A Tall Tale About a Stellar Visitor

This story appeared in The Los Angeles Times on October 20, 1975 and is the one that frustrated my composition professor so much because he had been trying to get something in the Times for so long. The couple that prepared the Oregonians for rapture are the same ones that cropped up 30 years later as Bo and Peep. I was attempting to poke fun at the whole idea and at the same time pose the question, "How would we or should we react if we really were visited by either a spiritual visitor or an alien visitor?"  I tended to see the man I talked to as sort of a Popeye character.

Looking back it's not much of a story but it was my first to be published and most of the research was done in a bar.

Were those Oregonians better ‘Believers’?

A fictional account of a factual event, which may have been fictional from the start.

I’ve been keeping up with the story of the 20 Oregonians who have left their state with stellar hopes. According to press reports, a mysterious husband-and-wife team paid a visit and enticed them to sell their belongings, and then move to Colorado—in preparation, supposedly, for some future trip into space.

This would be a very hard story for me to believe, verging almost on the impossible, except for one thing. I met the same man—or someone like him—about three years ago in San Pedro. Now I know what you’re thinking but it just isn’t so. I’m no kook or spiritualist or fanatic. Let me just tell you what happened.

Stellar Visitors Everywhere

In Hell on Earth, I write about a lot of events that seem to be tied together even when they occurred many years or often decades apart. Maybe that’s just the writer in me trying to tie things together.

One such event was the publication of my first free-lanced article in the LA Times entitled Tall Tales about a Stellar Visitor. There was just a short mention of the article in the book but there was much more to Tall Tales about a Stellar Visitor that made the event important enough to include in the novel.

The story starts on a quiet night in San Pedro when Cecil and I are sitting in a bar discussing the world and how we could fix it if someone gave us a chance. A man sitting next to us, possibly recognizing our unutilized potential announced to us that he was from Alpha Centauri and that he was down here observing. We spent the next several hours quizzing him to see if he was legit. I believe at one point we put a lighted match inside the heel of his shoe to see if he could feel pain. We also played a little pool with him to see if he had any superhuman skills. We also allowed him to buy numerous rounds to possibly determine just how big of an expense account someone traveling from another star might have to play around with. What we learned was that yes he could feel pain and no he didn’t have any special skills and yes aliens did travel quite comfortably. In the end we couldn’t reach any conclusion as to whether he was telling the truth and eventually returned home and forgot about the alien.

A few months later I picked up the LA Times to find an article about 22 Oregonians who had sold all their possessions and vanished in preparation for a rapture event they believed to be right around the corner, where most rapture events seem to be waiting. These faithful were led by the Bonnie and Clyde of the rapture movement, Marshall Applewhite, who called himself Bo and Bonnie Nettles, who went by the nom de plume Peep. Get it? The obvious question with these kind of stories is how much of it can or should we believe. In my article I related the story about the man in San Pedro from Alpha Centauri, if in fact he really was from Alpha Centauri and if in fact we really were in San Pedro. Again that should have been the end of it but just as some wells never go dry some stories never die.

Twenty years later, living in Virginia Beach, I picked up the paper again to read that 39 members of a cult group, “Heaven’s Gate,” had successfully committed suicide to coincide with the passing of the comet Hale-Bopp overhead, which apparently was their ride out of here. No word on whether the rapture was successful but get this, “Heaven’s Gate” was led by the dynamic duo Bo and Peep.

Put all these things together—the man claiming to be from Alpha Centauri, the Oregonians following Bo and Peep to nowhere, my article debunking the hysteria surrounding these missing Oregonians based on my actual meeting with an alien in a bar, and then the re-appearance of Bo and Peep in yet another trip to nowhere and I decided the episode earned at least a mention in a novel involving more than a little unexplained coming and going and at least a few stellar visitors.