JERUSALEM FOR THE WEIRD

MT SHASTA, CALIFORNIA

Jesus Goes to Heaven — I Am Come Pageant, Mt Shasta, California.

It is Sunday morning in Mt. Shasta City, California. The shops offering Namibian Crystals, which believers believe, can be combined with copper tubing to serve as multi-dimensional portals to inside Mt. Shasta, are not open yet, nor are the book­stores with their special sections featuring books about extraterrestrials and/or refugees from a lost continent living within the mountain, which towers above. My wife Pat and I stopped in one. While we were browsing the stacks, a woman behind us bared her back while a man picked ticks off of it.

Mt Shasta California, Jerusalem for the Weird

“This morning I took a look out my window and wow, there was a unicorn,” he said. “And Pegasus was flying right next to it”.

Maybe they were just trolling us as a couple of innocent tourists.

The racks of tie dyed shirts and skirts have yet to appear on the street this morning. No sign of the two young Je­sus freaks who marched yesterday shrieking that the end of times was near.

I am sitting at the Seven Suns Coffee Shop nursing a cup of French Roast, on break from a four-hour pageant, a passion play of sorts that tells the story of Jesus with all of the nasty bits such as Judas’ betrayal and the crucifixion eliminated. Even the Roman guards come out looking like friendly neighborhood cops. The “I AM Come” pageant has happened every year since since 1950, except for 2020 due to COVID19. A friend told me that I really had to witness this. She had seen the spectacle of the Oberammergau Passion Play and this was almost as grand.

I left the pageant just after Jesus had finished rounding up all of his disciples. I was planning to return two hours later for the Last Supper and The Resurrection, which I am told is quite spectacular.

My mobile phone goes beep. I can’t seem to turn off these notifications that happen every time someone or some app thinks there is some breaking story like a celebrity DUI or a Facebook update. The latter was true. My friend and sometimes traveling companion Mandip Singh Soin FRGS (Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a fine fel­low indeed) had just come off a raft on the Zanskar River in Kashmir. Now he is complaining about sunburn while engaging his friends in an international Facebook talk show, an exchange of puns about rivers and whitewater rafting. Mandip, a Sikh whose home is New Delhi, is known as “The Punster of the Punjab”. He is a master.

I join the fray:

A raft of rapid questions please.
Water we getting into here?
You guys all seem so much in sink.
going off on ex-stream tan-gents now.
Should we bail out of this or just paddle along?
This punstery has reached Class 6. Bail before you reach the falls.

I get back in the car and return to the pageant. It is at the G.W. Ballard Amphitheater, a modern performance space in the redwoods. Mt. Shasta towers behind it. It was built by the Saint Germain Foundation in honor of its founder Guy W. Ballard. In 1930, Ballard, a mining engineer, mineral claim hustler, and student of the occult claims to have met the Comte de Saint-Germain, an 18th Century European mystic and alchemist while wandering on Mt. Shasta. St. Germain claimed immortality saying he was an Ascended Master, a reincarnation of Francis Bacon (who Ballard and others said wrote Shakespeare’s plays). Jesus, he said, was also an Ascended Master, sent to Earth to assist mankind. The good Count anointed Ballard an Ascended Master. Bal­lard later claimed he channeled both Richard the Lionheart­ed and George Washington. His wife Edna said she was the essence of Benjamin Franklin risen from the grave.

Ballard’s writings, under the pen name Godfre Ray King, became the basis of the I AM Activity, a bouillabaisse of theosophy seasoned with generous chunks of modern Christianity, material plagiarized from 19th century fantasy novels about Shasta, and flag-waving US patriotism.

Ballard took his show on the road, staging rallies across the country.

In “Psychic Dictatorship In America 1943”, a disgruntled former student named Gerald B. Bryan wrote that Ballard wore a white tuxedo and diamond bling. His wife Edna (aka Ben Franklin), was described as a throaty-voiced blond woman who dressed like an opera singer. Ballard’s speeches and broadcasts ranged in tone from reas­surances of a kind uncle to the gibberish of a cattle auctioneer.

Ballard sold Love Gifts, records, jewelry and electrical gizmos equipped with colored lights called “Flame in Ac­tion” that would assure his followers “channels of commu­nication” to wealth and immortality, a comforting thought during the depths of the Great Depression.

All went well and the Ballards amassed millions until the immortal Guy unceremoniously died in 1939 after which Edna, his son and eight others were indicted by the US government on mail fraud charges. Hundreds of chanting supporters mobbed the Los Angeles Courthouse. Among other things, the defense argued that an invisible force called K-17 had come to Ballard’s aid and sunk a flo­tilla of Japanese submarines ready to attack the US. The case ended up in the US Supreme Court. In the landmark ruling in United States vs Ballard, Justice William O. Douglas ex­pressed the majority opinion that the state had no business determining whether religious beliefs were real or bogus. According to the First Amendment, heresy is not an offense. The Ballards won that round. They were let go on a technicality, then charged with tax evasion and forced to pay the IRS $104 thousand.

Guy Ballard, as far as we know, is still dead.

Today, the I AM Activity lives on, but quietly.

I re-enter the amphitheater just in time for the Last Sup­per. I am greeted by a portly silver haired man in a white suit, looking something like Colonel Sanders. For such a grand pageant, there are probably only about two hundred people in the audience. Most are impeccably dressed in white, but there are many touches of violet and a few other pastels. These light colors, they say, create more auspicious vibrations than dark ones. The I AM symbol is a violet flame. If you put light on a chart of the frequency spectrum, the rates at which molecules or electrons vibrate, its vibes are are higher than radio, much higher than my mobile phone. Violet is the fastest vibrating color and ultraviolet is off the charts. Meditating on a blue crystal, as some Shastans do, is said to bring one closer to Michael, the majordomo of all angels.

I entered the pageant early in the chilly morning wear­ing a violet sweater, which attracted smiles. But now it is hot, and I have stripped to a black tee shirt. Black won’t do with these folk. Neither will earth tones. Pleasantly, nothing harsh for these I AMers. Every year during the weekend of the pageant, restaurants comply with I AM beliefs by offer­ing dishes without onion or garlic.

But nobody here seems to be judging outsiders, we the curious who have shown up in tee shirts and jeans. Blue has sacred power, but not the blue of my faded Levis. Nobody asks our name or passes a hat. Nobody proselytizes. The Colonel just presents me with a little program with a website URL where I can learn more. In bold letters halfway down the page: “We are not a cult”.

An organ begins to play, funereal but also remindful of 1950s radio soap opera music.

The Last Supper, IAM Come Pageant

Out rolls a rectangular con­tainer, the size of a semi-trailer. The side retracts revealing a table piled with loaves of bread, a setting for thirteen: Jesus and his disciples for The Last Supper. Will he announce that Judas will betray him? I wait for that. It does not happen. Nor is there a crucifixion. This play omits the negative stuff. The plot is largely traditional — the story I grew up with — but the words are strange indeed, replacing much of the language of the Bible with I AM-speak. The Lord’s Prayer is punctuated with “I AM presence”. The slant seem to be that God lives within us. In past years fundamentalist Christians have staged protests outside.

The script doesn’t tell how Jesus meets his death, but sev­eral scenes later, a rock rolls away from the mountain and Jesus strides out, arms open, like a late night TV host. Soon the stage is filled with angels with white and lavender wings that swirl in an almost trance-inducing circle. Jesus enters and through the magic of cables and audio visual technol­ogy rises, glowing, up a towering redwood tree followed by two American flags. The crowd stands and recites the Pledge of Allegiance.

I leave, feeling strangely mellow.

Shasta’s natural beauty has always inspired awe: trout-filled streams, clear mountain lakes, stands of Ponderosa pine, elk, and eagle. Mt. Shasta, at 14,162 feet, is one of the south­ernmost volcanoes of the Cascade Range. It is topped by ice and snow most of the year and provides the innerspring for five glaciers. It takes about two days to climb it and that can be treacherous as weather can change almost instantly. Lenticular cloud formations known locally as “waves of as­cension” often appear above the mountain. They are created when moist air blows over its peaks. When some of this air condenses it forms weird doughnut-like discs which some believe are UFOs. No wonder the Shastans, the Achumawi, the Atsugewi, the Wintu, and the Modoc tribes who lived at its base assigned Shasta spirits. No wonder F.S. Oliver fanta­sized in his 1905 novel A Dweller on Two Planets that Mt. Shasta was home to refugees from Atlantis, which he placed on the land bridge that once joined India with Madagascar called Lemuria for the bug-eyed little lemurs that became separated from the Indian subcontinent. Under cover of these clouds, the inhabitants of the mountain, who live in a city some call Telos, were served by spaceships from Venus.

No wonder Shasta has become Jerusalem for the weird.

In 1954, a woman who called herself Sister Thedra claimed to have daily contact with the space beings. She set the date for the end of the world as December 21st, admon­ishing her followers to give up their jobs and worldly goods as they would all leave earth on a spaceship.

They all gathered, but no spaceship arrived.

Sister Thedra was studied by three sociologists who in 1956 published a book titled “When Prophecy Fails” in which they developed the theory of cognitive dissonance. Supporters of an idea or cause will avoid mental discomfort by ignoring contradictory facts or putting a positive spin on them, sometimes even becoming stronger true-believers. The cognitive dissonance theory has received new attention in modern American politics.

Another group of true believers here are supporters of The State of Jefferson, several counties in southern Oregon and Northern California that want to secede from their respective states and create a paradise of “Free people, Free Markets, Limited Government”. This was going on long be­fore the so-called Tea Party dating back to an unsuccessful effort prior to World War II. They don’t trust government of any sort, especially massive conspiracies such as the United Nations. A few years ago, word went out to members to beware of UN spies lurking about masquerading as birdwatchers. They were warned to be especially wary of their leaders, who wore patches labeled Audubon Society.

Allen Radio Telescope Array at Hat Creek Near Mt. Shasta

Don’t start looking for auras, but everything from the soles of your sneakers to the moons of planets in distant univers­es sends out signals. When the atoms of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, shift from one state to the another they broadcast at 1420.40575177 MHz on your ra­dio dial, about the same frequency as some mobile phones. It is such a common vibe that radio astronomers have used what is called the hydrogen line to map the universe. It is so common that scientists like astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake surmise that ET has probably figured that out too and that he/she/it might use it like a CB radio channel to hail us with a hey old buddy! Some call this hydrogen line the watering hole where civilizations might gather.

In the 1950s, Drake, one of the founders of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), came up with a mathemati­cal equation that predicted that there is a strong chance that there are beings out there. Gene Roddenberry made up a formula based on it to justify Star Trek’s mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civiliza­tion.

SETI radio astronomers have been scanning the hydro­gen line since 1960.

I am standing in near silence at Hat Creek, in a valley between Mt. Shasta and the other major volcanic peak in Northern California, Mt. Lassen. A few cows in the distance. A slight wind rings the metal structures of a collection radio telescope dishes. A dish near me buzzes with the sound of an air conditioning unit, cooling its superconductor antenna snout, a huge proboscis that looks like the nose of a beagle. There are 42 radio telescopes here, some pointing upward, some with their noses down like contrite pooches.

Hat Creek is surrounded by volcanic mountains and iso­lated from man made radio waves. Cell phones don’t work here. I had to shut mine off to enter the property.

In the 1960s, scientists at the Radio Astronomy Labora­tory of the University of California took advantage of Hat Creek’s isolation and set up an 85-foot radio antenna, which operated it until a wind storm brought it down in 1993. Us­ing it, astronomers discovered the first interstellar molecular cloud. Before this, researchers thought that molecules could not exist in space.

Enter Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen who agreed to finance Drake’s dream of building a huge radio telescope ar­ray to search for ET. The University of California went along with it: it would be a powerful tool for other radio astrono­my as well. A group of 350 small telescopes, linked together like the eye of a dragonfly, would be the most awesome sky gazer ever. The first 42 telescopes went online in 2007 to great fanfare. SETI scanned the heavens, capturing a wider swatch of sky at one time than any other observatory. It set up a system in which volunteers put a program on their personal computers that allowed SETI to borrow comput­er time to process the enormous amount of data that was sucked from the heavens.

Crickets.

Then the shoe dropped. In 2011, the University of Cal­ifornia ceased funding and the site went into hibernation for several months. Since it got up and running running again, it has been managed by SRI International. It is shared by SETI and other clients such as the US Air Force which uses it to track space flotsam, the junk from old rockets and satellites that floats around the earth.

But SETI takes over at night.

Standing amidst this pack of metallic beagles, I hear a loud hum. All of the up-pointing dishes make a 180 degree turn. Is someone sitting behind some mirrored glass win­dow showing off for me, giggling as my lips form the sound Wow or is some astronomer shifting her sights to some other galaxy? The dishes are controlled remotely.

Earlier, when I had a working mobile phone, I had a long talk with a SETI scientist Doug Vakoch, the go-to guy for extraterrestrial lingo, that is, how to recognize a signal from ET if you hear it and how to answer. It is about detecting repeated patterns, he said. Patterns that distinguish them­selves from the static of elements, like hydrogen changing state in nature.

If ET is listening for us from afar, where our signals may take years, even centuries to travel, he/she will probably not make much sense of Morse’s code, Herbert Hoover’s accep­tance broadcast or Stephen Colbert.

Let’s give them everything we’ve got” said SETI’s senior astronomer Seth Shostak in a 2005 Forbes Magazine in­terview. “I would just send the entire contents of Google‘s servers, porn and all. The information is so redundant…they will learn”.

In 2012 the now collapsed Are­cibo Observatory in Puerto Rico beamed a message toward Sagittarius containing 10,000 Twitter messages.

The Hat Creek telescopes, originally made from off-the-shelf parts such as old TV dishes, have undergone major changes. SETI is now aiming its antennae toward what are called exoplanets, celestial bodies that could physically support life that circle suns similar to ours.

Now scientists are scanning planets at many new frequencies, for clues far beyond carbon-line signals, and harnessing powerful computers — so called “big data” — to crunch them.

Bruce’s Fishing Cabin at Mt. Shasta

I retreat to a friend’s fishing cabin next to a stream at the base of Mt. Shasta. It is the night of the Perseid meteor shower. Every few minutes I see a flaming particle, a frag­ment of the Swift-Tuttle comet, shoot across the sky. Some are as small as grains of sand. They must be proud of their dramatic swan songs. They appear in line with the constel­lation Perseus, which is 250 million light-years away. 250 million years ago, we were, it is assumed, not capable of radio transmission. Our primitive selves, some scientists believe, were some sort of shrew-like cross between a reptile and a mammal. There is evidence that we snacked on tiny dinosaurs.

There may, however, be a sweet spot of places just close enough. Someone right now might be trying to decipher the Titanic sending an SOS, Lawrence Welk’s accordion or early Facebook pictures.

If we were to travel to meet our possible new pals on Kepler-452b, one of the so called exoplanets, at Space Shuttle speed it would take us 1,400 years. But someone unknown to us out there may have already figured out the technology to do it: laser sails, antimatter engines, and warp drives, to us still within the realm of theory or science fiction.

Or maybe the answer lies in something completely differ­ent, interstellar slime molds or copper tubing and crystals. Maybe the Lemurians and Telosians who live inside of Mt. Shasta above me are guffawing, doing armpit farts, sliming each other, or whatever they do, at the thought of our prim­itive science.

NOTE : This a condensed version of a chapter in Russ Johnson’s book and audio book TALES OF THE RADIO TRAVELER, available on Amazon, Audible and in bookstores.