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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Hip, hip and away I go!
There's no need to fear, Al is here! When the going gets tough, the Gores get literal. Plus: Out of the ring into the ring? More on the great WWF migration. And, Scully and Mulder smooch.
By Amy Reiter
[11/02/99]

Brilliant Careers
Garry Trudeau
The most powerful voice for truth and justice in American journalism is the junkyard dog of editorial cartooning -- and the creator of "Doonesbury."
By David Rubien
[11/02/99]

Nothing Personal
Munster movies
Widow's peaked: Eddie and Grandpa are baaack ... their careers, not so much. Posh Spice on how to get famous in 30 days or your money back; and Anna Nicole Smith's late, great, reprobate husband.
By Amy Reiter
[11/01/99]

People Feature
The dearth of cool
Are white hipsters an endangered species? Is sellout just another word for nothing left to lose?
By Frank Houston
[11/01/99]

People Feature
Warm for Wendy
More beautiful in person than on TV, Wendy Shalit is nonetheless just a modest woman -- with much to be modest about.
By Dov J. Levine
[11/01/99]

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The expansiveness of the terrain gives a motorist going 85 mph a sense of traversing a sizable chunk of the planet Earth. There are distant mountain ranges, ancient sea beds, a palpable sense of tectonic forces throwing up giant slabs of crust. When the sun goes down the stars come out as though there is no intervening layer of atmosphere. You drive down that highway and sense the truth that eludes us in the big cities -- that we really are space travelers, all of us. On this rock we zoom through the universe.

Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe by Joel Achenbach Simon & Schuster 416 pages Buy Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe by Joel Achenbach

At a UFO convention in Laughlin, a strip of bright lights along the Colorado River about 75 miles south of Las Vegas, I met two women who believed that they, themselves, were alien entities. Both were striking blonds, perhaps 40ish, and they were on an amazing voyage of self-discovery. Miesha Johnston ran a support group for people who had had "experiences" with aliens. She was gradually coming to terms with the theory advanced by her roommate, Jan Bingham, which was that they were aliens in human bodies, or "starseed."

Jan believed she occupied a human body that had formerly gone by the name of Val. She believed that a decade earlier Val was transported to a spaceship during the middle of a nap. Val voluntarily gave up her body, and she, Jan, an indigenous Pleiadian, entered it, and returned to Earth to live among humans and continue to raise Val's children. This is known as a "walk-in" situation, and is distinct from an abduction. It's all voluntary and congenial.

Jan said she had to learn how to do everything all over again -- walk, talk, eat. She broke the news to her daughter that she was no longer "Val" but a different entity named "Jan." The daughter accepted the idea. She told me later, "I think that it's quite possible that things like this happen, because for people to assume we're the only race out there is just stupid."

I decided I had to follow up with the starseed, and soon visited them in Las Vegas. The serious UFO people would not be pleased with this move, for the starseed are precisely the kind of New Age figures the traditional ufologists can't stand. Ufologists look outward, toward the universe, for answers to the alien enigma. New Agers look inward. It is not clear which technique yields the better information. Neither the serious ufologists nor the New Agers could actually produce an alien-made wristwatch or an alien-solved mathematical equation. In the news-you-can-use category, both sets of investigators came up short.

The New Age people at least offered the hope that all this energy being invested in the contemplation of aliens would actually improve a person's life. This was consciousness-raising, and consciousness-raising is a beautiful thing so long as no one tries to pry my own consciousness out of its dank dungeon of vicious rationalism.

Miesha Johnston invited me to sit in on a meeting of her "Starseed Contactee Group." She convened it weekly in her apartment, which was in one of those just-add-water housing developments found in every suburb in America. There were a series of two-story stucco buildings arranged in modules around a nucleic swimming pool, each apartment blessed with wall-to-wall carpeting, a cramped kitchen and sliding glass doors leading onto a small balcony.

Miesha's place was pleasant, clean, comfortable, but I also sensed the lack of permanence. This was a residence but not a home. She'd be gone in a matter of months. Nothing was rooted here, even the plants were in hanging baskets, they could be moved as easily as the coffee table. There are millions of people who live transient lives, with shifting beliefs. A few months pass and they have a new job, a new address and a new religion. In the fluidity of our lives the novel notions of the millennium are easily transported.

Miesha didn't publish the phone number of the starseed contact group (which seemed to have different names at different times). Jan explained that they didn't want any nuts calling up. The group's printed guidelines specified that the meeting would be private, that all comments would be kept confidential and that everything discussed must relate to UFOs, contacts, experiences and starseed. This was not to be a forum for debate or investigation. This was about support. Rule No. 10 made this clear: "We will not invalidate a member's beliefs, opinions, or experiences. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself."

The second sentence in that rule was conceivably a bit argumentative. The first sentence, meanwhile, was a wonderfully concise, timeless and elegant expression of what it is that distinguishes New Age philosophy from scientific methodology. A scientist considers it a sacred obligation to invalidate the spurious claims of others. Scientists are trigger-happy invalidators. Some would be happy to explain to a 5-year-old that Santa is merely an invention of parents who use the fat elf as a proxy disciplinarian.

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