The Extraterrestrials of Indian Stream

Page 6

by Ellen Barry

In the North Country, the sky seems close and the state capitol seems far. That's been true for three centuries.

Colebrook physician, historian, and geologist William Gifford -- who is still called "Doc Gifford" even though he gave up his license in protest of bureaucratic interference -- tells a story about a whole town that was impounded in the mid 19th century because the farmers refused to pay taxes. One of Gifford's wife's ancestors purchased the town, for $18.04, and he took a trip over to inspect his property. He banged on one farmer's door and asked him -- just out of curiosity -- how much he owed. The farmer said, "Seventy-five cents."

"It was just 75 cents, but he would not pay it," Gifford adds. "There are still people around here who think like that."

But it is in precisely this rocky, resistant atmosphere that the UFOs -- and the body of ideas connected with them -- have found purchase. To Sandy Black, as to many, many Americans, aliens are a part of the same narrative framework as the Trilateral Commission and the approaching destruction of the planet. "All the Whitewater stuff is a diversion," she says. "Our society has gotten the point of bread and circuses."

Her beliefs are strong and sincere, and she considers them a guard against cataclysm. She tells people about them. It's part of a process -- ideas multiply themselves through the media, through the Internet, or through people, and the UFO story evolves. The ufologist Jacques Vallee explained the evolution of ideas this way: "Conventional science appears more and more perplexed, befuddled, at a loss to explain. Pro-ET ufologists become more dogmatic in their propositions. More people become fascinated with space and the new frontiers of consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture in the direction of a new image of man."

Here, in an area that seems to have more than its share of anomalies in the first place, the mysterious closeness of nature has combined with deep-rooted politics, creating an organic theory of government conspiracy and the supernatural. The ideas -- whether they were born in John Mack's forums or in Internet discussion groups -- bring meaning to what was already there: the eerie field, the hovering spacecraft, the huge insects, the yeti, the night lights, the day lights, the inexplicable humming of the earth.

Except that -- as people up here will tell you -- they've been seeing UFOs for centuries. That's how Black figures it, anyway. To her, she's just scribbling notes on a phenomenon that dwarfs her. Asked whether the number of local reports bears any significant relationship to the amount of UFO activity in the area, she is quiet for a long time, thinking. "No," she says at last.

People see what they see, she points out. She does not, in the end, consider herself a vital figure.

MUFON on the California suicide

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.