“Uh-uh, no, on the scanner. And they were moving at incredible speeds. Accelerating naught to a thousand miles an hour instantly, then stopping dead, reversing, turning right angles. Crazy stuff you normally only read about in books. It was pretty exciting and we were all pretty high.”
“High?”
“No! No, not high. None of us was into that. No, high on adrenaline; on the buzz. So then the lights just vanished. We sat around waiting for them to come back, but they didn’t and finally a bunch of the guys got tired and went into their tents.” She paused. “I’m trying to remember who stayed… Danny, obviously, me, Don and Jasmine, and Paul… There may have been some others. The conversation was all between Don and Danny. To say they were excited would be a huge understatement. They were tripping. Then, it must have been about two in the morning, Jasmine suddenly freaks out and starts having this kind of fit. She’s shaking all over and kind of moving her hands and feet. I remember asking Don if she was epileptic. He said she wasn’t, but he was looking for something to put between her teeth to stop her from biting her tongue. We were all sort of, what the hell do we do?” She stopped, shrugged and blinked a few times. “Then it just stopped. She lay still, on her back, with her eyes closed, and started talking.”
I leaned forward. “Have you read Don’s book?”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t want to.”
“Have you discussed what happened that night with many people?”
“I lost touch with the group immediately after what happened, and I think this is probably one of the only times I have discussed it with anybody in all this time. Why?”
I nodded. “OK, good, I would like you to try and be as accurate and precise as possible about what happened next, and in particular about what Jasmine said.”
She looked a little surprised. “OK.” She thought for a moment. “It was like it wasn’t really her talking. Her voice kind of changed. It was deeper, kind of weird. And she said… I can’t remember it verbatim, Detective Stone, but basically she said that each of us there had some kind of function, or purpose, but that she and Danny were like their messengers or spokespeople, and that they should go up a path—it was a path we had explored earlier that led to a kind of clearing—and there they would have a close encounter with these beings.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I am not proud of my feelings right then. You know, maybe I am just really shallow. Everybody else there was, like, blown away because we were making contact with ET, and these two guys were going to carry their message to mankind. But me, all I could think of was why was it Jasmine going up that path with Danny and not me?
“So when Don turns around and says, no way, he will not allow Jasmine to go, I was the happiest chick in the world. So he is saying ‘Either we all ago, or nobody goes!’, most of the others are saying we should follow the aliens’ instructions to the letter, and me, I am saying, let’s me and Danny go. You know, like a compromise. And then Don got real mad, and he started quoting cases at us about where humans had been abducted and mutilated. Um… he quoted Darlington, Ohio in 1958, Sergeant Lovett in New Mexico in 1956, Guarapiranga in Brazil, in the 1980s, 1988 I think. And several other cases…”
She trailed off. We waited a bit, but she just sat and bit her lips. Finally, I said, “What about these cases, Jane?”
“Well, you’ve heard of cattle mutilation?”
“Something. Not much.”
“Well, Detective, however skeptical you are, this is something that has been going on in the Midwest for at least forty years and even the FBI don’t know what to make of it. It’s a problem, because ranchers are losing stock, sometimes by the hundred, and in every case the genitals, the lips, and other parts of the anatomy have been surgically removed, without leaving any trace of blood, or any tracks. There is basically no sign that there was anybody there. You go and talk to those ranchers, and we have, and they’ll all tell you they have seen lights in the sky at night, and in the morning they go and they have five, six, seven—sometimes more—dead cows, all surgically mutilated. Now, each one of those animals weighs half a ton. And there isn’t a trace of blood, a tire track, a foot print…”
She paused. “Now, what Don was telling us that night was that this also happened to people, but it’s something that is hushed up even within the UFO community, and he listed a number of cases where people had been found exsanguinated, surgically mutilated, with genitals and other parts of their body removed; and in some cases with parts of their body incinerated. As with the cattle, no trace of any person or vehicle was ever found near the body. In the light of those cases, he insisted that if anybody went, we should all go together.” She stopped and studied the expression on my face for a moment, then smiled unhappily. “If you have contacts in the FBI, check with them. You know they visited most of us after Danny’s death? This is real, Detective.”
“It’s also a hell of a coincidence.”
“Maybe. But I can tell you that I had nightmares for two years, thinking about what might have happened to us if I had persuaded Danny that we should go to that glade, that he should go with me instead of Jasmine. I had to see a therapist in the end.”
I grunted. “So in the morning you went back to Donald’s house?”
She nodded.
