Well, I have had some strange days and nights in my time, but this past Sunday (the 5th) was spectacularly odd, even by my standards! I had flown out to California for a day of business, when distinct weirdness reared its odd head.
As I was being checked-in at the hotel I was staying in, I quite literally did a double-take when I noticed that the name-badge of the chap on the desk was - wait for it -
Charles Fort! I was like: "WTF??!!"
It didn't end there. My room number was 1163. Only a day before my flight, I was working on an article on the JFK assassination and its alleged UFO links. When was JFK shot? November 1963. Or: 11/63. My room: 1163.
After crashing out for a while and pondering on the high-strangeness that was afoot, good mate Greg Bishop came over to the hotel and we drove back to his place, chatted, caught up, and then went and got an early dinner, as we were going to do Greg's radio show -
Radio Misterioso - that night.
Before the show, Greg shared with me a veritable treasure-trove of UFO-themed material he had acquired some years ago, contained in which was a copy of the FBI's file on infamous Contactee, George Hunt Williamson.
I wish I had had this file when I wrote my
On the Trail of the Saucer Spies book (since it told a great deal of how the US Government spied on the UFO community), but I will do a lengthier post on the entire file at a later date, as it contains some classic gems and hilarious nuggets of data from the early years of Saucerdom.
At this point, I should explain that although the file was titled "
George Hunt Williamson" a significant portion of its pages were devoted to yet another Contactee - an equally controversial one - Truman Bethurum.
I wrote extensively about Bethurum in
my Contactees book. He was the lucky geezer who claimed flirty encounters in the Nevada desert in 1952/53 with a hot alien space-babe known as Captain Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion (yes, the usual wacky and absurd Space-Brother stuff that no-one should take literally - although I do believe something of
a hypnagogic nature occurred to Bethurum).
Old Truman was quite taken by Aura, who he described as being "tops in shapeliness and beauty" and whose space-outfit "did fit so snuggly." There's really not much I can add to that, except...
It seems that the FBI was quite taken by Her Royal Hotness from the stars, too. In the papers on Bethurum, an FBI agent (whose name is blacked out on the available files) relates the story of how Bethurum met hotty Aura, who is described as - and I quote the Bureau - "...a ravishing woman commandant."
I have to wonder what was going through the mind of the agent writing that! (See the top of this post for an extract from the FBI files on Bethurum.)
Then, after digging into the file, it was time for Greg's show, in which we covered everything from the aforementioned oddness at the hotel, the Aura Rhanes saga, the state of paranormal-themed TV (a clue: it's all rubbish), and much more of a controversial and Fortean nature.
Finally, there was the trip back to the hotel, before an early Monday morning flight back to Dallas.
So, that was my weird weekend, one which involved an encounter with Charles Fort, the JFK assassination, a space-captain from a far-away world, and the FBI.
Do you even get the feeling that our "reality" is just a big joke on the part of some deranged computer-programmer in a strange and unearthly dimension of
Matrix-style proportions? Perhaps I took too many red pills...
