from CHAPTER THREE

In the US News and World Report issue of December 27, 1993, there appears a very strange story about a group called the Finders. The story was first reported in the Washington Post on February 7, 1987, and involved the discovery, in a Tallahassee park, of six “disheveled” children who were being supervised by two well dressed men. Concerned residents called the police, who found the children in a dirty and unkempt condition. They ranged in age from four to six, and only one of them would talk.

The men explained that they were part of an organization called the Finders, a Washington group who sought out brilliant children in order to help them get educated to their full potential.

This seems innocuous enough, but the children involved were filthy, hungry and apparently did not know their own names. Documents were found at Finders headquarters, a warehouse in Washington D.C. that suggested that abusive rituals had taken place there. As it appeared that international child trafficking might be involved, Customs agents investigated the case.

Their report of February 12, 1987 states, “This office was contacted by the Tallahassee Police Department on February 5, 1987, who requested assistance in attempting to identify two adult males and six minor children, all taken into custody the previous day. The men, arrested and charged with multiple counts of child abuse, were being very evasive with police in the questions being asked of them pursuant the children and their condition.”

The report continues, “The police had received an anonymous telephone call relative two well-dressed white men wearing suits and ties in Myers Park, (Tallahassee), apparently watching six dirty and unkempt children in the playground area. HOULIHAN and AMMERMAN were near a 1980 Blue Dodge van bearing Virginia license number XHW-557, the inside of which was later described as foul-smelling filled with maps, books, letters, with a mattress situated to the rear of the van which appeared as if it were used as a bed, and the overall appearance of the van gave the impression that all eight persons were living in it.”

“The children were covered with insect bites, were very dirty, most of the children were not wearing underwear and all of the children had not been bathed in many days.”

“The men were arrested and charged with multiple counts of child abuse and lodged in the Leon County Jail. Once in custody the men were somewhat evasive in their answers to the police regarding the children and stated only that they both were the children’s teachers and that all were enroute to Mexico to establish a school for brilliant children.”

Something in that document almost stopped my heart: the two men reported as supervising the children, Douglas Ammerman and Michael Houlihan, had explained that they were “transporting these children to Mexico and a school for brilliant children.”

Was it the same place that I had been taken in Monterrey? Did it still exist in 1985? Does it now?

I came across the Finders story in 1995, which decided me to make my visit to Monterrey. When I returned in 1996, I recognized details of the Encirra easily enough. We stayed there and even ate at the famous buffet, which was still spectacular.

I drove up and down in the hills above the city, trying to find the mansion where I had been taken. But I could not find the house. Nothing struck a familiar chord. If only I’d had a street name or an address, I could have organized a records search, but I was unsuccessful. I had a vague memory that the house had been connected to the Pan American Sulfur Company, which had been formed in 1947 to exploit sulfur deposits in Mexico. But I could find no evidence that any of the principals, who were from Dallas, had ever lived in Monterrey.

The trail of the children found in Tallahassee led back to Washington D.C. and the Finders group, whose leader, Marian Pettite, claimed that nothing illegal was being done. Citing the National Security Act, the CIA took over the investigation, stating that it was an “internal matter.”

Although the Justice Department announced at the time that a “continuing investigation” was in progress, nothing was ever released suggesting that the Finders were more than a rather eccentric group, and nothing was ever revealed about any school in Mexico.

Florida Representative Tom Lewis is quoted by U. S. News as saying, “Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and turned their backs on these children? That’s what all the evidence points to.”

from CHAPTER FOUR

After I published Communion, I endured a years-long media barrage that, in the end, led too many people to turn away from my work. No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake the relentless characterization of me as an advocate for belief in alien contact. When the aliens didn’t land, people simply tuned me out. It seemed as if the inertia obscuring the true question simply could not be overcome. What was so sad is that it was and is an exciting, vital question, so much more engaging than the alien folklore that has enshrouded it.

For financial reasons, we were forced to move to a small condominium we owned in my hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

Since then, some explosively powerful and remarkable events have taken place, but that last night at the cabin marked a fundamental change. What happened there would be the last and most magnificent ‘contact’ experience. But not with aliens. My last visitor was human—but in a very extraordinary way. As will be seen when I discuss him in more detail, perhaps the most compelling discovery I have made in all my journey is that there is more than one mystery here. We are not what we seem, we human beings.

From the next morning on, my encounters with creatures that appeared to be alien would be few. Now, the human aspect of the experience would explode into my life as never before, and I would discover the most wonderful thing: a human being is much more than we have yet dared to imagine. Much, much more.

But, on that morning, I had barely even begun to process the meaning of what had transpired over the previous few years at the cabin, much less the epochal event that had taken place the night before.

As we drove down the highway on that sad morning, my cellphone rang. It was an old, dear friend, the filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who had been the first person I’d told about my 1985 encounter, even before I told Anne. I had decided to try the story on him and get his advice about how to tell my wife before I actually faced her with it.

Now, he said, “Whitley, I just saw your woman, the woman on the cover of Communion. She came up to my car and leaned in the window while I was stuck in traffic on Fourteenth Street.” He paused. “She’s prettier than that picture.”

My heart almost stopped. How I envied him. Now that I was leaving, maybe he was going to be my replacement.

Later, he also commented that her eyes were different from my picture. “They’re hard to describe. Deep and dark, but not like dark glasses. You can see something in them.”

I have always regretted that picture, because it communicates the ideal of an alien presence far more forcefully than I had intended. But at the same time, the picture has served as a mnemonic for many people, who have, upon seeing it, realized that their own encounters were not simply ordinary dreams.

On that morning, he continued, “She asked me if I was going west. I said ‘no, I’m going east,’ and she said, ‘well, that’s good.’”

I knew exactly what this meant. She was not only expressing gladness that Timothy was staying, but also regret at my departure.

I might add here that, while it may seem extraordinary that somebody who appears even slightly like her could walk the streets of a crowded city, she could and did. Up close, there was something deeply human about her. One did not get an impression so much of alien as of human strangeness, and the feeling that one was face to face with a living aspect of a very deep mystery, which is the mystery of man.