Our bug-eyed admirers

THIS SUMMER I returned to my family home in Sedona, Ariz., to discover that the housesitter had not yet vacated the premises. He had been delayed, albeit indirectly, by aliens.

I’d been living out of town for some years and had forgotten that Sedona has for decades been an extraterrestrial meat market, where hapless believers are body-snatched and where the red rocks double as landing pads for spacecraft. For 15 years, my parents ran a bed and breakfast out of our home, and they made a fine living off the New Agers who had flocked to Sedona in droves since the early 1980s, when a prominent psychic, Page Bryant, claimed the town was home to seven vortexes of deep Earth energy -- which also serve as beacons for spaceships.

Although a majority of our guests came for the views, others came to commune with the Pleiadians, Andromedans and other ETs that loitered atop the rugged buttes. One guest claimed he could channel Ashtar Command, the nice aliens, from one room, but he left for the Super 8 after it was clear the house phone would not be turned over to him for channeling sessions.

I had thought the aliens left Sedona once the developers and Californians crowded in. But the housesitter, a sandy-haired gent, informed me that the ETs are thriving, not just in town but in our family home. First, he explained, there was the oscillating vortex in the master bedroom, a minor but irritating architectural glitch we had failed to notice before asking him and his fiancee to look after the place. Without billing us, our self-reliant sitters got a half-price deal on a $700 exorcism to clear the insomnia-provoking energy field.

Then there were the Grays in the kitchen. Seven of these ashen apparatchiks of the alien world had abducted and impregnated his fiancee, he told me, and, after a two-week gestation period, stole the hybrid babies. The trauma made it hard for her to help with the cleanup; hence their delayed departure.

I think the Grays decided I’m not their type, so there have been no further incidents. Or perhaps there have been and I’m just forgetting. That’s the subject of a new book by Harvard’s Susan A. Clancy, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology whose research into repressed and recovered memory inspired her to write “Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens” (Harvard University Press, 2005). Her diagnosis: Most “abductees” have either watched too much TV or suffered bouts of sleep paralysis, a byproduct of desynchronized sleep cycles that makes a person feel paralyzed, hear buzzing sounds and hallucinate shadowy figures.

Good luck finding Clancy’s book in Sedona. “We have a lot of the ‘we believe in it’ books,” explained one matronly bookseller. “We don’t really have a debunking section.” She led me past the crystals and the wind chimes to the shelf labeled “Pleiadians, UFOs and Extra-Terrestrials.” I settled on a copy of “Feeling Sedona’s ET Energies,” by Zoosh (as channeled through Robert Shapiro, Light Technology Publishing, 2005). Zoosh advises on the best times to visit Cathedral Rock, where you can feel the vibrations of celestial broadcasts to equipment left behind when the Pleiadians pulled up their base in the 1960s.

Sedona is like many other small tourist towns, but scratch the surface and you find a very alternate reality. The other day I found a leaflet advertising Julie, a “licensed alien abduction counselor,” who has “been received by the Intergalactic Space Brotherhood as an ambassador for all alien contactees.” In November, I dropped in on a meeting of the Arizona chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which rented a parish hall from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. The lecture was on Atlantis and UFOs, and when the speaker asked the crowd of about 20 upright-seeming citizens if they’d ever been on a spaceship, four raised their hands. We watched a video of a regal-looking woman who, under hypnosis, spoke Atlantian, which to the untrained ear sounds like a cross between Basque and Mandarin.

Several locals endure nosebleeds, not from the dry altitude but from the surveillance implants. “A lot of people are faking it. The ones who’ve really suffered don’t talk about it,” explained Barry, a local 39-year-old ex-military who has suffered long nights of suspicious noises and tingling paralysis. He knew his cat, Wolfgang, had been implanted by aliens after he discovered a shaved patch with a puncture wound over his pet’s heart.

One of my elderly relatives, Phyllis, liked to tell how she once had to pull off the highway between Cornville and Sedona, utterly terrorized, to scream up at the misguided operators of a spacecraft chasing her that she was a waste of their time. She was old and had “no more eggs!” for intergalactic harvesting.

A few weeks ago, I made a terrible faux pas while out for drinks with a new friend, a hipster in her 30s who works at a health food store. I told her how nice it was to talk with someone who didn’t consider herself an alien. Her eyes widened; the conversation came to a screeching halt. It turns out she’s a Star Person.

Perhaps, I told myself, I’m not being fair. I signed up for a card reading with a clairvoyant (15 minutes for $35) and stuck to one budget question: Had I ever been abducted by aliens? Turns out there’s a good chance I have but that my memories have been erased by my captors. To get 100% accuracy, I was told I must be professionally “regressed” -- a longer, more costly process.

Just for kicks last week, I asked some folks at my favorite coffeehouse, Sedona Coffee Roasters, if any of them had ever been abducted by aliens. Two of them laughed, but Hraefn, an artist who wears only black, volunteered his story: He dreamed of a spaceship with white, plasma-like tentacles. He awoke in convulsions at 3:30 a.m., the same time his neighbor saw a strange light in the sky. And no, it was not lightning.

I recall one line of Clancy’s abduction book that spoke to my fondness for this town and some of its more creative inhabitants. It’s about our need to believe there’s something bigger and better than us out there: “Whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us.”

So what if our admirers are bug-eyed and macrocephalic? Nobody’s perfect.