Gone at Midnight, page 17
Then I called my sister and she was disappointed in me. Unfortunately, she’d been left to field the neurotic calls from my mother wondering if her only son was buried in ice.
I drove home more disappointed in myself than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Depression and drug abuse were slowly unraveling me, straining friendships, encumbering my family, turning me into something I no longer recognized. I’ve experienced intense phases of depression before, but nothing like this.
There was another storyline here that I was struggling to put into words. There was something different about my mind. A mutation was occurring.
A few hours outside of Albuquerque, I entered a thick snowstorm that eliminated all visibility. A white fog descended and engulfed everything. Before it registered that I should slow down, I hit a patch of black ice, and my car surged into a high-speed 360-degree spin in the middle of the freeway.
In suspended motion, I braced for the end. This is it. The life of Jake cutting off mid-sentence. Back to the primordial ether. Back to the Source—whatever I was before I was born.
If there had been other vehicles on the road, it most surely would have been the end. But my car came to a rest angled diagonally across three lanes of the freeway.
I had lost control. Literally and figuratively. Completely and totally. I sat there lost in a fog, nearly equidistant between family and friends and yet with no direction or plan as to how to get back on track.
Where did I belong? The answer, in my current state, was nowhere. It was the one thing I knew for certain.
THE UFO CONFERENCE
I briefly considered going to Peru for an Ayahuasca clinic after reading about how the psychedelic can help depression by paving new neural pathways. New research on psilocybin (mushrooms) and ketamine made an even stronger link. But I thought about the possibility of me totally freaking out on Ayahuasca and instead opted for a conference in the Joshua Tree desert.
A couple days before I left, I went on a walk in the woods with my parents. While reminiscing about our late Beagles, Dominique and Collette, I spotted something ahead of us, a piece of paper in the middle of the deserted trail. I picked it up and gazed upon a coloring book image of a ghost in a flying saucer, a partially colored-in kids’ illustration of a UFO.
We hadn’t seen a single other person, yet here was this artifact deposited conspicuously in the middle of the trail before us. And I marveled at the synchronicity—because, you see, the next day I was set to depart for my Joshua Tree event, which was: a UFO conference.
Contact in the Desert started as exactly what you would expect from the UFO desert in the middle of the Joshua Tree desert—a fringe gathering of conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, and paranormal researchers that almost borders on cult-like.
This year the desert floor at 29 Palms reached blistering temperatures as high as 113. The speaker list was a who’s who of the fringe field, including George Noory, Giorgio Tsoukalis, Jim Marrs, Stanton Friedman, Erich Van Daniken, Linda Moulton Howe, David Wilcock, Richard Dolan, Daniel Sheehan, Clyde Lewis, Travis Walton, and David Paulides.
I immediately looked for Clyde Lewis and found him sitting behind the Ground Zero merch booth. Beside him, his producer, Ron Patton, energetically engaged with some fans. I introduced myself and told him I’d been a long-time fan of his. Then I casually mentioned how some of his shows touched upon the case I was working on.
“What case is that?” he asked.
“The Elisa Lam case,” I responded, casually.
His eyes lit up, as I knew they would, and we went down the rabbit hole together. By the end, he told me he wanted me to be a guest on the show.
As the sun set over Joshua Tree, an incredible purplish crimson glow bathed the land, casting shadows over the vast tableau of yucca trees that turned into psychedelic Samurai frozen in their final battlefield death gasp. The temperature dropped, breaking the heat, and my father and I wandered out into the trees, discussing the limits of human knowledge. My father is much more of a skeptic than myself when it comes to conspiracy theories, especially paranormal activity. We’d had countless arguments over the JFK assassination.
We ate edibles and gazed at the trees. I took pictures of him in his turtle-like hat and asked him when he was going to finish his Vietnam novel. He’d once told me the Vietnam War was a great hole in American history.
“Never,” he said.
I guess the hole had grown larger.
I told him the story of the previous year, when I had attended the conference with Jared, my college-roommate-turned-lifelong-partner-in-creative-neurosis. We’d come to the same section of the desert, across the highway from the lecture halls. Jared took pictures in the “golden hour,” the short window of time between dusk and night when a beautiful, almost otherworldly glow redefines the landscape.
He was looking through his pictures later when, suddenly, he said, “What in the hell?” and motioned for me to come over.
I looked at the picture. In the sky above the desert where we stood, a small orblike shape hung in the sky over us. He scrolled to the next picture: The orb was there too, though its position had changed slightly; and in the following half dozen pictures, the orb remained, moving in a semi-circle above us.
We looked at each other and then looked up. A few moments passed during which the two of us entertained the notion that we may have been under surveillance by a UFO, or at least a government drone.
I recalled Steven Greer, a well-known UFO whistleblower, who conducted a meditation at Vero Beach in 2016. He told his adherents that UFOs would soon appear as they guided and welcomed the visitors with pure consciousness. Suddenly, an ember orblike light appeared in the sky above the ocean; a few moments later, a second orb appeared, illuminating the sky with a lambent glow. The people in attendance gasped in shock.
“Let’s welcome them,” Greer said to his adherents.
“So you really believe this stuff?” my dad asked after I told him the story.
“I’m not sure. In a universe this big and absurd, our conception of reality will always be limited and flawed.”
“You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor, right?”
I groaned. I hate Occam’s Razor.
I recalled journalist Josh Dean, who wrote one of the better articles about the Elisa Lam case, telling me that he was only able to get one response from the LAPD regarding the case and it was from Detective Tim Marcia.
“Good detectives,” Marcia said, “operate under this principle: Occam’s Razor—‘Other things being equal, a simpler explanation is better than a more complex one.’ In other words, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Once the horses are eliminated, then move on to the zebras . . .”
I recalled what happened a week after Jared photographed the orb in the sky. He was looking through other pictures of random things around his house when he saw the orb again but this time overlaid against a wall.
The orb was not a UFO but rather a digital artifact inside his camera.
And some debunkers claim there was a naval training exercise called COMPUTEX going on near Vero Beach when Greer summoned his spiritual UFOs, though, to be fair, I haven’t seen a single report confirming that.
Occam’s Razor, once again, makes its move.
THE CEMETERY SYNCHRONICITY
Back at the conference, a voice called to me out of the din of conversations. It was Ron. He stood beside what looked at first like a post-goth rock-star couple.
“I was just talking about you,” Ron said. “They’re working on the Elisa Lam case, too.”
“They” were Frank and Genevieve, a married paranormal researcher team. I remembered instantly that they had been on Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis talking about the synchronicities of the case.
Genevieve is Chinese-American and speaks with a slight but crisp British accent; she has dark green hair and blue eyeliner. Frank is Salvadoran whose parents fled here in the 1980s to escape the horrific violence of the CIA-fomented right-wing revolution there.
“Oh, have you heard about the cemetery synchronicity?” Genevieve asked me with a smile.
“What is that?”
Apparently, The Last Bookstore, they explained, hired a registrant privacy company that manages its website. The registrant company’s business address is a PO Box on Canada Way in Burnaby, a suburb in Vancouver. Burnaby happens to be where Elisa and her family lived. Additionally, and this is really the kicker, the postal/zip code listed on the Last Bookstore’s registrant info shows up in Google Maps as being located within the Forest Lawn Cemetery, the same cemetery where Elisa was buried.
“What in the actual hell . . .”
I looked this up and it’s real. It’s certainly possible that someone is running an elaborate prank (which, given the hysteria over the case, wouldn’t surprise me), but the base-level info is factual.
MISSING 411 AND AN UNEXPECTED CONNECTION
The next day I attended David Paulides’ presentation. Paulides is a former cop who is on a crusade to document thousands of mysterious disappearances around the country.
In his Missing 411 books, Paulides notes recurring characteristics to these cases. In many of them, the person had just been seen by a friend and disappeared very quickly, sometimes in close proximity to a group. Sometimes their voices are heard faintly, as though they are there but concealed in some way. One child who disappeared was seen briefly at the top of a high cliff that he couldn’t have possibly reached on his own.
Frequently, bloodhounds are unable to pick up a scent and, in many cases, bodies are found in conspicuous areas that have already been searched many times.
In the course of his work, Paulides assessed around 2,000 cases and found eerie similarities and patterns: The disappearances are clustered in twenty-eight distinct areas; the victims are usually found in water or national parks; the cause of death is either anomalous or difficult to ascertain, even by trained coroners; sometimes victims are found conspicuously laid out in spots that were searched multiple times by investigators.
About eighty minutes into the presentation, I realized in horror that I hadn’t urinated in at least ten hours. My bladder was full to bursting as I sat at the back of the conference hall. I drink a lot of water anyway, but in the hot desert environs I was a veritable porpoise.
I side-shuffled down the row of sitting people and was about to reach the exit when suddenly I heard a familiar name . . .
“Canadian tourist, Elisa Lam . . .”
I stopped and looked up. Paulides was discussing the Lam case. I couldn’t believe it. What did Elisa have to do with disappearances in national parks?
He started going over some of the basics of the case but I couldn’t concentrate because of the ten-pound medicine ball of urine throbbing against my pelvis. As much I as desperately wanted to stay and listen, I had to leave.
By the time I got back, the conference hall had let out, and the crowd dispersed. I made my way back over to the merch area. About 15 minutes later, I saw Paulides, satchel in hand, return to his booth, where his books lay stacked on a table. When I came moseying around, he gave me an uninterested once-over, gulped some water, and checked his phone. Then he pointed to the table of his books.
I bought the volume where he discusses the Lam case and immediately flipped through to that section.
Paulides says that Coast to Coast AM host George Knapp predicted that the harrowing phenomenon described in the first five Missing 411 books would eventually move to the city. Sure enough, it did. In Paulides’ sixth book, Missing 411: A Sobering Coincidence, he covers cases in which people inexplicably vanish from crowded areas, buildings, bars—some of them heavily alarmed and surveilled.
In this book, Paulides devotes about ten pages to the Elisa Lam case, calling it “one of the most mysterious disappearances [he has] ever investigated.”
What shocked me is reading that many of the characteristics of the Lam case, which I considered to be random and arbitrary, turned out to fit into some of the profiles Paulides had established in previous books. In other words, as extraordinary and unusual as the Elisa Lam case is, he believes it is part of a pattern.
Many of the cases involved surveillance footage being captured shortly before the person’s disappearance but not revealing how the person got from point A to point B. Many of the cases featured inconclusive autopsies in which accidental drowning is attributed but not proven.
Kevin Gannon and D. Lee Gilbertson, a retired police officer and criminologist respectively, analyzed many of these cases and about a dozen other suspicious drowning cases and wrote about them in their book Case Studies in Drowning Forensics. Paulides references their analysis throughout his work.
After surmising that many of the victims were in fact murdered, Gannon and Gilbertson come to a chilling and controversial conclusion regarding these cases, which they believe may be connected to the Smiley Face Killer murders: “They cannot be touched. They cannot be caught. They are superior. This is the collective mentality of an organization of killers.”
A majority of the parents in these cases suspect murder and have begged for additional autopsies and independent analysis. Many of these parents are adamant that the death of their loved one was neither an accident or suicide and that local law enforcement are using the designation of “accidental drowning” to forego further investigation.
I have problems with some of Paulides’ analysis, and his followers often jump to extraordinary, uncorroborated conclusions, ranging from alien abductions to Bigfoot and cannibal cults. But Paulides’ perspective regarding the efforts of law enforcement agencies to distort, conceal, and whitewash the results of missing persons and homicide investigations is spot-on.
Paulides poses an important question: “Can anything positive come from not telling the public the absolute truth about a death? . . . After the trial,” he continues, “it should be made available to the public.”
Paulides, who is himself a former cop, concludes by asserting that police departments sometimes distort information and investigation conclusions for the sake of placating worried community members.
CHAPTER 14
Inbound Train
I WAS TORN. Assuming Elisa’s death had to have been a homicide ignores the complex nature of psychiatric conditions. People who claimed there’s no chance Elisa could have climbed in on her own, for example, demonstrated a poor understanding of the variability of hypomania and psychosis.
On the other hand, chalking it all up to mental illness runs the risk of scapegoating a condition that millions of people safely live with every day. And to ignore the many suspicious anomalies in the case risked depriving Elisa of justice. What if she had been the victim of a predator? What an awful thing to be murdered and then posthumously branded with such an ignominious identity.
As the train passed through the dark desert planes of Arizona, I recalled that earlier that year a man on psychedelics ran into the Burning Man while on psychedelics and died. It was the same year, another friend of mine had done the exact same thing in a different setting and sustained life-threatening injuries.
I have many friends and loved ones who abstain from psychiatric pharmaceuticals despite having clear symptoms of illnesses. In some cases, these symptoms have caused severe manic episodes, debilitating and life-threatening injuries, and even suicide attempts. The refusal to take meds is not always rooted in philosophy, but certainly the denial of the existence of mental illness sometimes takes the form of a spiritual discipline, a belief that with self-actualization one can control and eliminate one’s own negative thought patterns. Some argue that psychiatric illness doesn’t even exist in the first place, that society is pathologizing what are genuine, if sometimes eccentric, expressions of human consciousness marooned in a sick society.
One of my friends, who had nearly died a few years earlier, told me some kind of energy healer cured his bipolar disorder with hypnotism. I worried about this and we debated the issue. I’m sympathetic to the belief that many pathologies are reactions to society and open to the belief that the human mind can write new source code for itself. I also see virtue in rebelling against the homogenization of social behavior and consensus reality. But there’s a slippery slope there that must be acknowledged.
I opened Elisa’s blog document again. This time I wasn’t looking for evidence of a killer (that would have to wait a few months). I wanted to put myself in the mind of Elisa and figure out how she got to that rooftop.
MANSLAUGHTER
Perhaps the surveillance tape showed her after an encounter with some men or women at the hotel during which she had either smoked something or been accidentally dosed with something. Toxicology showed no illicit drugs but it did not test for GHB or any number of other “date rape” drugs. It’s worth considering whether Elisa was dosed with a date rape drug when you consider that something like GHB can produce strange behavior and hallucinations. It is also often used for the purposes of rendering a partner unable to fight back or remember a sexual assault. Elisa was found naked in the water tank, and her clothes were with her, floating in the water.
I have wondered more than once whether Elisa’s death was voluntary manslaughter after an attempted date rape. Perhaps Elisa made new friends, or met up with online friends in person for the first time. Perhaps she befriended a hotel tenant or employee. A person or persons dosed Elisa and because she was still on a couple meds, it didn’t slow her down as much as it might normally have. But it did cause her to exhibit unusual behavior, which we saw a glimpse of in the surveillance video. “Date rape” drugs, like Rohypnol, slow down the central nervous system and can cause dizziness, impaired judgement, loss of motor control (which might, in some circumstances, look like psychomotor agitation), confusion, and even excitability.
