Journal of a UFO Investigator Read Online Free PDF

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    The microfilms were kept in the library’s Newspaper Room, on the ground floor below street level. With much laughing and touching, Jeff showed Rosa how to thread them onto the spool. So now there were three of us, not just him and me like the weeks before. For hours we sat at the microfilm machines, our index cards filling with UFO sightings from the archives of obscure newspapers all over the country. Luminous disks in the nighttime. Silvery by day, sparkling in the sun as they weaved among the clouds. Egg-shaped UFOs, cigar-shaped UFOs. UFOs of fluorescent red, and every other possible color.
    Patterns eluded us. It took faith to believe they’d emerge. With cramped hand and weary eyes I looked up from my work toward Rosa. She and Jeff sat in front of her machine, not writing, not reading, just holding their hands in the green-tinged light over the screen. Jeff put his hand on top of Rosa’s. Then she put her other hand on his, then his over hers.... In a minute they were giggling at their game, and I tried not to watch while I hoped a librarian, some elderly scold, would come over to remind them this was a library, a quiet place for solemnity and seriousness.
    I turned back to my own machine. I cranked the handle; I watched the pages of long-destroyed newspapers whiz by under my nose. When I stopped, I saw the newsprint on the screen beneath me, looking so real it seemed I could reach out and touch the paper.
    But there was no paper. There was only the screen. If I held my hand close above it, the newsprint appeared on the back of my hand as well as the surrounding screen. My hand then took on a ghostly appearance, not invisible exactly but transparent, as though my bone and flesh had become unreal. The only things real were the letters and words of the long-forgotten stories, shining upon my skin.

CHAPTER 4
    Somewhere in Chicago, it is reported, there is an apartment house where the elevator stops conventionally at the basement level. But it also goes down, down, down to a much lower level, when the down button is pushed in a certain coded manner....
    AND IN A TINY TOWN IN PENNSYLVANIA LIVES A METALWORKER named Richard S. Shaver. He receives through his welding gun—or maybe his memories—revelations from under the surface of the earth. Of beings called dero, survivors of an ancient race of space travelers abandoned on Earth when the sun turned poisonous. Its rays made the dero mad; their madness made them evil. They live underground, in a network of hidden caves. The UFOs are their secret airships. They are the devils of the ancient myths.
    â€œFrom immemorial times,” Shaver was told, “the dero have had their Hells in the underworld, and it has never ceased. You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive. There have always been Hells on earth, and this is one of them.”
    Crackpot stuff, I always thought. Only a nutcase could believe it. Now I’m not so sure.
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    After lunch I left Jeff and Rosa in the Newspaper Room and took the elevator to the Rare Book Room on the third floor. “Follow the moon”—and to do that, I needed to find Jewish calendars because the Jewish year is lunar. I was told they’d be in the Rare Book Room.
    In the elevator I was alone. I pressed the button marked “3.” As soon as the doors closed, I began pressing buttons rapidly and at random. I don’t remember which ones I pressed. To my relief, or maybe disappointment, I didn’t go down, down, down . The elevator car shuddered and paused. I thought I was going to be trapped between floors. Then it moved again and stopped back at the first floor. Three young men who looked like college students got in. Again I pressed “ 3 .”
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    I’d never been in the Rare Book Room before, and I was curious and a bit excited