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.

I had been sitting in a bar—oh, maybe 15, 20 minutes at the most—when this man entered and sat down on the stool next to mine. There was nothing extraordinary about him. He was an older man dressed in rather comfortable clothes. He ordered a beer and, for quite a while, the two of us sat there staring at our bottles without exchanging a word.I was preoccupied with the music coming out of the jukebox and he seemed to be mildly interested in the pool game being played just behind us. Then, suddenly, he spoke to me.

“Do you know what the answer is?”

“The answer?” I said, thinking he might have had one beer too many (though I knew otherwise from casual observation).


“Yes, the answer,” he repeated. “Do you know what the answer is? You look like a bright young man.”

I acknowledged the compliment, but assured him I had no idea what the answer might be. Perhaps, I suggested, he could give me a clue or a hint—like, maybe, the question.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said. For a moment the only sound was the cracking of pool balls, then he resumed. “I can’t give you the question. You’ll have to find that out on your own. I’m just down here to observe. But you looked like a pretty bright fella, and I thought maybe you might have known it.”

“The question, you mean?”

“Yes, young man, the question. I was hoping maybe you had tried to figure out the question—“

“And then I would know the answer?”

“It’d be a start. You certainly could not expect to know the answer before knowing the question.”

He had a point. I didn’t want to appear totally dumb, so I decided to ask some question—any question—just so he would know I cared. “You say you are only down here to observe. Do you mind if I ask where you’re down from?”

“Certainly not. I would expect you to be curious about that. I’m from Alpha Centauri.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You are familiar with it?”

“Well, lets say I know of it. I never really met anyone from there before. You’re the first. But I knew it was there.”

“Yes. Well, it’s been quite some time, you understand, since I was there last. Roughly a million years or so.”

“That long?”

“Give or take an era,” he said. The reason he had been sent here, he went on, was to observe earthlings in whatever form we happened to be existing in.

At this point, I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not, but I decided to play along, and what happened next certainly surprised me. I mean, if I was going to go into a strange bar and come off as a celestial being, an interplanetary visitor, I would certainly take a holier-than-thou attitude. I mean, I would immediately profess bewilderment and distaste for such things as war and starvation and corruption. That would just be an easy thing to do, a very natural thing.

But this man—he never told me his name—was quite understanding toward earthlings. Even, it seemed to me, rather generous. Sure, as he pointed out, we had our problems, but we weren’t doing all that badly. “No worse,” he said, “than anyone else in the universe.

“A couple of your wars have escalated out of all proportion,” he admitted, “and human beings do have a tendency toward improper priorities. But, all in all, you’re doing OK. As well as can be expected.”

“As can be expected.” I repeated his words, aware that he was suggesting we could possibly be doing better.

“Well, of course, there are certain things which someone like myself could tell you that would help matters.”

“Like the answer,” I said.

“If I was asked the right question.”

“But no one knows the question.”

“Ah, but it’s there, young man. It’s there—just like the box..”

“What box?”

“The box with the solution in it to solve all of man’s problems. I have it back at my place.”

As I was thinking what to say next, he ordered us two more beers. I tried to pay for mine, but he insisted on buying because, he said, it all went on his expense account anyway.

I asked again about the box. Was it like Pandora’s?

“Hardly,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t think so. See, I already know what’s in the box. And I’m the only one who could open it. You wouldn’t even be able to find it. I suppose I myself would even have trouble—you know how things get lost. I’ve picked up so much junk over the years…but I could find it if I had to. The point is, I already know what’s inside, so there wouldn’t be any surprise.”

“And you say it’s the solution to all man’s problems?”

“All of them.”

For a moment, again, we didn’t speak. I sat there staring into my Schlitz, thinking of all kinds of magic potions and serums and herbs and spices and gadgets and famous quotes and …

“I got it,” I said at last.

“Got what?” he asked.

“Spinach.”

“What are you talking about, young man?”

“Spinach. You have spinach in the box. Your name is Popeye and you’re not really from Alpha Centauri and you’ve got spinach in the box and you think you can lick the world.”

“Are you making a fool of me?”

“Are you making a fool of me?”

“That’s the trouble with you human beings,” he said. “You always think you know it all. That’s what I’ve noticed over the years. No one else can ever be right. You’re very much the disbelievers of the universe. But you’ll learn—someday you’ll learn.”

With that, he collected his change and walked out of the bar. I never saw him again.

At the time, as he said, I was rather a disbeliever. Knowing he couldn’t be drunk, I thought he must be some sort of crank, even though he didn’t talk nonsense. Now, after reading about those 20 people from Oregon, I don’t know what to think.

But I hope they like spinach…