I didn't know what was going on, but what was happening to me was - I was like, utterly unconcerned for his (Dennis McKenna) mental health, or any practical concern, which was causing a lot of problems for the other people on the expedition. In classical psychology this is called a folie à deux, a delusion of two. It's a simultaneous schizophrenic episode usually involving a mother and a daughter. I've never heard of a brother brother folie à deux, but it was accompanied by all these exterior manifestations, freak rainbows, and in my case, an encounter with a UFO.
This UFO encounter had a very curious quality to it, not that they don't always I suppose, but this was even more curious than the pedestrian UFO encounter. It was on the 13th day of the reversal, and I had this intimation there was something going on about the southwest. I wasn't clear quite what it was, and the the two women on the expedition were, that afternoon, washing our clothes down by the [Chorro] - by the lake.
I looked across the lake and saw in the sky - not a rainbow, but just a spot in the sky that was a spectrogrammatic diffraction. You know - a little patch of rainbow. I asked the women if they saw it and they said they didn't. Then it intensified. And by this time I was plenty in the dog house as well, I mean this put a great deal of strain on our small party as you can imagine. This spectrogrammatic iridule intensified, and then I said to them, "Now do you see it?" They looked, and they said, "Oh yeah, um, it's no big deal, not much."
But I knew. I knew, and "knowing" means the Voice was speaking to me. All kinds of weird things went on. I discovered that the closer I was to water the easier, it was for me to rhyme. Then years later I encountered a celtic saying, "poetry is made at the edge of running water." The thing would give me these aphorisms, like one time it said the "clone's load is a stoned mode."
I was not sleeping, I was now 11 days without sleep. So that night I decided to sit by the [Chorro], and just because I stayed up all night, I would walk in the fields. The thing would draw - would connect up the constellations for me, and show me where they were in the sky. There was also embedded in all this thing the intimation of this thing called "the teacher" which was a giant insect-like thing that was always like right over here. There was the sense of something watching us from the sky, something moving us very very gently but persistently toward this very weird breakthrough.
So I sat there all night long on the laundry stone at the Chorro. Around dawn I looked out across the lake and to the jungle, and about a mile away over the jungle there was a low bank of clouds. As I watched these clouds, I noticed that they seemed to be rolling in place, like scrolling, like the the roller on a typewriter or something. As I watched, they divided into four perfectly shaped lens shaped cloudlets. The four coalesced into two. The two coalesced into one. At that moment I heard the "wee-wee-wee" sound that flying saucers make in Hollywood B movies, ya know?
I looked back over my shoulder thinking of the people in the in the hut behind me about 70 feet up the bank, thinking "I have to get, I have to get a witness." I was driven nuts by this idea of the witness because everybody's interpretation was that we had just gone bonkers, completely bonkers. So I thought "I have to get the witness", and I assessed the possibility and looked back across the lake. Thing was coming toward me, it was coming straight for me.
I felt, even for me, this was some kind of a moment of truth, where then I realized "my god, it's actually real. We are going to get the lens, we are going to break through to the machinery of the millennium." I felt my knees go out on me, and I sat back down, and the thing - I could see it! Getting closer and closer and clearer and clearer. And then it passed above me, and in the last moment before it was lost by the hill of the bluff of the Chorro, I could see it was turning slowly. It had blue and orange lights. I could see the rivets on the underside. I could see the three half spheres on the underside.
Having at one point been interested in UFOs, I immediately recognized it as the end cap of the 1937 Hoover vacuum cleaner. The the very Hoover vacuum cleaner that the charlatan George Adamski had suspended by a fish line in his garage in southern California in 1948 and photographed and released as a picture of a UFO which was then totally debunked.
So here I am, seeing a 50-foot version of a Hoover vacuum cleaner end cap slicing across the sky. Psychologists have a term, "cognitive dissonance". This is when things get so out of control, that you don't know shit from shinola, is what cognitive dissonance is. So it was more shocking to me than an extraterrestrial spacecraft would have been, because it was showing me that what I was looking at was couldn't possibly be a flying saucer. It was rather something so preposterous and absurd that if I were to tell this to anyone for sure they would drop nets over me.
The next morning we actually flew out of of La Chorrera. Dennis normalized about four days later to his present normal state. I, on the other hand, have never come down.