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.