Encounters, page 16
PATTY: You have to understand that quite a lot of my parents’ lives were secret, and it’s no longer possible for me to pinpoint exactly when I first realized that their secrecy (and mine) were anything but normal. Covertness is not apparent until the cover is blown, and it remains to be seen where my boundaries might even approach a foreign land. It’s only after my mother’s death that I began to understand that she, too, led a double life. In some important ways, I have also led a secret life without meaning to, but there it is, the ever-present urge toward never telling, never revealing my real thoughts and feelings, my real history with clamps on it. It’s only because you asked and seem truly interested (and trustworthy) that I am even attempting to share this story.
You should also know that memory is a trickster, and many of the things I’m about to tell you happened almost half a century ago.
I think I realized that my dad’s work life was secret sometime in the 1960s, when school and friends all seemed to know what their parents did for a living, and I did not. I only knew he worked at Kollsman Instrument Company, left for work at 7:30 A.M., and returned home at 5:30 every evening every weekday with two weeks off each summer. He wore a suit and tie every day, clean shirts laundered professionally, and had boundless energy even after work. When I was ten or eleven years old, Kollsman had a “family day” when employees’ families were invited to tour the plant (which Dad called “the plant”). I remember vividly the “white room,” which was sterile. We could look at it through glass panes but could not go inside. This is where delicate parts and instruments were made or used. There was nothing in it but empty tables and cabinets that day. I had met his Kollsman friends here and there when they came to the house for a party one time, and other times when he and I would visit someone on a Saturday afternoon sometimes.
But mostly, he didn’t talk about them, and after a while, they seemed to disappear. I also knew he had worked at Sperry and at Grumman earlier, during the war, doing something with radar and radio, so he said. My dad built his own radios and stereos as well as things he invented. One of his inventions was a receiver that, when triggered, would turn on a light in another room. He made this for my cousins who were deaf so they could hear if their children awakened at night. Both my parents agreed that my father’s “top secret” clearance meant he couldn’t talk about his work in the present or in the past. My mother especially resented how intrusive the clearance process had been, so he might have been cleared more than once since they married in 1952, years after he had been doing similar work. His work life was a closed book, but so was his entire life other than the moments he spent at home with my mother, brother Robert, and me. Since he was born in 1913, the oldest of four living children whose father died in 1917, I imagined him as a street kid, hustling for the family and not going to school. He had attended a German Catholic school in lower New York City through eighth grade, and beyond that, he had nothing to say. His first language was Italian, his second German, and English his third. I think he was a reader, but that’s a chapter for another time perhaps.
My father had a room full of instruments and tools at home and could make and fix anything electronic or motorized, a skill he taught me. By age seven, I was testing television tubes in the local hardware store, my first foray into formal logic (easy because it was fun!). We stargazed together on the roof of our house. One time while we were up there, the entire world went dark—it was a blackout that hit the entire New York area sometime in the sixties.
Of course, it was mandatory to watch news coverage of anything having to do with space exploration, travel, or the Moon from beginning to end. I felt as if he was not only watching but studying it.
The first I knew he had anything to do with the space program, he came home very excited to have put his handprint on one of the Lunar Excursion Modules. As usual, that was all we were told. Another time, he flew to Greensborough with some others on a private aircraft to deliver and install a computer there. I once saw a photo of him standing in front of a room-size set of computing panels he said were UNIVAC, but like a lot of childhood objects, the photo went missing. I do remember it was around Valentine’s Day, and he brought home a China doll and marshmallow hearts as a gift for me. Forgive these details that don’t seem to have anything to do with your question; they’re helping me to remember.
When my father died in 1977, his wake was simply packed with people I didn’t know. There were at least a hundred. However, they knew me, though how or why they wouldn’t tell. I never thought he knew this many people. How did they even know he had died?
DIANA: Why do you think this program is or was secret?
PATTY: I thought the program was secret because I was told it was. “NASA contract” was the reason given. The corroborating evidence is sketchy and mostly by my own inference. For one, my father was a great fisherman. We always had boats or went out on boats fishing on Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, where we could see a line of ships gathered at the three-mile limit—the distance at which Soviet ships were legally permitted to throw anchor and spy on us. Three miles is the distance at which audio listening devices could not pick up signals from the airfields (over one hundred airfields on an eighty-mile-long and twenty-mile-wide lick of land) and aircraft plants on Long Island. If there were nothing secret there, why would Soviet ships want to keep watch, and why would there be an international agreement keeping them there?
Second, a “joke” my father and his friends often exchanged consisted of one word: “simulacrum.” One would just drop the word in the middle of conversation as if it were a joke, and the others would repeat it and move on. I believe it was their reminder to themselves that they had to keep up some pretense or other about what they were actually talking about.
Third, one time my father explained an element of his work to me, the MIL-Q system, and it was so completely boring and ordinary that I couldn’t believe this could possibly hold his interest for longer than ten minutes at a time, let alone over a thirty-year career for which he was paid quite a lot. This might have been another cover story.
My brother claims our father was working on a navigational matrix that used starlight as its basis (his words). NSA had been and may still be watching me. Many NSA and Sandia agents have read my book on Peirce’s 1903 lectures on pragmatism and other writings and wanted further information from me as well as my assistance in creating a “thinking machine.” NSA has its own battalion of scientists who practically duplicate everything going on in public. I would have been willing to continue work with NSA except that my work required real-time problems to do its investigations and inventions, which NSA was categorically unwilling to share. My own education and experience in academic settings, as awful as we know that can be, made me impatient with secret organizations who demanded knowledge without any understanding of how knowledge is acquired.
DIANA: Did your parents live a different life from that of your friends’ parents?
PATTY: In general, my parents were older than my friends’ parents, having had me in their thirties. I felt as if they avoided anyone who didn’t already work with my father or anyone not related to my parents. In retrospect, it turns out they had lots of money, lots, but we lived as if we were just scraping by. Where did that wealth go? It certainly didn’t go toward me, who had to beg for drawing paper and other ordinary items. They seemed to spend much more energy than other families on protecting me from … kidnapping? Was this a peculiarity of the culture or a real, specific fear? I was monitored every minute, literally. I wasn’t allowed to talk on the phone. I wasn’t allowed to see certain friends. They knew it took fifteen minutes to walk home from school, and if I was a minute late, it was pandemonium. No sleepovers or even playdates were allowed. I could ride my bike “this side of Newbridge Road” but no farther. Dinner was at 5:30, and then I was in for the evening, with no exceptions. This lasted until I was fifteen and I managed to talk them into letting me take martial arts lessons. But as soon as I earned my yellow belt, I was no longer allowed out at night. My mother did not drive and only got her driving license after my father stopped working at Kollsman. I could no better appreciate how abnormal this was than I could describe the taste of water. I only bumped up against the weirdness of it all when my friends became incredulous at the rules by which I had to live.
DIANA: I remember that you had been recruited into a program targeted toward young smart kids, and that this was related to space. Can you say more about that program?
PATTY: When I was in third grade, I was taken out of class for two days and given a series of tests. The consequence of this testing is that my parents were given the opportunity to enroll me in EAP (extra accelerated program?—no one would say), which was a program for kids whose IQ was 140 or better. My personal view of IQ is that it’s an utterly ineffective method of measuring intelligence. I thought so then and I still do. But my parents signed me up and sent me to a different school.
EAP involved skipping the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades and curriculum and completing elementary school in two years with bonuses. The bonuses were hands-on science training with planned experiments, foreign language education, audio-visual equipment at our disposal, and possibly others. We watched a great many filmstrips and movies presumably made in the Soviet Union, some of which were propaganda about USSR five-year programs. We were meant to enjoy seeing through the lies told there (e.g., Soviets invented the tractor and the electric train.) My favorite was a film about Roman Vishniac, the microbiologist, which inspired me to want to become a biologist too. My dad bought me a real microscope upon learning about my passion for biology. We spent many days learning about and presenting our learning about foreign countries. We learned how government works in America down into the weeds of things, like party caucuses. The math was super easy, but we had to show our work, which was agonizing for me because I had no idea how I came up with the answers. I suspect my interest in logic began because I was compelled to find all the not-very-obvious inferential steps leading to conclusions.
We were segregated from all the other kids in the school, even eating lunch away from others in our own isolated cafeteria period. By the end of the program, I was making friends with regular sixth graders in the playground, who called us “the eggheads.” But the psychological isolation that arose from being a “smart kid” never ended. My father taught me how to get past some of the social obstacles it caused by tutoring me on body language (look people in the eye and they will think you’re paying attention to them) and behaviors that let me not draw attention.
We were tested again every month or so for two years. It’s easier to see now how we were data in some hypothesis about our progress. Most of the kids did not continue in the honors track in junior high, though I did. There were fifteen girls and five boys in our class with whom I spent the next two years and then never had anything to do with forever after. Where did they disappear to? When I was in my forties, I discovered that many of them had died young, as had many in other cohorts of EAP beginning before my own. There is no information about this program on the internet or anywhere else.
My favorite experiences in school were art class and free time at lunch inside the classroom where we were allowed to play with the science equipment. Our regular teacher was a horrible man who never revealed a single fact about his own existence (Are you married? Where do you live? What do you do in the summer? Are you enjoying La Bohème?). I felt he and I were in a contest to be the most stubborn about our behavior, what on my part today is called “malicious compliance.” I ended the last year having made a “report card” about him and his quirks and habits, which I presented to him at graduation. Maybe this trait of speaking to power in the face of social censure is why I lived and others didn’t.
As for space, it was a given that in any competition for participation in research and space exploration, we kids would lead the pack. This must have been said quite a bit. However, when I began junior high at age ten, I had the social skills of a ream of paper and the intellectual skills of an adult. EAP founders must have imagined the rest of our lives would duplicate the EAP classroom. This might be a clue as to the kind of worldview presumed most desirable by the space program.
DIANA: There is a belief among many people that there is a “breakaway” civilization, and it involves space. Do you have thoughts about this belief?
PATTY: In the period in which I knew my dad (1953–1977), the extinction events that were thought most likely to occur were overpopulation and nuclear war, overpopulation being the most urgent among people I knew. However, the three-mile limit attests to the fact that the Soviets in all their forms were considered a threat. My dad had some very quirky friends—masons, pilots, engineers, astronauts, etc. who had hidey corners in parts of the tristate area—is all I can say. “Breakaway” was never mentioned, though I do wonder where all the money went that was in the dozens of bank accounts (empty after being very full) I found in my mother’s possessions after she died. And they never acted as if a long future in any one location was assumed or expected. “Home” for both my parents was temporary and forgettable, neither of whom would say anything whatsoever about where they had grown up or anywhere they had lived until we moved to our house on Long Island. My mother, in fact, denied that there were any photographs of our family. This was a lie, as I later discovered, but to what end, I haven’t even a slight guess. It’s as if our lives were being erased even as we lived them.
* * *
When I began to “connect the dots” about my friendship with Patty, a few things stood out as being significant. She was immersed in a world that I had not yet discovered. This was the world of the “invisibles,” or the communities of scientists who seemed to exist parallel to public scientists involved in space and aeronautics research. Then there was the coincidence that I happened to know her and forge a lasting and meaningful friendship with her and her family. Finally, I recognized that her father was immersed in the oral tradition with which I had become familiar—the “pencils up” transmission that related a “need to know” part of a puzzle. Simone would characterize it as cryptography, knowing key information, sound or code, that potentially opened the door to knowledge about what was going on. And, what was going on?
It became clear that, in reference at least with the “secret” programs related to UFOs, much of the data was stored by people and passed on as oral tradition. Secret oral traditions exist in many cultures. In the Western culture Socrates is famous for transmitting his knowledge through oral tradition, and he was against the nascent technology of writing because he knew that through it one lost knowledge, or at least its gnostic forms. Plato, his student, was also against writing, and his argument against it is, ironically, written in his dialogue Phaedrus. He used the dialogue form to preserve what he thought was lost through writing. What did he think was lost? In Phaedrus he warns about the new technology of writing:
It will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.2
Socrates links knowledge to experiential thinking and learning, which is gnostic knowledge. When Jacques questioned me in his apartment, “What have we learned from Tyler?” I would also answer that I learned that the tradition of knowledge about UFOs is an oral tradition transmitted between people and through certain communities. Tyler, when I knew him, lived a life that was not dissimilar to a monk or a mystic. Mystics are in direct union with a divine force within their own tradition. Tyler spoke of sometimes feeling the energy of creativity, and he cultivated his ability to access this creativity through his protocols. He didn’t feel the energy all of the time, but he said that he recognized it when it came.
Simone also spoke to me about writing and speaking. She preferred the latter because she said that sound and voices hold a lot more information than writing. She also said that some people’s voices work cryptographically.
“Your voice unlocks certain information, not dissimilar to how we replicate cryptographic multisignature permissions (e.g., the ‘key’ is given to five people and three must sign off to release any action). A few years ago, a friend was writing a book on AI, and I was assisting with it. As we discussed a chapter, his six-year-old son casually mentioned that voice-activated AI has been around for centuries: like Ali Baba’s cave when he said, ‘Open, Sesame.’”
Another interesting critique of writing in Phaedrus that is universally overlooked is Socrates’s mention of losing communication with the world around us, literally. My philosophy teachers glossed over the references in the text where Socrates discusses how writing will interfere with being in communication with trees and stones, such as the following:
Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth.
My teachers glossed over these passages because to them it would be preposterous to think that Socrates meant that people spoke with trees or stones. But if we take his criticisms seriously, especially putting them in the context of an attempt to preserve an oral tradition of knowledge, it makes sense. Today, we learn of similar critiques of writing from those working within indigenous ontologies (knowledge systems). Their languages are bridges to communication with their environment, which many—indigenous Australians and North American systems—consider sentient. Stones and trees are considered sentient within these cultures. It becomes a clear possibility that Socrates described writing as a cultural event that would sever people from communication with others, and not just with human beings.
