One Night in Copan Page 6

  I never mentioned the incident to anyone, fearing that I might come across as a lunatic or a drunkard. I recorded the incident in far greater detail in a small notebook which I then placed in a sealed envelope marked “OPEN ONLY UPON MY DEATH.” I posted the envelope and its contents to my attorney in Paris.

  On December 30, 2007, I e-mailed my old Honduran friend and colleague, Pablo Beltrán. I summarized the events I’d witnessed nearly a year earlier and gave Beltrán permission, should he deem it of interest, to relate my story on condition that my name be changed or withheld.

  Beltrán did just that in a column dated January 1, 2008 and published in El Mundo, the leading daily where he works.

  “What have I done!” he lamented the next day. “I’ve been swamped with calls -- fifteen or more -- all asking for your address, all demanding to know when and where the sighting took place. The UFO Club of San Pedro is organizing an outing to Copán on Saturday … they plan to spend the night outdoors. Hondurans love the occult, UFOs, prophecies, witchcraft, voodoo and all that nonsense. Should I give this story continuity or drop it? One caller said that the notebook to be read after your death must surely contain details of your encounter with an ‘extraterrestrial.’ The column is a hit but what do I do next? Can you tell me more?”

  “Pablito” I responded, “stay with the story but keep my name and whereabouts out of it. You and my attorney are the only people who know anything about this ‘encounter.’ I’m weighing your request for additional details and might provide you with some in the coming days. My eagerness to tell all is dampened by circumspection. It’ll be interesting to see if the other dailies pick up on your column and whether Roberto Hidalgo [La Republica’s Copán correspondent] mentions it in one of his self-serving commentaries. Meanwhile, hoteliers will do brisk business as the UFO Club converges on Copán for a night or two of sky-gazing….

  “I’m in Marseille. I had a fabulous bouillabaisse and feasted on escargots in garlic butter. With some time to kill, I visited the Chateau d’If, the tiny rocky island fortress where Edmond Dantès, the semi-fictional hero of the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned and from which, the Dumas novel purports, he managed to escape. French revolutionary statesman and erotic novelist, Honoré de Mirabeau, and half a dozen other notable inmates, were not quite as lucky. Some languished in the catacomb-like prison for years, among them Protestants, anti-royalists; an aristocrat who maintained a lifelong homosexual liaison with Monsieur, the brother of Louis XIV (and seduced one the king’s bastard sons); and a man falsely accused of bringing the plague to Marseille. Ah, if only some of your colonels and generals could have met a similar fate ….

  “In the meantime, you might consider penning a second column based on the responses and reactions your first one elicited among readers. That’s one way of giving the story an extra pair of wings.”

  In an e-mail dated January 4, Beltrán wrote: “I’ve been re-reading all the UFO background material you sent me, while fending off a new wave of frantic calls from readers. THEY BELIEVE! They seem to have a need to believe! Yesterday was a strange and freaky day. First, there was a nationwide power failure that lasted well over thirty minutes. Then it began to rain heavily. The torrential downpour was accompanied by howling winds that uprooted trees and leveled countless shanties. Well, you can imagine, the phone kept ringing, with readers asking me if the daylong deluge had ‘anything to do with what your friend saw at the Archeological Park.’ It took quite a bit of doing to convince people that the freaky tempest was in no way connected to your sightings. People here are scared shitless. Some blame you for ‘interfering with the supernatural.’ This is a riot! Members of the San Pedro UFO Club are converging on Copán. They will be spending two nights at the Park’s main gate, binoculars, telescopes, picnic baskets and all. I think my last column was the most widely read of my entire career. I don’t know whether to embrace you or curse you”

  “Pablito,” I answered, “How amusing that the power failure is being blamed on other than deterministic earthly events. Few UFO sightings have ever coincided with massive blackouts. I don’t have to remind you, most electric service interruptions in Honduras are either weather-related, the result of human error or deliberate tampering by the power company to compensate for overload conditions. Anyway, I’m stunned by the volume and stridency of the responses your column inspired.

  “After careful reflection, I’ve decided to prepare a ‘second round’ that is certain to deliver a knockout punch and make UFO believers -- and skeptics alike -- see stars. I’ll send it in after a decent interval. Let’s let the fever rise then subside for a while.”

  On January 10, I e-mailed Beltrán:

  “Pablito, I’ve been thinking. Adding, however cautiously, to my earlier disclosures puts me in the awkward position of saying far more than I should. I’m still alive and a working journalist. I worry not only about my reputation, which would be compromised should my identity accidentally be leaked, but also about a man in Copán whose astounding revelations left me bewildered and apprehensive. I’ll try. But that’s as far as I’ll go for the time being.

  “You can appreciate how difficult it was for a hard-boiled cynic like me to accept what I’d witnessed last February. I felt compelled to supplement what might have been a mirage, an optical illusion -- or a brief descent into madness -- with some verifiable evidence. I needed to know the truth not only to validate my own sanity but to add some measure of solid reality to an occurrence dismissed by skeptics as ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘psychosis’ and by believers as foreshadowing apocalypse.

  “The next day, I gained admittance to the Archeological Park about an hour before closing time. Dressed in dark clothes, I meandered through the Park’s vast expanse like a tourist, shooting pictures, taking notes and attracting no undue attention. At about 5 p.m., I hid in a dark and narrow cavity linking two crumbling stone structures in a remote area behind the Ball Court. I waited for night to engulf the Park before venturing out into the open.

  “By 9 p.m., nothing had happened and I began to feel like a fool. Worse, the cold chill of the ancient stone walls against which I’d huddled for more than an hour permeated my being. I knew a way out of the Park by climbing over the collapsed remains of an ancient parapet at the eastern edge of the ruins and scaling down a steep incline covered with dense underbrush. It was dark and I realized that this route would place me some two kilometers from the main road and in densely forested terrain.

  “I was mulling over my next move when I felt a sudden pressure in my ears. The pressure billowed into a very low-pitched hum that throbbed through my chest. The hum intensified and it was then that I observed the same ‘object’ I’d seen the night before hovering about 30 meters over the Hieroglyphic Stairway. A bright, thin, pulsating laser-like green shaft of light shot out from under the craft, bathing the top rungs of the Stairway with an eerie glow. This incredible spectacle lasted about three minutes. My heart was pounding and I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t in the throes of a horrible nightmare. No sooner did I realize that what I’d seen was real, terrifyingly real, than the beam of light receded slowly and telescoped back into the belly of the craft. The craft then shot upward at a speed beyond human comprehension -- and which would have pulverized any human occupant -- and vanished.

  “I was now bathing in sweat, breathless, dizzy. I must have passed out for the next thing I remember was being revived by Eusebio.

  “‘What are you doing here,’ I asked.

  “‘No! What are you doing here?’ he replied, grabbing me by the wrists, with more than a hint of annoyance in his voice.

  “I told Eusebio what I’d witnessed the night before and what had compelled me to return to the site the night after. I asked him if what I’d seen was real and, if so, whether he could explain it.

  “Eusebio, whose impoverished hamlet nestling near the Guatemalan border I’d visited several times, knew I could be trusted. But he hesitated. He then pressed his lips against my e
ar and murmured something about ‘ancient prophecies,’ ‘tribal payback,’ and the ‘imminent return of the Lords of Xibalba to reclaim the land from the usurpers.’

  “I urged him to elaborate. He smiled gently but said nothing. I left Copán the next day on the 6 a.m. bus to San Pedro Sula and flew out of Honduras.

  “Pablito, I’ve told you infinitely more than I should have. The rest, which I resolved never to reveal while I’m alive, is detailed in a letter written in Mayan symbols. The letter now rests in my attorney’s safe.

  P.S. Has there been any reaction to your columns from the military?”

  A day later I received an animated e-mail from Beltrán.

  “… Another stampede of stargazers is charging toward Copán tomorrow. They must first obtain special permission to spend the night at the Park. They will be charged an extra fee and won’t be allowed to take in any food or beverages. It’s a riot: A reader called claiming that the U.S. Army is using the humming sound you described in Afghanistan. The humming, he said, becomes so intense that “insurgents” burst out of their caves screaming in agony. He also asserted that the U.S. ‘reverse-engineered the humming effect’ from the UFO that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947….

  P.S. Germán Monteblanco, of La Nacíon, published a cautious editorial based on my original article. He takes the UFO theory seriously. Strangely, the Honduran military have been mum on the subject. The military here don’t read. They just listen to the radio or watch TV or get drunk or torture people…. It’s the readers who are out of control. They hunger for more. What else do I tell them? Who is ‘Eusebio’?”

  “Pablito,” I answered on January 17, “you’ve asked me, justifiably, to endow ‘Eusebio’ with more than just skin, bone and marrow. I hesitated this long for reasons that will become apparent. But since your readers are clamoring like a pack of wolves for more of the flesh of this extraordinary story, and to prevent anyone christened Eusebio anywhere in the greater Copán River Valley from being hassled, possibly victimized, I can tell you this much: ‘Eusebio’ is an alias. He told me that himself. His real name is unpronounceable. Several weeks after I decamped from Copán, I learned from a tribal counselor in Corralitos that ‘Eusebio’ had disappeared under mysterious circumstances and has never been seen again. One can only wonder whether he was assassinated, a fate shared by so many of his kinfolks, or whether he left Honduras for a better life elsewhere.

  “In retrospect, ‘Eusebio,’ whom I’d befriended on previous visits to Copán, seemed more aloof, remote, more distant than his fellow Maya. He was short and wiry, and his coal-black eyes would often turn milky when the sun hit them a certain way. I never paid much attention to this peculiarity, which I dismissed as an optical illusion or ophthalmological oddity. ‘Eusebio’ spoke softly, almost in a whisper, and his words, often ambiguous or allegorical, conveyed ideas that were sometimes so perplexing and impenetrable that I dismissed them as the ramblings of a mystic high on magic mushrooms.

  “I also remarked that few of his cohorts called him ‘Eusebio.’ They preferred to address him as U-wach-euse, a name I inferred was a reverential title in Kakchiquel, Q’uiche or one of the twenty-odd Mayan languages spoken in the region. I looked up the name in an encyclopedia of linguistics; my search proved fruitless.

  “I remember Eusebio with great fondness. He was a gentle, self-effaced character who spoke in riddles when asked probing questions, and who had the uncanny faculty of vanishing and reappearing as if he had wings or could travel through walls. I will never know why he was at the Archeological Park that fateful night and what special meaning his words conveyed.”

  “The recent UFO citing in Stephenville, Texas,” I wrote Pablo Beltrán on January 21, “hit the big news, with CNN and other networks milking the story dry. People are crawling out of the woodwork, eager to tell their own tales. Stanton Friedman, a respected astrophysicist I first met when I was managing editor of Aerospace America magazine in New York, insists that the U.S. government’s studied indifference is contrived to trivialize phenomena that have captivated and troubled people for decades. If UFOs are not prototypes of secret U.S. military research into, say, anti-gravity technology, Friedman argues, they must be extraterrestrial. Predictably, the government is not commenting.

  “My own take on this affair is that if these unidentified objects are not human in origin, their existence poses a grave threat to monotheistic religions.

  “Anyway, mounting worldwide interest in UFOs could justify another column in which you solicit reader feedback. What you collect should offer revealing insights into the psyche, fears and fantasies of a cross-section of your public -- all of which you could then synthesize into yet another column.”

  Pablo Beltrán let the story die. He never told me why and I never asked. Perhaps he got tired of the phone calls, the frenzy his columns had created. Nor would I ever tell him, or anyone else what I’d itched to reveal from the start: that Eusebio came from the planet Euse in a distant outpost of the spiral galaxy closest to the Milky Way, Messier 31, some 2.5 million light-years from Earth in the Andromeda constellation; that he’d added the suffix “bio” to his name to denote life, and that his Euseian ancestors had shared their secrets of astronomy, mathematics and calendric sciences with the ancient Maya.

  It is not for me to echo Eusebio’s expressions of sorrow and anger at the poverty, alienation and dismal prospects of the Maya, or of his people’s age-old yearning to punish those who continue to mistreat their descendants. Nor can I ever admit to having seen Eusebio on the night of our last encounter emerge from an aperture in the hewn rock wall behind which I’d been hiding (or was it a window into another dimension?) and into which he coalesced and turned to stone, his fingers still clutching my wrists. Don’t take my word for it. If you ever visit the Park and look carefully, you can find him, frozen in time, his brow furrowed, his eyes, half-closed, staring at infinity.

  Only time will tell whether the ancient Maya’s predictions of a new Xibalba within the next decade or so are accurate, or the delirious hallucinations of madmen.

  Before me, relived in cryptic iconography and faded hieroglyphics, was the colossal spectacle of genius exhausted, splendor humbled, enlightenment dimmed by a headlong rush toward cultural extinction. Conflict, ferocious blood-letting rituals, an obsession with death, overpopulation, deforestation, hunger, disease -- all had conspired to bring to a close an epoch of fabulous artistic expression and agonizing self-inquiry. The meteoric magnificence of the Maya is chronicled in the lichen-covered tabernacles, in the austerity of age-worn temples and ball-courts, in the enigmatic stares of petrified kings and demigods. The calamity that befell the city-state of Copán is witnessed in the bleak anonymity of unfinished monuments and abandoned stonework that lay scattered on the forest floor. Spectral vestiges of a powerful dynasty that began in the fifth century C. E. and ended in flight and dispersal four hundred years later, they may also be seen as a metaphor to the passion and the agony of a dispirited and rudderless posterity -- the modern-day Maya.

  And as I gazed at the pyramids and temples and awe-inspiring statuary, I asked myself what sort of future awaits these time travelers. Past is prelude. Xibalba is not a mystical destination. It’s a “circumstance,” as Eusebio had called it, “an unavoidable and unending status quo.”

  LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAX

  I’m mad between long intervals of horrible sanity.

  I feel no pain when madness crests.

  Keith Sidney “Max” Pontifex

  There’s an island where fish have wings and birds dive in the blue for their favorite catch, where men, groping for self-realization, blinded by the sun but scarcely enlightened by their colonial past, prey on each-other the better to cope with a common nightmare.

  It was serendipity, not purpose or plan that first brought me to Stonewall. I would call this small island home for a decade or so as I searched for Shangri-La and surrendered lustfully to its siren call. Beyond its golden shores and the l
anguid cadence of its ways, the world turned, and each rotation witnessed the dawning of human hopes and the demise of reason. Man was neither smarter nor more depraved than he’d ever been -- just more inventive, brazen. It was a ten-year period defined by momentous events long since forgotten or demoted to the back pages of history: The Watergate scandal. The raid on Entebbe. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger seventy-three seconds after takeoff. In Edmond, Oklahoma, Patrick Sherrill had gone “postal,” killed fourteen co-workers and committed suicide. The Iran-Contra affair exposed yet another aspect of America’s two-faced foreign policy.

  In far-flung Stonewall, hidden from view under an azure canopy, as lush rain forests and mangroves spread their green tendrils all the way to the sea, things take place that escape scrutiny.

  Fickle and self-absorbed, people entomb what they need not remember; they enshrine what they will not forget. Trifles take on mythical dimensions. Minor scandals feed the rumor mill; large ones invite outlandish, crowd-pleasing twaddle or ignite choleric tirades. Reminiscences apt to give people nightmares are promptly swept under a rug of selective amnesia. If you probe too deeply, if you resort to insightful conjecture, you will be greeted with suspicion or scorn. When doors slam shut, when friendly smiles turn to scowl, the truth, mind-boggling or hideous, lurks underfoot like a scorpion squeezing beneath a rock. Shadow politics and spin-doctoring are Stonewall’s national sports. Boozing and cricket come a very distant third and fourth.