UFOs: The Hallucinagen Hypothesis

I think it interesting to probe the mysteries of the universe, and a useful tool in that endeavor is an extremely open mind. I have no specific agenda here, neither believing nor disbelieving in particular explanations of paranormal events (e.g., UFO sightings). So when it comes to looking for a solution to the paranormal problem we shouldn’t shy away from explanations which may be nearly as peculiar the reported phenomena.

I’ve had various friends and relatives report odd experiences for which I could provide no explanation. Either the phenomena they experienced was objectively real or their brain entered into some unusual, transient state wherein the experience was produced and believed as real. I’ll focus here on the latter possibility, that no objectively real as-described event occurred. What then might explain their experiences?

Brains are peculiar things, capable (at times) of doing things we may neither want nor expect. Many (if not most) of us who have lived some significant number of years on this Earth have probably experienced moments where our perceptions of events differed wildly from reality, something we generally suss out only in retrospect. For myself I will readily admit that my work and my personal life have included many pockets of profound stress, and during a handful of those moments I experienced and believed in things which I later came to realize were not real. These false experiences ranged from the horribly paranoid event I describe on this blog (the one which probably cost me my marriage) to several trips to the emergency room as a result of panic attacks I mistook as heart attacks, to a worried journey I made out of the city I was living in during college because I woke up that morning irrationally concerned about an imminent disaster. It has never been suggested by any of the competent professionals I’ve seen over the years that these mental aberrations exceed the norm for a mildly anxious man living in this unnaturally confusing modern world of ours. That was a bit of a disappointment, I think. I think I would have been more comforted to know that there was something wrong with me, rather than learn there was something wrong with the universe that such things could exist within the space of “normal”. It never occurred to me that sane individuals could take these brief sojourns away from their properly reasoning mind. But, I accepted this new found appreciation for the strangeness of the mind and at some point began to wonder whether if my departures could manifest themselves in my particular ways, perhaps other people’s momentary lapses of reason could not manifest themselves as experiences with UFOs, aliens, ghosts, etc. Now let me be clear, none of my experiences ever had any hallucinatory qualities. My flights of fancy were serious errors in the interpretation of objectively real data, not an error involving the manufacturing of data (people, places, events) which is otherwise not objectively real; there’s quite an important distinction. But perhaps it was possible for others to make that one greater step beyond. It felt like the errors were similar, just occurring in a different part of the brain, at a different stage in the receipt of the real world through the many interpretive filters of the brain. I liked the argument, but it never quite satisfied me. My thinking languished in that state for a span of years until I was on a camping trip with my then young kids and their friends and fathers. Once the kids had all gone to bed the conversation around the fire somehow turned to our college days and some of the fathers’ youthful drug experiences. Several of the fathers described their experiences with LSD. Their descriptions of chemically induced false realities got me thinking. While the idea that LSD, or some other chemical/biological agent, could be behind some allegedly paranormal experiences was hardly a new idea, it was at the time profoundly new to me. As I looked into the matter a little further after returning home I realized how well the concept, if not the specifics, fit many of the requirements of the explanation I sought.

The solution to the paranormal (UFO, alien, ghost, etc.) problem was something that could make otherwise sane people see things that were not there, experience things that were not happening, and then return them to sanity mere seconds (and sometimes minutes) later. A hallucinogen fits that requirement perfectly. But there were two key questions it failed to directly address. How might people be exposed? And more problematically, could hallucinogens explain incidents where more than one person has an experience?

The first point was relatively easy to establish as possible, exposure is not hard to imagine. We all know people can become affected by agents in the air, in food, in water, through skin contact, etc. LSD, as just one example of hallucinogens, is able to produce profound effects with extremely small doses. Oral contact with a tiny piece of paper previously dipped in lysergic acid diethylmidecreates (LSD) is enough. The government has admitted to exposing soldiers to LSD in the interest of scientific (read: military) research, so it was no surprise when I discovered via a Gopher site on the earlier (largely academic) Internet a paper describing research done to weaponize LSD (perhaps it included other hallucinogenic compounds, I don’t recall). My own mind doesn’t leap to assuming the government has any interest in using such technologies against its own citizens, so my interests in the paper were purely in their apparent success in tests effectively aerosolizing the hallucinogenic compounds and inducing effects in test subjects at some distance. I remember they specifically mentioned successful tests using an ultrasonic piezo-electric device as the atomizer, I remember this specifically because it was the first I knew you could use ultrasonic sound to create a mist (similar technology is now to be found in many, if not most, humidifiers). I had now proved to myself via this research that it was possible for people to be exposed at some distance from a hallucinogenic source, and importantly to be exposed without being aware of it. But I rejected the notion that most people were having this experience as a result of some sort of governmentally or privately driven effort, this seemed flatly absurd given even the few paranormal cases I knew of directly where the circumstances did not allow for such meddling. If this was not artificially induced then it followed it must be naturally induced and so the question became, are there naturally occurring hallucinogenic sources which people could be exposed to, through the air or through touch? This certainly seemed theoretically sound, given that various biologic sources exist for hallucinogenics (e.g., plants, fungus, frogs, etc.). The biologic source that seemed most worthy of further investigation was fungus. LSD was first found in the ergot fungus; magic mushrooms are another common form of hallucinogenic fungus. And fungi have far more latitude in where they can exist than would hallucinogenic plants or frogs (and I think people would have noticed the frogs). And of course in terms of a method for spreading without direct physical contact, it’s important to note that the life cycle of fungus involves spreading via spores released into the air. While I have found no research establishing the fact that anyone has investigated whether there exist fungal spores capable of carrying or triggering hallucinogenic effects in humans, it doesn’t mean there are no such spores. Scientists have only just begun to understand the more complicated aspects of molds such as Stachybotrys (“toxic mold”) which can in some people trigger immune responses that do impact the brain, causing such things as memory loss.

From a purely logical standpoint it all makes sense. Where do most people have paranormal experiences? Ghosts are rarely reported in shiny, sterile new offices or homes, they are widely reported in older buildings, in basements, in locations which would have much higher fungal activity. UFO experiences similarly do not often occur in modern, sterile environments, they generally occur outside, where the air is (and the experiencers are) subject to contamination from such things as fungal spores.

In theory this should be an easy theory to test. Anyone who reports a paranormal experience would be immediately tested for any residual evidence of hallucinogens. Unfortunately, hallucinogens are very hard to detect, and if only slight exposure were involved what tests currently exist (that are commercially available) would more than likely provide negative results. And so we remain stuck with this currently untestable, but very compelling hypothesis.

And so I turned my attention to trying to reason my way around the bigger obstacle, can hallucinogens explain a paranormal event witnessed by a group of people? To more formally state the problem, if two (or more) people were simultaneously exposed to the same hallucinogenic compound could they share the same experience (or believe retroactively that they had) and recount the experience such that others would also believe they had shared it? On the surface this seems utterly impossible, the standard explanations of mass delusion or mass hypnosis just won’t cut it; it’s as unsatisfying and as bogus an answer as dismissing UFOs as swamp gas some 60 years ago. And so I began the exploration of this topic by trying to find examples of similar or at least tangentially related phenomena outside the arena of UFOs and ghosts. And after many false starts I found what I was searching for in my experiences with fellow members of a religious group I fell into; most would, and have, called them a cult but I still shy away from that term because it is just too convenient a way to dismiss beliefs we don’t (or no longer) agree with. In the end I left the group, but not before realizing just malleable our minds could be made, just how easily they could be made to align themselves to a commonly expected or hinted at experience and how little we may realize it when it happens. I’ll need to think about how to present these experiences such that they seem intelligible and worthy as explanation/proof that a group can indeed mislead themselves into a uniform experience of a lie.

And that’s more or less where my thinking has trailed off, with my strong suspicion that many of the paranormal events that are reported are the product of some naturally occurring hallucinogen (possibly delivered via fungal spore) combined with peculiar and little understood psycho-religious survival mechanisms in the brain encoding experiences which did not objectively occur as such.

Anyone agree with this hypothesis, or have evidence for or against it?

John

WikiLeaks: Preparing Us for ET Disclosure

Let me be clear, I am not yet convinced that UFOs have ever had extra-terrestrial origins.  Neither do I necessarily deny the very honestly believed and very hard to dismiss accounts of the many credible people (including family and friends) whose encounters, experiences defy my ability to offer alternative explanations.  My problem is simply that I find myself presented with two seemingly equally implausible scenarios and asked to choose. It feels more a matter of faith than a matter of reason. Do I believe:

1) ETs are interacting with our planet and its people in ways which seem to make little sense to me (widely varied interactions, widely varied interactors).

2) Sane, healthy, right-functioning individuals are having imagined experiences which are generally considered only possible among those who are insane, unhealthy, dysfunctional.

I have neither the knowledge/evidence to confirm the first option nor the theoretical/clinical psychology background to venture more than a guess about the second option.

But, if we take the first option as a working hypothesis, that there are ETs who interact with planet Earth and its people, and if we include in that hypothesis the fairly small leap that if such a thing were truth the governments of the world would likely have the resources to have become aware of it, then in this new age of WikiLeaks I can easily see how disclosure could come any day. I can imagine people suggesting there is a disclosure agenda underway would point to the massive disclosure of secret government documents as proof that the mechanism for UFO disclosure has now been established. The
pump has been primed, the people and the press have been taught to accept WikiLeaks as a true, reliable source for leaked information. The government has not seriously denied the authenticity of the leaked documents, the media has not denied the authenticity of the leaked documents, the public has not seriously denied the authenticity of the leaked documents. Had the first caches of documents released by WikiLeaks pertained to a UFO agenda you can easily imagine the response, complete and total denial of authenticity, no matter the actual content; the mainstream media and public would not be willing to give the contents a serious look. If there is to be a UFO disclosure it’s easy to see how WikiLeaks would be ideal for that purpose. Perhaps the documents Julian Assange threatens to release if he is made to face US prosecution are not merely a continuation of the USA’s terrestrial turmoils but something quite different.

If I were to allow myself faith enough to presume ETs were here then my prediction for the new year (or the new years which follow) would be that the government will disclosure their existence via this new international vehicle of disclosure, WikiLeaks. Of course whether that disclosure is the result of individuals with conscience or a global elite manipulating our perceptions for their ends is a matter for a separate leap of faith.

John

Preserving Myself & Losing My Soul

I’ve been following the events related to WikiLeaks very closely; it has a particular importance to me.  Their initial document releases didn’t meet with denial from our government, and WikiLeaks themselves seemed to face no overtly grave repercussions.  I began to naively hope that truth could really set us all free, that perhaps those in power had tired of their machinations, had tired of staring down at their hands perpetually coated in other people’s blood, or at least drenched in their own nervous sweat.  While they might not like having their dirty laundry aired in public, I liked to imagine that they had decided to do the right thing, to own the truth or at least let the truth stand (if only because elections and internal upheavals meant the events being disclosed happened on someone else’s watch and the repercussions would largely pass them by).  I was wrong, of course.

I was deeply saddened, but not terribly surprised, when Julian Assange, the face of WikiLeaks, the publisher of these truths governments would like kept secret, was suddenly the subject of an arrest warrant accusing him of vague but alarming sex crimes after one of their larger releases of US government documents.  It’s hardly a new tactic, when you can’t attack the message (because it is unarguably true), go after the messenger.  This is what the powers that be did.  The initial warrant was canceled for technical reasons, but was since reinstated and he has since been arrested and held.  Assange’s reputation has been seriously damaged, ensuring that every interview he has done and will do since the allegations first surfaced is notable for the discussion of, or lack of discussion of, his alleged sex crimes.  From what has now been disclosed, we learn the sex crimes of which he has been accused involve little more than the fallout from two women disappointed that his interest in them did not extend beyond momentary romantic trysts.  He appears to be charged with an obscure Swedish law pertaining to his not practicing safe sex.  The women were apparently upset that he prefers not to use condoms, and that he refused to provide them with a clean bill of health from an STD testing clinic.  If I am reading it right, he bedded one woman one night at a conference, then apparently openly flirted with and replaced the first woman (who was organizing the conference) with a second woman the very next night.  Neither woman were, on balance, satisfied with how things went and this somehow translated into an arrest warrant being issued for a crime which appears to be resolvable through the payment of a $715 fine.  He is no one I’d want my sister to date, admittedly, but his behavior is sadly no worse than what I’d expect from the majority of males on this planet suddenly given access to a bevy of “groupies” almost half his age.  I suppose one can be grateful that they have sought only to kill the man’s personal reputation and not the man himself.  Perhaps that will come later.

My paranoid mind cannot help but see his situation as a cautionary tale for me.  I am not so arrogant as to imagine I pose even a fraction of the threat WikiLeaks does, but neither am I likely as robust as is Julian Assange.  We all have skeletons in our closet.  We have all done things we would not wish broadcast to the world or revealed to friends and family.  As part of the process of obtaining and maintaining the secret clearances necessary for my work I have been hooked up to polygraph machines and forced to disclose to agents of my government my painful imperfection and its manifestation in the form of painful indiscretions.  The premise is that by disclosing to the government all that could be used to blackmail you,  you become immune to the threat of blackmail (at least where your job is concerned).  The reality is that you have just given all your secrets to the most potentially dangerous blackmailer there is, one who is above the law, by being the law.  If you ever wonder why more people don’t come forward to tell all they know about clandestine government activities, remember what risk those people are really facing.  Most people could survive the loss of their job, their financial security, their material possessions, even their lives, but to have things revealed about you that would damage all that you ultimately are, your reputation in this world, the image your family, your friends, your colleagues will retain of you forever; that is worse than death, that is the nullification of your very existence.  Recorded forever in a manila folder somewhere deep within a long filing cabinet in some government office is the scribbled notes from my sessions, likely backed by secretly recorded audio or video, the truths I wished I could unmake, wished I could have hidden from the polygrapher.  I cannot escape the fear that something I say or have said will poke that bear once too often, and that I will find my own greater hell on Earth (even worse than the events of the past year, seeing my family, work, life fall apart).

And so I must act out of self-preservation, and a germ of an idea came to me as a means toward greater protection.  The idea is hardly new, and the more I think of it the more I suspect it is frequently employed by those who do come forward.

I met up with an old college friend a few weeks ago.  He’s a lawyer now and in response to the standard “What have you been up to?” I got to hear about a case he is currently involved with.  The case is a variation of a typical whistle-blower scenario, an employee discovers something about his company which he believes to be “wrong” and out of conscience the employee makes this public by passing his information to one who knows better than he how to get others to take notice so that the change he could not affect from the inside could be imposed from the outside. The vehicle he chose was a popular blogger who writes about that industry. The blogger in his over-eagerness contacted the company for comment somewhat prematurely, before giving my friend’s client the opportunity to relay the evidence documenting his claims.  My friend’s client was instantly identified as being the source of the leak and he found himself not only fired but sued by the employer for libel to the tune of millions of dollars; the millions of dollars being valuation the company lost in a sale which overlapped the time when the story exploded on the internet, a story extensively quoting my friend’s client.  Unlike the common whistle-blower case, what the employee discovered was not something illegal, just deeply unsavory, something the company’s customers (and the public) would likely want to know, whether or not they had a legal right to expect that knowledge.  This employee had not anticipated the speed at which things happened and had not removed the evidence he’d gathered from his office before he was forcibly escorted empty handed from it.  Unable to access the evidence he’d gathered he now faces the very real threat of losing the case and having a judgment issued against him, one so harsh that it will likely seriously damage the rest of his life, preventing him from enjoying anything beyond a frugal life as he struggles to pay the judgment.  My friend said he’s had no choice but to advise his client to accept an offer whereby his life will be disrupted only for the next 10 years, not the next 50.  My friend said he doesn’t believe they have any chance of winning the case.   I was asking my friend what his client should have done to protect himself, presuming he wasn’t able to secure the proof he needed to back up his statements, a situation eerily familiar to me.  My friend told me something that surprised me.  He said something like, “My client should have revealed the truth as a fiction, and not just shared the story with one pseudo-journalist who would expect proof.  He should have created a fiction derived from the truth he wants to reveal and distributed this fiction online in anonymous comments within the communities he believes will be inspired to ask the right questions.  If those right questions get asked, and asked loudly, the company will be forced to respond and given the falseness embedded in the rumors that were circulated they can save face by honestly and forcefully denying the overall allegations while secretly getting their shit together so by the time anyone figures out what the original truth was they’ve already addressed the problem.  In that scenario everybody wins, the whistle blower keeps his job, the company gets to keep most of its reputation, the shareholders get to keep most of their investment, and the much needed change takes place.”  Out of my surprise at his response I made the smart ass comment, “Well, everybody wins but the truth.”  To which he gave a very lawyerly reponse which approximated, “Truth is often a technicality.”

The conversation wound down but not before I posed a few hypotheticals, including ones in which the client had already spoken out before receiving this advice, and was told that assuming no immediate action had been taken against him he could have at least reduced his vulnerability by stating after the fact that his statements had been fiction, or at least creating an atmosphere of doubt surrounding his honesty, shifting the burden to others to sort fact from fiction, allowing them to find their own truth from his mixed bag.  There is nothing noble about being anything but honest; there is nothing respectable about telling lies.  But to date I have not been strong enough to take my case to the public openly, and as such I have been far less than courageous.  How much less of a man does it make me to go one step further back and issue the disclaimer that I am a liar, that I weave my experiences with unspecified departures from reality.  In the days which followed I couldn’t shake the thought of taking refuge within the plausibly deniable while not losing the ability to sort (retroactively at least) fact from fiction.  Surely there must be a way one could one have their cake and eat it too?

The other day I hit upon what I believe might be the best solution available, for myself and those others who cannot proudly stand behind pure truths.  Perhaps we can at least hide in our words the acknowledgment of what is true and what is not.  I came up with a simple steganographic system to accomplish this, a system wherein I can record for posterity when I have said more that is untrue than true.  If I become braver or the situation becomes more agreeable I can reveal the key and prove that I at least knew what I intended, what I believed.  And until then the reader can make the connections for themselves, draw their own conclusions.

John

The Big Lie of Weird Life

Much is being made today about NASA’s impending ‘weird life’ announcement, the discovery of a life form that isn’t built from the same stuff as everything else. Unfortunately out of ignorance and a desire to get hits and boost advertising revenue most of the reportage has the facts or at least the spirit of the discovery wrong.

While mildly interesting, the discovery is largely academic, and not all that surprising. Sure, it could suggest life existing elsewhere could more easily adapt to available chemistry, but I doubt few exobiologists would have supposed otherwise.

All that was announced was that a known bacteria was able to thrive in an environment where one of the fundamental building blocks of life (phosphorous) was in short supply, and another, arsenic, was offered in the environment as a substitute. Arsenic is a similar molecule, same column on the period chart, which means it bonds similarly. And a scientist discovered that this bacteria was able to use arsenic instead of phosphorous to build its cells, DNA, etc.

The life is still Earth-like, still very familiar cells building themselves from very familiar DNA. This discovery is the equivalent of a car designer proving you can build a car body out of fiberglass instead of steel. Interesting, useful, good to know, but at the end of the day it’s still a car, it hasn’t become a space ship.

Exobiologists inside and outside of NASA have long theorized, and most likely expect, that life evolving on other worlds would be fundamentally different. And no doubt we will one day find such life, even if we don’t immediately recognize it.  Perhaps it is already here, perhaps it us, or perhaps it hides within us or within this particular bacterial.  The proof of extraterrestrial origins may lie in the used or unused portions of the DNA we’re only just beginning to map and understand.  (For those who wish their mind blown, I suggest reading about non-coding regions of DNA, formerly known as “junk DNA”, which are thought to include remnants of ancient viruses, abandoned biological abilities, and more.  It is in these non-coding regions we may ultimately find the best proof of our origins.)

The announcement from my former employer was a disappointment to the many who misunderstood it to be something more. To my mind it certainly paled in comparison to the far more significant announcement made in 1996 when we found evidence of life in a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth. I well remember when my colleague “Bernie” came into my office and excitedly told me that they’d scheduled a press conference to announce possible ancient life on Mars and that Goldin was behind it.  You don’t forget a moment like that!  (I think Bernie was wearing a red tie and tan pants, and I was wearing a tie my dad had gotten me a few years before for job interviews, it had paisleys on it.)  I jumped on my terminal and sure enough I found the notice by Goldin and the scientists, and an abstract for the research.  I kept waiting to hear Goldin or someone from PA back off the announcement which was still a few days off, add a few more caveats to what was being disclosed.  To my surprise the press conference went off just as planned.  We were all excited, newly emboldened for the missions to Mars which would follow.  It was all the talk around our center for days if not weeks, and I doubt this recent announcement is having that sort of impact.

One reader of this blog alerted me to Richard C. Hoagland’s recent statements about the announcement where he apparently suggested this was a step in a secret agenda of “disclosure”.  Given the reduced significance of this new announcement, relative to the one 15 years ago, I just can’t see it that way.

John

The Semisub Explanation for the Launch Off the California Coast

I’ve been largely unemployed, and arguably unemployable, these last few months.  I keep getting calls, and I keep hearing from friends working on new commercial space projects, but I rarely call them back, and when I do it’s either too late or the job would require more from me than I have to give.

About three months back I did have a series of interesting conversations which came to mind yesterday when I was reading about the alleged undisclosed missile launch off the California coast.  A former colleague had recommended me for a consulting opening managing software development for a company that was working on converting abandoned oil drilling platforms into launch pads for commercial satellites and rockets.  In the course of one of the last calls, with the president of the company, I realized that some of the oil rigs they were talking about modifying were semisubs, or floating, mobile oil rigs.  I asked why they’d outfit semisubs as launch platforms, given the added complexity and insecurity of a floating as opposed to rigidly anchored platform, and he never gave me a satisfactory answer, saying only that some of his customers were very keen on having flexible launch windows and being able to control their visibility.  The latter statement I took as meaning that the companies or governments who would buy these semisub platforms wanted to be able to go unmonitored by other companies or governments.  While I could see some legitimacy to private companies or governments not wanting their rivals overly aware of their activities, it (combined with the president’s peculiarly unsettling personality) made me uneasy, and I politely declined the job citing scheduling conflicts.

I should add that I don’t know to what degree a semisub platform could escape or avoid notice, this is all conjecture on my part.  Surely any launch would be detectable by rival governments or companies, and the launch would be tracked back to its source via commercial or government reconnaissance satellites.  Once spotted any traditional slow moving launch platform would have quite a job escaping the watchful eye of a roused satellite.  The possibility occurred to me that since these semisubs have built into their very design the ability to radically alter their buoyancy, perhaps a modified platform could be made to slip most of its bulk just below the waves, or at least right to the waves, where its remaining imprint could be hidden by the wake of the ships covertly tasked with tugging the platform to its new location.  Such a system might be able to escape notice post launch.

What the practical purpose of such a commercial or foreign launch off the California coast would be I don’t know, unless we consider the possibility that some entity was making the radical statement, “We can launch our benign or malignant payloads from anywhere we choose.  You cannot  stop us, you cannot even identify us.”

I’m not saying that’s what happened, of course, perhaps it was just a trick of perspective and high altitude winds toying with a contrail.  The company I talked to didn’t sound as though they were so close to having a viable mobile platform, and I’m not sure if there are any other competitors in that space. Still, it is an interesting possibility to consider, particularly given the rogue nations we all worry about (North Korea and Iran in particular).

John

Reducing Lives to Dollars

It’s been a long four months of mostly solitude. The terms of the divorce have been pretty well worked out now, all that’s left is a judge signing off on the terms we’ve agreed to.  The lawyers got their cut, the state will get its cut, and my wife got hers.  The kids have chosen to keep their distance from me, the process of separation hasn’t been easy, and I suppose it’s just easier for them to treat me like a ghost until things settle down.  Maybe I raised them with too much coddling, because right now I can’t help but wish there was a little more fight in them, more willingness to fight through the awkwardness and give their dad a call, or at least return his.  It’s hard not to be bitter after so many years devoted, in various ways, to growing and securing your family.  I guess you just imagine your end will come with them all around you, you still willingly providing for them.  Instead the end comes early, and they all get the payday early.  But it could have been worse.  My wife, soon my ex-wife, may have selfishly chosen not to stand by me through all this,  but one of the things that first attracted me to her was her fairness, and to her credit she remained fair through the mediation.  She didn’t ask for more than she felt she deserved, and I mostly agreed in principle at least.  There were three or four items I objected to, including her lawyer requesting equity from a mountain cabin an uncle had left me almost twenty years ago.  The cabin had been almost worthless when it was given to me, and wasn’t worth more than $20k now, but I’d fixed that cabin up with my own two hands, working on it every few weekends over a period of years, using only donated scrap materials from a neighbor’s construction business.   That cabin was entirely mine, it was my place away from the world.  It was a little hollow I carved out of this complicated world where I could be and owe no one anything, not time, not attention, not money.  Once it was fixed up I probably only made it out there one or two weekends a year, but just knowing it was out there, available, made every day better.  When I objected to her getting any money out of it she instantly relented and looked apologetic.  I knew the lawyer had put her up to it; they don’t care about morality, they just care about legality, and there’s a world of difference.  She got mostly half of everything else, and she probably deserved it, I think I’m just so deeply offended that I can’t be the one to hand it out, that neither the state nor she trusts me to do the right thing.  I’m probably making all this sound like it’s about money, but that’s what so hurts, that money should be the least of what this dissolution is about.  I hurt every day and will to some degree forever, whether I lose all my money or keep all my money, that pain isn’t just going away.  I’m too old to start again, to recreate the happy home I once had.  I will probably date again, may find love again, but there will be no more of the family I had.  And yet this whole process has been essentially about coming up with a dollar amount that represents our life together, and ensuring she gets paid that amount.  I wish the state cared as much about my emotional well-being as it did about her financial well-being.  What a rotten system we have created for ourselves over these many years of civilization, where the best of our government cares first and foremost about the money of its citizenry, and not their happiness.

John

Unwinding a Sean O’Keefe Assassination Plot

This morning I was saddened to wake up and learn of the crash of a floatplane in Alaska carrying former NASA head Sean O’Keefe (and former Senator Ted Stevens). It was initially feared that O’Keefe was among those killed, but I am glad to learn he and his son were among the survivors.

In thinking about Sean O’Keefe, I am reminded of what a controversial figure he was at NASA, felt by most I worked with to be far too willing to leave vital and exciting science back on the ground in order to meet or slash budgets and impress the political machine that put him in power, andthat he hoped had plans for him beyond his NASA post.  The worst offense came when he  decided to let Hubble die unserviced back in ’04, using as a scapegoat the foam strike issue which suddenly came onto everyone’s radar with Columbia’s destruction.  I was part of many discussions which looked unkindly at the sudden cost and risk aversion, at a time when the same administration sitting on top was willing to risk vastly greater sums and vastly greater numbers of lives prosecuting wars of dubious value.  O’Keefe’s ultimate legacy and the fondness I’ve heard expressed in more recent years has come somewhat undeservedly from the inarguable success of the twin Mars Explorer Rover (MER) programs, and O’Keefe’s pursuit of FBC (Faster Better Cheaper), ISS not withstanding.  MER succeeded not because of O’Keefe but in spite of the cost cuts associated with him.  I think O’Keefe is remembered favorably as Reagan has been, their policies may have been flawed, their methods may have been meritless, but no one can argue with the outcomes, and neither do people have a stomach for deeply questioning them.  I remember a quote from my high school Latin I class that went something like, “Victories are never questioned by the victors.”

What many do not know is that O’Keefe was a member of the elitist, secretive Bohemian Club, and participant in their Bohemian Grove rituals; his participation has been an open secret within space circles.  Much has been suggested about the roles these players have in remaking the world, our America, and the space which surrounds us all.

While it is too soon to meaningfully speculate on whether the plane crash qualifies as a tragic accident or a devious plot, it’s not too soon to remember O’Keefe’s impact on NASA, not too soon to look at his still early role in leading the American branch of the increasingly important European Aeronautic, Defence, and Space Company (EADS), not too soon to wonder what conspiratorial filaments might manifest in these upcoming days, and whether they will join together to support the weight of larger truths.  I hope, as I always do, that the world is simpler than that, that what we see is what there is, but more intelligent people than me think differently and who am I to say they are wrong.

On a personal note, I am truly glad Sean O’Keefe has survived, and sad to learn that Mr. Stevens and five others did not. But we must live with what the facts are, and the tragedy that exists because of them.

John

Cover-Up on the ISS?

I got an email yesterday from someone I used to know slightly at NASA Lewis. He ended up retiring a decade after I moved on. He did some contract work on shuttle and ISS systems. We were never close but a thermodynamics buddy of mine who was also briefly at Lewis would mention this guy now and again as they crossed paths, and more so when they consulted on the same project about five years ago. My friend was no fan of this guy, not because of his work, which was solid as far as I ever heard, but because this guy had an extremely abrasive personality and was given to some pretty off-color humor.

I’m not sure how I ended up being on the receiving end of this guy’s email, the email itself was sent with the recipients hidden in the BCC field. I have no idea to how many people this was sent, but presumably quite a few if I ended up on the list.

I’ve been following the reported PVTCS issues on the ISS and they’re peddling a load of crap. They knew this wasn’t a simple PFCS failure before they did the first EVA. The timetable and procedures are all wrong for a normal PFCS replacement. My best guess is a micrometeorite strike of the PVR, causing coolant pressure loss and contamination, overworking the PFCS until it failed, or a direct PFCS strike with coolant contamination. It’d hardly be the first time they covered up a strike of the ISS. You heard from Jack? I haven’t spoken to him since the fall conference, wonder if he knows something.

Some Googling identified the PVTCS as the entire cooling system, the PFCS appears to be the pump module, and the PVR is the radiator.

I’m not sure I buy the validity of what this guy is saying, I am not at all familiar with the ISS systems. I forwarded it to my friend to see what he thought and got a one line response, “That asshole is just pissed off he lost his fat shuttle contract.” There’s no love lost between the two of them, and my friend’s a pretty toe-the-line sort of guy, so he isn’t likely to go against what NASA reports.

I am not aware of NASA covering up any significant micrometeorite strikes. I remember reports of a few serious ones to the shuttle, found as part of the stepped up imaging after the tragedy following the foam strikes, and those were hardly kept from the public. Something as large as the ISS is bound to be routinely hit, given its many years in orbit, and thus such strikes would hardly be news worthy, unless perhaps the risks to astronaut safety are greater than is widely known. I can imagine NASA might be motivated to keep such a danger quiet at a time when it’s being forced to mothball the shuttle fleet and terminate its plans to return to the moon. The ISS is NASA’s last stand in space, and they would not be expected to give it up without a fight. But are they covering up the nature of the PVTCS failure on the ISS? I’m not yet convinced.

The Things that Matter and the Things that Don’t

My wife left me two weeks ago, on Independence Day. Actually that’s not factually correct, she made me leave her, the kids, and the home. She intends to file for divorce. I suppose I could have made her move out instead, or at least put up a fight, but it would have been a Pyrrhic victory. The bulk of the life I care about that doesn’t involve them can easily fit inside the trunk of my car, and the closet of the extended stay motel room in which I’m currently staying.

I suspect there’s at least one moment in most people’s relationships where each person is forced to make a choice about how vulnerable each wants to allow themselves to be. We have all done things we’re not proud of, we’ve all been aspects of ourselves we’re not proud of, we’ve all got secrets we keep because we’re afraid of what others would think of us if they knew. I wonder how many of us have truly been honest with our spouses, told them the things we knew they might not be able to accept, the things which might make them leave.

My wife and I had been doing a lot of counseling. I’d been going individually twice a week to try to get control of my emotions and anxieties and life, and we’d been going as a couple once a week in an effort to reconnect and undo the damage the wear and tear long relationships produce, as well as address some of the unique issues our circumstances have created.

At some point in the process I began to seriously weigh telling my wife the whole story about my leaving JPL, and the mind shift and fears which followed. The flirtation with the idea became an obsession with the idea. Telling the internet your secrets provides some relief, but the internet can’t give you a hug, it doesn’t know you, it hasn’t known you. The internet can never tell you everything’s going to be alright in a voice louder than a whisper. I wanted to tell her, I needed her to tell me.

A few years ago during a bout of insomnia I fell into watching true crime TV shows. Often enough they’d feature a story where an unsuspected killer spontaneously confesses to his prison cell mate or his pastor or his friend. And it’s not long before his perfect crime is undone by his own hand. As a viewer I couldn’t help but think, “How stupid are they?” While I accepted that guilt and conscience are very real psychological phenomenons, how could these people not have wrestled those urges into submission, just as easily as they had the morality which should have prevented their crimes? I suppose I better understand the mind of the confessor now. I knew what might be lost if I was honest. I knew it might cost me my marriage. I did it anyway. And now I’m paying the price.

While I may wish I’d never told her any of it, I now realize it was inevitable. Maybe I would have told her in a month, a week, or a year, but I would have told her, and she would have left me. The compulsion to share was too great, the need for acceptance too great.

I can’t blame her, I suppose, but I do. My anger at her is putting a functional life out of reach for the present. I’ve been delaying client after client, rescheduling meetings into next month, and using each project as an excuse to push back the deadlines of every other one. My days have looked like nights. Sleeping too much, drinking too much, embracing the idiocy of the idiot box, and reading lunatic ravings like my own on the web. Anything to avoid or justify the present.

My wife was always the practical one. She loved me for being a dreamer, able to take her to worlds she could only dimly imagine. And I loved her for grounding me, just enough to see my ideas and dreams get traction in the real world. I owe what I have to her, which is curiously said in both thanks and damnation. We were a highly functional match, and for many early years a passionate and loving one. But age changes us, life changes us, takes from us our capacity to tolerate differences. And soon we’re just left separated by a giant chasm of dissimilitude. Still, you cling to the perpetual hope that you can get it back, that the gap will close, or that perhaps some invisible bridge remains to let you meet in the middle when you most need to. Ultimately I felt constrained by her pragmatism, grew resentful of the me I may have been in some parallel universe unfettered by a wife who countered so many of the ideas I’d gleefully share with an argument beginning with the phrase, “Now be realistic…” And she would have been better off with a husband who didn’t aspire to more than he was, who was satisfied with being a loving husband and a good employee, who didn’t think his destiny was much bigger, a destiny borne on the back of some idea or invention he hope to nurture from dream to reality. We both meant well. I didn’t mean to be the bad husband, she didn’t mean to be the bad wife. But often enough the things which attract us to our spouse turn into the very things we come to hate about them.

Her religion doesn’t permit of much that is unusual, at least unusual for them. One could well argue that the story of Christ is highly unusual, and were it not for its embedding in two thousand years of social history, few would accept it as anything but a peculiarly implausible fairy story, as unbelievable as any UFO, bigfoot, ghost story. But her beliefs are backed by all that cultural embedding, and her religion responds as if threatened by claims of the unapproved paranormal. She doesn’t go so far as to say the paranormal is the providence of the Devil, but I suspect she believes it. Her dogma was the source of my fear of sharing, most of the reason for my silence, and why I knew this might not end well.

The end came unexpectedly, as they always do. I spent so much of my life anticipating fears, worrying about the unlikely worst-case scenarios of the obvious situations that surround me. I worry about the infinitesimal chance that my plane will crash on its way to Pittsburgh, but I head off on a camping trip with my boys without giving a moment’s thought to the pain of a pulled muscle which turns out to be a near fatal case of acute appendicitis. The worst of life comes without warnings. And even when we do accurately anticipate unavoidable horrors (the deaths of those we love, the course of our own diseases) we are spared nothing through the endless anticipating worry. We’d be better off living like moderate fools surprised at every reasonably unavoidable horror.

My wife caught me, saw “troubling” web pages open on my computer. I felt like a Caucasian husband with a Caucasian wife caught looking at a site devoted exclusively to Asian fetish porn; her reaction operated on multiple levels. She was troubled at the general subject matter, troubled at the very specific subject matter, and let her mind read deeply into just what this specific corruption of my interests and intellect said about me, about us. I limit almost all my research and absolutely all my personalized browsing and posting to one cheap, disposable, anonymous netbook. I ordinarily keep the computer in the bottom of my desk drawer when not in use, underneath two outdated and unusuable laptops. I ordinarily keep the computer locked down so rebooting, suspending, hibernating, or screen saver activation will lock the console and require a password. As with all such failures of security, it only takes one mistake and one wrong moment for that mistake to occur. I was installing a number of updates and some new software and had thought I’d be in the house alone until evening. After the third or fourth password prompt triggered by the screen saver activation my laziness got the better of me and I disabled its password prompt. I took a shower. My wife returned home early after errands, her sister no longer needed help setting up for the family barbecue. My wife went in to my office to tell me she was back, and finding me gone thought she’d take the opportunity to print out some directions she was going to need the next morning. I cycle through so many computers she didn’t think anything of getting on this unfamiliar netbook. She has no interest in gadgets, and she’s just as happy I don’t bother her as I once did introducing her to each new one I buy; besides she views their expense as profligate. Because the installations were going slowly I was reading quite a few fringe sites in Firefox as the disk slowly churned its new bits, periodically prompting me for approval.

I came around the corner to my office unsuspecting. I immediately had the dread of being caught, and the guilty look of being caught. My face doomed any chance I had to play off my browsing activities as the fruits of boredom. “What the hell is this?” set the tone for everything else she had to say.

Most of us flawed humans have irrational responses waiting for activation on particular subjects. Hers had been biding their time. I hadn’t brought up any of these fringe topics in years, they had introduced unpleasant discord a decade or so before, back when my only interest had been academic.

Without being aware of it, I had apparently been hinting at or cowardly suggesting that my troubles had their origins in the paranormal. I suppose it was my confessional toe dipping itself in the water while I was sleep walking through recent weeks. This was all the confirmation she needed, the whiff of perfume clinging to the collar of a suspected cheater. I had a choice, I could have probably gotten away with whitewashing it all, making up some elaborately confused but compelling lie. But her anger invited mine, gave me a voice. And so I told her. I’ll never forget her expression. I imagine it’s a face paranoid schizophrenics get used to seeing, frozen on the faces of those witnessing lost, loudly quasi-interactive rants. My voice was calm, though, but perhaps too calm, resigned. I don’t know how much she heard, I’m sure it became too much and she checked out early on. Regardless, she heard enough.

Instead of the comforting hug I had long hoped for, craved, I got what I had always known I would, something along the lines of, “John, you need serious, serious help. I can’t help you, the kids can’t help you, and the fact that you’ve kept all these… delusions to yourself for so long tells me you refuse to help yourself. What’s all this counseling been for? Why have you wasted my time? Their time? Your time? You’ve not been honest with the psychologists, and more importantly you’ve not been honest with me… I can’t do this any more, I don’t want to do this any more. I don’t deserve this, the kids don’t deserve this.”

The remainder of the conversation continued on that theme, with me too devastated to offer much protest. The evening ended with me getting no barbecue, seeing no family, and getting to see only a handful of safe and sane fireworks set off in the parking lot of the motel where I spent that first night. My accommodations would improve slightly in the days that followed, but not my life; a pool and jacuzzi in the building hardly makes up for the unending hours of devastating solitude, and the anticipation of an uncertain future.

I fear all this time alone isn’t helping my mental state. I spend my hours alternately numbing my faculties and consuming vast quantities of variable conspiracy/paranormal information. Conspiracy/paranormal writings make for deeply unhealthy reading. I have come to believe that if you read too much of someone’s insanity their mental contagion may spread to you, at least for a time. In the realm of the conspiracy/paranormal it’s almost impossible to tell who is insightfully sane and who is merely ravingly clever.

John

Almost the End of My Everything

For weeks now I’ve been avoiding the world of conspiracies, avoiding this site, other sites, and even my own thoughts and memories. I’ve been forced instead to think about the mess I almost made of my life, the mess I may be making of my life. I’m still struggling to sort it all out.

My wife, my two sons, and I had all gone out to brunch with some of my wife’s relatives. We’d taken two cars since I had some work I needed to do, and my wife and our sons were going to head over to her brother’s house where the boys were going to ride their cousins’ four ATVs. When I got back to the house I let myself in and noticed the alarm was off. I didn’t think anything of it at first, because this has happened before when we all leave separately as we did this morning. She thinks I’m still inside, I think she’s still inside, and so nobody sets it. I put in an hour of work before going to the kitchen to get some tea. As I’m filling the kettle from the tap I notice that the kitchen door is unlocked, both the deadbolt (which requires a key) and the lock built into the knob. We never use that door, it’s been impassable for years, one of those security door braces is against the door knob, and in front of the door is a low shelving unit my wife keeps the laundry supplies in. The key has been lost for at least two years, and only weeks before this incident the wife and I once again searched everywhere for the key because without it we had to disassemble some of my son’s college apartment furniture in order to bring it in the other entrance. And yet now both the deadbolt and the knob were unlocked. I felt the sudden grip of panic.

I’m not sure who or what exactly I was initially afraid of. The government was not my first thought, but it would become my primary one. The big gun safe was in the closet in the guest bedroom, just a few feet away from the kitchen. I quickly moved there, unlocked the safe and grabbed the only gun I kept loaded, my dad’s Korea sidearm, an old M1911. I went back to the front door, set the alarm to “night stay” so I’d know if anyone came or went, and then searched the house room by room, checking under each bed and in each closet. I even peered into the attic when every other location was checked. If anyone had been there, I saw no trace of them. Nothing appeared disturbed, and no one remained. As the adrenaline waned I began to get a little disturbed by what I’d just done. I was like a man possessed. I am ordinarily relatively meek by nature, avoiding confrontations whenever possible, sometimes to my detriment. God knows what I would have done if I’d found someone. My calm did not remain restored for long.

I tried to reach my wife to see if perhaps she had found the key or gotten a locksmith, but got instant voice mail, which wasn’t unexpected, her brother’s house has spotty cell phone reception. I went back to my office, and started to get back to work. My mind was still too energized to get back to the mentally intensive task I really needed to work on, so I tried to ease back into work by tackling some simple debugging, looking at why a SQL query was pulling the wrong data from a database. I clicked the shortcut I’d set up to automatically build the SSH tunnel I’d need for my DB front end. The login dialog popped up. It shouldn’t have. The login should have happened completely automatically using my configured SSH keys. The key agent was no longer running. That was odd. It quickly dawned on me that my computer must have been restarted, and I simply hadn’t been paying attention when I’d logged on earlier. A quick check of the event log confirmed that the system had probably stopped within 20 minutes of us leaving the house that morning, and whatever happened wasn’t graceful, the event log just stopped suddenly. This was not related to any scheduled update, there was no tell-tale sign of a blue screen, and nothing but a power failure could explain the long down time. And the fancy UPS that my computer is connected to would have kept the computer alive for at least an hour before gracefully shutting it down.

I went back into panic mode. Without particular intent I pulled my gun back out of the desk drawer where I’d temporarily placed it and left it out within easy reach. I began a search to try to narrow down the exact time my computer went down. The last event log entry could have been made a while before the computer was hard reset. While that search was running I examined my computer to see if looked as though it had been disturbed. It had clearly been moved. The speaker out cable I had connected to the desktop barely reached, so much so that I’d accidentally pulled it out a few times myself when I’d nudged the computer mere inches. The speaker cable was now disconnected. Just minutes before leaving the house this morning I’d been listening to a streaming radio program on that computer over those speakers. I now examined the computer in minute detail, looking at every screw head, every USB port, at the CD ROM tray, looking for any sign that someone could have gotten data out of my computer. And I’d swear I saw it, the USB ports usually end up plugged with dust or cat hair between uses, and I keep a can of compressed air handy for that reason. One of the USB ports looked different from the rest. I even used a coated paperclip to probe that one to see if there had been hair which had been just compressed out of the way when something was inserted. There was.

The file search completed to reveal that the computer had shut down about 35 minutes after we left. I looked for any other signs that there was a power outage, and there had been no power outage. All the clocks which usually reset with any outage longer than half a second were all showing perfect time. My son had left his non UPS protected X-Box paused on some game in his room, and it was still paused. I still had my gun with me as I walked the house checking for signs of a power outage.

The only conclusion I was left with seemed to be that someone had come in and perhaps cloned my hard drive, just as people had done at JPL. I just kept pacing the house, alternately moving my finger into and out of the trigger guard. I must have done that for hours, pausing occasionally to sit on my bed, look out the window for suspicious cars, check my cell phone, examine the various doors and windows for signs they were used. I didn’t think the person(s) had made their way in through the kitchen door, I supposed that was just the door they first picked, and finding it still wouldn’t open they moved to another door, and then subsequently forgot to go back and cover their tracks by re-locking that door as they had done another. Perhaps we had forgotten to set the alarm, or more likely they’d disabled it; I’d read years before about how easy it was to eavesdrop on and then clone the little key fobs for auto alarms, and suppose it is just as easy for houses. The more I tried to force an answer from a paucity of data the more and more disturbed I got, and the more time passed.

My family found me this way. No, they found me far worse. The alarm was still on “night stay”. When they got home that evening my wife opened the front door and the alarm went off. The house was that dark that comes at dusk when your eyes seem least able to make sense of what they see, made worse by my turning on no lights. The alarm horn was blaring from inside the bedroom closet, less than ten feet from where I had been sitting. My gun was still in my hand. I ran down the hall towards the front door, leading with my pistol, and when I came around the corner to the living room, in view of the door, and saw it open I began screaming at the figures in the door something they told me later approximated, “Who are you? Who the fuck are you?” They said I repeated it almost 10 times. My wife was apparently repeatedly screaming back, “It’s us! Don’t shoot! It’s us!” I didn’t hear her. I don’t know that I heard anything. I don’t know where I was, and in that state I don’t know why I didn’t fire. Someone turned on the lights.

The recognition finally came, and I lost it, utterly and completely. I broke down immediately, stumbled backwards the foot or so to the wall by the doorway to the hall, slid down to the floor, pushed the gun out of my own reach, under the edge of the couch. I sobbed uncontrollably, gradually drawing myself into a fetal position, lying on my side there on the floor.

My wife has always handled our crises; I’ve always been in awe of her ability to make the right choices in situations where I would freeze and make no choice; she spent some time in college as an EMT and told me about a few awful calls she went on that would have ruined me forever. My wife took command and told our younger son to go down the street and see if our neighbor, “Dr. John” was home and could he rush over; he was a close friend, and a psychiatrist. She had our older sun retrieve the pistol and lock it up. I found out a week or two later something that sent me on a brief crying jag; she’d sent him back to the safe less than twenty minutes later to quickly inventory the guns and to change the combination to one I wouldn’t know; how horrible it is to think of your own family very reasonably afraid of you.

I was just lying there, sobbing desperately, gasping for air, as she wrapped her arms around me, and just told me all the nice things I couldn’t imagine I deserved in that moment. I had very nearly killed them, perhaps even should have killed them, had I not retained some slim sense or cowardice or something. And all she did was tell me that she loved me, that they all loved me, and that everything would be ok, that I was safe, that we were all safe, that everything was fine. I am so grateful for her love, many is the time I’ve felt unworthy of it, and never have I felt less worthy than this lingering now.

Dr. John came over; he probably got there within five minutes. I was still uncommunicative, only making horrible, desperate noises. He sedated slightly me with some sort of injection. I guess my youngest must have given him a preview of my condition; I can’t say I’ve seen doctors carrying around those medical bags they once did. They led me back to our bedroom, got me in bed, and I was left for only a few minutes while she consulted with him, and made arrangements for the kids to drive back and stay with their uncle and aunt. I also found out later that they had apparently invented a cover story. They were kind enough to not tell anyone their dad had gone insane, instead they said the power had gone out, and that it wouldn’t be fixed until at least the morning. I’m not sure I deserve their kindness, either, to continue to look after my image in a moment like that.

I was calming down, or letting fatigue over take me. I was vaguely aware of my wife coming back in soon after, and of her lying next to me, and holding me. And I slept into the next day.

There is an awful moment that comes in mornings like that one, where you don’t remember what’s wrong with the world, where you naively think this morning is like every other recent pleasant morning. And then it suddenly isn’t. I remember many such mornings after people I loved left me, after my dad died, after my dogs have died. Perhaps the sedation I had received had helped reduce the intensity of my memory, or perhaps my altered mental state had done that job, because although I was roughly aware of the horror of the evening before, it felt a little like someone else’s horror. I just remained, sitting upright in bed. I was probing my memory, trying to understand it, and afraid that if I moved or got up my wife would suddenly awake and have so many questions to ask that I wouldn’t be prepared to answer. What could I tell her?

I could tell her something that approximated the whole truth, something that included the suspicions, stories, and experiences that had cost me a job and ultimately friends and colleagues. But that meant sounding certifiably insane if my truth was wrong, and perhaps putting her at risk if I my truth was right. Or I could just leave the episode largely unexplained, leave out my fears about my computer data being taken, and just present it as it started, a fear that a burglar was still or had been in the house. I’d already been lying to her for so long by keeping my truth from her, I wouldn’t really be making a new choice so much as just perpetuating the old one.

She was awake. Perhaps she had been. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “Like it was all a horrible, horrible nightmare.” I said. “Maybe that’s all it was.” she offered, and kissed me as she got out of bed. I stayed there a bit longer. After a couple minutes I heard her in the kitchen, making breakfast. And after a very quick shower I joined her. We ate mostly in silence, but not an unpleasant one. She wasn’t requiring anything of me, and I wasn’t quite ready to offer anything. The silence seemed natural. We finished, and she went about the next hour or so as normal. The kids would be back at noon, and I knew I had to talk to her with enough time before they got home, so I did eventually seek her out. For some reason it feels very difficult for me to share that conversation. I tried a few times to write it down, but I don’t get very far. Why it should feel harder than the rest of the story I’m not sure. Perhaps everything else could be framed by actions, and this was largely emotion.

At any rate, I did tell her something more than the nothing I had told her before. I didn’t give her specifics, but I did finally let her know that there was a reason I left to begin consulting, that it hadn’t been for the reasons I’d previously told her. But I presented everything slightly skewed, not that I thought there were secret forces working within the government developing technologies that were hidden from those of us with a right to know, but more like I believed the direction the program was going in was vaguely unethical, that lives were being put at risk, that money was being squandered, and… To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I said. That’s the danger of lying, it’s so hard to remember. She heard it as I’d hoped, it didn’t make her feel I was crazy, and it sounded plausibly stressful, and perhaps it could have led to an eruption in some sort of panic attack when combined with a possible burglary.

She provided the solution to that mystery. I had gotten everything wrong, there had been no government agents in our home, there had been no cloning of my computer hard drive. She had called a locksmith, specifically because we’d had such a horrible time dealing with my son’s furniture, and because we’d have the same horrible time when he went back to college at the end of summer. He had come out the afternoon I was out of town, just a couple days before, and he had picked the locks and when he went to re-key the locks realized he had left some tool or part he needed at his shop, and because my wife’s schedule was crazy and she didn’t know mine, she’d asked him to come back on Monday, and she told him it was fine to leave unlocked, but secured with the bar and blocked as it was. And my computer had been moved, and it had been disconnected, but not by unknown persons. My wife had borrowed her sister’s digital camera a few weeks before, ours had recently broken and my wife was planning on trying to get it repaired while I was trying to use this as an excuse to get a new one. My wife had told her sister she could pick it up. Her sister did so on her way to meet us for brunch, she turned off the alarm, came in, retrieved the camera from where it was by my desk, unplugged the camera power cable which would have been in the same strip as my PC, and my sister-in-law must have moved the power strip just enough to barely unseat the computer power cable not at the outlet, but where the cable goes into the PC’s power supply. This tugging also moved the computer just enough to disconnect the speaker cable. As for how my computer came to turn back on, I suspect it might have been the cat. She often lies on top of the computer, and I suspect in getting on or off she brushed against the power cable just enough for it to make contact again and turn the computer back on. As for the USB port seeming like it had been used, I could not sanely ask for any of this information, so I can only guess that my wife may have plugged in my memory stick reader to copy the photos off the camera in advance of her sister collecting it. I nearly killed one or more of the people I loved because of a fiction I had invented. Just how much am I capable of inventing?

Dr. John had referred me to a psychologist he knew in the weeks following, just to see how I am doing, try to help me cope. And it is helpful, but I suppose since I am not being entirely truthful with anyone about exactly what I fear it can only be so helpful. You can’t expect a doctor to cure a disease when you lie to him about the symptoms.

I’m still trying to make sense of all this. I have been staying away from everything that drove me to this point, that invited all that fear, all that anxiety. I clearly didn’t and don’t have a healthy relationship to it. I’m not sure how I find that, or how I’ll know it when I find it. I felt like talking about these things was helpful for me, should be helpful for me, but it feels like I’m doing it wrong, at least in part.

I am continuing the therapy and journaling has been an exercise my therapist has suggested, so perhaps I can come to understand better how and what to more healthily share.

I may need to continue my silence here for some time, and perhaps for a while keep to topics which feel less personal and more abstract, topics where perhaps I can provide professional insight, but without directly knowing the persons or projects involved.

John