The eerie feeling of that night in Boston for the American Academy of Religion meeting settled over the library. The mystery of possibility hung like an invisible fog in the room. Parker Yaffle had been one of the most respected Harvard scholars ever, right up there with William James. This uncredentialed, independently wealthy man had a private academic arrangement with Yaffle, earning the equivalent of a doctorate from him. Terah had often spied Yaffle at a distance at the Academy conference. He was always surrounded by the big names in the field and it was impossible to get close enough to introduce yourself. Terah had been snubbed by lesser academics who thought highly of themselves, and once, when the meeting was held in a rainy Chicago, he was standing outside the McCormick center for a moment when Yaffle had come out without a gaggle of followers. He’d held out a hand to introduce himself, but the academic lackeys quickly appeared and hustled Yaffle into a cab to whisk him off for a night of academic ass-kissing. Terah had trouble accepting that Calum knew him.
Lindsey brought over a folder. An oaken table stood in the center of Calum’s library, large enough for ten readers. “Thank you, Lindsey. You read my mind.”
She slipped into a chair and smiled. “Calum knows what he’s talkin’ about.”
Terah couldn’t believe the signed letters Calum produced. Not only Parker Yaffle, but Anne Quarles, Derrick S. Iray, Brian Abernathy, Ultima Thule, Vannevar Synge, and a host of others, had been in regular correspondance with Calum, validating aspects of his work. His host, in other words, had set up his own doctoral program from universities across the globe.
“I don’t often go on about my credentials like this,” he apologized. “Most of my students don’t know who any of these scholars are. Nor do they care. Most of them aren’t skeptics, either. I’m glad for the challenge, though.
“After Parker’s speech we went for a walk down Newberry Street. It was November in Boston and a chill breeze blew. The white Christmas lights decorated the small ornamental trees along the street. Warm light spilled out from the boutique shops that were still open. Not many pedestrians were out on a night like that. Parker told me that he knew John Mack, a colleague at Harvard, and despite the public posturing, the university authorities knew and respected Mack’s theories.”
“I don’t know John Mack.”
“Mack was the head of the Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School. He also wrote books on and firmly believed in the reality of alien abduction. Don’t smirk. He was deadly serious. All of this, Parker told me, was widely known in the academy and kept under wraps because of the ridicule factor. Professors of religion, he told me, already studied in a field that was considered less rigorous than most. He’d studied ancient languages so difficult that a nuclear physicist would dissolve into tears, but it was never considered essential information. He had less to risk by trying to pry open lesser minds among the academy. Abductions were real. This, he said, was but the ‘pyramidion atop Khufu’—his words. He told me to keep up my work, but for the sake of my own reputation, to keep it low key. Thus you see Rothochtaid has become an invisible institution. Lindsey stumbled into it on a roll of thunder. Literally.”
Terah distractedly looked around at the collection of books. “So, these are all books on esoterica?”
“Paranormal,” Calum corrected. “Some people would see them as esoteric, but there is a difference. Some people, we call them focal agents, have many paranormal experiences in their lives. You have to realize that when I say ‘many’ I mean they have an usual number but they don’t happen all the time. In fact, years can go by without anything strange happening. This is what makes this kind of investigation particularly challenging. I call it the problem of occasional phenomena. If they happened consistently we could set up observational equipment, or ‘laboratory conditions.’ If, as is actually the case, you never know when they will happen, how can you set up a camera?”
“You mean like why pictures of bigfoot are alwaysblurry?”
“Sasquatch isn’t a good example. There are plenty of undiscovered animals, but that doesn’t make them paranormal. Of course, the media ridicule response classifies them along with things that are truly inexplicable, according to our current scientific paradigms. UFOs might be a better example. See? It made you smirk. That’s the ridicule reaction.
“Unidentified Flying Objects are seen. In that sense, they’re ‘real.’ They leave trace evidence (burn marks and such) and this has been well documented. The government, for anyone curious enough to check, has been investigating them since the 1940s. There’s extensive government documentation on them. The media ridicule response makes it difficult to realize just how seriously this has been taken. Are UFOs paranormal? It depends on your definition of paranormal.
“Just because humans haven’t figured out how to travel faster than light doesn’t mean it’s impossible. That’s assuming UFOs are from outer space.”
“Where else would they be from?”
“Some people theorize they’re inter-dimensional travelers. Others that they’re time-travelers. That has the obvious advantage of explaining how they look somewhat human—convergent evolution is recognized here on earth, but on an infinite number of planets would two species develop with two arms ending in fingers, two legs, a head at the top with sense organs ordered eyes, nose, mouth? Possibly, but if they are far distant humans from the future that might explain things. All of these are reasonable questions. They simply go beyond what our science knows.
“The reason I raise this is that we’re trying to get serious research done on the topic, and we need focal agents. I suspect from your skepticism that you’re not one. That’s no value judgment; most people aren’t. Kjell isn’t. But Lindsey is. I took an interest in her because the number of experiences is unprecedented, in my experience. She has an unbelievable number even for a focal agent. And those around her are often brought into the experience. It looks like one is happening right now.”
Terah glanced at Lindsey and screamed.
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