Two alien vegetable sellers

In my recent post "Cucurbits from an alien land," I quoted this passage from Whitley Strieber's book Breakthrough (1995). Strieber is writing about an incident that occurred at his cabin in August 1991. He had invited a group of houseguests for the weekend, including the writer Michael Talbot (who would die less than a year later). Strieber wakes up at about five a.m., hears Talbot's voice, goes downstairs, and sees him at the door.

There was a shadow out there. I could see it clearly. It shocked me, because the likelihood of a stranger appearing at our door in this rather isolated area at five in the morning was vanishingly small. Then I saw that the figure was very thin, and seemed to have a huge head.

The idea that this was a visitor certainly hadn't crossed Michael's mind. . . . Then I heard him say, "are you trying to sell those vegetables?"

It stunned me practically senseless. Then I saw that the visitor was holding a big paper shopping bag full of squash.

In Ed Conroy's Report on Communion (pp. 77-78), the author reproduces a letter, dated 30 July 1988, sent to Strieber (in care of his publisher) by his childhood friend Bill Mebane. Mebane jokingly writes in the voice of Strieber's alien visitor and refers to himself in the third person. He hints at further "Elizabeth Road adventures" (where Strieber grew up) in addition to those recounted in Communion. The ellipsis and brackets are in the published version.

Dear Whitley,

The one chosen to commune with the cosmos. Last Saturday afternoon I have mistakenly landed (flying too low) on the Matterhorm. Carefully climbing down to Zermatt, I was very shocked to find our story on sale in the local bookstore. Without my permission, and most importantly, without my point of view! And what is this Transformation already announced? Have you had other visitors?

Yours jealously

Slant-eyed Sally

P.S. I also visited in Zermatt a certain Signor Mebane (Italo-Texano) who claims his own version of the Elizabeth Road adventures. For example, he does confirm the sighting of a long cigar-shaped "ship" in your back lot, but he also asserts that we had previous contacts in the numerous games of night hide-and-seek around the Flowers' mansion. That was not always Patricia hiding with him! And what about that time your grandfather chased him and Mike Ryan out of the house, who was really to blame? And the old "vegetable wagon" that used to come to Elizabeth Road, who was that mysterious seller? And all the towers and treehouses that you all constructed; those in Mike's backyard, even near his pool; that wooden platform near Bill's bedroom; and all those tree outposts in your front yard. Were you establishing, unconsciously, bridges to the sky? And all the weather balloon and rocket experiments. . . .

This Italo-Texano, a shady character, could go on and on. Perhaps you should establish a direct contact: [address in Rome, Italy listed here].

P.P.S. It's a great book. Congratulations,

Bill

Mebane's letter is obviously tongue-in-cheek, so it's impossible to know how seriously he is proposing that the "vegetable wagon" and its "mysterious seller" had something to do with the visitors. Still, the parallel with the Talbot story is interesting.

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Note: I found the illustration at the top of this post by running an image search for ufo vegetables (because, you know, you can find anything on the Internet). It turns out the same artist recently posted a birdemic cartoon.

A familiar face

Yesterday before work, I picked up Communion and started reading it yet again. I became interested in the cover art and did some searching online for other work by the artist, Ted Seth Jacobs. In particular, I was trying to find his original (unpublished) cover art for Majestic, which had shown a soldier standing over the body of a Gray. The published version was edited in ways that Jacobs found outrageous, including messing with the lighting (Jacobs' particular area of expertise) and airbrushing out the soldier. I remembered the original painting had been published in an online interview back in the nineties, but it seems to have vanished from the Web since then. In the process of searching, I happened upon his original cover art for Transformation (later briefly used on the cover of one edition of Ed Conroy's Report on Communion), and decided to put it in this blog's sidebar.

So, after spending some time thinking about the art of Ted Seth Jacobs, and his cover art for Whitley Strieber books in particular, I went to work. Mondays are pretty easy for me, as I only have a few classes to teach. When the last one was finished, I came down to the lobby of the school.

In the lobby, there's a small section of wall that has been transformed into a whiteboard by sticking something on it. This stick-on whiteboard surface is now old and cracked, but the kids still like to draw on it. It had been clean when I arrived, but at the end of the day I found that at some point someone had doodled a face on it -- a face that reminded me of something.

If this had been the result of a remote-viewing experiment, I would have considered it a pretty strong "hit." So what happened? Subconscious telepathy, with the kid "reading" an image from my mind, or just one of those weird coincidences? Or it could be subconscious precognition on my part, I suppose, with my sudden interest in Jacobs' art triggered by the "premembered" whiteboard image. (I am very sure that none of my students have seen my Strieber books or know of my interest in that author.)

This is far from being the first time one of my students has drawn or written something that seemed to have been taken (with some slight distortion) directly from my mind. In one of the most striking cases (recorded here), I had dreamed about writing a book called Pineapples and Apple Pies -- thinking in the dream that the two terms used the same two morphemes in differing sequence, and realizing only after waking that pie was not the same as pine. The day after the dream, my student wrote, for no apparent reason, the word applepine -- explaining when asked that it was "like pineapple but the other way." (Note: This was many years before "Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen.")