“Close Encounters” – the UFO, the Dreams, the River

She was 13 when she, her brother, and a neighbor boy were overflown at close range by a flying triangle.  She was 16 when the UFO appeared in her dreams, and drew her and her mother together before it drove them apart.  Her name is Bella Clarke and she’s a forensic investigator, a woman devoted to science, reason and the “preponderance of evidence.”

In her scientific world, how does a UFO fit in?

Bella and I explored these questions together on “Close Encounters of the Second Part,” which aired on March 14 on the RISK! storytelling podcast.  We were joined by Cyndi Freeman and John LaSala, who produced Bella’s story just as brilliantly as he produced my complementary story the week before, on “Close Encounters of the First Part.”  My story was entitled “My First Alien Landing” – yes, the UFO landing in Glassboro, NJ, that I was investigating as a 16-year-old boy in the fall of 1964.  But also myself, a Jewish boy from the Philadelphia suburbs landing in the midst of an ultra-conservative Glassboro family.

In this post, I can’t possibly convey the richness of Bella’s narrative, of her wrestlings with what she experienced and how it wove itself into her life.  You’ll have to listen to it for yourself.  But here are some highlights:

Her “close encounter” took place in south Georgia in the early 2000s, not long before Christmas.  It was late at night, cold and clear, and she and her brother and their friend Brennan were sitting on a dock on a river, fishing for catfish.  It was eerily quiet, the familiar riverside sounds of owls and other wild creatures fallen silent–the sort of circumstance that’s been known to surround UFO encounters, for which British UFOlogist Jenny Randles coined the term “the Oz factor.”  And some four miles down the river, they saw a light rise up.

It was yellowish white.  It flew soundlessly toward them, following the path of the river.  When it drew close, Bella could see it silhouetted against the sky: triangular, matte gray, looking like a smashed-up computer, spray-painted silver, with lights around its perimeter.  It hung over their heads, the height of a two- or three-story building, its bulk blotting out the sky.  Though it did nothing overtly to threaten them, “the terror was unimaginable. … The impending doom of it was surreal.”

Bella fled up the dock, while the two boys stayed frozen in fear.  She ran back to them, and the three held gloved hands, forming a knot.  After the object had passed, they ran back to Bella’s house and came in screaming, crying out to Bella’s mother–who, to Bella’s surprise, was still awake–what they’d experienced.

Three years later, Bella’s dreams began.

Some were of horror-movie monsters, others of emotional trauma, of futile strivings to get her parents’ attention.  In still other dreams she and her family were in post-apocalyptic rubble, with a UFO coming as a savior from the sky.  Then came the pivotal dream: she was led, in a sort of fog, into an unknown space where she was met by two individuals whom she couldn’t see, one older and one younger.  And eventually a “humongous” being with two sets of almond-shaped eyes, along with a putrid odor.

She woke up thinking: “I must remember this.”  Her mother said, when she told her about the dream: “Do you think you went somewhere last night?”  And from then on, “all our conversations were about aliens.”

Her mother gave her Whitley Strieber’s Communion to read; it affected her deeply.  Her mother arranged for her to be hypnotically regressed to the night on the dock, and this time taken aboard the UFO.  Bella’s alien encounters became the bond between mother and daughter–until Bella broke free.  “I don’t want this experience anymore!”

“You can’t make sense of something like this!” the experiencer, now a young woman and a scientist, cries out.  It’s “something that I don’t understand, probably will never understand. … You just recognize it, respect that it happened, and you just continue on.”

And I?  I recognize the event; I respect that it happened.  I have no explanation for its happening, no theory of what in the physical world may have befallen those three not-quite-adolescents on the dock that December night, of which all three seem to have preserved the memory.  What Bella shared with us reinforces my conviction that a UFO witness is not just a bystander, someone who happened to be in the right place to see a vehicle from Zeta Reticuli or wherever come cruising by.  He or she is an essential participant in the event, which in Bella’s case–her brother’s and Brennan’s also?–wove itself into her psychic life and her family life for years to come.

UFOlogists, hearing Bella’s story, are bound to think back to the Pascagoula (Mississippi) abduction of October 11, 1973, when two fishermen–one older and one younger, an eerie parallel to Bella’s dream–went forth to a dock on the Pascagoula River to catch fish, and found themselves fished for by a greater Fish.  Perhaps also back to the granddaddy of UFO encounters–“UFO” not in the sense of “spaceship,” but of the alien, the undetermined, the numinous.

“It came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the River Chebar, that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God …” (Ezekiel 1:1).

And from there the vision unfolds–living creatures, “wheels,” fiery throne and all, starting from the river.  (As in Daniel 10:4-11, possibly written in imitation of Ezekiel, where, as in Bella’s experience, “a great trembling” falls upon Daniel’s companions, “and they fled to hide themselves.”)

The “River Chebar” (Hebrew k’var), found nowhere in the Bible except as the locus of Ezekiel’s “UFO” vision, is usually identified as the “nar kabari/u, ‘the Kabaru canal,’ an obscure body of water” mentioned in Babylonian documents as lying near the city of Nippur (Moshe Greenberg’s commentary on Ezekiel).  From the historical perspective, I wouldn’t dispute this.

But perhaps there’s also a psychological dimension to that river, hinted at by the use of k’var in late Biblical and post-Biblical Hebrew as an adverb, “already,” pointing toward that which has been before.  An ancient rabbinic text uses this understanding of Ezekiel’s river to buttress its claim that the angels were archaic beings, their existence prior even to the Garden of Eden.  “As it is written, ‘This was the living creature that I saw beneath the God of Israel by the River of That-Which-Was-Before, and I knew that they were cherubim'” (Midrash Genesis Rabbah 21:9, quoting Ezekiel 10:20).

Was it beside some River of That-Which-Was-Before, something primordial in the human psyche that transiently intersected with the physical river by Bella’s home, that she and her companions met their UFO?