Part 16: My Name is Zak

Some would say I am crazy. I’m not. The crazy ones are the people who point radio telescopes into deepest space and search for alien messages. What a waste of tax dollars. Do those idiots really think that aliens think this way, that they would have the slightest inclination to cater to human notions of high-tech communication, to first make contact with scientists and their latest batch of tinker toys? Why would aliens deal with such moronic setups when they could just make contact with that finest of receivers, the human brain, or plug into the ordinary methods of communication, like the telephone, fax, mail, radio, TV?

My name is Zak. I didn’t ask to be contacted by the Hoova messengers. Nor do I think I am someone special to be communicating with them. The prophet Jeremiah was called from the womb, so it is said, but I doubt I would have ever become involved if I hadn’t been working on the roof that day. They told me they dwell in spaceships, which they wear like mechanical bodies, and that they come from our own future. Why would they lie? But even if they lie, who could explain their ability to keep track of my own activities, my own thoughts? If this is all a trick by some group, they must have an army of surveillance people. I don’t believe it’s possible. And if it were possible, why would they care about me? And no, I am never looking or listening when the messages appear on my answering machine. But if this is a hoax or a prank, why does the answering machine tape often erase itself, or even disappear entirely, while I am still in the room? No one has come and gone, and I have felt no chills from passing ghosts.

I am not a mystic. I’ve never cared for religion or spiritual things, at least before now. I dropped out of synagogue when I turned thirteen and refused to attend anymore. My mother was always trying to send me off on one of the summer programs to work on a kibbutz in Israel, but she couldn’t make me go. Oh, I like working. I like tinkering with real things, using my hands. I enjoy construction, and mechanical projects. But there was an abundance of summer jobs right here in Los Angeles, where I could be with my friends. I am an American. Yeah, maybe a bit alienated because I am a Jew, but not as half alienated as I feel toward my own family when they try to force me into modes I didn’t want. We never could have French wine at home. Some offense the French committed against the Jews or Israel--I forget what. She--my mother--went out of her way to buy imported Israeli wines. Awful stuff. That’s why I don’t care for wine much, I guess.

I am a down-to-earth kind of guy, and so are most of my friends. I didn’t suddenly become a raving lunatic just because I started talking to spaceships. But I was conscious of how it might look, so mostly I kept it to myself. I told Jeff. Jeff has a good head on his shoulders. I had taken classes with Jeff. He was good at history and biology, but he was also a cabbalist, and thought about the structure of the world in terms of the tree of life, and he was also interested in gematria and other weird stuff.

And Dean. But only because Dean asks too many questions. I occasionally run errands for Hoova. Sometimes the schedule is awkward, and people wonder where I’ve been, and I make up some innocuous answer. But Dean is too sharp. That crazy Arab thought I was working for the Mossad, or some spy agency such as that, so I finally told him about Hoova, so he could relax. Surprisingly, I only managed to convince him more than ever that I was working for the Mossad. The whole notion is ridiculous. Though my father does know a few of those people. I think he met them at synagogue, or through friends there.

What I like about Dean was that he has been everywhere. He is only a little older than me, I think, maybe even younger, but he has been all over the Middle East, and he has been to Jerusalem, and in most of the countries of Europe. Hearing him talk, seeing things through his eyes, makes me think the world is brimming with infinite possibilities. I’ve never been out of California much, really. But so what? It has everything--the beach, the mountains, the desert, and up north the forests.

Anyway, back to Jeff. Jeff is a cabbalist, and I was sure he wouldn’t think the notion of Hoova was all that weird. We had known each other a long time. But to my surprise, he was pretty upset.

"Do you know what happens to most people who get involved with elementals?" he asked.

Then he answered his own question:

"Their lives are usually ruined. They lose their job, their friends, their wives/husbands/lovers. Their business goes bankrupt. Often they themselves go insane, or end up in some abandoned hole where whatever is chasing them can’t find them, writing their revolutionary manuscripts that are going to overthrow current notions of science or revoke the rules of society so humans live by the same conventions the spirits live by."

It annoyed me he talked about spirits. Look, this is science, I said. The spaceships come from the future, and they are controlled by humans. Future humans who live inside the electronics of the spaceships themselves. Flying saucers, not angels, I said.

There are parallel realities, Jeff said. When something oozes through the barriers between them, when humans make contact with the other, their nervous systems are not equipped to deal with something so alien to this space-time. So they interpret the phenomena in terms familiar to them, ending up with explanations that are rife with contradictions, but which are now an embedded memory, the mind’s best attempt to impose order on chaos. Spaceships, angels and demons, fairies, elementals, strange animals--these are all flawed human interpretations.

Then Jeff told me about Jack Parsons. I remember this now, because Dean called the other day and asked me if I had ever heard of a guy named Jack Parsons. I said yeah, and he seemed really surprised. What Jeff had told me was Parsons had been doing magic experiments in the Mojave desert. Shortly thereafter this was the same area where George Adamski had met a Venusian, and spaceships from Venus. And then after that Kenneth Arnold saw flying disks up in the Northwest in July 1947 and the flying saucer age began.

"Parsons opened a hole in the fabric of space-time," Jeff said, "and something flew in."

For a while I was impressed with this story. Parsons had been trying to invoke a goddess named Babalon. Apparently one aspect of Babalon was Aphrodite, or Venus. And George Adamski had met a "Venusian" and even traveled on their spaceships, he said. So it kind of fit. But later I read about the great "airship" wave of 1897, and I wasn’t so convinced anymore. The airship wave happened all over the western part of the U.S. It was like a UFO wave, except instead of modern spaceships there were dirigibles, and this was consistent with the technology of the time. Sometimes people would come out of the airships, tell people they were from Kansas, and this was an experimental aircraft, and so on, all of which would later prove out false, but sounded so reasonable to the people who were observers. But sometimes there were other, alien, creatures in the blimps, and once a farmer saw an airship trying to lift one of his cows up inside with a sort of hoisting belt. When the farmer gave pursuit, the airship dropped the cow, and the farmer later lodged a complaint with the local sheriff.

What about it? I asked Jeff. Here we have a UFO wave fifty years before Kenneth Arnold. Jeff thought about this a while. And then he came back and said that there were occasional bleed-throughs between realities because of terrestrial or solar events, just like there were sometimes in ritual magic, like the kind Parsons practiced. But these holes opened and closed again. What Parsons had done was create a permanent rip.

I guess this made sense. I mean it was possible. But he had explained it this way only after I confronted him with the 1897 airship wave. So I was still somewhat suspicious. But it also made me question whether I should take Hoova at face value. Jeff had given me Passport to Magonia, by a Frenchman named Jacque Vallee. Vallee seemed to show that Irish encounters with "fairies" had all the aspects of what modern people reported as contact with UFO occupants. Jeff also showed me a picture of "Lem", an elemental Aleister Crowley had been in contact with, from his magical workings. Crowley’s Lem painting had appeared in a Greenwich Village art exhibit in 1919. Lem looked like one of the "grays" of UFO lore. The oval-shaped head. Although the eyes were closed in Crowley’s portrait, and weren’t the big cat eyes you usually see. But all this did make me think.

Despite everything, I tried to explain to Jeff why it was important to interact with Hoova. It was hard to explain. It was like in the Tanach there were all these stories about interactions with the gods or angels or Yahweh or whoever. But these were just old stories that were already distorted before they were written down. And then they got edited and edited again, and the Baal’s crossed out and Yahweh inserted, or vice-versa, and who knew what it all meant?

But here I was dealing with the source--or at least some source. If you want to call it the other, then I was in contact with the other. And the way to learn about it, it seemed to me, was to play with it. To perturb the system, as computer people might say. I’m not much into computers, so let me use another analogy. Say you wanted to learn about a cat. Some idiots would say: Let’s dissect the cat. That way we can observe its internal catness. Others will say: Show me the evidence of this cat. Give me some fur. Let me measure and do a chemical analysis of this alleged cat fur. But the way to learn what a cat is all about is to play with it. To feed it and not feed it.

To watch it creep up on a bird through the grass. To watch it move to the one spot in the room where the sun was coming through the window. Interaction and observation. I got a better handle on things when I read Jacque Vallee’s The Invisible College. He called UFOs a control mechanism. Their function, as best I could understand, was to change people’s beliefs. But his calling it a control mechanism gave me confidence in what I was doing. "I’m probing the mechanism as it probes me," I told Jeff. "I’m trying to figure out what it’s all about." I didn’t want Jeff thinking I thought I was some sort of prophet or holy man. And I was cautious about doing anything I didn’t want to do. My parents couldn’t make me pray, and I was damned if I was going to pray for peace in the Middle East because Hoova wanted me to. "Let those idiots blow each other up," I said to Dean. I think Dean agreed.

That’s when I decided that the true Semites--ones like Dean and me--lived in the desert of Los Angeles. Jerusalem was inhabited by the remnants of some ungodly Nazi experiment. Let them keep fighting over the water and the oil, and killing each other like they’ve done for the past several thousand years. What was Hoova’s point? Pray to whom or what? Here these people come from thousands of years in the future, and their bodies are electronics and hardware--the spaceships themselves. Do they really still believe they were created in God’s image? I mean, is God a spaceship? And if he is, then what about us? We have two legs and two arms, so we’re not in God’s image. It’s all self-contradictory. So you can throw the Tanach out the window. Like I say, pray to whom or what?

Maybe I shouldn’t say, or think, some of this. But I never could understand why so many people who shouldn’t have been involved cared what happened between two tribes in the Middle East. Yet, at the same time, I found myself suddenly in the middle of world events because of Hoova. Hoova always seemed to have its finger on the latest trouble spot. I found myself going about my daily life in Los Angeles, yet somehow I was a participant in events happening around the globe. It was a heady feeling. Take Larry Meier. A casual acquaintance of my father. Some sort of explosives expert or spook. We were at a dinner party and out of the blue we start talking and he ends up asking me to do him a favor. To pick up some money from Oral Jerry Swagger and to deliver it somewhere downtown. Once upon a time I would have said no, thinking this was really weird. Oral Jerry Swagger, for Christ’s sakes.

But I knew it was because of Hoova, and I said sure, no problem. It was just another one of those strange coincidences that keep happening to me. And Hoova was watching. They left me a message--to videotape the entire transaction. No reason given, but this was the type of thing that appealed to me, and which I liked doing for Hoova. I asked Dean to do the taping, since he had done that sort of thing before, and since he already knew about Hoova. I didn’t tell him who I was doing it for. But later Hoova warned me to keep Dean out of sight, because Dean knew Larry Meier, had met him in Paris once. I casually asked Dean about it and it blew his mind. But it goes to show you Hoova is what it claims to be, or at least has amazing powers. I certainly had no idea that Dean knew Meier, much less about their meeting in Paris. So it wasn’t like I was making all this up, hallucinating or something. You can say: Those tape recordings, you just imagined them. It all happened in your mind. Hoova is all part of the hallucination. Well, if that true, then how did Hoova know about Dean and Larry Meier?

So now I am going to have dinner with OJ, which is what people call the Christian evangelist. At L’Orangerie over in West Hollywood, for Christ’s sakes. OJ goes there all the time. We are going to ride in OJ’s limo from Pasadena over to L’Orangerie, and have dinner. Then when I come out I will be carrying a briefcase of money. I will get into a different car to take me to my next destination. I don’t know how Dean is going to get a video of us at the table in L’Orangerie. It worries me some, but that’s Dean’s problem. And Hoova’s.