The Men Who Stare at Goats (12 page)

ART BELL:
Well, excuse me if I say holy smoke, Dr. Brown. If you knew how much what you just said sounds like what Major Dames said, I guess you’d probably start digging.

The civilians who had trained under Ed Dames seemed to inherit their teacher’s disdain for his former colleagues. On the Art Bell show, Courtney Brown said they weren’t intellectually equipped to engage with the more profound by-products of their divinations. For instance, if the CIA asked a psychic spy to hunt for Saddam Hussein, and while psychically creeping through a Baghdad palace the spy chanced upon an extraterrestrial hiding in the shadows, he’d just keep on walking until he found the dictator. Surely, Courtney Brown suggested to Art Bell’s listeners, any psychic spy worth his salt would stop and engage with the extraterrestrial, but oh no, not the military psychics. Art Bell agreed that this seemed crazy—and talk about wasted opportunities.

ART BELL:
You did a serious professional project of Mars, didn’t you?

COURTNEY BROWN:
Well, I studied two ET species—a species called the Greys, and the Martians. Long ago, at
the time when dinosaurs roamed on earth, there was an ancient Martian civilization… .

When the Martian civilization was wiped out by some planetary cataclysm on Mars back during dinosaur times, explained Dr. Courtney Brown, “the Galactic Federation sanctioned a rescue group of Greys” to save them.

“Many Martians were rescued,” he said.

“Taken off planet?” asked Art Bell.

“Yes,” said Courtney Brown. “But they are now in underground caverns back on Mars. They’re happy to have been rescued, but they’d love to have been brought to Earth instead. The problem is, they’re basically on a dead planet. They must leave. They’re between a rock and a hard place. They’ve got to leave Mars. They must come here. But
this
planet is populated with an aggressive, hostile human species that has movies about invasions from Mars, and the Martians themselves are terrified. The remote-viewing results on this are absolutely unequivocal.”

Courtney Brown said that the Martians would certainly be arriving on Earth within two years. Art Bell immediately asked the question that was presumably haunting the more right-wing antiimmigration listeners among his audience:

ART BELL:
Important question. How many Martians are there?

COURTNEY BROWN:
It’s not going to cause a population problem. We’re probably talking enough to populate a reasonable city.

ART BELL:
That’s a small number, really.

COURTNEY BROWN:
You may say, what is the incentive? Why should we help them? People have actually said to me, “Forget the altruism of us having a good name in the galaxy. Why should we help anybody? We had trouble accepting Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War, so why should we help Martians of all people?”

Courtney’s answer to these Earthling isolationists: forget altruism. The Martians have a “one-hundred-and-fifty-year technological advantage over us. Imagine if somebody like Saddam Hussein says to them, ‘Hey! You want a place to land? Just come on over here.’”

This was why, Courtney Brown stated, with some urgency in his voice, it was imperative for the United States government to seize the opportunity and “get those Martian ships under NATO command. Get those Martians in through the proper immigration processes.”

At this point, Art Bell expressed concern that “desperate people do desperate things.” Even if the Martians were inherently peaceful, perhaps their hopeless living conditions inside the caves of Mars might render them unexpectedly and ungratefully violent when the Americans came to save them. Isn’t that essentially what had happened in Grenada and Vietnam?

Courtney Brown assured him that he understood his concern, but that this would not happen.

Prudence thought Courtney did brilliantly on the Art Bell show.

“Courtney’s charisma leaped off the air waves and into your lap,” she said. “You could feel his sincerity and tenderness as he spoke his words.”

And, as Prudence listened to the show that night, her telephone rang.

“Pru,” said the voice. “It’s Wolfie.”

Wolfie was, according to Prudence, the Internet nickname of a woman named Suzy (not her real name), a friend of Houston-based radio newsreader Chuck Shramek. Prudence had met Suzy and Chuck in an Internet chat room; they had exchanged e-mails but never spoken.

“Pru,” said Suzy, “there’s something you have to see. Chuck got a picture of the Hale-Bopp comet, and there’s something next to it. I’m going to send it to you.”

At that moment Prudence’s e-mail icon flashed. She opened the attachment to find a photograph. Chuck, Suzy said, had taken it from a telescope in his back garden. He was an amateur astronomer. Next to the Hale-Bopp comet, to the right of the frame, there seemed to be some kind of object.

When Prudence saw this photograph, she cried.

“The companion object,” she told me, “glowed brighter than any star.”

In the days that followed, Prudence and Courtney Brown and Courtney’s other students began to work seriously on psychically viewing the Saturn-shaped object next to the Hale-Bopp comet.

“And we found,” said Prudence, “that it was artificial. And it wasn’t a mistake on Chuck’s camera. It was an actual object. And it was alien in origin. It looked like a huge round
metal object and it had all these dents in it. Concave indentations. And it had antennae sticking out, tubes sticking out. And it was coming right toward us! And we were so excited. Courtney Brown phoned Art Bell right away.”

Chuck Shramek’s photograph.

On November 14, 1996, Art Bell announced two guests on his show: Chuck Shramek and Courtney Brown.

ART BELL:
Chuck, welcome to the program.

CHUCK SHRAMEK:
Thanks, Art, great to be here.

ART BELL:
You are an amateur astronomer, right?

CHUCK SHRAMEK:
Have been since I was eight years old. Now I’m forty-six.

ART BELL:
So not such an amateur!

CHUCK SHRAMEK:
Ha ha ha!

Chuck began to describe his photograph, how he had come to take it, how his heart had started pounding when he realized that the object—the “companion” to Hale-Bopp—wasn’t a star, because he checked his star chart and there was no star like that in the comet’s vicinity.

CHUCK SHRAMEK:
This is a big thing. And there appear to be Saturn-like rings. This is amazing.

ART BELL:
What could it be?

CHUCK SHRAMEK:
Well, I think that might be an area for Courtney to get into. I have no idea.

ART BELL:
So there you go, that’s Chuck in Houston. We’re going to ask Courtney Brown what it’s all about. Maybe he can help. I suspect he can.

After the break, Courtney Brown offered the knockout—the result of his and Prudence’s and the Farsight Institute’s psychic study of Chuck Shramek’s photograph.

ART BELL:
I’ve seen the Hale-Bopp photograph and it really is odd. There’s something really big out there. I’ve no idea what it is, but whatever it is, it’s real. Well, Professor, what the hell is it?

COURTNEY BROWN:
I’m willing to tell you. Do you want me to tell you?

ART BELL:
Tell me.

Courtney attempted to sound scientific and levelheaded but he was unable to conceal his excitement.

COURTNEY BROWN:
The information I’m about to give you is so far reaching, so incredible, you’re going to be saying, How could this be? Remember, I’m a Ph.D.

ART BELL:
Right.

COURTNEY BROWN:
This object is approximately four times the size of the planet Earth, and it’s headed our way. It apparently has tunnels in it. And it is moving by artificial means. It is under intelligent control. It’s a vehicle. And there is a
message
coming from it.

ART BELL:
Oh boy! There’s a message coming from it?

COURTNEY BROWN:
These beings are trying to communicate with us. This object is
sentient.
It is alive. It is
knowing.
It’s something like the obelisk from
2001: A Space Odyssey.
It has hallways in it. This is good news. Our time of ignorance, our time of darkness, is coming to a close. We are entering a time of
greatness.
There are more of them coming!

ART BELL:
What?

COURTNEY BROWN:
My Lord... My Lord...

ART BELL:
There are
more
of these coming? Folks, this is not a fake
War of the Worlds
broadcast. This is breaking news. I feel like I have been hit by a sledgehammer.

COURTNEY BROWN:
Art, this one is real.

There was a short silence then, and then Art Bell spoke, and his voice trembled slightly.

ART BELL:
Somehow I always felt I’d be on hand for this.

That night, Art Bell’s web site crashed with the volume of traffic—listeners trying to log on so they could view Chuck Shramek’s photograph. Finally, in just a few months’ time—approximately mid-March 1997, in fact—the Martians were coming.

An extraordinary thing about the Internet is how it can freeze moments in time. If you look hard enough, you can find the thoughts of some of Art Bell’s listeners that night as they typed passionately with the radio playing in the background:

Is this really happening? Oh man, this is incredible!! On Art Bell it was announced that some astronomers are now SUDDENLY seeing a Saturn-like huge object near our Comet Hale-Bopp! It is under intelligent control and it is connected to ETs!!

Dear Friends,

As this incredible news is breaking I am typing wildly.

FLASH!!! Moving toward Earth a celestial object four times the size of Earth tracking right behind Comet Hale-Bopp; a ringed sphere, self-emitting light source, surface uniformly smooth and luminescent.

Is this the coming of the anti-Christ?

Prudence went on Art Bell too, a few days later, to clarify her psychic findings about the Hale-Bopp companion. She and Courtney were inundated with phone calls and e-mails.

“Thousands of e-mails,” said Prudence. “We sent out a standard response to many of them because you just can’t answer the whole world. You have to pick and choose.”

One e-mail, among the thousands of others, seemed particularly odd to Prudence. It asked, “Will the companion raise us to the level above human?”

Prudence stared at this e-mail for a moment, then sent the standard reply: “Thank you for your interest in the Farsight Institute. Here’s our upcoming class schedule… .”