I just finished listening to the second installment of Jeremy Vaeni’s Culture of Contact series on Ko-Fi. If you like live chat, you can also catch any first episode on Jeremy’s You Tube channel and have access to that feature.
Vaeni has experienced a lot of highly strange things. In this second episode he looks back at his early experiences for clues as to why he was chosen and not the people around him. He comes up with a number of possibilities:
- a very early experience that served as a kind of ‘hook’ for his attention,
- a tendency to obsess once ‘hooked’,
- an experience in which he was molested by a neighbor as a kid and shortly thereafter lost a sense of family security due to his parent’s divorce,
- a series of experiences with family religious views and choices that left him with a mistrust of authority,
- but last of all and maybe most of all, a desire to know the truth, the real truth about life and experience.
What is true and what is bullshit? What are we doing here anyway? Not everyone cares. Which is fine. For them. For the rest of us, it can feel very isolating.
So that’s Jeremy Vaeni’s fascinating life. Let’s talk about me now. Me, me, me. I’m a little freaked out by the similarities between my own history and Jeremy’s.
The Hook
I too was a weird little kid.
I suppose my ‘hook’ was the people who came to take me flying. I was four or five years old at the time, and I knew the people were not people at all–they were tall white things that seemed to be made of light, and once we were flying I didn’t see them at all, just the ground below. I felt the night air on my face, I saw the streetlights and the neighborhoods we flew over.
My parents chalked this kind of thing up to ‘an overactive imagination’. As a kid I used to sleepwalk and have night terrors. My parents said that sometimes I would come into the living room late at night and try to climb the drapes, and they’d just put me back in bed.
After that I always watched the windows in the room where I slept, looking for them. When I got a little older and moved upstairs, I sometimes saw little beings looking in the second story window at me. I didn’t share this stuff with my family. I had a neighborhood friend my own age I could talk to about it, but no one else.
One day, walking to school, I looked up at a neighbor’s window and saw the Virgin Mary standing in it, larger than life. I was terrified. I knew it wasn’t really the Virgin Mary. It looked something completely other wearing a full body Virgin Mary mask. I pounded on the next door neighbor’s door but no one was home.
Loss of Security and Trust in Authority, Sexual Abuse in Childhood
When I was in fifth grade my mother had another baby and was sick all the time, in and out of the hospital. Coming home I’d never know if she’d be there or not, or whether she’d be well or not. By junior high I was junior mom to a younger brother and two sisters, and junior wife to my dad, My mother and father relied on me heavily, and my mother hated me for it.
The sexual abuse started when I was ten and got way worse in junior high. It was bad and it went on a long time. That’s all I’m going to say about it here because it’s horrible. I was trapped in a really horrible situation, and the result was that I lost all trust in my father, who had seemed to me, as a kid, the more stable of my two parents.
I would like to say that I took it in stride but I didn’t. It was indescribably painful. Even after all these years it is hard to write about and harder to talk about. I’ve had therapy for it, I’ve met other people who went through similar things, but some things just hurt. The best I can do is live my life now.
Obsession
After a few years, when my mother stopped going into the hospital all the time, my father decided the two of them would head up the youth group at our church. I have a lot of compassion for my folks, who had a gazillion personal problems of which I was certainly one, but honestly, for them to set themselves up as model parents to a bunch of strange kids who then called them Mom and Dad–it was too much.
My father insisted my brother and I join this group. The group occupied most of our evenings and weekends. Our house was always full of clergy and other kids. My brother and I decided to call my parents Chuck and Louise, because it was too much, all these fake sons and daughters calling them Mom and Dad.
So controlling and yet so out of control and fake. It just kept getting worse.
I had my first UFO experience at 16. That same summer my neighborhood friend and I also saw a UFO on a night walk around the block. It was oddly shaped, like a glowing red trash can with a long stick coming out of the back of it. We both saw it. No one believed us. Much later in my life I read about an astronaut who saw a similarly shaped craft around that same time.
I also had a strange experience involving a UFO near the airport that brought my brother and I up inside it. That experience was both vivid and impossible, and was following by random sightings of ‘craft’ that drifted behind clouds, that only I ever seemed about to see.
I don’t think of myself as obsessive, but if some idea or phenomenon gets its hooks in me I cannot let it go. A teacher once called me a junk yard dog because when I get ahold of something I don’t let go. He meant that to be a compliment but I don’t see it as a compliment. It’s more of a brokenness in me that has to get to the man behind the curtain and yank him out by his suspenders and ask him WTF?
A Desire to Know the Truth
Early in my life, when I was still in grade school. I was up in room listening to music and watching for little people to appear in my upstairs window when I got to thinking about the concept of self, and how it can’t possibly be static, and that being the case, how can it be the central stabilizing factor of a life, and what is a life anyway? These are not normal thoughts for a person under 10 to be having, but what are you gonna do if you are having them?
So I went downstairs and asked my dad, who, at that time, I still thought knew pretty much everything, and I asked him, “What are we doing here? What is this?” (Meaning LIFE.)
And he answered right away, “We’re in my house. And I’m watching TV.”
And that was my dad all over. My house. My TV. My kids. My wife. And so forth. I knew then I was on my own. And nothing really horrible had even happened yet. I just realized, OK, it’s true. I am weird.
Then, when I was just out of high school I. survived two sexual assaults, the second worse than the first. After the second, I could see and feel the little beings all around me. The way they moved was strange, kind of jerky, and my entire body felt like it was buzzing ,as if I’d been electrocuted. They were whispering to each other and lightly touching my face. I opened my eyes and they were gone.
After that, I left home. For a long time after that I figured that all the alien stuff was some kind of artifact of trauma, but that explanation never felt right, and the high strangeness kept coming back. Also, what about the experiences I had before the trauma? I had a lot of questions about why trauma would conjure little beings and visions of spaceships. I wanted to know the exact mechanism that caused that.
Well, there isn’t one.
So who are they? I don’t know, but I have thoughts about it that I’ll write down next. If you’ve plowed through this whole story of mine, thank you. You are a better person than I am.
Don’t forget Jeremy’s next Culture of Contact on You Tube or Ko-Fi, Saturday May 4th at 5:00 ET.
Life at the End of the World 