BIG BEN

By Michael Farmer


Working in a retirement home one can hear many an odd tale and run into many sorts of characters.


This tale relates to a gentleman only known as "Big Ben."  He was so dubbed because he weighed in excess of 300 pounds and needed help getting up and out of bed.


I encountered Ben in 1990.  He told me how he had been an Operative with the OSS just after the Second World War.  He was living in Cuba at the time.  They wanted him to send them any intelligence that he could.  He tried to back out but the "Company," as he called them, indirectly threatened his family.  He "joined" after Castro took over.

He was retrieved by a Company boat.  It appeared to be a small fishing trawler but its holds were jammed tight with weapons and radio/radar equipment.  He was brought back to the United States via Miami.  From there he was sent to Virginia for training and eventually Washington, DC for his assignment.


They were simple, he told me laughingly.  They were simply to discredit these new "Flying Saucer witnesses."  He was so good at what he did he was reassigned to a Top Secret division that analyzed UFO evidence and then summarily debunked it "scientifically."


Agents, according to Ben, were standardly issued black suits for, as he put it, "scarin the folk that seen them ships" and a James Bond like kit that could make a murder look like an accident or suicide.


He said he told me so that a guilty man could die an innocent death. (He died two months later of emphysema.)


From Ohio he next found himself assigned in Nevada.


Ben had been born into a Catholic family.  His father was half American Indian, half Mexican.  His mother was a devout church goer.  His father stuck more to the old Indian ways.  It was here in Nevada that Ben began his spiritual quest.  Previous to that he had been an agnostic.


The thing that Ben claimed changed him was a Top Secret project that the Air Force and the Department of Defense were working on.  It dealt with recovered aliens and hardware.Its members were dubbed "gems" and he thinks that the mission was named "Project Ruby" or "Project Garnet."


He claims that in the mid 1960s he met up with a small grey skinned humanoid that communicated via telepathy or a series of dog like grunts and whines.  Ben swore that Stephen Spielberg must have met up with an alien because they are partial to M&Ms and ice cream and ET showed such a liking to Reeses Pieces!


The aliens normal food was a processed cake consisting mainly of plankton and vegetable matter and until the process was perfected at least three casualties resulted.


He said they were a simple folk, and in some ways surpassed humans, and in others they were awed with human's philosophical outlook.  They worshiped a Supreme God, which was a duality, both male and female and was referred to as simply "The Consciousness."  The beings he encountered were neither male nor female, yet he said you just "knew" their gender.  Their life spans were normally 200 to 300 earth years but on earth considerably shorter.


Ben died, as I said, of emphysema.  He had no survivors, yet three young men driving a luxury car and wearing business suits came to claim his remains and possessions, meager as they were; an electric razer, a bottle of Old Spice, two shirts and three pairs of pants and his ragged Bible.  They took Ben and buried him in some Veteran's Cemetery, even though he had never been a member of the military.