Chapter 2 of RattleSnake Fire, by Jean Eisenhower

March, 2004.  Less than two years after the Judi Bari trial, while my boyfriend, Asante, worked late one night, I decided to sleep in the bedroom we’d created in the greenhouse/bathhouse.  Loud metallic rattling roused me and, in my first struggle toward wakefulness, I thought a washing machine was out of balance with a heavy load – then I woke fully and remembered where I was and that I didn’t have a washing machine, or even electricity in that building.

A metal bed frame stored under my bed was clanking on the cement floor, and the whole bed and I were vibrating too.  (Arizona hasn’t had an earthquake in over one-hundred years, and no one ever mentioned any tremblers.)  No sooner had my brain registered the shock of this, than a different recognition dawned:  Oh, this.  And then these words: It doesn’t make any sense, therefore there’s no need to think about it.  Might as well go to sleep.  And I did.  Later I’d wonder if it had been a command, but I then took it as my idea.  Curling my arms comfortably around my pillow, anticipating something familiar and good, I lay my head down and slipped away.

The next morning, I wondered if it was a repeat of the vibrations at the FBI trial.  There, too, they had felt familiar.  But why would it be the FBI now? I wasn’t doing any more environmental work, and I’d never been as successful as others anyway.

Asante had moved his teepees onto my land and become my partner about a year previous and was very familiar with the FBI, having been a radical activist since he was a teen. After Judi’s bombing, her lawyer heard that the FBI was holding another “bomb school” in Asante’s county, where he was stopping a great many timber sales, so that the lawyer worried that his life might also be in danger.  He and his girlfriend had gone on a whirlwind tour, telling everyone about their work, about Judi, and about the newly planned bomb school.  Either they were never in danger, or their tour worked.  We discussed my experience over breakfast, coming to no conclusion.

Rising from the table, I walked to one of my bookcases and, without any conscious intent, pulled Whitley Strieber’s Communion off the shelf.  I’d read it a couple years previously, telling myself I only wanted to see what the rest of our culture had found so intriguing in this #1 New York Times Best-Seller.  I’d found the book credible, and was happy it had “nothing to do with me.”  My life had enough weirdness in it.

Though I had other work to do, I took the book and sat on the couch intending to spend “just a little time” reviewing it, for no particular (conscious) reason, other than to take my mind off things.

Within a few pages, Strieber described sensing himself vibrating before the “visitors” abducted him.  I sank back in the sofa with my mouth open, then with a quavering voice I told Asante that I might have just experienced … (I paused, too embarrassed to say the words) what people call … (another pause – I hated this – Go ahead, just say it – I prodded myself, and inside I withered with humiliation) “an alien abduction!” spitting out the words.  I wasn’t sure I’d rather it be feds.  At least their harassment wasn’t something that would make all my friends think I was wacky.

For months, I continued to have similar experiences (told to nobody but Asante), a few each week, many beginning shortly after I drifted off, and others happening in the middle of the night.

One of those earliest events, on March 19, 2004, I went to bed earlier than Asante again and, after I’d arranged my pillow and was just beginning to relax on my back, I was shocked alert by a laser-like light that seemed to hit me between my eyebrows – so bright, I saw it through my closed eyelids.

Wanting an assuring explanation, I scrambled for one, and thought, Lightning? But I’d sensed being hit directly between the eyebrows, and memory had it coming at a precise angle, not through the sliding glass door, where I might convince myself it had been lightning, but through the eave and wall above and to the left of the door.  My memory was also clear that it had been circular, about a pencil’s width, with a precise, not fuzzy, perimeter.  Like a laser.

Suddenly I realized I was immobilized, which filled me with utter terror.  I tried to pray for protection, but my speech center, including the part of my brain that creates silent speech, was mostly incapacitated.  I was able to drag the name Jeeeeeee—-zzzzzuhz through my brain, but my mind seemed frozen and unable to remember the name of any other helping spirit I had, which added to my fear.  I could accept my body immobilized – but my mind?!  That provoked a terror unimagined until that night.

Then I saw in a picture glass on my right, a reflection of the window on my left, and through it a tall being gliding southward, just a few feet from the house.  After struggling for a few moments with deep-soul fear over my inability to even silently pray, I mentally “tossed” my need for protection, like a basketball, to spirit helpers I imagined gathered nearby overhead.  Then I fell unconscious.

The next day, Asante and I recalled that the night had been pitch black when I’d entered the bathhouse.  It was a first quarter moon, which wouldn’t rise until near midnight, and the sky had been overcast, so there weren’t even stars for the palest light.  There shouldn’t have been light to see anything reflected in the glass.  Years later, I’d read that observations of ETs are often attended by inexplicable light, presumably from their craft.

I’d once ended a friendship with a man the first time he said the word “alien” and clarified, “Yes, as in aliens and UFOs.”  I believed this was all a possibility – and quite likely true – but I adamantly did not want to be friends with people who talked about those things.  And now I certainly didn’t want those things in my life.  I’d come to the country for peace, to read, write, and contemplate life.

Since they were showing themselves to be part of my life, I should have been willing to contemplate them, but I wasn’t willing – probably because the subject is so ruthlessly ridiculed.

Today, I suspect I’ve left this realm frequently over the course of most of my life.  Sometimes it has felt like a vibration, other times I’d slip into a vortex or sense myself turning to “mist” and materializing again.  But as I was taught by my culture, I’d forget it – mostly.

Occasionally, after this happened, I reasoned that, if aliens are visiting the Earth, they need to pick someone for whatever they’re doing, but I couldn’t figure out: Why me? It made sense that their goals might include letting the populace know they are here.  But if that is the case, Why didn’t they choose someone who had more credibility? It was true I’d been a reporter and even won a couple of awards, which might add to my credibility, and I had been respected in various business circles that didn’t know about my activist leanings, but that was all years ago.  Yes, I was a PR person, maybe perfect for the job, but I thought I’d blown my credibility when I’d aligned with Earth First!  So, it seems they’d made a mistake in choosing me.

Later, I would learn there appear to be connections between “alien” contact, environmental awareness, psychic phenomena and, much to my dismay, government intelligence agencies – all of which I was involved with, or they involved me.