“You’re holding out for a real drink?”
“Too early,” I told him.
“Not for a beer,” he said.
He disappeared somewhere and came back shortly with two bottles of some microbrew with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on the label. I noticed that he also had a brown accordion folder with him, bulging with papers. He didn’t say anything about that to me as he settled himself into a chair.
During his short absence, I’d picked up one of the magazines, which featured a story about poltergeists. It was still in my lap when he handed me the beer and it prompted me to begin our conversation by saying, “So, ghosts and ghoulies. What got you involved in all that?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I was a DJ for a lot of years. A lot. There were a couple of different jobs before that—nothing really important except for four years I did in the army. Straight out of high school. I was a ham—an amateur radio enthusiast—from the time I was a kid, so they sent me to the Signal Corps. I was assigned to the radio shack on a base in Germany and I guess that’s when it started; sometimes the pilots would see odd things when they were flying. Occasionally, I’d pick up some chatter about some weird thing they’d seen or picked up on radar, but when they landed, if you asked them about it, they’d clam up. As far as the Signal Corps was concerned, there were no UFOs or anything like that, so making a report about seeing anything unusual—unless there was a possibility that it had some military importance—was seriously discouraged. I wasn’t discouraged, though. I was fascinated. But so was someone else,” Jack continued. “Do you know who Howard Gilmartin is?”
“Sure,” I said. I took a sip of my beer and decided it wasn’t all that great. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t used to the taste; at the bar, we never stocked microbrews, just the standard labels, so the few times when I was out somewhere and had a beer, I tended to buy what I served. Jack must have seen my reaction, so he offered to get me something else. I said no, but he insisted.
“Let me get my hosting duties over with,” he said, “and then I’ll tell you the Blue Awareness version of the creation story.”
“Which will get us to the Wild Blue Yonder?” I asked, reminding him what I really wanted to know.
“Eventually,” he said.
He put the brown folder down on the floor and left the room again, returning with a can of Miller Lite.
“Better?” he asked, as he handed it to me.
“Better,” I told him.
He settled back into his chair and then he began to explain.
Jack told me that Howard Gilmartin had also been what he called a radioman, though he had served in the navy, in World War II, years before Jack’s time. Gilmartin—much like Avi—had been a dedicated amateur radio operator when he was a boy. Probably because of that skill, when he was drafted into the service he, too, had been assigned to a radio shack, but his post was on a carrier that fought its battles in the South Pacific. On this ship, it was the custom to name different areas where the crew worked: they ate in the Pineapple Lounge and showered in the Tiki Hut. But the sailors who manned the radios and radars had a different idea about what to call the place where they spent their days and nights; because their main job was to track airplanes, both their own and the enemy’s, they had dubbed their workspace The Wild Blue Yonder.
Jack continued his story. Radar, he said, was still a relatively new technology at the beginning of the war, when Gilmartin had been drafted, but on the carrier he became fascinated by it and was training to become an operator. One night, someone told him to climb the tower where the radar was positioned to clean off some debris, and that’s when he saw what he thought was another crewman standing on a platform under the radar array. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, exactly the kind of figure that lived in my dreams—or my memory—the same one that Ravenette had described to me. Flat, gray, featureless. Standing on the platform next to the radars. Gilmartin froze, momentarily unable to believe what he was seeing, but as he watched, the shadow figure leaned against one of the radar dishes and pushed it, slightly changing its position. Apparently, without even thinking about what he was doing, Gilmartin moved toward the figure which, finally noticing him, turned toward him and emitted a sound that Gilmartin later described as somewhere between a growl and a high-pitched hiss. Painful to listen to and clearly unfriendly. Dangerously, aggressively unfriendly. The sound somehow emanated from within the shadowy figure that had no face, no eyes or nose or mouth, snaking outward like radio static carried on the damp night air. Shocked, Gilmartin climbed down the tower and ran into the radio shack.
Maybe he was going to tell the other crew members what he saw, maybe not. But when he entered the shack, the other technicians were already dealing with a mystery of their own: the radars were registering strange signals, too faint and on the wrong frequencies to indicate that they were pinging off any real, physical target. Possibly they were echoes or some malfunction of the equipment. They were about to send Gilmartin back up the towers when they suddenly faded away. Having had a few minutes to think about how his fellow crew members would have reacted to him confessing that he had encountered some kind of alien being readjusting the positioning of their radars—and that might be the cause of the weird signals they were receiving—Gilmartin decided to keep quiet. That was the only time in his entire life that Gilmartin ever saw the shadow figure or personally encountered the phenomenon of what later came to be called ghost signals.
“Does any of this sound familiar?” Jack prodded. Well, of course it did. When I admitted as much, Jack said, “So do you want to go on trying to convince me that your friend on the fire escape was a dream?”
My reaction was to try to make light of the idea. “At least he must have liked me better because he didn’t hiss at me.”
That made Jack laugh. “Yes, I’m sure he liked you better. Even an alien could tell that Howard Gilmartin was an asshole from the get-go.”
“You know,” I said to Jack, “I went to a Blue Awareness introduction session when I was . . . well, back in the hippie days, in San Francisco. They explained how Howard Gilmartin had founded the Blue Awareness but they never mentioned anything like the story you just told me.”
“No, of course not,” he agreed. “Because that would make Gilmartin sound like a coward. Instead, when he got out of the service and started writing, he turned the story around. In his version, the alien—whom he describes as looking like a shadow—is hostile to him at first, but Gilmartin is able to create a rapport with him. Apparently, somehow the alien senses that Gilmartin is not your everyday human: he’s a superior being. Smarter, stronger, a highly advanced version of your everyday homo sapiens. Anyway, over the course of the next few days, the shadowy alien returns again and again to Gilmartin’s radar station and has a lot of long conversations with him—only in the stories, the radar installation is somewhere in a remote desert area of the southwest instead of on a navy ship and the Gilmartin character is the lone operator stationed at this post, where he works for a secret government agency. Eventually, he quits because the higher ups at the agency don’t believe him when he reports his particular close encounter with this strange being, or the information that his visitor revealed to him, which is that humans are actually the descendents of an ancient alien race who deliberately placed us on this planet long ago. It seems that over the course of time, we lost our collective memory about our real origins. Somewhere in our recent history, however, the aliens began returning to remind a small, select group of individuals that we have just taken on these shell bodies to accommodate the conditions of living on Earth. As the stories progress, the Gilmartin character learns more and more about the plans that the aliens have for these special humans: they are the ones destined to become the first people to be made ‘aware’ that they are the aliens’ seed and that they have to reclaim their true nature, which is, more or less, to join the master race of beings who run the universe. That’s where the Blue Box comes in. It’s a device that the alien gives the Gilmartin character to help him and the people who will follow the movement he establishes to develop their consciousness, rid themselves of their human nature and remember their alien identities.”