The Silver Bridge (14 page)
Authors: Gray Barker
I smiled when I thought of Hugh. He had been a dear friend over many years, and always used a great deal of “saucer talk” on his radio shows. He now had a half-hour program,
McPherson’s Journal,
on which he used material of local interest along with offbeat interviews.
I wondered if he were pulling my leg about the saucer detector. Hugh had a great warmth of personality—yet displayed a touch of the sardonic when he discussed UFOs. Although he vowed he didn’t “buy” the ufological syndrome, he nevertheless always seemed to be fascinated by it.
Another pall of smoke in the sky signalled that I was nearing Institute, one of the satellite industrial towns of Charleston, this one boasting a small smoky state college campus, a Negro school recently integrated, now receiving more state funds and trying to raise its status to compete with the formerly all-white institutions.
The setting sun burst out suddenly through the smog to offer some small reprieve to the dismal mood of the area; but in so doing it served to outline the tanks and towers of the vast Carbide plant, which dominated the town and was now transformed into a sprawling skeleton, spectrally back-lighted in red.
“A perfect setting,” I thought, “for what I’m about to hear from Jarrett.”
An ambulance, double-parked in front of a small wood frame house, further complicated the traffic congestion. Approaching and swinging around the vehicle I saw two white-coated men, restraining and leading an old woman out of the dwelling. She held onto a sheet of paper which she tried to raise into the air, apparently to attract passersby. The red light of the setting sun added to the unreality of the scene, like something out of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula.
With long, uncombed hair streaming, and dressed in an ill-fitting smock-like attire, the woman seemed to be begging anybody to hear her out. Through my rolled-down window, my eyes caught her fierce gaze which also contained the quality of piteous defeat and helplessness. Somehow she broke the firm grip on her arm, held the paper high and cried at me:
“Dr. Pandolus is no fool! Look what I wrote in the dark!”
This tragic situation added to the gloom of the late afternoon, along with the traffic which threw a layer of mud on my windshield, and the cold hostility of the wind and rain.
Once in Ralph Jarrett’s neat study, however, the engineer’s hospitality and warm friendliness soon had me cheered and relaxed—and discussing UFOs.
“The boys at the plant don’t really think I’m a nut; they know me too well for that,” he told me; “but they still play these little jokes on me. Today, for example, someone took an ordinary saucer (the kind that goes with a cup), wrote what might be construed as a ‘message from outer space’ on it, and slipped it into my locker. I don’t know how they got the blasted combination, but there’s a lot of bright boys down there. I suppose they could also make a good living at safecracking.”
I asked him about the flying saucer detector Hugh had mentioned.
“He probably made a big deal of it,” Jarrett replied. “Really there’s not too much to it, and it’s something anybody can build. It’s only a bar-type magnet pointing north and south. If nothing bothers its equilibrium it remains in that orientation. But if another magnetic influence, such as this small permanent magnet, intrudes into the vicinity—here, I’ll show you…” He brought the small horseshoe magnet close to the apparatus. The bar magnet moved, touching an electrical contact and activating a loud buzzer. He removed the horeshoe and the noise stopped.
“To the bar magnet and the contacts you add flashlight cells and most any bell or buzzer—and you have yourself a good watchdog in case a saucer comes around.”
Except for his deliberately setting it off, the ufological alarm had sounded only once during the year it had been operative. One evening he heard the buzzer, ran out into the yard and witnessed a star-like object. Initially it appeared to be stationary, but suddenly began moving and quickly receded into the distance.
Jarrett reviewed the evidence collected by UFO researchers which showed that the saucers, whatever they were, often displayed one common denominator: they exhibited decided electromagnetic effects, often interfering with and deadening auto ignition circuits and causing engines to stop. From reports he had collected, he also believed that the great eastern electrical power blackout may have been caused by the unidentified objects.
He replaced the plastic lid on the box containing the detector, moved to a cabinet and withdrew a detailed drawing he had made of the strange machine Tad Jones had seen and described to him.
“I knew Tad Jones very well about ten years ago, when he worked for Carbide. I lost track of him though, after he quit and opened an appliance store in Crosslanes, a few miles west of here.”
The drawing depicted a spherical object with a port or window in the top of it, with four protruding landing gear, an antenna, and a strange propellor. He reviewed Jones’ account.
On the evening of January 19, 1967, Jones was returning from Charleston to Crosslanes. He had followed approximately the same route I had taken, then had swung onto the beginning of the newly completed section of interstate highway a short distance beyond Institute. As he neared the Crosslanes exit, his low beams caught an obstruction on the long straight stretch ahead of him. He tramped the lights to bright, slowed, hit the turn signal and swung into the left-hand lane. As he approached the obstruction, his curiosity grew.
At first he thought the object was some sort of state road equipment, though he wondered why it would be left on the highway without warning lights and signs. The bright metallic glint of the spherical thing was now becoming more apparent, and he was picking out more details. Now more curious, he eased back into the right lane, with the intent of stopping and observing the object.
He estimated it to be about 20 ft. in diameter. Next he saw it was not resting on the road, but hovering a foot or so above it. He then noted a slowly-revolving propellor-type device, connected to a short protruding shaft on the underside. But the “propellor” was odd, indeed.
“Tad called it an ‘impellor’.” He said it looked for all the world like a washing machine agitator. As he came to a stop, about ten or fifteen feet from the thing, he said the ‘impellor’ began rotating very rapidly and became a blur. Suddenly the sphere shot up into the air at great speed, and as he rolled down his window and put his head out to get another look at it, all he could see was a light, departing rapidly and then vanishing.”
“Ralph,” I told him, “you have just mentioned another of these things that so often bother me. Jones said the propeller looked like a washing machine agitator. So often, parts of and aspects of these machines seem almost frighteningly
terrestrial
. Next thing, I’ll bet you’ll tell me it had rubber tires.”
“Exactly! You must have read about this. Tad described the ‘landing gear’ as airplane-type, such as you’d see on a very small plane, maybe a Piper Cub—with rubber tires, just as you say.”
Like the Woodrow Derenberger case, which also occurred on an incompleted interstate highway, near Parkersburg, about a hundred miles to the north, here was an opportunity to obtain many substantiating witnesses—for this road must certainly be well-traveled.
Jarrett explained that Jones had noted several passing cars, but observed that most people would not stop when they saw something unusual in the road. As was Jones’ first impression, they probably thought the object was some ordinary piece of road equipment. and were thoroughly accustomed to objects in the road because of the many construction projects they encountered during the building of the new highway. He did say that one man, a barber, had told friends of seeing an unusual object, and that he was trying to locate the witness, so far without results.
“Tad’s story is backed up in other ways,” Ralph added. “There is this fellow who lives near Bancroft. I had a difficult time getting him to talk, and was successful only after telling him some of my own experiences.”
The same night Jones has observed the sphere, the man had gone home and masked his fear by informing his wife, “You can’t guess what happened to me. I’ve just been buzzed by a water tank on the interstate!”
He was driving east, in the opposite direction from that traveled by Jones. A brilliant orange light appeared in the sky ahead of him, rapidly descended and changed to purple as it reached road level and approached him on a collision course. He slammed on the brakes of his truck, ran it onto the shoulder, and crouched down. As he did so, the thing suddenly rose and passed over him, barely clearing his vehicle. It was then he could see it was not just a light, but a well-defined spherical object. He watched as it again descended to road level, speeded along for a few hundred yards, and then rose and disappeared as a brilliant light, changing, again, from purple back to orange.
“During the same week, Jarrett continued, “two of my neighbors, who live about two blocks from me, were going to a basketball game at Page Jr. High School, when they saw a gray metallic-looking object. They caught it in their headlights, speeding ahead of them on Strawberry road. Like the thing Tad saw, it suddenly popped up into the sky and disappeared. A group of school children down in Sun Valley also reported seeing a sphere, earlier the same day.”
I then asked about the rumor, passed on to me by Hugh McPherson, about Jones’ disappearance. At first Jarrett seemed reluctant to answer, then did admit that the witness had indeed vanished, along with his family, apparently in the middle of the night—for the neighbors had not seen them move out.
“But there really were some other circumstances,” he hesitatingly added, as if pondering whether he should continue.
“Do you mean those notes which were stuck under his door (John Keel had told me about this)?”
“Oh, that. I took John Keel to see Tad, while Keel was here to investigate the case. We concluded, however, that they were written by a prankster, in the same manner that the boys at the plant play jokes on me.
“Those notes were hand printed, with charcoal, I would guess, on pieces of cardboard about four by eight inches. They had been deliberately burned around the edges. I don’t remember exactly what they said, only something like, ‘You have been warned! Do not talk about this further!’ and so on.
“They were worded much like the prank telephone calls I’ve received now and then. But, of course, there was this one occasion I’m not sure of—the morning the story about Jones appeared in
The Charleston Gazette.
“At the time I hadn’t yet seen the paper, for this was before breakfast, and I was in the bathroom. I hadn’t begun shaving, however, so I went into the bedroom and picked up the extension. I heard a very clear ‘beep-beep’ sound.
“ ‘Ralph, what is that?’ my wife, who was on the phone downstairs, asked me. ‘I don’t know—it’s very strange,’ Itold her.
“The beeping continued for about two, maybe three minutes. Then the phone went dead and the dial tone came on. I’ve heard all sorts of code transmissions on short wave, but nothing quite like that.”
I gathered that the “other circumstances” Jarrett mentioned earlier had nothing to do with the threatening notes, for he had ascribed little importance to them. I asked him if he was withholding something—information that might explain Jones’ flight from the Charleston area.
Beyond a few generalities and hints, Jarrett gave me little additional information. He had promised his secrecy to Jones, in exchange for the information, he finally explained, terminating his discussion of the case.
Jones, I reasoned, had not been unduly alarmed by the thing on the interstate highway, nor by the threatening notes. What had happened to him, to frighten him into leaving the area?
Trying to construct a theory from my notes of my conversation with Jarrett, I confess I cannot come up with much. But this does certainly involve some incredible occurrence on a dark, rainy night, during which Jones was driving north to Ripley.
I can envision a light following his car, a fog enveloping him, and his being lifted, lifted, into a wild, horrible phantasmagoria. He returned from it, but somehow he felt that a Something, somehow, somewhere, still held onto a part of him.
I
n the shadows, the Men In Black had long lurked, biding their time, waiting. Here and there, now and then, some people thought they had seen them, but they weren’t quite certain; perhaps they more sensed than actually regarded them.
Fourteen years earlier, the shadowy visitors had shown themselves openly. Then they had descended upon flying saucer buffs, threatening and terrorizing them, hushing them up.
Al K. Bender, a UFO researcher, had been the first known victim, in 1952. He was turning a certain theory over and over in his mind. He thought he had some hard evidence about the origin and purpose of unidentified flying objects. Then one day he performed a certain experiment, and the lurking horror came. It began with glowing blue lights. Then came the stranger with the luminous eyes in the darkened theatre, and later on the dusky street. It culminated when the men in black, three of them, paid him a visit.
Bender gave up his predilection with the UFOs; and the men indicated they would go away.
In Canada, and even Australia, they showed up. They were deeply tanned, mysterious and threatening. Some people thought they were Government Men, though most UFO researchers agreed that they were emissaries from outer space (or even from the Inner Earth)! Their mission appeared to be quite simple, however: they wished to silence those people who had found out too much about flying saucers.
