Barbara: The Story of a UFO Investigator Read online

  I picked up a magazine from the table next to me and idly thumbed through the pages while I waited for some cue to speak. He hardly needs me, I thoughts as Bill warmed to his subject and began to explain to the psychic why Sherman should agree to do a TV documentary for a new little upstart television production company in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  My God. The voices in the room faded to an unheard monotone as I gazed at the image on the page in front of me. It... It couldn’t be. A sensation of brisk cold, followed by warmth, swept over me. I studied the picture, then allowed the magazine to fall to my lap as scenes from my memory flashed before me.

  Strange beings in a Missouri attic. An unformed but real figure sitting before the glistening keys of my Grandmother’s huge grand piano. A carpet of emerald green rolling meadows.

  I continued to stare into the space in front of me as the scenes projected themselves at a quickening pace.

  Earth fell away, open space enveloped me ... the figure of the man appeared again, this time with more definition, moving in rhythm to his music ... my Mother’s porch, the walls spun about me as I danced pirouettes on a summer’s evening.

  Now the scenes came faster, each almost overlaying the one before. A collage of remembrance blurred before my gaze.

  Giant spheres suspended in space, a figure of a man pounding out classical music at my Grandmother’s piano, an alien being holding my finger, touching my hair and pointing to the tender skin just back of my ear...

  Then the scenes slowed. Slowed, stopped and held, on the man at the piano. I stared at him, concentrated on his features, features refined, yet distinct. Dark brown hair parted on the side with a lock falling lazily across his forehead. Grey eyes. Deep and compelling eyes. Nose straight and thin. Chiseled jaw culminating in a determined chin.

  “Are you all right?”

  The images, invaded by gradual transparency, faded slowly.

  “Barbara?” A man’s voice penetrated my reverie.

  This was one of my first experiences with supernatural visions or occult happenings, and it frightened me more than just a bit. I closed my eyes and held my lids tightly shut to force the remains of my vision away. When I opened them a moment later, I focused on the concerned face of Harold Sherman.

  “Are you okay, Barbara?”

  I felt the warmth of the psychic’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Yes, sorry.” I smiled and tried to collect myself, tried to push the image of the man at the piano from my memory. “I don’t know what happened.” I looked down at the magazine which lay open on the floor. “Who?” my voice was hardly more than a whisper, “Who is that?” I pointed to the photograph of the man with the wave of hair angled across his forehead.

  I felt a light touch on my temple. Startled I looked up from the magazine and met the gaze of the psychics Harold Sherman. His intense vision seemed to reach into my skull to explore the recesses of my mind. A light tingling began at my temple where Sherman still held the fingers of his right hand. I felt the tingling grow and spread with caressing warmth to the back of my neck and down the line of my spine. I leaned into the power of the man’s hand.

  After a few seconds his hand fell away. His lips parted as he smiled at me. It was a smile that spread to his eyes, a smile which touched me with the same delicacy his fingers had shown as he’d touched my forehead only a moment before.

  He...He knows, I thought.

  “What’s going on?” My producer shuffled in his chair and turned to Sherman when the author returned to the chair where he had been sitting.

  “Awhile ago, before you arrived,” Sherman ignored my boss’ question, “A national network called and offered to pay me to do a documentary.”

  “What’s ...” My boss looked blank.

  “Do you still want to do a documentary about me and my work?” Sherman interrupted.

  “Of course we do.” My answer tumbled over my lips.

  “We can’t pay you anything.” My producer tossed out the words quickly.

  Sherman concentrated his attention on me. The room seemed warm and abnormally quiet. “I want my documentary done right. To be sure that it is what I want, I’ll pay your company $10,000. But it has to be just right,” He paused, smiled, then added with a gesture toward the floor, “The man in the magazine is a noted French scientist, Dr. Jacques Vallee.”

  I was caught unaware but I grappled in my purse for pencil and paper to write down the name.

  “He is a renowned physicist as well as a UFO and psychic investigator. I believe you should meet him, Barbara.”

  “I’d love to.” I think I might have gulped the words.

  “He’ll be speaking in St. Louis next month at a paranormal conference. While you’re there,” Sherman spoke with authority. As though there were no question that I would be going to St. Louis the following month. “While you’re there, you, Barbara, will meet with Doctor Vallee.”

  When we left Sherman’s hotel I took the magazine with me. Back in Tulsa I put it under my mattress. I had no idea at all who the man was but I wanted to learn more about him.

  (Editor’s Note: Doctor Jacques Vallee was portrayed as the French Physicist/Investigator in the famous movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)

  # # #

  We ended up doing a 26 part series on Harold Sherman. Parts of our tapes were to be shown at the paranormal conference so Harold was right. In the next month I found myself shouldering through the crowds in a St. Louis hotel where the paranormal conference was being held. I wandered through the crowds, almost in a daze.

  Earlier in the morning I’d awakened to a strange experience and the supernatural displays got even stranger as the day wore on. When I’d awakened I’d heaved a huge sigh of contentment. I’d had a great night’s sleep, no rooster calling me to wake up, no donkeys braving for a handout, no children wanting breakfast. Still on the edge of Morpheus, I saw a beautiful silver and gold saucer shaped ship in the upper right quadrant of my mental vision. It was quite plain to me, clearly visible, dimensionally correct to the tiniest detail, as if it were really there, hovering in the air of my mind, just above and to the right. The ship vision dissipated when the telephone jolted me awake with the person on the other end reminding me I was having breakfast with her.

  When I stood up I felt disoriented, somewhat dizzy. The shower awakened me fully. I couldn’t understand why I had been feeling so groggy since I’d had such a peaceful, undisturbed night’s sleep. As time went by, months later, I began to understand that whenever I had been abducted once again or had had an encounter of some kind with the aliens, I was always dizzy, and not myself when I awakened the next morning but I never gave a moment’s thought to such a thing as I wakened in the hotel in St. Louis.

  When I slipped my purple dress over my head the glittering space ship again entered my mind just enough to make me notice. It was as if the ones responsible for the mental vision were saying, “Now, don’t forget!” I wondered all through the morning, Why? What had I seen? What did it mean? I’d never experienced anything like the silvery gold UFO that hung so beautiful, so realistically within my mind, nor had I had such an experience before.

  Later during the lectures I looked in my purse for my new sunglasses. I then searched the floor around my seat. During the break I asked if anyone had seen my glasses. No one had. Just before the talks began again a woman four chairs over from me opened her locked briefcase and with a look of wonder, pulled out my sun glasses and held them up. I didn’t know the woman. I muttered “Impossible!” It seems my new sunglasses had teleported themselves into a stranger’s briefcase.

  Already this conference had given me several surprises with more to come.

  On the second day, after I’d heard the astrophysicist, Dr. Vallee, I just wanted to get closer to him. It wasn’t that his speech was so compelling. In fact, I was bored by all his talk of UFOs. I know now that it was my lack of background and my paucity of information about the UFO phenomenon that kept me from understanding and appre
ciating his program. I did want to meet him to see if he might be my man from the piano. The full skirt of my borrowed purple dress brushed against my bare legs and felt silky and beautiful to me. I had combed my hair and put on fresh makeup before searching him out. I was ready for this meeting. Really, there was no hurry. The crowds still surged about him, hundreds of people, all of them wanting to get near him or talk to him or ask him for his autograph. I kept putting myself at the end of the line so, when I finally was able to talk with him, neither of us would feel hurried or pressured to move on. I realized that someone or something important to my own future was only minutes away. I don’t know what I asked him but I distinctly remember what he said to me.

  “Would you like to have coffee and discuss this matter?”

  New crowds of searchers again surged between us so I went on to the next lecture. I looked around during that session and was shocked to see Dr. Jacques Vallee hunkered down against the wall a few feet from where I was sitting. A man, one of the acquaintances with whom I’d had breakfast, took me to Vallee and introduced us. When I tried to talk my throat locked. I could hardly speak. I was usually not intimidated by fame. I asked myself what was wrong but could find no answer. When he spoke to me and we had left the lecture hall to walk to the coffee shop that movement seemed to break the barrier between us.

  As we talked, people kept coming up to him but the interruptions didn’t seem to matter. I now felt at ease with him. Like a colleague. It was as if we had known each other forever.

  He was very interested in the idea of the documentary we had just produced, the story of Bo and Peep ... according to them, and he had a number of questions. He expressed a desire to see the tapes. I told him I wasn’t sure because we weren’t supposed to show the tapes to anyone until Bo and Peep gave us permission.

  He was amazed that Bill and I had been able to film the self-designated extraterrestrials for hours and days on end. He was astounded to hear that they and some of their followers had been “roughing it” by camping out near Lake Keystone in Oklahoma, just a few miles west of Tulsa for all those weeks.

  He told me he had written them numerous times but the leaders of their group had always refused any interviews. He had written about them in his latest book, Messengers of Deception. We discussed the fact that most of the members of the Bo and Peep group were professionals of one sort or another, who had given up high level jobs or left wealthy families to follow these two people.

  Finally, when it was clear that we could not talk undisturbed, we left the crowded air-conditioned hotel and walked outside into a tidal wave of heat and humidity. We stopped and without a word, we embraced. I felt terribly strange.

  We returned almost immediately to the hotel and a participant called to him, “Jacques, limo waiting.” “I’ll see you again.” He said to me.

  “Yes.” was my only answer. I was devastated by my feelings for this man. I went to my room and sat in a half lotus position meditating for two hours. I didn’t want to lose the feelings that engulfed me. I didn’t want anything to disrupt the purity of my emotions. I was so very sure. Here was the man from the piano.

  As I meditated he was arriving at the St. Louis Airport to return to San Francisco. He saw the billowing, roiling, lowering, strange looking, clouds moving in to St. Louis. He told me later that he had had them replicated in the movie, Close Encounters.

  It wasn’t long until he showed up in Tulsa. At the airport when I went to pick him up he said something that affected my life for years to come.

  “Barbara, I knew I would be with you again because I feel I know you from the future.”

  I said nothing and only made small talk as I drove because I didn’t understand. We went straight to the studio to look at our tape of the Heaven’s Gate people, Bo and Peep then, of course. Even though I told Bill again about the warning against showing the last five minutes of tape they both merely looked at me as if I were some sort of weirdo. Peep had told me privately that the documentary, especially the last five minutes, was supposed to be shown only after they had been taken up in a space vehicle.

  It was a perfectly calm, starry, beautiful Oklahoma night. At the first second of the last five minutes of tape, a wind rose and circled the building. Then tumultuous rain, thunder, and lightning burst in the sky above and around where we were. As soon as we’d finished the last 5 minutes of tape and Bill turned off the machine, the storm stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  Dr. Vallee was puzzled but he didn’t want to give credit to either Bo or Peep nor did he care to hear of their testimonials. He refused to speak of the display which had just engulfed us. His reserve was unbreakable, seemingly, and he would not comment on the weather nor on the Bo and Peep tape at all.

  The next day before he left he told me he was interested in cattle mutilations and he asked me to call if I heard of such incidents. I promised I would do so.

  Within three weeks a friend had called me from Eureka Springs, Arkansas and she said they were having a rash of cattle mutilations there. In fact, I wasn’t aware of it yet but I had just been linked up with the largest cattle mutilation case in the United States. The mass mutilations in Arkansas, by the way, started the night that the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiered across Arkansas. That was in December, 1977.

  Jacques called and I told him about all the UFO’s that were filling the sky above Eureka Springs and about the series of cattle mutilations that were taking place night after night in that area.

  Our relationship, born in 1977, grew into an investigative partnership that lasted for years. The physicist, practiced in the methods of objective scrutinization of almost everything that appeared before him, became my mentor. I learned the art of scientific interviewing and the craft of interrogation. I learned to recognize a thread of evidence, then learned the patience required to follow that thread through a maze of deception and masked memories. I learned to follow the thread until it led to a conclusion, putting aside all my own prejudices and preconceived notions. I didn’t work for Vallee but with him. The cases came to me and together we investigated them.

  I believe the same synchronicity that led me to meet Bob Bartholic that evening in Tulsa, also brought me to work with Dr. Jacques Vallee.

  When Vallee left Tulsa after viewing the Bo and Peep film I took him to the airport. As the announcement of his flight came over the speaker he reached for his attaché case and smiled down at me.

  “I’ll call you from San Francisco, Barbara. We can start work right away.”

  “Wonderful,” I answered, still unsure how I should address my new friend and investigative partner. I had agreed to work with him, I just didn’t quite understand what that work would be. I watched his airplane grow smaller until it disappeared into the eastern sky, then I walked toward the parking lots at the front of Tulsa International Airport. Outside I glanced at the sky again. Cumulus built and soared to the heavens. Lightning streaked across the sky and formed a myriad of electrical bridges between the towers of clouds.

  The sky was the same as it had been that long ago day in Kirkwood when I was a little child returning from meeting with those strange people. I really hadn’t given that incident any thought, not for years. I smiled in sudden recognition. I had actually been on UFOs from infancy to early childhood. Those “people” had been aliens! I puzzled over the strange mixture of nausea and thrilling intensity which assaulted my solar plexus. Depression intermingled with my joy. It was as if I could foresee all the psychic cases and the UFO sightings and the frightening incidents that lay before me in the future.

  As Jacques Vallee and I worked together, I noticed other occurrences. Not just those associated with UFOs and Psychic phenomena, but occurrences with numbers. A particular combination of numbers began showing up more and more frequently. Suddenly, automobile license plates, hospital or hotel room doors, airline flight numbers, which would have something to do with me or with him, would all boast these numbers.

  At first I
kept my observations to myself. Finally, I mentioned the numbers in the spirit of a joke to Vallee and we both laughed. Later, I learned the numerological significance of the numbers. It was the customary belief of psychics, as well as that of many persons of the Jewish and Christian religions that these numbers represented the conflict between evil and good, negative and positive, Satan and God.

  I began to associate other happenings with the occurrence of the numbers, happenings which were not always fortuitous. I learned that the appearance of certain numbers seemed to indicate that something important, a profound incident in my life was taking place. In any context, the incidents presaged by those numbers could be good or bad, but always important. I learned to sit up and take notice whenever the sixes and nines began to appear on anything which had to do with me in some way.

  Chapter 9

  AN INVESTIGATIVE TEAM

  Starting in 1977 there was a rash of UFO sightings and reports of widespread mutilation of cattle in Arkansas. The flying saucers appeared over cars, followed children walking in country lanes, and left dogs cowering near their master’s homes, begging to be allowed into the houses. One girl, who was curling her hair with a curling iron, received a serious electrical shock when a UFO swooped over her house.

  Arkansans report that goats, cats, dogs and other animals were frightened acting and restless in the places where the UFO’s were seen. It was a phenomenal event with national coverage in the media. The range of cattle mutilations was the largest ever reported up to that time.

  In less than one month’s time I was in Arkansas, interviewing citizens. It was fascinating work. When Vallee called I told him of some of the things I’d observed. He always listened with interest but rarely commented. I suppose he was taking notes. Over the years we worked together he must have taken a whole library’s worth of notes.