When you travel wilderness places like I have and you have the knowledge of government projects I do there is more than enough cause to believe seemingly fantastic stories about the things being done the ordinary citizen is never told about. I’ve done work in Silicon Valley and other places requiring top level security clearance, but on one occasion I was working on a secret project in a shop in Palmdale, and once well into this project despite my security clearance was not surprised when six federal marshals appeared and without explanation took what I was working on and closed down the shop. Once while being interviewed for a job near China Lake, I noticed something I should not have noticed. However, when I innocently called attention to this item and expressed some familiarity with it I was told to wait until the base police showed up to question me, and was politely though firmly ushered off the property.

I’ve had enough experience in the aerospace industry and intelligence agencies to realize the symbiotic relationship with the military to know when not to make waves. These days, you dare not even stop on the roads around Edwards or China Lake to take pictures of the wildflowers, so, all in all, I’ve been pretty fortunate. Certain agencies of our government are still in the business of making people disappear.

But if watching politicians was not enough to convince us there are parallel universes, that ghosts and space aliens are all about us there is the widening gap between the haves and have-nots to prove we do live in a very surreal world, that life itself is becoming increasingly surreal. Orbiting above us is the International Space Station, and here on earth people are still murdering other people in the name of Allah and dying of hunger while TV is devoted to such things of consuming national interest and great import as to whether an obituary is being written for Brittney Spears.

While some uncharitable souls may accuse me of being a few feathers shy of a full duck, when Larry King is devoting air time to UFOs you just have to know the game is afoot. But I found it passing strange the case of Steve Fossett was not mentioned, nor was that of Amelia Earhart. But given the peculiar circumstances surrounding Fossett’s disappearance and the unparalleled and virtually unprecedented search efforts to find him his is still an interesting case, and made all the more so considering proximity to Area 51. However, if aliens didn’t bother Howard Hughes… well, some might say they did and this more than the government drove him into seclusion.

That people are spending enormous amounts of time and money searching for mini-black holes in places like the Bermuda Triangle and elsewhere, speculating whether they may blink on and off, speculating about Atlantis and searching for clues to that fabled city, continuing to be absorbed in the Riddle of the Sphinx, decoding the Bible and proving or debunking many myths and fables the wide range of interest in possibilities natural and supernatural goes on apace. In the final analysis many of us humans are curious as Dee Dee in “Dexter’s Laboratory,” and with an “Ooh” of curious fascination upon our lips push that button just to see what it will do.

When you think about the enormous amounts of time and money being spent in esoteric research together with the resources devoted to exploring our earth, solar system and the universe all the while so many hundreds of millions are suffering from want and ignorance there does seem to be something nearly surreal about this. But right here in America when I first read “Tobacco Road” by Erskine Caldwell, a distant relative, it did not surprise me those people didn’t know you had to put oil in the engine of that car. For that matter, I was born and raised among the very same kind of ignorance as that of people like the Lesters, and those described by Steinbeck and Harper Lee.

In places like Weedpatch and Little Oklahoma, Southeast Bakersfield, I recall an old woman that believed she had to put a cloth in an empty light socket to keep the electricity from leaking out, and the old man that would never eat anything from a can that had been opened on the bottom because he believed this poisoned the contents; though when I opened a can of lima beans the other day and found a very large and very bloated dead fly floating in it I should not have been surprised; disconcerted but not surprised. One expression I recall from childhood is “You have to eat a certain amount of dirt before you die.” Of course, this was qualified by no one expecting to eat it all at once. However, with so many things going wrong with our food supply one has cause to wonder? The old Phil Harris song long ago had it right; some little bug is going to find you someday, and “to eat at all is such a foolish game.” Alas, we haven’t yet come up with a suitable alternative.

Potable water is becoming scarce. Many years ago I read a SciFi story in which some astronauts died of thirst because they could not bring themselves to drink the recycled toilet water provided in their spaceship. Now Orange County, CA is going to provide such water. Do you suppose the bottled water industry might have something to do with this? More and more we come to understand why the ancients drank such copious amounts of beer and wine, and New England rum was in such demand during the early years of our nation. As the haunting refrain goes, “People die from drinking whisky but drinking water’s twice as risky” or, as Tom Lehrer had it, what goes into the bay “comes out of your tap in San Jose;” so, just to be safe: “Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.”

“You’ve got to have a dream.” It’s a line from a song in “South Pacific,” and if dreams were for sale, there would be no lack of buyers. But dreams are not for sale; they are personal. Some time ago I was given a “Dream Catcher” the young woman had made especially for me. I don’t know if it works, but I treasure it nevertheless. A very dear friend just sent me a quote from Clarence Darrow: “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.” It’s an appropriate expression for our times when our children have every reason to doubt so many things, but are forbidden to give expression to their doubts. Worse, our children are not receiving the kind of education that would enable them to verbalize or give written expression to their doubts. And without these skills how can our children possibly survive, let alone have a dream? And surreal will never take the place of a dream.