A HELLISH DAY IN HEAVEN

A bit of entertainment today, I think – at least, I hope it’s entertaining. I’ve written hundreds of short stories over the years, dozens of which were published in the UK small press in the 1990s. This tale, of how easily a society can be corrupted, just missed these glory years, so is published, here, for the first time.

I had been in heaven for several eternities before it happened. Although the word, eternity, is perhaps not the best way to describe life up here. It is suggestive of age-old boredom, when, infact, heaven is anything but boring. You meet so many people; and the infinite possibilities within the simple act of greeting make boredom an impossibility.
Perhaps it is the new emphasis upon expectation that makes heaven the Paradise it is. I remember well when I was mortal, the time when intellectual capacity was far in excess of the life span available to realise it. Rushing here, rushing there, wanting this, wanting that ..
No time. That was the problem. But here .. ? Before …

I was walking past the gates to say hello to old Mrs Grimes when he arrived.
Two things struck me as most peculiar about the incident that followed. The former was Old Pete’s uncertainty at the presence; the latter, the presence itself.
He was a youngish man, hardly past his teens. His hair was blonde and I suppose he could have been a handsome youth if not for the scar across his cheek. He was of average height yet slight, almost undernourished, and a fire seemed to burn in his cold, blue eyes.
‘And what do you want?’ asked Old Pete, worrying his long, white beard.
The youth had been sauntering up the path, his feet fitting unhealthily into what I later found out were called ‘Trainers.’ As with his footwear, the rest of his clothes were unusual – jeans and baggy shirt, I’m told – and he wore a cloth hat called a baseball cap on his head, screwed the wrong way round.
‘What’cha, grandad,’ said the youth, coming to a halt. ‘Gimme a ticket.’
At that he raised an opened can of what I later identified as a drink called Coke. He guzzled thirstily, finally offering a burp.
‘A ticket?’ asked Old Pete, bemused.
‘Yea, a ticket. How else am I gonna get in?’
Old Pete stepped back, appraising the youth before him. ‘Excuse me,’ he finally said, ‘but are you sure you’re in the right place?’
‘That weird fella with the wings told me to come ‘ere – man, I loved his style.’ This statement gained emphasis with a stamp of the foot and a pirouette.
‘Well, I am sorry, young man, but I don’t think you are.’
‘God Almighty,’ replied the youth, ‘this is as bad as social services. Come ‘ere, go there, not ‘ere … man, it drives us mad.’
Old Pete blushed at the blasphemy, attempting to hush the youth with a finger to his mouth. Then: ‘But have you lived a virtuous life?’
‘What’cha mean, Pops?’
‘Have you always lived your life caringly?’
‘Oh, I get it. Used condoms, you mean.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Old Pete, shaking his head.
‘Well, can I come in or what?’

Old Pete contemplated the issue at hand. Being in heaven for quite a while, I knew the difficulties facing him. Heaven was an orderly place for orderly, God-loving folks. There were often complaints from downstairs that we had a far too exclusive preserve. ‘Politics of envy,’ Old Pete used to say, being philosophical concerning matters spiritual.
But soon I realised that Old Pete couldn’t just dismiss the youth, as he had been guided to heaven by an angel. Perhaps God was changing the policy – moving to the Left?
‘One moment,’ Old Pete finally said. He hobbled over to the celestial PC and tabbed in for the Menu of that day’s deaths. He soon found the youth’s demise. Gratified, he hobbled back to the gate, opened it and let the youth enter.

As he sauntered up the road, I approached Old Pete and said: ‘Was that wise?’
Old Pete said: ‘I’m afraid I had no choice. Most of his life the youth has been anything but Godly, but this morning he was walking down the road when he saw a truck going out of control. Driver had imbibed too much of the beverage that is called alcohol and was drunk. At the time, a school party was crossing the road, the truck heading straight for them. Using his initiative, the youth jumped at the truck, managed to open the door, push the drunken driver to one side, and steered the vehicle away from the children before crashing into an empty shop. Basically, he sacrificed himself so that others could live. ‘
‘A noble act,’ I agreed. However, later that day I was walking to afternoon prayer when I noticed a small group of people congregating near a bush. Intrigued, I approached.
‘What is it?’ I asked, noticing the concern on their faces. Mrs Grimes pointed it out to me. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing at the ground.
Turning my attention as directed, I noticed the empty can of Coke lying close to the bush. ‘Oh dear,’ I said, soon becoming as disturbed as the others.
At that moment the youth approached. Seeing him, I called him over and said: ‘Excuse me, young man, but would you mind picking that up?’
The youth stood silent for a moment. Then, raising a stiffly held finger, he said: ‘Stuff you,’ and walked off.
The people continued to watch the can, concern showing on their faces. What was to be done, I thought.
What indeed. Options, you see, were few. For being heaven – perfect and all that – contingency plans for anything but perfect behaviour were unknown. Even God – who was consulted some two days after the depositing of the can – was bemused, mumbling about plagues, famines and even floods being inadequate to put a stop to human anarchistic behaviour, once broken out.
Heaven, it soon became apparent, was in turmoil.

And thus would have been our lot if not for the sudden, miraculous intervention of Jesus, who, passing by one day, spied the can, picked it up and popped it over a cloud.
Where the can went, no one up here knows. You, good reader, may know different. It could be in your garden at this very moment.
As for heaven, normality, of sorts, returned. Although I do wish Mrs Grimes wouldn’t be quite so eloquent with her greetings nowadays. Only this morning my ‘hello’ was greeted with a prone finger and resonant ‘stuff you.’
Perhaps God was right, once again.

(c) Anthony North

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SAUCER RECOVERY

Most people have heard of the crashed flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico. But this was not the only supposed crash of an alien craft.
One of the earliest recorded UFO crashes is said to have happened on 6 June 1884 when a blazing object crashed in Dundy County, Nebraska. Local farmhands rushed to the scene and found sand fused to a glass-like substance, and a large pile of hot debris. One person who got too close suffered blisters similar to radiation exposure today. It took several days for the debris to cool down, whereupon the local paper reported it was extremely light metal but incredibly strong. It could have been aluminium, except it had not yet been invented. Local papers of the time even speculated the object could have come from outer space.

THEY KEEP COMING DOWN

Researcher Todd Zechel learnt from witnesses about a possible UFO retrieval when a saucer crashed in Laredo, Texas, on 7 July 1948. Prior to the crash, the 90 foot disc was seen by pilots, and said to be travelling at 2,000mph. Witnesses at the crash site spoke of a craft being taken away by US forces, and that a hairless, four foot alien had died there.
At the time it was dismissed as a hoax, and government papers since released show that Nazi V2 rockets were being modified in the area at the time.
Researcher Ivan Sanderson collected sighting reports of an object that flew over the Great Lakes on 9 December 1965. Towards early evening there was a boom in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke and a tremor shook the ground in a wood near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. A Soviet rocket, Cosmos 96, had re-entered that day, but 13 hours earlier.
In 1980, the fire chief who attended the incident finally told that he saw a conical craft 12 feet high embedded in the ground, but they were cleared away by the military. Later that night, a truck left the site, the military claiming nothing was found.

TOLD AFTER THE FACT

In 1973, US scientist Fritz Werner contacted UFOlogist Ray Fowler, telling him of an event at Kingman, Arizona, on 20 May 1953. Picked up by a blacked-out bus, he and over a dozen other scientists were taken out into the wilderness to do tests on a 30 foot diameter disc embedded in the soil.
Taking a quick peek into nearby tents, Werner observed the body of a four foot alien in a silver suit. Four years after Werner had told his story, confirmation came from a pilot, then at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He knew of crates being received one night in mid-1953 containing wreckage with strange writing on it, and the bodies of three aliens packed in dry ice.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

One of the latest episodes comes from Brazil. In the early hours of the morning of 20 January 1996, a farmer outside the city of Varginha saw a bus-sized object hovering above the ground spewing smoke.
By 08.30, the fire department received an anonymous call about a bizarre creature in the Jardim Abdere neighbourhood. When they arrived at the scene they found a group of adults chasing the creature which was bald, brown-skinned, had bulging, blood-red eyes and strange limbs. Capturing it, it was driven away in an army truck.
Rumours circulated that there had been more than one creature, and platoons of soldiers were seen throughout the day, with sporadic machine gun fire. At 15.30 hrs the Da Silva sisters were walking across a field when they saw a creature hiding fearfully behind a brick wall.
Within 24 hours of the first sighting of the craft, three extraterrestrials are said to have been taken to a Hospital, where medical tests killed at least one of them. The following day, bodies of the aliens were said to have been transferred to the University of Campinas, never to be heard of again as a military cover-up attempted to deny anything had occurred.

MILITARY MIS-IDENTIFICATION

Could the above have been real extraterrestrial events, or could something else be going on? There seem to be several factors identical to most of these episodes. First of all, something appeared to crash. And second, in many cases, it isn’t until many years later that people come forward to talk about it.
As these incidences usually revolve around military personnel, it is taken for granted that aerial phenomena that led to the ‘crash’ could not have been mis-identified. Yet how valid is this assumption?
As an ex-military man myself, I can testify to numerous exercises where personnel have ended up chasing shadows. A report comes in of an incident in the dead of night and it is soon blown up out of all proportion, with personnel regularly ‘seeing’ things that are not there.
The process can lead to a form of induced, and communal, self-hypnosis. You know that what is going on cannot be real, but your senses conflict with what you’re seeing. The Angels of Mons is not the only time such incidences have occurred, usually fuelled by fatigue followed by a rush of adrenalin.

A RECURRING THEME

After the event – a form of communal hallucination – the personnel involved feel rather stupid, and the authorities conspire to keep the event quiet. After all, it is inadvisable to let it be known that the military can occasionally seem to go insane.
Over the years, the personnel put the experience to the back of the mind, but as a culture forms out of research by non-military investigators, ‘false memories’ begin to form of what actually happened. And in no time at all, you’re sure that, as the books say, such events really did happen.
Hence, the result is a continuing culture of saucer crashes, almost identical in every case, because they are more a product of the researcher’s mind than the actual experiencers.
Indeed, this is a theme that can be found again and again in all manner of ‘paranormal’ experience, from exact mechanisms behind past-life regression through hypnosis, to the archetypal alien abduction event.
Of course, I am not saying that saucer crashes are not exactly what they seem. I am merely saying the possibility of other cultural and psychological processes should not be discounted.

© Anthony North, August 2007

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