In elementary school, my girlfriend and I were in the playground playing on the spider. You know, the rounded, metal jungle-gym. I was near the top and my girlfriend was at the very top. I was watching her. She let herself down through the bars and she was hanging by her hands. She let go to drop to the ground but she didn’t fall. She just hung there in the air, with no contact with the bars. After a few moments, she suddenly dropped to the ground. When she landed she looked at me and said “Did you see that!?” “Did you see that!?” Yes, I had seen it. After that, she climbed up those bars over and over again, dropping herself from the top, just as she had before, but that strange thing didn’t happen again.

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In the early 1960’s, my sister’s boyfriend gave me a reel-to-reel tape player. It was an older one but it worked fine and, at age 13, it felt like a real treasure. I lived in a rural area with few other kids around so I was often bored, looking for something to do. One summer day, walking by myself down one of the narrow, country roads, I saw that someone had taken a reel of audio tape and had apparently thrown it out of their car window. The tape was completely unraveled and tangled in the weeds and tall grass alongside the road. Having nothing better to do, I went home, got an empty reel and returned to where the tape was and started to carefully wind it onto the reel. I finally finished and hurried home to play it. After all, wouldn’t it make sense that a spy or someone like that would throw a tape out of a car window? I turned on the tape. “…the battle which took place tonight…” there was a battle? “… has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders…” The Army was fighting a machine? “One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean..." What? I live in Connecticut! "Railroad tracks are torn and service from New York to Philadelphia discontinued…” What the heck!? “… except routing some of the trains through Allentown and Phoenixville. Highways to the north, south, and west are clogged with frantic human traffic. Police and army reserves are unable to control…” O.K., that was enough. I ran to my mother and started telling her about this amazing tape I found that had probably belonged to a spy and the Army was defeated and we should call the government or something and… She came over to listen to the tape. Within moments she was smiling broadly and telling me about an old made-for-radio play called “War of the Worlds.”

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I dropped my two older daughters off at school and was going back home with my youngest daughter. There is this long, straight, flat stretch of road on the top of a hill. At the end of that stretch the road goes sharply down, though still straight. About 500 feet down from the top of the hill is a left-hand turn, the first left, the road I take to go home. That morning, I went from the flat part of the road into the down-hill stretch. For a moment I got distracted and looked up to see that I was passing by my turn. Upset with myself for missing the turn, I resolved to take the next left, about another 1,000 feet down the road, though it wasn’t my preferred way home. Heading further down the hill I noticed that, ahead of me, was the turn that I had just missed. Only this time I made the turn. Even though this happened a year ago, you’re the first person I’ve told this story to. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy.

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I grew up in New Orleans. We moved there when I was five. My mother loved it. She and my Dad were from the Mid-West.  My Mom just loved living in New Orleans. She fit right in, which is kind of a hard thing to do if you’re not from New Orleans. She passed away in 1992. She passed away and it was very sad. Years later I went to a meeting there, a professional meeting, in New Orleans. I hadn’t been back for years… since Katrina. I was there in my hotel room and I came out of the bathroom and I just saw this shape in the room and I had never seen a ghost before. I thought “There’s something here.” I just began to cry. On another day, I was in the main room of my hotel room and the blow-dryer hopped off the counter. Maybe I didn’t have the cord wrapped right but I’ve never had another blow-dryer hop off the counter. I think it was my mother. She loved New Orleans so much, maybe she decided to stick around.

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This encounter occurred during the month of May, 1987. I lived in McPherson, Kansas. My parents lived in Salina, Kansas. My husband was a sheriff’s deputy and worked the 4-12 shift.  On Friday or Saturday evenings, I would leave our home early in the evening and take my two daughters, aged 4 and 5-months-old, and drive to Salina to visit with my parents for the evening. I always left my parents' home at 10:00 in the evening, and always called my mother when I and the children returned home so she knew we were safe and off the highway. It was a 30-minute drive from Salina to McPherson on the highway. Lindsborg is 14 miles from Salina, halfway back to
McPherson. As I approached Lindsborg’s lights on my right hand side, I glanced back at my sleeping 4-year-old and also at my infant daughter asleep in her carrier in the front seat of my car. I could see the sodium lights of the rest area, called “Stuckey’s” about a mile ahead and to my right off the highway. I became aware that I saw something outside of my driver's-side window. I looked up in the sky. Around 500 feet up, across the double highway a solid black shape was ‘hanging’ in the air. I recall there was a red light, a green light and a white light and they were in the corners of the object. I determined it was a black triangle-shaped object. It was totally silent, not moving, just hanging there, blotting out the stars and clouds in the night sky. I rolled down my window to listen, but there was no sound except my tires on the pavement. I thought, “I should stop for a moment to see what this is.” I remember pulling over to the side of the road on the highway. There were cars across the grassy center on the opposite side of the highway also stopping. One car behind me was also pulling over. I looked over at my sleeping daughter in the front seat, and opened my car door. I had my right hand on the steering wheel, my left hand on the top of my open door pulling myself up out of the car. My left foot was on the road of the highway, my right still on the floorboard of my car. I looked up and this triangle shape was just THERE. Hanging.  Silent with three soft lights barely shining. 

My car tires bumped up over the raised part of our driveway and I parked my car. I took my 4-year-old into the house and put her in her bed. I returned to the car and got my 5-month-old daughter and the diaper bag out of the front seat. I set her, in her carrier, down on the couch in the living room and was surprised to see headlights turn
into our driveway and flash across our kitchen window. My husband, a sheriff’s deputy, burst into the front door, both angry and worried. “Where have you been?” he demanded. I was rather surprised but told him, “I just left mothers…what are you doing home so early?” “EARLY?” he shouted, “It’s midnight! Your mother has been going crazy calling the department, saying you must have had a wreck. I have half the department out looking in the ditches for you!” I was stunned. I looked at the clock on the stove, it said ‘12:05’. I said that was impossible, that I had JUST left there 35 minutes ago. How could it be after midnight? I told him what I had seen in the sky and when he calmed down a bit, he called information and got the telephone number of the Salina Air Base and handed me the phone. I dialed the number and a nice young man answered. After I explained about the triangle-shaped ‘plane’ I saw, I asked him if the Army was testing any new aircraft over the highway between Salina and Lindsborg. He said he was not sure, but he would transfer me to someone who could answer my questions. Another man got on the phone and identified himself as a Colonel. He was very nice at first, questioning me about who was with me when I saw this shape, what time it happened and more general questions. He then turned cold. “What is your name, ma’am? What is your address?” I put my hand over the phone and whispered to my husband, “He wants my name and address.” My husband took the phone out of my hand and hung up. He said, “They want to know who you are and where you live for a reason.” This was long before the days of caller I.D. and cell phones, being 1987. 

After that experience, I began to develop a fear of the nighttime. I would go in the car at night, but years went by and I continued to lean forward and search through the windshield for “something.” I had a very disturbing auditory experience for years, a low heavy ‘droning’ cycling in and out, I told my husband for years, while holding my ears, “Don’t you HEAR that? It’s driving me crazy!” It sounded like a very large piece of machinery, with a very large engine droning on and on, from very far away. I watched the night sky constantly, and avoided as much as possible going out after dark. I found a place on my right arm, on the back, right above the elbow – there was something sharp and stabbing in my arm. I would squeeze
this area and feel something very sharp deep in the skin. I had it for years. During this time, I would have auditory experiences. If I stubbed my toe or bumped my shin, a hot ‘zip of electricity’ would run along the back of my head from one ear to the other and a robotic mechanical voice could be heard only by me. “The small toe is injured.” “ The right leg is injured.” Always this mechanical, emotionless voice. I thought I was going crazy. I had a total hysterectomy in February of 1997. From the time I had the hysterectomy, the voice, whenever I was injured, stopped. I continued to notice the sharp object on the back of my arm and determined to remove whatever it was, got a needle and began digging on my arm. As I am not left handed and it was on the back of my right arm, this was awkward and not very successful. My husband knew about this sharp object and encouraged me to try to remove it. After considerable digging and squeezing, a piece of razor thin white ‘plastic’ came out of my arm. It was approximately one  inch long and came to a dagger point. I showed my husband the object and he told me to save it. That was in 1999. I regret I cannot remember what I did with this object. My mind conveniently ‘forgot’ whether I saved it or discarded it. 

This is my story. My husband is now a Chief of Police and will verify under oath all that I have related. I am quite willing to undergo hypnosis or lie detector to verify my claim.

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1973, I was standing on the grass, off the side of a road in Washington State, when several police officers, pulling up in speeding cruisers and motorcycles, surrounded me and pointed their guns at me, hand-cuffed me, pushed my face down hard onto the burning hot hood of the police cruiser. I was two weeks shy of twenty years old and had hair half-way down my back. I was with a guy with a butch haircut. They tried to take my backpack off my back while my hands were hand-cuffed behind my back, ripping out some of my hair in the process. They were very rough. As I stood, they pulled off my boots and socks. Their hands went up my pant-legs, in my pockets, down my pants. They knew that one of us was AWOL from the Army and they were going to find out which one of us it was. It took them about 15 minutes to figure it out.

My knapsack had been emptied and the contents kicked around by the police. When they decided it was the other guy they were looking for, they took me out of the back of the cruiser, unhandcuffed me and screamed at me to "pick up that shit and get the fuck out of here!" I was shocked and sickened. They took him away in the back of a police car and I was left alone. I picked up my clothes and other things and put it all back into my pack.  Then I walked the half-mile to the next highway entrance, put my pack down, sat on it and sobbed. I had never been so scared in my life... the freedom they so crudely and completely took from me... and it was the 4th of July.

In 1995, I got divorced. The legal act was completed the following year. But the conversation about ending our marriage, and the actual ending of our marriage, that was on July 4th. It was scary but liberating.

I look at the 4th of July differently now.

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This is a story of a miracle. It was 1971, I was 18 years old and I had become homeless the year before. A Christian family had taken me in and we read the bible and did drugs every day. The man of the house was a small-time drug dealer. When it came to the bible, at first I didn’t believe and I struggled to understand what I was reading. One night, feeling desperate and alone and hopeless, I asked Jesus to come into my heart, though I had no hope that anything would happen. I cried myself to sleep. In the morning when I woke
up, I felt strangely refreshed. Everything seemed to have a sharpness and a glow around it. The Old-English bible I had been reading had been printed in 1819 and it had been very difficult for me to understand. But that morning, when I read my bible, everything was crystal clear. I understood everything, simply and completely. We lived about five miles from town and I did not have a car. It was a rural area with little traffic so hitch-hiking was unreliable. Most of the time I just walked all of the way to town. Soon after the bible became clear to me, I was walking into town and I was passing this area that had four raised-ranches in a row. They were the only houses around. Several dogs lived in that little neighborhood. I had walked past the third house when I got this feeling that I should look behind me. About a hundred feet behind me there were three dogs running at me, their teeth bared. Front and center in the pack was a large German Sheppard. He was growling in a threatening way and looked especially vicious. I felt deeply calm. I looked right at him and I said “Jesus loves you.” And, I swear, he froze in mid-air and mid-stride, not standing on the road, but frozen in mid-air. The other two dogs kept running towards me, so I said to them “Jesus loves you.” And they, too, completely froze. I turned and continued walking where I was going. After 50 feet or so I looked back at the dogs and now they were standing in the road, each with a shocked and dazed look of “what hit me?” Later, I found out that the German Sheppard’s name was "Satan.” 

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My Mom was home and she was doing something in the kitchen when she heard a knock on the front door. She wanted to finish what she was doing so
it was a couple of minutes before she went to the door. By then the man had
already begun to leave. She had a dog with a deep bark and the dog was barking. My Mom looked out the window as the man was leaving and she caught a glimpse of his face. About two weeks later, on the news, she recognized the man’s face. He was someone who had killed multiple people in her area. He had been pretending to sell something door-to-door.

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I ran into my old boyfriend in Portland and he asked me “When did you get to
Portland?” Then he said “No, wait, let me tell you when you got to Portland.”
And he told me the exact day I got to Portland, months after I had arrived here. He told me that he had had nightmares about me and knew that I must be in town. I ran into him at the beginning of September and we hung out. We had always been very attracted to each other. The last time I saw him was on September 11th and we got into a huge argument. The next morning he woke up and said to me “Would you like to go to the coast or would you like to go to Mount Hood?” If we had gone to the coast, my phone would have died and I would have never gotten the phone call. So instead, we go to Mount Hood and as we’re driving there I get this phone call and a friend says to me on the phone “You’re not going to date him again!” And I said “No, I’m not going to date him again.” He overheard me and got very upset and he’s crying and we get into an argument. I sit in the car for hours trying to talk him down. Eventually I had to get out of the car because I realize that I can’t calm him down. I apologized for upsetting him and I promised him I would
never call him again.  A couple of weeks later I went somewhere and ended up sleeping under a tree. I woke up in the morning out of a nightmare and I thought to myself “Somebody is dead and it’s my fault.” I told some friends about this dream and everyone said “Oh, no, no, no. That’s just a dream.” I went back to Portland and a friend told me that my old boyfriend had killed himself two days after September 11th. I was pregnant with his only child. It was especially strange because I was told I would never have children because of cancer I had as a child.

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Six months ago, I had a friend who was in prostitution. She got beat up by her pimp really bad in a hotel room one night. He beat her to the point where she has kidney problems and PTSD. I was out here and I tried to take her off the street and help her out. Well, you know how when you have PTSD your mind sees different things. I was giving her four or five 400mg ibuprofen to sleep every night, so she wouldn’t fight in her sleep, which she did on a nightly basis. There was one time we had a fight. I knew it was coming and we broke up. There was this guy and I told him “Don’t take advantage of her. It isn’t right.” You know, she has mental problems. So he laughs in my face and he takes advantage of her. Six days later she tried to jump off a bridge. So I made a bargain with God. I said “God, listen. I don’t know where she is and I don’t know if she is o.k. but if you save her life and don’t let her jump off a bridge, I will marry her. Regardless of how I feel and regardless that I can’t trust her, I will marry her if you save her because she means that much to me.” So, she’s alive. And my question is, what does that mean for me? I haven’t told her about the promise I made. She is trying to practice forgiveness and I’m not ready to forgive this guy yet. Every time I see that guy, I think about throwing him in that water right there (pointing to a deep river.) It would have been different had he not known what he did. But when he laughed in my face and said he was going to do it anyway, that’s when it became personal. Everyone says that God will handle it in his own way. I believe in God but what am I supposed to do with the hate that I have for the guy? If I kill him, I’m breaking one of the Ten Commandments, I’m breaking one of my deals with God. But if I let him live, it’s a constant reminder that I had to bargain with God because of something that he wanted to do. So it’s a Catch-22. How do you believe but not be able to practice it? He left her on a bridge to die after he got what he wanted. How do you forgive that? How do you have compassion for that? I can’t not believe in God but I also can’t give forgiveness for that. And I can’t say that I support her and continue to watch him rub it in my face. What happens when your religion and reality hit up against each other like that?

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