Volume 11, Issue 8, page 5

There's Danger in
Being Different
By JACK FELTS
WHEN Wilbur and Orville Wright were
working on their flying machine,
a Dayton witling listened skeptically as he heard of their plans
to fly. With an air of superiority such as only top quality morons can
assume, he spat on the ground and said,
sagely; "Listen to me, Feller. In the first
place, ain't nobody gonna fly in the air.
If the Lord had wanted us to fly, he'd a
given us wings. In the second place, if
they does, it ain't gonna be nobody from
Dayton, Ohio."
This reiterates the old axiom that a prophet
is not without honor save in his own country.
And among unrecognized prophets today are those
who have had some sort of contact with some
sort of life from alien worlds. Let me say at
once that I am familiar with the amateur hoaxers who come rushing up to people, holding a
crumpled piece of tin foil in their hands, declaring it to be a previously-unknown metal
from a far-away planet, which they got off a
space ship in Uncle Homer's pasture. The hide
goes with the hair, and in anything as controversial and as touchy as the subject of visiting life from alien spheres, you are sure to
have the usual crop of amateur hoaxers trying
to crash the gate and make guys of themselves,
during which they cast suspicion on the actual
contacts made by others. We have this in every
field of endeavor known to man, including vociferous actors who race wildly up and down
Hollywood Boulevard with sandwich signs on
their backs declaring themselves to be the
"Stars of Tomorrow'', and the 10, 000 or so people who last month invented mental telepathy.
But beyond this layer of dramatic and histrionic simpletons, we have a sizable number of
sober-minded people who have been brought up
with the startling realization that they have
had a contact with something outside of this
o world and this life. These people are usually
intelligent enough to know that the most intelligent thing you can do in such circumstances is to keep your mouth shut. If you begin telling people you have just had contact
1 with something from Venus, you are going to
run into the kind of trouble you always run
into when you report something to the police:
W You bring about a lot of unnecessary harass04 ment to yourself, and the more innocent you
are the greater the harassment. Contactees are
usually afraid to talk to strangers, and often
afraid to talk to friends.
landed what he thought was going to be a channel catfish -- at the very worst, maybe a turtle,
even tho it didn't bite like a turtle. What he
pulled to the banks was something alien to his
experience and almost beyond his comprehension.
I HAVE HIS comments on tape. Edited a bit, it
goes like this: "I thought this was a fish,
but as soon as I got the thing to the bank, I
saw different. I landed it in a clump of Johnson grass. It was about a foot and a half long,
with bright green and reddish spots. It had a
body like a great big oversized beetle, with a
little pinhead on it that looked like a distorted man's head. Its nose was like the beak of a
bird. It had little hands with fingers an them,
and it didn't flop. It held the line in both
hands. By this time I was nervous about the
thing and was ready to run. I have been fishing
Walnut for all of my life and nobody ever
caught anything like this that I ever heard
of. I just stood there and looked, holding the
pole. It stood up co its hind legs -- little thin
legs like pieces of wire -- and looked at me.
Now you are going to say I am nuts when I say
this bug or whatever it was talked to me in
English. It said, 'Surprised to catch me, eh?'
Naturally my first thought was that I had gone
crazy; I wanted to run, but my curiosity wouldn't let me. It continued, 'I know you, my
friend. I have lived here on this creek for 59
years, and know everything that ever happened
around here.' It called me by name and rattled
off a bunch of names of people I knew in town
and in the country, as well as some folks that
used to live around here including a few fellows who were kind of outlaws. It convinced me.
Then it told me that the reason I could see it
was because I have some kind of vision that
most people don't have, and can see things
that others can't see. I never knew about this
before. It talked just like a human, except
its voice squeaked a little bit. It said that
only one other person -- a human being -- had ever
been able to see it, and he wouldn't tell me
who he was. He said he came from another kind
of world, and got left behind there in that
hole on Walnut as some kind of scout or undercover agent for whoever sent him in the first
place. I began talking back to him, whispering
kind of low because they were some fellows up
the creek fishing, fellows from Oklahoma City,
and I didn't want them to catch me talking to
Start with the fellow in my own birthplace,
CC Blanchard, Okla., who was fishing on Walnut
Creek near the small city in the brightness of
a) summer sunlight. He sat on the muddy banks of
,4 the stream with a cane pole in his hand, a tobacco can full of red worms beside him, and
nobody else in sight. He was fishing for channel catfish. About 2 P.M., he got a nibble that
quickly turned into a strike, and in the expert fashion of an Oklahoman fishing for cat,
5 he jerked the line at the right moment, and