I Wanted To Believe: UFO’s, UVA, the Bible

Septennial Saucers and the Season of the Great American Eclipse

Charlottesville, May Day 2024. I go to the bookshelf on the east wall of my apartment, the wall with the three big windows that let the sun stream in from over the mountain that holds Monticello. The books are arranged on a shelf that mimics a stack of books. I pull off the top book on the shelf-stack. I open it. I have not opened this book for a long time.

This is the Bible Monty Quintana, shi’n’áá (my brother, in Jicarilla Apache) gave me in Dulce, New Mexico all those years ago. This was back when I first got interested in UFOs—then quickly became more interested in the people who saw them. Monty’d seen more than one. He’d been in one, he told me, and not by choice. The Bible is a teal blue leather copy in roughly quarto dimensions from Holman Bible Publishers in Nashville, Tennessee.

I open to the title page; across from it, there’s a section which lists deaths with spaces under it that you’re intended to fill in.

I have not filled it in.

It is empty of ink.

I soon think it full.

Plenty of names to choose from.

I think.

Start at the beginning.

Start with the Jicarilla Apache. I’m a mangani—white guy—but Monty was my brother and he told me a few things, showed me other things. I realized after his death that he’d trained me up some of the same ways Grandpa Juan trained him up; I still hear him saying dan dai (sit down!)

Their creation story is familiar.

In the beginning there was nothing - no earth, no living beings. There were only darkness, water, and Cyclone, the wind (Opler)

Genesis 1, in the New Oxford Annotated Bible I’ve read for this excellent class at the University of Virginia says something similar:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the waters.

I think it’s time for my pen to sweep over the page.

I should inscribe Monty. I should inscribe Gabe. I should inscribe Miles. I should inscribe all my Jicarilla Apache bros who perished during the pandemic, from the reaction to the illness more than the illness itself. Monty starved to death, when it comes right down to it. Throat cancer meant he couldn’t eat. The last time I saw him in Dulce, I left and cried the whole way back the J2 to Colorado. The last time I saw him in Farmington, the last thing he wanted to do was go back to Dulce to die. But he was in the hospital and they were intent on keeping him there. This was two years ago.

So I held his hand, putting the medicine bag he’d arranged for me one summer after little beaver in between us. I wanted him to feel how well worn it was, let him know that I always had him with me, always had a bit of Dulce from Quintana Road with me. He knew. He knew I would’ve taken him back to Dulce with me, sat with him until he died looking east toward Lumberton, east toward Chama. It wasn’t my call to make.

Instead, after the hospital, I went to Pagosa Springs with my father, who’d come with me on this trip. We bathed in the Hot Springs, then we checked in to our cabin in Chama and waited for the call. They wanted me to be a pall-bearer, told me to get black jeans, black shoes, they’d take care of the shirt. We expected to wait for four days for the burial—Apache are supposed to be in the ground within four days, they’re serious about this, but because of the pandemic backup at the morgue in Farmington it takes five. I worry about this. I was young in a Muslim country; they’re serious about burying their dead within four days too.

In the meantime after Monty’s soul leaves body I kick it at the NRA’s largest gun range north of Raton for the next couple days with my dad. He’s always wanted to come here, is bummed he didn’t bring a rifle to test out against the thousand yard target range. The land for this place was donated by the same family—the Whittington family—who owned the Hot Springs in Pagosa now.

The IRS and DHS raided them in 2013, up at the spa in Colorado, suspecting the place was a front for narcotics money laundering; they’d been race car drivers moving marijuana to pay the track bills before they got noticed and into airplanes; old man Whittington was eventually convicted on tax charges.

Back to the Apache.

I wonder how Nijoel is doing; I’ve called Mel, but it always goes to voice mail. He’s non-verbal but in person a good communicator; he told me all about visiting magician/illusionist/mindfreak Criss Angel in Las Vegas at the Luxor Pyramid, at night an angular hole of black glass emitting blue beams skyward. I lived in Las Vegas for a month one December around this time. I wrote this in my notebook about the Luxor.

Las Vegas is the Amygdaloid of America. Las Vegas is the cultural nerve cluster from which all other impulses that drive life in these United States emanates. Las Vegas can be found by the light of the Luxor hotel back to its point of origin.

There’s a spot in Las Vegas that’s impossible to miss at night. It is as a landmark—gleaming, man made, the brightest man made spotlight in the world—throwing out the equivalent illumination of a million lighthouses.

The light shines straight up into the stratosphere—the real one, not the casino. The light is visible from space, the MGM corporation’s own great wall of China, on the cheap. The light attracts moths. The moths attract bats. The bats, in turn, attract owls. There’s so many of them nested into the landscaping around the Luxor and the Mandalay Bay that they’ve formed their own little ecosystem. Sometimes the vast armadas of flying creatures are mistaken, unable to be identified. Sometimes people call them UFO’s.

That’s the story in the south of the strip. There’s a different food chain up in North Las Vegas and the desert that stretches to Idaho past that. There, the water attracted the Paiutes and then the Mormon settlers, who displaced the natives for the first time, then the Army. After the Army showed up it was done—the government saw open land and spread out wide and far, lichens in the desert.

Drive straight up north, past the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, past Nellis Air Force Base, and the land seems to switch polarity, repelling life rather than attracting it. Look closely—all that’s there is desert and rough bluffs leading to Area 51, not even lonely lines of barbed wire by the highway.

The things I’ve learned since then.