masters rob us of the intellectual tools we need to thrive as humans? What do they gain from such atrocities?

Destruction of social services – aka “austerity,” in truth slow-motion genocide targeting women and the neediest members of the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal questions: who (or what) benefits from this policy? How is genocide on such scale beneficial to our masters?

Prohibition (or destruction) of health care as a human right – another process begun by USian malevolence – in this instance by its relentless insistence health care remain a privilege of wealth – but now, disguised as “austerity,”  metastasizing rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. (The foregoing data is somewhat dated, though the deadly trends obviously continue both in the U.S. and Europe.) Pivotal question: who (or what) benefits from this growing tsunami of sickness and death?

Ultimate question: what do all these atrocities tell us? What singular purpose does the ruling-class-induced atrocity of global warming -- that is, ecogenocidal climate change -- have in common with the ecogenocidal atrocities of ruling-class-induced austerity? What terrible truth does that purpose suggest?

Note that universal education and health care are investments in our species’ future, and that their methodical reduction -- like the abandonment of infrastructure -- is a message from our masters they believe we no longer have a future worthy of investment.

What we see in the above are eight aspects of a total war against our species and against our Mother Earth’s ability to support human life. It is a truth too bewildering and terrifyingly painful for most of us to acknowledge. The cunning, deliberately sneaky, slow-motion pace of our subjugation guaranteed its plausible deniable until the ChristoNazis boastfully declared it our national purpose. I wonder -- might Mars have been similarly destroyed? 

Capitalism  -- Photograph by Loren Bliss (C) 1984, 2026  (Nikon F; 50mm f/2 Nikkor, Tri-X @800 ASA in D-76.)   

I SHOULD PREFACE what follows  by stressing I have no prior history as a devotee of the unidentified-flying-object cult. Moreover I remain profoundly antagonistic to the VonDanikenoid notion all of our species’ ancient achievements were fostered by extraterrestrial visitations, which I regard as an especially devious means of vilifying the matrifocal, probably matriarchal potlach-communism that characterized our collective history until the decidedly curious, unquestionably violent imposition of patriarchy some six-or-seven-thousand years ago. Though I have heard many credible UFO stories, especially from fellow veterans and from cops during my years in the working press, I always ranked them among the many seemingly inexplicable anomalies of modern life, and never until now felt any compulsion to write about UFOs or even give them much more than momentary thought.

Also there’s the fact that in all the time outdoors (often in genuine wilderness and sometimes days or weeks at sea) that characterized the best of my 86 years, I myself have witnessed only one genuinely UFO-ish phenomenon. This was in 1959, as best I recall in May or June, just past sunset while sitting outside with friends quietly chatting as we routinely awaited the scattered pinpoints of gracefully floating green and amber light that are the opening movements of suburban  Knoxville’s  breathtakingly exquisite seasonal choreography of fireflies. Instead there was suddenly a bright orange fireball maybe a hand-span above the north-northeast horizon; it was astonishingly big, about a quarter the size of the full moon at its smallest mid-heaven zenith; it glided eastward for maybe 10 degrees almost parallel to the surface of the earth, wobbled violently, showered sparks, descended in a shallow curve, briefly ascended, again wobbled and spewed sparks, then plunged out-of-sight behind the silhouetted peaks of the Great Smokies. It left us startled and muttering exclamations. I immediately telephoned a friend, WKGN News Director Tom Combs, and reported what we had seen. He said he’d already received a half-dozen calls about it. He told me the next day it had been witnessed by at least a hundred persons; that because of its erratic flight, some had feared it was a crashing airplane. All a University of Tennessee astronomer would tell Combs – note the wording – is “we can say it was a meteorite,” and like so many other incidents of its kind, it was soon consigned to official oblivion. But it stuck in my mind because even then I had sufficient background in astronomy to know meteorites do not momentarily gain altitude in their descent from outer space.

Now, given the combination of newly acknowledged UFO incidents with the undeniably apocalyptic perpetuation of the eight atrocities I described above, I am compelled to suspect it is at least possible we’ve already been conquered by interstellar predators – and that the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, is merely functioning as the invaders’ own obscenely recompensed SS-Totenkopfverbände, its present task the reduction of our world to a planet-sized Auschwitz.

Indeed, per Occam’s Razor, this is the only hypothesis that explains all of today’s afflictions – most especially the self-imposed pseudo-paralysis by which the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, relentlessly attempts to excuse its ever-more-apocalyptic refusal to reduce the causative abuses, much less its refusal to ameliorate their disastrous results. Mind you, I’m not saying extraterrestrial conquest is the final, definitive truth of our species’ increasingly hopeless present-day circumstances. But the unprecedented solidarity of malevolent cunning the global ruling class exhibits in the success of its universal promotion of the originally USian ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility and in the veritable omnipotence demonstrated by its diabolical skill at co-optation and/or suppression of any and all forms of organized humanitarianism most assuredly suggest an equal capability for beneficence -- the glaring absence of which is therefore both infinitely damning and all the more suggestive of purposeful choice.

There is also the fact the present-day plague of atrocities is entirely the function of patriarchy and is therefore arguably the final revelation of  its unspoken purpose. Note too how the imposition of patriarchy is biblically attributed to talking snakes; allegedly "divine" apparitions cloaked in smoke and fire; flaming wheels in the sky;  loquacious brush-fires; and let us not forget the decisive message of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Might that alleged meteor  have been an extraterrestrial thermonuclear weapon instead? Note too the how the destruction of  Tall el-Hammam seems to share an approximate date with the volcanic debacle that brought about the slower death of the genuinely global Minoan trading commonwealth,  which metallurgical analysis suggests mined and shipped 500,000 tons of copper (five-hundred-thousand tons, not a typo) from what we know as Isle Royal in Lake Superior.  (See also this, newly posted on YouTube.)

Influenced as I am by Marija Gimbutas, Barbara Mor and Robert Graves, and as I have said many times for many years, I cannot overlook how patriarchal dynamics are a macrocosm of smallpox-contaminated blankets; the latter were the biological weapons of a holocaust; the former is a psychological-warfare weapon ever-more-obviously purposed for our Mother Earth's destruction. With its misogynistic war against our Mother Earth, against all femaleness and implicitly against all Earthly life,  patriarchy is increasingly recognized as a death cult. Dialectic-materialist efforts to define patriarchy as a logical outgrowth of the agricultural revolution not withstanding, it is not unthinkable to suppose it a  long-term interstellar expression of the same strategic scheming evident in smallpox-infected blankets and equally manifest in neoliberal "austerity." .

At the very least, this body of evidence that indicates the possibility we're being  terminally victimized by extraterrestrial conquerors should be given serious consideration and thorough investigation.

Investigated or not, the likelihood we are already the powerless subjects of some conquering alien species becomes more obvious when we examine the undeniably anti-human, sometimes undeniably genocidal or ecogenocidal consequences of the afflictions in question. Though it is clear there is no longer any rational hope we might yet save ourselves, at least we would then be able to correctly identify our executioners and thus yet retain some minimal authority over the courses --of our individual lives.  

Aftermath -- Photograph by Loren Bliss (C) 1967, 2026 (Canon VT, 35mm f/2 Leitz Summicron,  Tri-X in D-76) 

IN THIS CONTEXT, let us now consider the possibility the burgeoning official acknowledgment of unknown aerial and oceanic phenomenon is  the precursor to admission we are a conquered species. Note how we are being methodically robbed of all our former freedoms -- and more importantly of even any expectation of freedom --literally everywhere on the planet. It is thus at least arguable our minds are being conditioned for enslavement. Is it then mere coincidence that, after denying the reality of UFOs and their underwater counterparts for at least 80 years -- often ridiculing and even slandering as mentally ill anyone who dared admit encountering UFOs --  the world’s governments are now finally acknowledging such things are real? Or that the propaganda apparatus which serves the global ruling class now releases documentaries that claim humans are routinely kidnapped and used as lab rats by extraterrestrials? 

Typical of the aliens-as-conquerors documentaries is “Alien Endgame,” an hour and 25-minute film available on Max that claims a “massive military cover-up” of the fact “our very existence is at risk.” It includes testimony about incidents in which UFOS allegedly rendered nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) un-launchable; it notes that UFOs operate with speed and maneuverability far beyond human capabilities, that they can become invisible and are sometimes undetectable by radar. The film also describes naval encounters with unidentified submerged objects that demonstrate the same seemingly inexplicable characteristics. “If the aliens decide to attack,” the film concludes, “we don’t stand a chance.”  

Significantly, the aliens’ oberführers – the terrifying medical-experiment sadism associated with their kidnappings prompts me to describe them with the terminology of nazism – are often said to look like bipeds descended from giant preying mantises. This brings to mind a 1974 or 1975 comment by a prominent astrophysicist that only exoskeletal creatures can survive the gravitational forces generated by right-angle turns at mach 10 and other such astounding maneuvers even then attributed to UFOs. I’m sorry I don’t remember the astrophysicist’s name, but I do remember his comment generated a lively, mostly apprehensive discussion midway through the astronomy course I was then taking as an overage undergraduate. Now, knowing how insect biology is a prime inspiration in robotics and artificial intelligence, I find the notion of insectoid conquerors horrifying beyond words. Is our obviously methodical reduction to moral imbecility the beginning of our replacement by dependably emotionless machines? And let us not forget that female mantises, like female spiders, eat their mates, nor that a large enough plague of locusts – or greedy patriarchs – could leave our Earth as barren as present-day Mars. Are we humans being bred to be our masters' Soylent Green? Might irremediably desolate Mars exemplify the ecogenocidal ruin Earth too is now fated to become?

Even so, a few documentaries present the invaders as benign. “Encounters,” a four-episode program on Netflix, describes the extraterrestrials as claiming “the environment is our first priority,” warning us our species is “actually making harm on the world,” that “technology is not going to do humans any good” and urging us to care for nature. It also quotes Japanese sources who describe the aliens as “kind and comforting,” which echo many First Nations accounts of encounters with beneficent “Star People.”

The notion of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrials and their implicit competition for human allegiance is obviously the newest variant of the ancient traditions, common to all cultures, of cosmic warfare between the forces of good and evil. From any such perspective of universal dualism, the pivotal question becomes the one poised by the coal miners’ anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” But the oft-demonstrated omnipotence of the ruling class – specifically its uncanny genius at deception and co-optation (which history shows us is at least as old as patriarchy itself) – makes any such discernment impossible. Note the paradox of Christianity: is it, as the late and oft-persecuted Jesuit Fr. William Bischel believed and practiced, a benevolently revolutionary credo of peace, humanitarian love, social liberation and the harmonious healing of Nature? Or is its equally documented function as the credo of ecogenocidal hatred embraced by capitalists, Trumpists, prosperity-gospel fanatics, Ku Klux Klaners, Nazis, witch-burners and other misogynistic moral imbeciles the true expression of its essence? Note too the message of Jesus according to the forbidden Gospel of the Egyptians, cited by Robert Graves in his King Jesus: "I have come to destroy the works of the Female." The same functional schizophrenia – and thus the same (unanswerable) question – seemingly applies to every religious or political movement our species has generated since the patriarchal conquest. Nor is it mooted by the growing suspicion many of our most iconic figures – Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Our Lady of Fatima – may have themselves been extraterrestrials. Quoth St. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:14, New International Version): “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” And despite its apparent absurdity, let us not overlook the naggingly persistent rumor that Hitler's Nazis – and now their USian successors – achieved power as the willing puppets of extraterrestrial masters. 

Stop War -- Photograph by Loren Bliss (C) 1967, 2026 (Canon VT; 35mm f/2 Leitz Summicron; Tri-X at 800 in D-76.) 

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A PERSONAL NOTE:  a damaging bout with Civid -- I was abed from 21 June to 9 July 2023 (this despite vaccination and three boosters) --  has robbed me of any expectation of longevity beyond the immediate present and -- ironically, I'd say -- thereby granted me the freedom and perhaps  the karmic necessity to disclose opinions, attitudes, experiences and suppositions I might otherwise have kept to myself. The run-amok disease -- my case exemplary both of “long Covid” and of “herd immunity” fulfilling its genocidal intent --  has fatally worsened my (hitherto-stable) congestive heart failure; an incurable fungus infection I brought back from Korea denies me corrective heart surgery, which in any case I am prohibited by poverty. Meanwhile the doubled and quadrupled medications so necessitated  have set me on an inescapable path to kidney failure and reactivated my decades-dormant esophageal re-flux problems. Now, in 2026, it also obvious the virus has slain forever my senses of taste and smell. 

But the worst of it is that Long Covid has inflamed my osteoarthritis so severely  I am now permanently and painfully crippled, ambulatory only in an ancient but superbly well-made manually operated wheel-chair. This was a gift from generous comrades, as Medicare and Medicare Advantage regulations define wheel-chair acquisition as a privilege of wealth -- another of the innumerable examples of how USian "health care" is in fact death care,  weaponized by austerity to exterminate those of us capitalism determines are no longer exploitable for our masters' profit. Yet it seems my crippled body refuses to die, which delights me no end because it makes my survival a revolutionary act, a spontaneous expression of my hatred for ChristoNazis and ChristoNazism  so intense it is physically manifest.  I am now 86 years old, which means as I revise this essay I have already lived six months past the two years the cardiologist estimated would be my maximum post-Covid longevity. 

An avowed agnostic, I nevertheless delight in occasionally testing our three main oracles, I Ching, runes and tarot, and at the beginning of the pandemic in 2ch of the three predicted Covid would kill me. Though eventually I came to believe I had either misread their messages or proven their uselessness, now the medical data tells me they spoke correctly, which it seems the I Ching  always does reliably, though the other two are reliable only about half the time. 

Another oracular form is dream interpretation, and though I have no particular skill in that area, I do recognize a radical change in my dream content, which now focuses on conversations with dead people. These are folks I dearly miss, usually my father or one of the two women in my life who were both lovers and confidants and therefore special friends. Many times I dream I am accompanied by one or more of my long-dead favorite dogs, any of whom were proper companions for the bear and cougar country I so loved for trout fishing, grouse hunting and exploring for its many archaeological anomalies. Absurdly in these dreams my body is often young and healthy, though in real life I am always near exhaustion, which is the CHF relentlessly working to end my life.  Thus when I fall asleep, I am never sure I will awaken. But as dreadful as all this may sound, it is also a liberation, for these are indeed the Chinese curse of "interesting times," and now that I no longer have any future to protect, I am free to write as I damn well please.  

LB/16 July 2026

-30- 

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About Me Loren Bliss I've been a print journalist – photographer, editor, columnist and reporter – since my 16th year, 1956, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a sports stringer and copyboy. After Regular Army active duty (1959-1962; 16 months in Korea), I returned to journalism, winning a dozen awards during the next three decades. I was the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal; news and photo editor of The Morris County Daily Record; editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine; a key United Press International stringer in Tennessee, New Jersey, New York City and Washington state; the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun; and the social-documentary photographer for Beth Israel Hospital's free clinics (NYC). But my magnum opus, “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” an uncensored portrait of the Counterculture, was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983, just as it seemed bound for publication. The fire also destroyed all my other significant work, and PTSD soon killed my career. Now I'm just an Internet gadfly and the volunteer founder/photographer/editor of the monthly newsletter that serves the senior housing community where I dwell. Thus, in the small ways I can, I fight on. View my complete profile

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Abutments: an Encounter in the Northern Michigan Woods

(Asked how I -- outspokenly Marxian and assertively agnostic -- can also be a Gaian Pagan, I answer that Paganism chose me, and did so in a way that sustains the revolutionary skepticism in which I was raised. What follows is the true and eerie story of how that choosing happened. It is reprinted from Dispatches from Dystopia, which was slain and purged by its server's death.)   

By Loren Bliss
I BEGAN KEEPING a journal in my 16th summer, a few months before I got my first newspaper job, and despite the discouragements inflicted by severe dyslexia, I have done so ever since. Though nearly all these annual collections of notes and letters and poetry fragments and other such personal memorabilia were destroyed by arson in 1983, the dynamic of memorization and recall that is a central part of writing enables me to remember enough of a given event – what occurred and how I felt about it – to be reasonably comfortable applying the first-person form to anything that happened in my life from mid-1956 onward.

But my pre-journal years are notably different: though thanks to my father's encouraging gifts of cameras I was already committed to a lifetime of photography, I remained a boy who had yet to discover the advantage of inked or typewritten paper mnemonics, a reality underscored by the present-day fact that while my pre-journal memories remain vivid, the emotional anesthesia that is both the curse and blessing of nonverbal time has given them a curiously once-removed quality akin to that of film footage or old sepia-toned photographs, of events in which I was an observer rather than a participant or – if reincarnation is more than just a comforting fiction – perhaps of memories from other lifetimes.

Clearly this is why whenever I try to write of my boyhood years before the decisive moment I committed myself also to a lifetime of writing, it seems gravely dishonest to do so in anything other than the third person, presumably a recognition that these circumstances demand the I (and eye) of the autobiographical present be replaced by the visually reportorial he and him – an expression of necessity and therefore not of some Norman Mailer affectation.

There is also the fact that until my emotional and intellectual vocabularies had expended to something approaching maturity – another milestone I associate with journal-keeping and its origin in my decision to study and practice accurate description – there was much that happened during my pre-journal years I frankly found impossible to verbalize until years later; I lacked both the words and the vital sense of metaphorical relationships – for example the clear image of Nature as a womanliness so huge and powerful and yes seductive that even now I can find no adequate synonyms for her timeless magnificence in any language beyond the visual arts or the haunting virtuosity of music. It is especially evident in tribal woodwinds, their summons like fire-blue Clyfford Still brush-strokes against an umber cadence of drums; the heartbeat of a forest; some clear and troutly river that yet murmurs in the Mother Tongue -- all the reflections and emanations of pure wildness and wilderness so beloved of Celtic or First Nations peoples.

The following describes an event I as a boy never dared reveal, one of those pre-journal episodes I can only relate in the third person, a true story I could not write until I was a 70-year-old cripple and no longer gave a damn if people thought me a liar or crazy or both.

Bear in mind too that children of my generation yet enjoyed a freedom that in the United States of today has become not only unthinkable but is in many jurisdictions suppressed as an imaginary felony perpetrated by parents falsely accused of criminal neglect.

*****

THE BOY WALKED in conifer-dappled sunlight along a road so old and unused it was scarcely more than an underbrush-obscured trace through the forest. He had long wondered where the road might lead and what he might find along the way, and now today he followed its hide-and-seek ruts of pale yellow sand westward from the charred remnants of a mysteriously destroyed bridge that in the late 19th Century had briefly sought to span the South Branch of Michigan's Au Sable River.

Local elders called the former bridge-site “The Abutments” and – curiously, the boy thought – spoke of it with the same subtle implied-capitals proper-noun reticence he observed in adult conversations about graveyards and funerals or disasters, a fact the boy had noted immediately. After the boy had seen the reality of the place, the name had perplexed him even more, the quiet weight of its syllables clearly unexplained by what was there: the bridge could never have been anything but a crude structure built of hand-hewn logs, and that scarcely a single lane wide. It had twice briefly spanned a watercourse no more than 30 yards across even at maximum flood. Now, decades later, its telltale relics were merely two pairs of fire-blackened pilings, one pair on each side of the river in the shallows just beyond its banks, each piling a tight cluster of three or four maybe 12-inch diameter logs bound together by wraps of iron cable that had long ago oxidized into bands of dull brown coagulation now barely discernible from the underlying charcoal, each bank's pair matched like gateposts perhaps 10 feet apart.

There was mystery here also, another quality the boy sensed about the place: the fact The Abutments was where his maternal grandfather dug pale-gray clay from the otherwise mostly brightly pebbled riverbed for the boy's aunt to use in her ceramic sculptures. Hence -- or so the boy assumed (because he correctly recognized his mother's older sister as his sole defender amongst maternal kin otherwise poisoned to unrelenting hatefulness by the toxins of dysfunction and divorce) – such a place, if only by its association with the sanctuary of his aunt's studio, should therefore have emanated the same comforting sense of home with which the rest of the river unfailingly welcomed him, its murmur like the gentle voices of women conversing fondly in some immediately adjacent room, voices that sometimes even seemed to call one's name – an eerie but somehow comforting quality the river guides and their adult-fisherman clients would acknowledge only after several whiskeys and about which the boy thus knew to keep silent. But uniquely the clear water that coursed past The Abutments offered no such comfort; it gurgled ominously, and though the bottom beyond its clay-bed shallows and ruined pilings plunged quickly to the come-fish-me depths of big-trout habitat, the boy could not comfortably cast into it or even look long into its cold green shadows without involuntarily shuddering, as if someone had drowned there or something deadly dangerous lurked just out of sight within its strong currents.

As a result everything about The Abutments aroused his curiosity, and he repeatedly questioned his elders about what had happened there until finally his persistence pried out of his maternal grandmother a reluctant, obviously pared-to-the-bones story about bridge-builders twice thwarted by fire that  struck at night and did so inexplicably, without apparent cause or motive, so that after the second blaze had dropped the second span of timbers into the river and for the second time left only monoliths of charred pilings, the builders surrendered to whatever pyromaniacal namelessness seemed to rule there and abandoned not just the bridge but the entire road-building project, never mind it had been hailed as the shortest, easiest-to-complete route from Luzerne to Grayling and back.

Again in that oddly wordless childhood mode of reasoning, the boy soon concluded the reality that echoed in his elders' voices was neither explained by his grandmother's story nor by the fact a place so seemingly innocuous – at least until you peered into its deeper waters – would bear a name so subtly ominous.

Denied all other sources, the boy's curiosity took the sort of quantum-leap that would someday preface his investigative journalism: he began wondering what the road itself might tell him – and now today he intended to find out.

*****

YOU GOT TO the Abutments by a seldom-traveled and severely potholed two-rut road that followed the river maybe a half mile along its west bank downstream from the self-consciously rustic cabins of the sprawling George Mason Estate and ended in the sandy expanse of a turnaround that sloped gently to the water's edge, an obvious if curiously underutilized launching-site for canoes and the AuSable's uniquely long and flat-bottomed riverboats.

Here a Norway pine, the oblong vertical scales of its bark the color of red rust, had sprung from the middle of the intended Luzerne-to-Grayling roadway maybe a dozen yards beyond  where the west end of the bridge had been. The tree had since grown to a towering height, as if it were adding its own exclamation point of obstruction to the message of the fires.

On the river's east bank the old road had long ago vanished, conquered by an unlikely jungle of marsh grass that grew chest-high beneath a grove of white-trunked paper-birch, but here on the west side of the river the way had been preserved well into the 20th Century, probably by hunters using it to access the deep woods beyond. What was now a turnaround had until sometime in the '40s been a riverside junction on the upstream side of the big pine, a 90-degree L-shaped intersection that ended the north-south road from the Mason Estate by connecting it to the remnant of the Luzerne-Grayling road that continued westward toward Grayling to whatever point the roadbuilders had reached when the project was terminated by the fires that twice destroyed their bridge. But this passage too had finally been by closed by winter windfalls that for some unknown reason no one had troubled themselves to clear away and now it was dwindling to just another of the innumerable forgotten tracks that thread northern Lower Michigan's ruggedly mature second-growth forest: scrubby jack pine and its less frequent but far more stately cousins, white pine, blue spruce, other Norway pines like the one that seemed to stand sentry here where the boy began his quest.

It was 1952, near the end of that fondly remembered era when the electric lines and telephone wires went no closer to the South Branch country below Chase Bridge than Grayling, the Crawford County seat a dozen crow-miles further west. Though the entire region had been clear-cut to a biblical barren during the 1860s – raped for profit and then burned to an ashy wasteland by the Great Michigan Fire of 1871 – in '52 its distance from modern utilities had preserved its wildness and fostered the ecological healing that made it also a place of healing for humans. It was middle August, hot and nearly without wind; the sky that pure late-summer-and-early-autumn back-country royal blue you never see much below 44 degrees North latitude; the few clouds white and billowy as raw cotton; the late morning air pungent with sweet fern, loud with birdsong.

The boy's every step flushed huge coveys of those big brown Midwest grasshoppers that always make you think of butterflies as they fly away on purple-black wings edged in yellow or orange. Small for his age, the boy nevertheless had already learned from his father how to move with the watchfulness of a seasoned hunter, the quiet economy of the boy's stride and his obvious comfort in woodland solitude a rebuttal of both their urban origins, his receptivity to his father's teachings probably bolstered by the fraction of First Nations blood inherited from his maternal ancestors, genes that colored his hair black as coal and gave his darkly greenish brown eyes their vaguely Asiatic shape. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and a floppy-brim khaki field hat of the type the Army had issued at the beginning of World War II; he wore a razor-sharp six-inch-blade hunting knife in a brown leather sheath belted on his right hip and carried a .22 rim fire bolt-action Remington target rifle, its six-round clip charged with high-velocity hollow-points, the weapon loaded and locked safe and slung by an oiled leather sling diagonally across his back; the area was infamous for its small but notably deadly Massassauga rattlers, its packs of feral dogs and its occasional rabid animals, but his distinguished-rifleman father had already taught him to shoot so well he feared nothing in his environment, and he was supremely confident of his ability to perceive any incipient risk in time to defend himself against it, especially now in the state of ultra-observant mindfulness his father had taught him during jaunts in the woods and the marksmanship training begun shortly after the boy's fourth birthday. It was an elemental version of paying attention later proven professionally invaluable, eyes focused on nothing yet somehow also on everything, scanning his surroundings seeing whatever might thrust itself into his consciousness: perhaps a snake on which he might otherwise have stepped; perhaps a quick subtle whisk of tail revealing the presence of another mammal whether belligerent or benign; perhaps a discarded tool or the rusted relics of a logging camp from the 19th Century; perhaps a clear-water spring otherwise hidden beneath sweet fern and bracken, its tiny brook expanding to a swamp, a pond, even a new place to fish; perhaps another vanishing passage through the woods; perhaps more of the so-called "Indian Mounds" he sensed might explain the mysteries suggested by the twice-burned bridge and this fading remnant of road.

Songbird morning gave way to cicada afternoon; a vast chorus of insects droned in Gaian harmony; a Yellowhammer drilled a hollow snag for beetles. The day basked in post-Lughnasadh summer fulfillment, at ease with itself.

The road curved slightly upward along a low knoll, dipped toward a shallow basin – now bone dry but every spring a vernal pond – a space shadowed to momentary cool by a dense grove of spruce; the boy welcomed the quick respite from the heat, paused for just a moment to relish it, then walked on.

When he re-entered the dappled sunlight on the far side of the stand of spruce, he remembered that time in Florida when he was six years old and he had wandered away from his playmates and followed a white-sand causeway road deep into the perpetual shade of a cypress swamp; a year earlier on Summer Solstice Eve his mother had tried to murder him and kill his father too, but his father had subdued her and a few weeks after the violent aftermath of frantic adults and sirens and cops his father and his new and obviously loving stepmother had promised him his birthmother was safely locked away forever and that she would never be able to hurt him and that he would never have to see her again. Because it was easier to try to make sense of it when he was alone, he began spending as much time in solitude as the relatively unlimited childhood freedom of that era would allow, but at last in the cypress swamp that afternoon he sensed he was going too far and he stopped walking and looked out over the suddenly ominous expanse of dark water on both sides of the road: the cypress knees reminded him of the swollen ankles of a beggar he had seen on a street corner in downtown Jacksonville and the Spanish moss looked like witch hair on Hallowe'en and off in the distance something big enough to eat him announced its presence with a swirl of disturbing ripples and suddenly he was a little frightened. But he did not run; somehow he already knew better. He merely turned back and walked in the direction from which he had come and when he walked out into the hot sunlight and then beneath the towering shade of a huge tulip poplar growing to his left just outside the swamp a leaf spiraled downward from the tree and touched his forehead and it felt like a kiss, exactly the kind of kiss he had seen other mothers bestow on their own children, and all at once he sensed he was being embraced not by a woman but by something female he could not describe: a sense of womanliness itself, womanliness big as nature that had just kissed him as if to tell him not only that she would be his mother from now on but that unlike his birthmother she would never betray him.

Remembering those moments in Florida momentarily brought to mind his present circumstances. A divorce court had voided the no-contact promise; the boy was in Michigan only because of a judge's bad-luck mandate he summer with his birthmother until he turned 18; he was in the good-luck South Branch region of the Au Sable River wilderness -- which he would realize in old age was the one and only place in the dry-land world he had ever truly felt spiritually at home -- only because that was where his maternal grandparents, upon whom his birthmother would be dependent until their deaths, maintained "the cottage," the vacation home they built on the six remaining acres of the much more vast acreage the state of Michigan had in 1866 awarded his maternal grandmother's father, Henry Heber Woodruff, a Civil War hero and later a state circuit judge.

But now the boy's fleeting and not entirely welcome contemplation of his decidedly mixed fortune was abruptly ended by the raucous jeering of a squadron of blue jays somewhere off to his left in the middle distance. Vaguely startling, it instantly refocused his mind on his quest; he wondered what might have disturbed the jays and remembered a fight he had witnessed between jays and a nest-raiding red squirrel who had climbed the branch-bare lower trunk of the largest of the three blue spruce that grew 10 yards beyond the cottage-wide screened front porch where they ate their summer meals and the ever-audible voice of the river as it coursed a cluster of boulders 20 more yards beyond. The squirrel was searching for eggs to suck; the jays had flown at the squirrel before it reached their nest amongst the tree's dense branches and fiercely pecked its head until bright droplets of blood appeared on its russet-colored fur and it abruptly turned and fled down the tree.

But the boy quickly dismissed the jays' warning as having no significance to himself, and so he continued westward, his boot-heels lifting tiny puffs of dust from the sandy spots where the abandoned ruts were not yet overgrown.

Cicadas buzzed and rasped; a woodland aviary of small birds twittered.

A new bird warbled -- its voice clear and compelling as a minor-keyed flute-solo, a brush-stroke of vibrant blue gliding like a caress across the beige canvas of the August afternoon -- a seven-note melody so indescribably exquisite the boy gasped at its beauty.

It was birdsong he had never heard before – a startling but delightful surprise to one who was sure he had already learned every bird and bird call in that forest – and now the call was repeated, again and again, each note drawn out with the same slow poignant sensuality, every note pure as cleanest clearest water, a spirit-caress more powerful than anything his flesh had ever known or imagined.

The boy stopped amidst the dwindling road, gained a few inches of height by stepping atop the weed-grown hump that divided its two faded ruts, searched the surrounding trees, expected to see birds even fractionally as lovely as their song, its compelling suddenness suggesting a mental choreography of something he could not quite remember, perhaps – because already he had begun to understand the associations of sound and color and geometry – a recollection of his aunt at work on one of her paintings while her own daughter practiced the flute, an ephemeral construct of twilight blue and lunar-white he could see in his mind but not verbalize; perhaps though not his Aunt Alecia and his cousin Pamela at all; perhaps (though how could that be?) some phantom echo of memories far older.

He envisioned feathers of green and gold; the size of the song suggested birds at least as big as ravens.

Perhaps someone's parrots had escaped their cage.

He watched, waited; he knew songbirds typically flitted from limb to limb. Surely one of

these wondrous birds would soon move and the boy would spot them all by the motion of one. But jackpine and blue spruce remained birdless. There was nothing save the song – its notes so unfathomably lovely each was its own microcosm of ecstasy.

No, the boy thought, this couldn't be – birdsong so intense and yes getting closer, louder – but no birds anywhere to be seen.

Perhaps it was another human with a flute like that on which he had heard his cousin sometimes practice modal scales curiously similar to the obviously avian melody that now seemed to surrounded him. Perhaps it was somebody with a flute hiding and playing a joke or trying to frighten him.

He thought of tramps, of grubby men said to prey on children.

The boy unslung the Remington, thumb positioned to release its safety, trigger finger resting in readiness on the edge of its blued steel trigger guard: “I'm armed,” he warned; “I'll shoot.”

Yet even as he spoke he sensed the Remington was somehow irrelevant and he reslung it as he realized the forest had absorbed his shout as completely as if he had whispered into a blanket or yelled into a down pillow and he had a fleeting sense of being trapped in one of those awful dreams in which your life depends on your ability to scream but you cannot make your vocal cords produce even a tiny squeak. Yet the boy knew he was not dreaming; he knew it was 1952 on an August mid-afternoon and he was here in the Au Sable country, the only place on earth that felt like it actually welcomed him, and he was wide awake and all the lesser birds and now even all the insects had fallen dead silent yet these birds of the strange indescribably lovely song seemed to be circling directly above him and now yes around him at no more than arm's length yet there were no birds to be seen anywhere and now the color of the day was changing, the air becoming somehow iridescent, darkening to a kind of greenish stormlight though out beyond where he stood on the abandoned road, the sky remained impossibly cloudless and the sun was bright as ever but something inside the darkening air that same arms-length from his face and eerily also of the air itself was shaping itself into what appeared to be a phantom image of an opening, the beginning of a passageway no more substantial than shadow…

Such terror as the boy had never known or imagined engulfed him from head to foot. He became terror personified, terror the verb, terror his entire internal universe.

He turned and fled. He ran east toward the river. He ran harder and faster than he had ever run, probably harder and faster than he would ever run again even under maximum duress. He leapt windfalls, dodged saplings, his lungs painfully craving air, his heart seemingly loud as thunder. He ran until he could no longer hear the strange birds and the forest was again alive with bugsong and casual twittering and there was just the very late August afternoon and the abandoned road and its grasshoppers and the hot westering sun and the air tangy with the cinnamon citrus scent of sweet fern and in the bracken off to his right a whitetail doe with two spotted fawns standing motionless as if amused by his retreat and now finally the Norway pine on guard by the river.

He shrugged out of the Remington's sling and sat himself down at the big Norway pine's suddenly protective base and laid the rifle across his legs and pulled off the hat that had been discarded in 1946 by another maternal aunt's Army Air Corps husband and mopped his sweaty face with the hat's coarse cotton floppiness and leaned back against the tree's rough bark until he finally stopped panting and caught his breath.

The boy was surprised to discover the sun was nearly setting; somehow his hike along the abandoned road and his frantic retreat to the place of The Abutments had taken at least five hours more than he had realized.

He stood; he unlatched the Remington's safety and lifted its bolt handle so the rifle could not possibly fire and leaned the rifle against the tree, grounding its butt securely enough in the sand it could not slip sideways. Then he strode down to the river and knelt on the damp sand between the western bank's abutments and dowsed his face with double handfuls of the river's icy water. Even now nearly 70 years after the final fire had destroyed the second bridge the close proximity of the charred logs smelled subtly of wet charcoal.

The current gurgled as if in warning. The boy stood again and dried his hands on his pantlegs and fetched the Remington and restored it to locked-safety readiness and slung it diagonally across his back and picked up the sweat-darkened hat and put it on his head and began walking the river road quickly upstream toward his grandparents' vacation home.

Later that night while he could still remember the melody he whistled it for his grandmother, asking if she knew what species of bird it might be.

“No,” she said, focusing on the boy with a lingering glance so acutely searching it seemed to him she looked not at him but more deeply into him than anyone had ever looked, and for an instant he glimpsed in the robin's-egg blue of her eyes a vastly older and more purely wild female spirit somehow close kin to the powerful womanliness he had sensed in the kiss of that falling poplar-leaf in Florida.

“No,” the boy's grandmother repeated; “there's no bird alive in these woods sings like that.”

*****

TWO DECADES AFTERWARD, In what would become one of the most memorable moments of the 24 years of evenings, weekends and vacations I worked on my own time to document what I still regard as the 20th Century's biggest unreported story – the beginning of anti-patriarchal global revolution implicit in the old Counterculture's eerily spontaneous resurrection of the breathtakingly ancient ethos of the Great Goddess – I happened in my research to read of a phenomenon described in pre-Christian Celtic myth as "the Birds of Rhiannon": goddess-sent messengers feathered green and gold, avian couriers dispatched by Rhiannon herself either as a dire warning or as a summons that is fated and therefore cannot be refused, their song said to be the most hauntingly exquisite music in the universe. They are said to dwell in another dimension, which is why they remain invisible even when they sound as if they are within reach.

Until that reading I had never so much as imagined a connection between my odd late-boyhood encounter in the Michigan woods and my growing certainty the pagan-liturgy-resurrecting folk renaissance of the later 1950s was the beginning of an event far greater than itself; I assumed the compulsion that since my 19th year and my second quarter at the University of Tennessee had nagged me to pursue the story wherever it might lead was merely journalistic intuition on overdrive. But having learned of the Birds of Rhiannon, I could only begin to wonder if my efforts were far less self-assigned than I had imagined them to be.

And apropos that missing time, now (18 April 2024) in what by post-Covid diagnosis is most likely at age 84 my penultimate year, I cannot but wonder if I entered that passageway, and if that from which I fled in such terror five hours later was not the Goddess-centered blessedness I like a latter-day Thomas Rhymer might have witnessed therein, but the prophecy of endless wretchedness implicit in its mandate that I spend the rest of my life (as indeed I have) struggling to convey its species-preserving exquisiteness to mostly hostile audiences.

Wretchedness indeed: for the remainder of my childhood and adolescence and nearly all my adulthood, I was ruled by my left brain. I was outspokenly, even caustically agnostic, and I was profoundly skeptical of all so-called spiritual or religious experience including my own, but in that instant of reading I was smitten by a gooseflesh chill so powerfully indicative I knew what had shown itself to me in those Michigan woods was nothing less than what Robert Graves calls “poetic truth,” and I remembered the odd piercing look my grandmother had given me when I whistled for her the song of those ineffable birds of strange, her eyes with their almost surreptitious flash of recognition an involuntary reflex that by 1972 I had learned is a telling characteristic of women who are in touch with the goddess-symbol even if they cannot (or dare not) speak her name – women who, had my "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" not been destroyed by arson just as it seemed on the brink of mainstream publication, might themselves have said of it what my late friend Helen Farias said to me after reading its earliest draft in the spring of 1971: “you have given me the words to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the vocabulary to express, and I cannot thank you enough.”

Since my 70s, I have recognized Helen's praise as among the finest, most telling, most significant accolades of my life.

And eventually Helen would express her gratitude in the best way possible: in 1987, returned stateside with her intellectual prowess confirmed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious University of London, she founded the quarterly Beltane Papers and its monthly supplement Octava, journals of feminist spirituality that steadily gained credibility and circulation until metastasized breast cancer -- eerily the fatal plague of so many feminist activists -- killed her on the autumnal equinox of 1994.

No matter my “Dancer” had been burned to cinders 11 years earlier, undoubtedly because the government and its owners regard any real threat to patriarchy as dangerously subversive; no matter the spare-time, 24-year reportorial investigation that was to have been my bridge to prosperity and the crowning glory of my journalism career died in flames with its irreplaceable research notes and its forever lost photography and all the rest of my life's work, text and pictures alike. No matter the fire was ignited at literally at the same instant I was meeting with a well-known Manhattan book-editor¹ who was assuring me she could mother "Dancer" to mainstream publication, insisting it would be one of the 20th Century's most influential volumes; no matter but for the fire I would have scooped the world on this the first visible wave of our species' survive-or-die revolution against patriarchal ecogenocide -- our first obvious mustering against the Apocalypse the patriarchs and their direct descendants the Capitalists are intentionally inflicting on us all. No matter the indescribable pain of loss and defeat remains the branding-iron on my psyche and the knife-blade in my heart it has been since the fire and ever shall be for as long as my consciousness survives. The odyssey that now in retrospect seems the irresistible mandate of that long ago August afternoon in the Au Sable River country yet prevails as my own solitary quest, its beginning a priceless gift I failed to recognize until 18 years after the fact, now in the brutally honest retrospection of terminal old age an almost-sacramental confirmation that endures even amidst the ashes and inescapable poverty of my post-fire existence. No matter there will never be for me any professional laurels or material gain from it; in the emotional, spiritual, purely aesthetic sense it remains as compelling as ever, precisely as Robert Graves proclaims in the poem entitled "To Juan at the Winter Solstice":

Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.²

^{_______________________________}

¹The late Cicely Nichols, a longtime friend and one of the primary facilitators of Sisterhood is Powerful (Vintage Books edition: 1970), acknowledged as "a sister in struggle" to whom the anthology's editor Robin Morgan is "especially grateful.." 

²Graves, Robert; The Poems of Robert Graves, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York: 1958 (pgs. 200-201)

*****
LB/May 2010-January 2011 (with additional minor editing to improve accessibility and eliminate typos, 2018-2019; 2022; 2024; 2025.)

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