White Eagle Initiation

The White Eagle Initiation

Beginning the Contactee Story[1]

by Ted Denmark, Ph.D.

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Late Seventies

As far back as I can recall, apart from the anticipatory “early bird” recollections of Part 1, my first dramatic interaction with the “Winged Messengers,” which I would later interpret as my first obvious UFO/ET contact, began with a surprising sighting of a large all-white—or, as I thought at the time, albino—eagle perched precariously in the top of a large Douglas Fir tree just above my chicken house one afternoon where I had been living for three or four years during the late Seventies in the Rocky Mountains above Boulder, Colorado. The chickens were obviously very frightened since the weight of the large bird bent the top of the tree over to one side as it maneuvered to maintain its balance. There was abundant wildlife in the area, but I marveled that I had never seen nor heard of an albino eagle before and made a note to myself to investigate whether any such albino eagle sightings had ever been previously reported in the area … or anywhere.

Such a large bird of prey would naturally have been expected to find my chickens, often out to range feed in the nearby garden, to be of the greatest interest, but I couldn’t help but notice that this stolid stalker was looking right at me the whole time with its piercing gaze. Oddly, I don’t remember how long the magnificent raptor kept its precarious position there in the top of the tree, even though it certainly looked awkward and uncomfortable, because I was soon distracted by my Australian sheep dog Mufti, who was becoming increasingly upset as we sat together on the front porch … and when I looked up again, it was gone! If I had to guess, I would say the large white bird—or whatever it was—stayed in its treetop perch for about ten or fifteen minutes.

At the time this unusual sighting made me wonder about a PBS TV program that I had planned to watch later that evening entitled, When the Owl Calls Your Name. I had heard that Native Americans believed that if you thought you heard an owl call your name at night in a moment of clarity, it could mean that your time on this Earth might soon be coming to an end. So I wondered what it might mean if an eagle, particularly one this unusual, appeared to stare you down in the full light of day (!).

I never got around to investigating reports of albino eagles in the times soon after this sighting[2]—it was long before Internet search—but I never forgot this mysterious appearance either. What makes me think this was my first ET contact is that I can remember reflecting and discussing with someone, a relatively short time before this milestone occurrence, what I thought and how I felt about the question of the existence of “flying saucers” that had been widely reported over the decades from the time of my youth. At the time I said that I believed they did exist, and I memorably wondered what it would be like to actually see one. I had also spent some time thinking about Carl Jung’s book[3] on the reported sightings of extraterrestrial spacecraft; he apparently wasn’t sure they really existed, never having seen one himself, but if they weren’t actual spacecraft visiting Earth from the Cosmos, they were impressive candidates for “projections of the Collective Unconscious,” nevertheless having great significance for the psychic development of mankind since they were a kind of circular mandala that might symbolically represent a “unification of consciousness.” This event occurred sometime in the late Seventies, probably around summer of 1977 or a little later.

White-bellied Sea Eagle of Southeast Asia, looking like my ‘White Eagle’[4]

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Eighties

I moved back to Northern California in 1981, returning to work at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab for the remainder of the Eighties. But before I did, I had a very strong urge to return to Zurich, Switzerland for reasons that felt very vague at the time but were nevertheless compelling. I had attended the C.G. Jung Institut there as a grad student beginning in the 1972/73 academic year and had a fascinating time of intellectual stimulation and growth with amazing dreams still memorable today, if it was a somewhat Spartan lifestyle on a limited budget. This was the beginning phase of a training program to become a certified Jungian Analytical Psychologist, after which I later learned that I would really need an M.D. or Ph.D. from an American institution before continuing on, so I only stayed the first year. I then returned to Berkeley, California, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the combined Education/ Psychology Department (UCB was not accepting new grad students into the Clinical division of the Psychology Department at that time since they felt the field was already overcrowded with new Ph.D.’s), got finished with my M.A and Ph.D. programs (in “Education Psychology”) in two years and moved to Colorado in 1975 with a new wife—where the “White Eagle Initiation” later occurred.

But at the time of leaving Boulder, I had half imagined I was making a new exploratory trip to see if I really wanted to pursue the Jungian certification as a post-doc, but my recollection is that there was also something else pulling me back to Zurich, something I didn’t understand, which greatly puzzled me. As I arrived back in Switzerland and retraced some of my steps from the earlier time, going through the motions of evaluating my options while sipping a lager in the chair frequented by Albert Einstein[5] during his days of residency in the city (there was a commemorative plaque in place), I felt there was something … just out of reach over the hills … which was almost palpable, but which I sadly never managed to find, and so I returned to my then adopted temporary home in Austin, Texas where I had lived the year before and had left my things in storage.

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Back in Berkeley … again and at some point around this time, I heard about the Billy Meier Contactee story for the first time, which had begun in January of 1975 near Zurich, Switzerland. My best recollection is that this first occurred in the Shambhala Bookstore on Berkeley’s fabled Telegraph Avenue when I happened to flip open the coffee table picture book[6] from Wendelle Stevens’ Genesis III Publications, showing the amazing UFO pictures of Eduard “Billy” Meier, which are as stunning today as they were at the moment when they and the associated story, “imprinted” me from this extraordinary document as few things ever have. This must have happened sometime around 1983 when the book was first published (and never reissued) when I returned to Berkeley after an absence of nearly seven years. It seems so long ago to recall in more precise detail now, but I must have made the connection between the story in this book occurring just outside the Zurich environs and my own first meanderings there just a few years earlier—without finding the mysterious siren’s call I was looking for, then finally returning to California. But alas, with our busy and complicated lives, when we miss a connection like this thousands of miles away, all we can do is file an “undecidable” entry in memory’s archive and move on to await later developments—as forlorn a moment as I’ve probably ever felt.[7]

The decade of the Eighties was to bring forth several extremely interesting, unusual—and completely unexpected—UFO/ET contact events that would perplex but not disappoint me. In retrospect, again after nearly 30 years, the sequence of events began, I think, in the middle of an afternoon in the early Eighties when I found myself taking a nap—very unusual behavior for me, particularly at this stage of life. After I suddenly awoke, feeling rather disheveled and oddly uncomfortable and uncertain, I suddenly had the impulse to walk to my favorite café a few blocks away, across the street from UC Berkeley’s North Side for an afternoon cappuccino to help wake up and in hopes of seeing some friends who often frequented that spot at about this time of day (Berkeley’s famous ‘forever Spring café society’).

But on the way, as I hurried along, I had a sudden impulse to look up into the eastern sky, and to my surprise there was a dark object of some kind slowly descending toward the ground on a narrow arc … from just past the East Bay Hills behind Tilden Park. I watched it glide or drift down for several seconds and then … it disappeared behind the forested hills. It did not have the look of anything I had ever seen before: small airplane, balloon, kite or any other ordinary thing one might see in the sky. It made me think of a very slow-moving large dark … shadow that was not a meteorite, which would have been moving much faster approaching the ground, but that nevertheless did not burn up or change its shape, rather appearing to make a soft landing … just out of sight. Furthermore, as I thought about it, there seemed to be a pattern running through all the unusual events of that afternoon beginning with the odd nap and continuing through the almost compulsive urge to go out to my café and then look up at just the right moment in the right direction …

In confusion and a little bit of desperation, I looked up and down the street for anyone else who might also have noticed this odd event, but there was no one to be seen. I wondered if I should call the police later to see if there might have been any other reports of this odd sighting. I continued to feel agitated and uncertain whether I should make inquiries or whether it would just be a waste of time or worse—whether I would be thought just another weirdo (there were many “street people” in Berkeley in those days who had been forced out of mental institutions by then Governor Reagan). I kept walking to my café in deep thought about how unusual it seemingly was to see a real UFO in broad daylight in heavily urban Berkeley. And it was probably already too late to drive up over the hills on my motorcycle to see what I could see … so I just filed it in the “high strangeness” category … and eventually began to forget about it—never completely—as there was nobody to meet at my café in any event, and thereafter I drifted back to my ordinary campus routine for the day … and coming months.

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My next encounter, in many ways the most memorable of all, was a time when I had a dramatic UFO sighting—in no uncertain terms—which I realized had to be an alien ET spacecraft[8]. It happened near Mount Shasta, the snow-capped, story-book mountain rising up out of its plain just north of the Sacramento Valley, into a perfect peak with a smaller cinder cone towards the back side. I had decided to go cross-country skiing at Castle Crags, a smaller state park about 20 miles southwest of the famous magical mountain, one weekend in the mid-Eighties and drove up to a little motel just south of Shasta City one Friday.

The first odd thing that happened was that upon awakening the next morning and getting ready to drive into the town of Mt. Shasta for breakfast, I found that my Volkswagen Bus would not start because of an unexpected dead battery. So I quickly resigned myself to walk into the main part of town which wasn’t more than about five miles—without a single car going by the whole time who would give me a lift. The highway from McCloud, CA where I was staying to Mt. Shasta was as straight as an arrow and pointed directly at the great white mountain, which stood before me in all its glory as I walked. After a short time I began to realize that the clouds atop the mountain were very unusual: there was a changing flow of triangular clouds that would turn into lenticular clouds and then back again into flat triangles—in repeating groups of three! These were nearly exactly equilateral triangular clouds (with pointed vertices!) that would each then morph into lens-shaped clouds stacked atop each other or in radial patterns, time after time as I walked and watched this almost hypnotic cloudscape play out. I had really never seen anything like it, though I had driven by Mt. Shasta many times over the years going up and down the coast to Oregon and beyond. Afterwards, I thought, how perfect to have picked McCloud—the cloud clan—to stay overnight and then the amazing cloud show to witness since I originally thought I had wanted to stay in the town of Mt. Shasta.

Majestic Mount Shasta[9]

After my well-exercised walk into town to meet some people who were new acquaintances, during which time the cloud show never faltered, I quickly exclaimed how unusual the clouds were that morning, and almost to a person, they said, “Yes, it’s always like that up on the mountain …” And I said, “But triangular clouds changing into lenticular clouds and then back, over and over …?” Nobody would admit the least unusual thing about it, and I could not get any one’s attention to have a look or even acknowledge that this could be in any way unique or even … unusual.[10]

A few hours later I was on my way to the groomed cross country ski trails, having gotten my van back on the road with a jump start. All went reasonably normally till fairly late in the afternoon of this beautiful sunny day with ideal temperatures and great workout skiing conditions when I was out in an open back-country area all by myself and ready for a rest to contemplate the glistening winter countryside. I had the impulse to look back at the magical mountain to the north, to see if the clouds were still steaming and streaming through their paces as they had been earlier; they were indeed, and I continued to marvel. Then suddenly out of the large triangular shape in the cloud sequence there emerged three reddish-orange glowing objects arrayed in perfect equilateral triangular formation, flying—for these plasma-like shapes were now moving very fast—in a wide arc out over the Shasta Valley. I was transfixed and fairly dumbfounded, but it now suddenly all made sense: those were no ordinary clouds that I had been seeing all day and this was no ordinary appearance I was now witnessing.[11]

As they quickly drew closer and then came nearly directly overhead at my closest view, I was looking up into the sky and then began to notice that I was starting to experience tunnel vision with blackness around the visual periphery taking over more and more of my visual field as these glowing lights in the sky began to look to me more like stars in a night sky.[12] I suddenly realized I must be starting to faint, but I resisted inwardly as much as possible because I really wanted to see what was going to happen next! They coasted by noiselessly overhead, heading south, still in perfect equilateral triangular formation. I realized the main event of the day was probably now over, and that I should find a rock or some place to sit down and begin to calm myself from the emotional state of being strongly shocked that I had gotten into.

What I experienced that day had all been crystal clear, and the connection between the clouds and the eventual appearance of the UFO’s seemed obviously but fabulously related. My mental/ emotional state was accepting of what I had witnessed in this dramatic moment as well as continuously during the remainder of the day, but I was also slightly … freaked out. I really didn’t know what to do next to relieve my excited but also anxious state. I sat for some time and went over what had happened, and then in a moment of smoldering agitation, I did something that I would not have imagined myself doing. I got back in my van, now with a powerful and seemingly irrational impulse to drive straight back to Mt. Shasta—which I did, as fast as my VW van with its hot-rodded V6 engine, would go!

I don’t know whether I had gotten this idea subliminally from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I had a strong urge to drive all the way up Mt. Shasta to get as close to the top as I could—to the origin of what had just happened above the mountain top. When I got near the end of the road that winds part way up Mt. Shasta to a campground, the engine in my van just cut out (were they tracking me?). I was actually relieved, because I did not know what I was going to do next when I came to the end of the road. So I just sat there in the driver’s seat once again and contemplated what had happened and slowly began to calm down a little more.

Late the next day I returned to Berkeley with these experiences etched into my brain, but unfortunately I would not be able to relate anything of it to my professionally skeptical colleagues at the Space Sciences Lab, which one might have imagined in ignorance that such a revelation could be of some interest to scientists for scientific investigation![13]

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My next encounter with what would seem like these same or similar UFOs, occurred a couple of years later (again it’s hard to remember the actual year) when I attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Oakland Coliseum, an outdoor concert venue frequented by the big name rock bands of that era. I think the concert had just begun, and I had my binoculars out and was intent upon watching the band members, particularly a female bass guitar player who was reputed to be the Boss’ main squeeze in those days … when I suddenly had the impulse that I should look up and over to the East Bay Hills, which I did and just stared for a moment, wondering what I expected to see. Then, just as unexpectedly as had occurred at Mr. Shasta, three fuzzy objects, with a subdued orange glow, again flying in seemingly perfect equilateral triangular formation, suddenly appeared from over the horizon of the eastern hills.[14] Instinctively, I put the binoculars, which I was holding, up to my eyes and saw a larger, clearer image of the streaking plasma-like objects, and again I went into a kind of reverie as very complex emotions welled up: surprise (but again I knew I had been prepared for my witness), gratitude (that they had returned), relief (that there was more continuity to confirm my earlier impressions), excitement (that I was able to get a closer look at these UFOs) and perhaps amazement (that this could happen in the midst of a crowd of thousands of people, who nevertheless appeared not to notice).

Once again, this flight group was seemingly headed directly towards the Coliseum from the east and arrived very quickly nearly overhead, at a moderate attitude of maybe a few thousand feet where airliners are not commonly seen, except near airports, swinging past my position very rapidly on a wide arc towards the south where they quickly disappeared. To have covered that much distance so quickly—it all happened in less than a minute, they probably had to be traveling thousands of miles per hour, and there was never any question that they could have been any kind of known conventional aircraft. It is possible that they could have been at a higher or lower elevation than I imagined since there was nothing else of reference in the sky at the time, and since I was mostly viewing through the binoculars, but there is no doubt about any part of the extreme clarity of the sighting—or the fact that I had been prepared to look in the right direction at the right time with binoculars in hand.

The notion began to occur to me in a more serious way that I could not easily discount that these appearances may have been actually intended … to be seen in particular by me. I spent the rest of the concert feeling a little disappointed by the seemingly derivative nature of the music and overly dramatic solos and antics of the band, but what was almost continuously on my mind the whole time was the significance of this second similar sighting of UFO entities in tight triangular flight formation.

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My final sighting experience recalled from the decade of the Eighties occurred a year or two later, again without a more accurately known event to reference it, except that my girlfriend of the time, Suzy, was accompanying me (the previous UFO witness events had occurred while I was alone). We had taken a vacation together to the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona, and were having a good time van touring, camping and looking at all the amazingly colorful landscapes and starscapes, now for the first time for me on the North Rim of this great expanse.

My customized VW bus, sporting a retrofitted water-cooled V6 engine, comfortable BMW leather seats, and a full double bed with built-in mini-kitchen and oversized tires, was always an interesting conversation piece wherever we stopped, but unfortunately on this trip a minor engine malfunction (fuel pump failure) occurred, and we were forced to delay our travels for a couple of days while the part was delivered from Las Vegas to the local mechanic. But we didn’t mind too much since it was such an interesting place to be in any event and close to a visitor center having a campground with a vacancy—rare in warm vacation-time weather in The Canyon.

At some point we were just sitting and relaxing at the picnic table of our camp site, which happened to be on fairly high ground with a clear view out to the distant southern desert, sloping down, probably a hundred miles into the distance. I saw what looked like a jet plane of some indistinguishable type, but smaller and flying lower than the big passenger airliners, languidly on a westerly heading, and I went to get my binoculars for a better look. It seemed to be moving rather slowly since it was far away, and I might have time to catch a glimpse before it disappeared. I quickly found the compact binoculars which I liked to take on trips and scanned the southern horizon. The plane I had first seen was gone, but there were other occasional seemingly slow-moving planes, perhaps military jets from Edwards Air Force Base or some other location in this dry desert area favored so much by pilots for its many days of good flying weather.

Then I suddenly noticed something, also far away but moving very fast across the same desert expanse, making the easily recognizable airplane in the same frame of reference look almost like it were standing still. I smiled to myself and thought, well that could only be one thing … We continued to idle at our table, Suzy on one end and me on the other. I still had my binoculars in hand when suddenly I noticed something in the air coming up the gulch from the direction I had just been watching. It seemed to be like a large greyish-white bird of some kind, moving towards us. As it got closer, I could see that it was a white eagle, not just a white-headed eagle like the well-known Bald Eagle, but an all-white, or what I thought again subliminally must be an albino eagle!

Oddly, I didn’t remember in that instant—because I was so surprised—that this was not the first “albino” eagle I had ever seen. But there it was, getting closer, and I suddenly sat up and began to feel a bit anxious at what might happen next, especially when a number of crows or ravens that had been hanging out in the area, suddenly hit the ground nearby running in obvious fright. The white eagle had now gotten close enough so that I could see that it was looking directly at me. After I recovered enough presence of mind, I instinctively put my binoculars up for a closer look at this unusual sight, but when I did so, the “albino eagle” turned into a classic “flying saucer” that stopped, perhaps twenty-five or thirty yards away, just slightly above my elevation on the downslope … in midair!

3D model of UFO in Grand Canyon close encounter

Again, I went into a kind of reverie in which I nonetheless began to inwardly ask myself if I was ready to know what kind of alien creature might be in this spacecraft that had come to find us here. It occurred to me that the viewports at the top of the disc might be transparent, but that I wasn’t really going to look yet and see until I had answered this critical question. It also occurred to me that the inhabitants of this spaceship must have advanced technology that detected that someone—myself—had noticed them from the great distance and decided to come investigate who I might be. I got my courage up a bit and looked intently at the trapezoidal-shaped viewports in the bulge at the top of the shining silver disc hanging in the air and was almost instantly relieved that, though they looked glassy, they were not transparent, and I would not have an impression of what lay behind them.

At that time I knew far less than I do now about UFO/ET visitations to Earth and the like, and I thought these intelligent life forms, whoever they might be and wherever they might be from, could well be of a scary or non-friendly nature and perhaps up to no good. All this went through my mind as I stared at the motionless craft, beginning to feel a bit relieved that nothing else had happened yet. I began to realize that since this exotic object was so close, I didn’t really need to keep looking through the binocs, but then, as I dropped them, in expectation of having a wider view of the ship, it suddenly … vanished. Evidently, only viewing through the optics of the binoculars was able to penetrate the white eagle motion hologram (as I now think of it) to reveal the actual spacecraft it was masking. With no glass optics filter to reveal the actual object, and with the white eagle cover blown, there was nothing to be seen. Now, I would see this as “invisibility cloaking,” which is believed to be a common advanced technology possessed by most ET spacecraft traveling within the Earth environs to shield their activities from common observation. I also tried looking through the binocs again, but there was nothing …

As I tried to regain my composure after this abrupt and slightly disappointing ending, I remembered Suzy, seated at the other end of the table, who had been looking in the opposite direction, and I said, “Did you see that?” I still hadn’t looked her way yet, but I heard her say, softly, “What?” Then I suddenly realized I had not uttered a sound for the whole duration of the event lasting maybe … what felt like ten or fifteen minutes or so, and she had no idea that anything unusual had even happened! Naturally, she seemed skeptical when I tried to explain in an understandably halting way what I had just witnessed. She probably never really believed my story, and even though I was known to her to like humorous stories, I had to try to make her believe that I would never make up such a strange story to tease or befuddle her. It has been interactions like this that have inclined me over the years not to attempt to tell my encounter/ contactee stories to very many people, even very sympathetic friends, because such unusual sightings are just too far from anything that has ever happened to the great majority of people, and the ultimate revisioning of reality required is just too far out of bounds for serious consideration—even with significant evidence—which I had little of, except my own memory witness of recollection.

As far as I know, neither of us was menaced or abducted that day, and there was no serious psychological trauma caused to me, but it was a really big wakeup call that I still remember as the saying goes, “as if it happened yesterday.” These images of the events of that day were and are deeply imprinted, such as the first sighting of the distant UFO, the sighting of the strikingly realistic flying white eagle, the ravens hitting the ground running, and the intense moment of decision whether or not to try to look through the saucer dome windows—all after more than three decades[15]. Of course, alternate conventional explanations, such as hallucination, mirage, etc. would come to mind for anyone attempting to evaluate my story, but I have had no history of visual hallucinations, was not taking psycho-active or other kinds of drugs, and had no motive to make up a fantastic story. And of course, this episode fits into the unfolding pattern of very unusual UFO/ET experiences that I am recounting here.

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These were my most dramatic and memorable personal UFO/ET experiences from the Eighties, beginning most notably with the browsing of Wendelle Stevens’ amazing two volume coffee-table color picture book on the Eduard “Billy” Meier case—the most controversial contactee story of that era … as it has remained in many ways until the present day. I have mentioned the powerful effect this Stevens and Elders’ large-format book with its astonishing photos of the Pleiadian “beamships” taken by Meier, had on me—because the beamships in the photos looked much the same as the craft that initially appeared to take the place of the second White Eagle in my close encounter in the Grand Canyon! But I haven’t yet attempted to describe the even more powerful effect Stevens’ companion narrative series, Message from the Pleiades, Vs 1-4, The Contact Notes of Billy Meier had on me later. I became almost obsessed with this fantastic set of explicit contactee stories while at the same time being greatly irritated[16]—as has also been described by many readers of this very lengthy underground classic contactee story (!). The reason it was so exhilarating—in addition to the fascination and high strangeness of Meier himself—was because of the presence of his extraordinary female Pleiadian liaison and handler Semjase, said to be from the Planet Erra, a planet similar to Earth in the Taygeta Star system in the Pleiades. I had been spontaneously attracted to this unique constellation from the time of my youth, often called the “Seven Sisters,” an open star cluster dating to famous lyrical references in the Hebrew Bible. The reason it was so irritating and frustrating was that Wendelle’s commissioned attempts at an English translation from Swiss-German was so uneven, stilted and filled with errors, which had caused Wendelle (and eventually his now friend Billy!) a great deal of distress for various reasons, but he soldiered on and finally succeeded in publishing the first volume in his limited series of a thousand copies in about 1980 and the remaining three volumes over the next fifteen years.[17]

It just so happened that an old acquaintance of mine, an engineer named Gerry Zeitlin, was working at the UCB Space Sciences Lab when I returned there for a visit in about 1981 after I had moved back to Berkeley from Austin, TX, and after returning from my second exploratory trip to Europe before that. When I walked in the main door to check in with the receptionist at the SSL, I was greeted by the same woman I had known in earlier years when I had first worked there on the early Mariner Mars 69 project. Virtually the first thing she said was, “Wow, are we glad to see you … there’s a job waiting for you to get started with as soon as possible …” What? So, I was going to get pulled back into the undertow of the hi-tech space spectrometer business again (a more exotic Extreme Ultra-Violet, grazing-incidence telescope with ties to Reagan’s “Star Wars” this time), after thinking I was free of my design engineering sub-career for more than a decade (!). But I didn’t have any other prospects for a job yet, and Berkeley was famously crawling with PhDs driving cabs and working as waiters and chefs … and I had had enough of the San Francisco commute years ago. So, the thing to do was get a pad and a motorcycle (also famously hard to find both digs and parking) to get started—at least I would have a NASA backed paycheck.

It also just so happened that my new work-space assignment in the overflow office “trailer park” outside the main Sam Silver SSL building was going to be no other than that of my old pal Gerry Zeitlin, who had just quit (more complicated than that, but I didn’t find out more until years later). I first walked into the office with some of my things just as he was moving out with his (!). We were both astonished and did bug-eyed double takes—I hadn’t seen him for ten years. Of course we made immediate plans to get together for dinner the next day and catch up on old times. Gerry, like me, had been a UFO/ET buff for a number of years—both of us at least partially qualified as “space scientists” interested in variants of ‘alternative science’ as much as the plodding professional ‘standard science’ that was done here at this exotic lab at the top of the hill above the fabulous Berkeley Canyon Campus (with the perk of a sporting volley ball game on the roof at tea time).

We had both been through a lot over the decade. He had gotten married to a lovely woman Bay Area BART train driver, but it didn’t work out; and I had gotten married to a lovely woman, whom he had met just before we moved to Boulder, but she had succumbed to brain cancer just a few years earlier, setting me off on my second treasure hunt to Switzerland. He was also to get a virulent form of cancer just a short time later, which he was able to beat after several desperate years of alternative therapies, but not before he told me of the amazing new books from Wendelle Stevens (the limited first edition of Message from the Pleiades and others). He was now offering them, all four volumes, for me to read, and I naturally accepted—Gerry knew more about the avant-garde UFO/ET buzz than anyone else I knew. And thus began the next of the most powerful breakthrough experiences of my emerging contactee life!

It turned out that Gerry had read the books initially with great interest but eventually greater puzzlement: first elated and then frustrated and incredulous—like many others. It was all just so … “far out,” to use an appropriate expression in great vogue at the time. He was an early generation BSD UNIX programmer, accustomed to depth of detail in greatly convoluted complexities … but the Meier yarn—for which it certainly also qualified—troubled him for reasons not clear to me at first.

Later, after I had become more familiar with the Meier story with the fabulous Semjase and her Earth-resident Pleiadian colleagues, I began to realize that Gerry had probably turned against Meier, Semjase, et al because of what he felt were critical statements made by her about Israel in a few obscure places in the books—he was culturally, but not particularly religiously, Jewish—yet it seemed to have offended him.[18] So, it appeared that Gerry was testing me to see how I felt about this case … and surreptitiously cautioning me at the same time to watch out for doctrinal error—I, being obviously more neutrally Scandinavian-Irish, as I believed at that time. So this was another component of why he had chosen to get rid of the books (!).

Well it was certainly true, the Pleiadians didn’t have much to say in favor of Earthuman religions—even though they were taking credit for creating them in those ancient times! Gerry, for his part, usually went to some length to be tolerant and liberal—even radical—being quite involved with some of the most intricate breaking and developing UFO/ET stories.[19] So his attitude about the Meier story was and always continued to be something of a mystery to me, even until the time of his death years later when he more explicitly had turned against a positive evaluation of the Meier presentation while I continued to be elated by it—even up to the point of publishing a second edition ebook of Wendelle’s nemesis undertaking, Message from the Pleiades. It took me many years to unravel what had gone on with the Semjase-Meier contactee collaboration, but that wouldn’t happen in greater measure until the Nineties.

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Nineties

Until the later Nineties what made my understanding of these earlier UFO/ET incidents uncertain or confusing is that nothing so obviously unusual had happened for some time. After winding up my job and affairs at the University of California in Berkeley at the completion of the EUVE Project, I had moved up to the Mother Lode in the Central Sierra of Northern California and began work building an off-the-grid solar electric and active-passive, space-heated house on a nice piece of acreage out in the country, which I can remember initially thinking a few times, would make a nice private spot for a reappearance of my ETs—if they were still interested in me in any way—if there were anything to follow up on … whatever the mysterious appearance of the white eagles may have been about in the first place.

Actually, there were some mysterious lights in the far distance on several occasions, which I could see while sitting in my hot tub at night, looking at the eastern horizon. They moved in very strange erratic patterns, which made me think of some of the descriptions of lights in the night sky over the hotly-rumored Area 51/ Groom Lake, Nevada secret government/ military complex—only about 250 miles to the southeast, but probably too far away for the flight patterns of experimental government antigravity test aircraft—or was it? I assumed I would probably never know.

There was an incident one Thanksgiving in the mid-nineties when I was standing outside in the late evening saying goodnight to a new woman acquaintance who had come for a visit to my house, when we were both suddenly surprised by the appearance of a very bright light in the sky that lit up the whole surrounding countryside for miles around in our remote Stanislaus River canyon basin. The view from my house is a wide panoramic view of the eastern horizon from north to south, being situated near the top of the highest hill in the area. There were no audible aircraft or any other obvious evidence of the cause of this sudden illumination that, for the time was almost as bright as daytime—or at least much brighter than the light of a full Moon (I don’t remember the phase of the Moon on that particular night, but it was quite dark). It was hard to tell if the light was from a point source or some other kind of wider array, it was seemingly as bright as the Sun.

After watching for a few minutes, I decided to risk running into the house to get my binoculars, but by the time I returned to the place on the deck outside, the light had disappeared, and all was in darkness again. It was very surreal … but what was it? We had no idea, and no one I talked to in subsequent weeks had seen it or had any idea what it could have been. Thanksgiving eve seemed like such an unlikely time for any kind of clandestine military activity that might involve flares or the like … and nothing like this has ever happened since.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Even though I didn’t happen to remember the series of trips I took to the Scott River Valley in the Klamath National Forest near Etna, California, in connection with eagle sightings, until Julie and I were talking one evening in February of 2014 about what I had been doing during the late Nineties … and then it all suddenly came back to me! I had been invited up to a remote area to enjoy the scenery in the wilds of far Northern California, just west of Mount Shasta, and spend some time working on remodeling a summer house owned by a friend, and had done so several times. The small house, along with several others on the shared-community property, was located on top of a ridge with a very close overlook on the Scott River, maybe fifty yards below, where it flattened out into several deep pools between steps of white water coming around the bulge of an up-thrusted projection in the canyon wall. It was a premium spot for dramatic views, being one of the few larger buildable flats to be found anywhere near the river in the twenty mile descent in its watershed. The bonus during late Spring when the river was high, was that the pools more than a hundred yards below the property on the river were also a favorite raptor fishing area, where bald eagles and ospreys would often come winging by at window level as they were making their dives down to the still water below to scan the schools of salmon that would be resting in the pools after coming up the last rapid. Watching the big birds and hearing their loud calls as they flew up and down river, was one of the main seasonal attractions of staying on the ridge, and there was hardly a day we didn’t marvel when the hunting parties of great birds appeared.

Scott River rapids[20]

There were regal bald eagles with their steely stare, patrolling the river canyon; great grey-white ospreys with fluffier feathers, often seen sitting in snags on our side of the river away from the highway; and an occasional hawk scouting the canyon for whatever might be attracted to the water’s edge by the flood of steelhead with cascading raptors in hot pursuit. One could get a good sense of the size of these big birds with five, six and seven foot wingspans as they drifted by the windows or were seen pivoting in plain sight if one were out walking in the area. They didn’t seem to mind being watched, at least by the few people on the ridge top—but were probably cautiously monitoring us while at the same time being completely occupied by their serious chore of feeding the hatchlings back in their huge nests in remote tree tops somewhere up higher in the Marble Mountains.

I wouldn’t say that I had any obviously more “personal” kinds of experiences with these eagle sightings—as with the White Eagles—that would suggest anything more than a strategic and privileged opportunity to witness these amazing wild birds in their native lush marginal rainforest landscape, but it was a uniquely engaging and quite powerful close encounter of a kind I had never witnessed “on location” before.

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  1. Excerpt from Winged Messengers (Part 2) by Ted Denmark, Ph.D., ebook, BookBaby, 2017.
  2. Subsequently, I have checked for such reports of albino “Golden Eagles” or other eagles and hawks—which do exist but are very rarely seen (~1 among 1800 birds of ordinary coloration ), yet make up a quite amazing part of Native American lore as white “spirit animals.”
  3. Jung, C.G., Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, trans. R.F.C. Hull,1979, Bollingen, Princeton. It has been reported that a young C.G. Jung actually interviewed Eduard “Billy” Meier as a kind of troubled boy who claimed to his teachers—in great detail—that he was having meetings with ETs. I would later do a 2nd edition of the Wendelle Stevens accounts of the later Billy Meier UFO/ET Contact Notes. Message from the Pleiades V.s 1-4.
  4. “White bellied Sea Eagle” thanks to Shankar via Flickr [license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]
  5. Who is revealed as a celebrity UFO Contactee in Message from the Pleiades, Volume 2, a work that will be discussed subsequently in more detail.
  6. UFO … Contact from the Pleiades, Volumes 1 & 2 (with listed co-author Lee Elders), hardcover, UFO Photo Archives, Tucson & Genesis III Publishing, Munds Park, AZ, 1980, ISBN 0937850020 (0-937850-02-0).
  7. There’s more about the possible impulse and rationale for this “wild goose chase” in the *Five Star Series* …
  8. Only recently (about 2014) have I begun to understand that there are, and have been, “gravity control” terrestrial spacecraft, even the B2 Bomber, secretly developed in the southwestern U.S. by “black ops” military/ contractors from reverse-engineered crashed ET craft (Roswell), that are part of a Secret Space Program that will have a most profound effect on all subsequent scientific and cultural circumstances on our little blue-green sphere in space.
  9. “Mount Shasta” by Tony Webster via Flickr [license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]
  10. After looking through hundreds of images of Mount Shasta on the Internet, I was not able to find even one showing cloud formations of the kind I witnessed that day, even though many strange and interesting “lenticular” cloud formations have been photographed.
  11. It has only recently (2016) occurred to me that what I thought at the time were three separate craft flying in perfect triangular formation, might actually have been a single triangular craft with lighted apexes.
  12. I am now also more aware that a prolonged effort to look up high into the sky, restricts blood flow to the brain, also making the tense awareness of my sighting experience more pronounced.
  13. One of the major puzzles of sleuthing the UFO enigma: why aren’t scientists even slightly interested (?). It turns out to be a long and winding road; ‘ET historian’ Richard Dolan probably has the best multi-book analysis.
  14. And once again it could have been a single craft—but it would have had to be very large (!)—again hard to judge, but it instinctively felt like three separate objects.
  15. Now even after four decades and still memorable and intense to re-read and edit (Dec. 2015).
  16. See the introduction to my 2nd edition ebook of Message from the Pleiades, V. 1 for more details.
  17. Message V. 1 has claimed copyrights on the frontispiece from 1979 to 1988, and Message V. 4 shows a copyright in 1995. Oddly, it’s unclear when the limited edition of one thousand copies, beginning with V. 1, was actually published (Wendelle was a retired USAF Major rather than a professional publisher).
  18. Some of the critical remarks were insinuations, but the main broadside was that the Israeli military had attacked civilian Palestinian refugees, burning their buildings, one to which Meier’s associate had fled, with a loss of the only copy of a very important ancient document that Meier had discovered in Israel, the Talmud Jmmanuel.
  19. In later years of Century 21 he was web master of his own intricate UFO/ET web site (www.openseti.org), featuring the shortcomings of SETI, the “Tall Whites,” Anton Parks, and notable French collaborators, etc., with wife Malou before it was hacked and evidently never quite able to recover its initial spirit of exploration.
  20. “Scott River in Scott Valley in far Northern Ca” by Mark Levisay via Flickr [license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]