The Psychic Meteor

Black Hawk: Readers may remember that on November 11 of last year, Calvin resident Brent Holcroft slew his family in a recreation of an Aztec sacrifice (see: Aztec Sacrifice In Black Hawk County, December, 1996: Vol.3, Issue #12). Neighbor Barbara Jennings, a witness to the spectacle, still holds that a misty, snake-like creature then flew with Brent into the heavens.

     As of this date, police investigations and FBI searches for Mr. Holcroft have proved fruitless. But work has been done by other authorities that has revealed much about the mysterious ritual.

     Professor Alan Wendell of the History Department at Georg von Podebrad College has been especially helpful in this case. He has noted that Holcroft himself produced maps and drawings of what looked like a set of ley lines around the house, and that the pattern of these lines closely resembled the structure of irrigation canals at Cholula, Mexico, which was at the time of the Aztecs a great place of worship and sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl, the snake-god of wind and rain.

     Now Wendell is not so sure that the canals were actually functional. "I spoke about the canals with some colleagues of mine in the Archaeology Department, and they seemed to concur that the canals may not have been for irrigation after all, but may have served a sort of decorative purpose," he explains. "In truth, it seems that the canals were not interconnected in a way that would have allowed water to flow very far, and the concentric rings they formed certainly wouldn't have helped the water flow from a higher spot to a lower. Yet, neither my colleagues nor I could unearth anything more concrete about the canals.

     "Then I noticed that in both Holcroft's drawings and in the canals at Cholula, the spacing between rings of the circles are not even. Now, in both cases it is difficult to discern exactly how many rings there are because the line fragments are so choppy and misaligned, but it is clear that as one moves toward the edge of the ten-mile diameter area, the rings are closer together. In fact, the rings at the edge of the circle are twice as close to each other than the ones furthest in. They resemble ripples. So, I followed a hunch and consulted a geologist. Sure enough, these circles exhibit a shock pattern that one would expect to see in the rock deformation and dispersal of debris at a meteor impact site."

     Yet no meteor has been known to have hit the Earth near Calvin, and the lack of a crater or other features in the ground to back up Brent Holcroft's drawings supports this. Still, the landscape in a five-mile radius around the Holcrofts' house is a little disturbed.

     "Think of me as a human divining rod, except I don't look for water, I seek psychic imprints." says the squat, bearded man. "I decided to start from the outskirts of where the circles should be and walk inward. I started in the parking lot of St. Stephen's, just outside the circle. I hadn't gone more than a hundred feet down the sidewalk that would eventually lead me to the Holcroft residence when I felt my body tremble uncontrollably. The sensation was fleeting, so I kept going. In my five mile walk, the tremblings came maybe ten or eleven times, but were more spread out as I drew near the epicenter of what I felt now to be a genuine psychic disturbance.

     "Finally, I found myself standing in front of the now empty Holcroft house. I closed my eyes and prepared for whatever sensations would come. At that point I had the most horrible, dreadful vision I've ever had in my two decades in this profession. I was in space. I was cold; the type of cold that can only exist in a vacuum, and though my lungs should have been bursting, something was letting me breathe---or at maybe I didn't have to breathe.

     "And flanking me were these huge, shimmery, phosphorescent... creatures with bulging eyes and huge wings and some things that looked like tentacles. They flapped and flapped and for some reason I received the impression that they were laughing, somehow communicating through the ¦ther. These things were alien, and their laughing seemed too sinister, wicked. I felt great foreboding.

     "I saw the Earth then, and knew that these creatures (how many there were, I don't know- five, six?) were heading toward it. There was the Moon, and we were approaching it at incredible speeds. One of the creatures slammed right into it, and even though I wasn't on the surface, I could "see" it as if I were. It didn't make a deep hole but instead-shoop! It passed right though the rock like it wasn't even there. Faint blue lines pulsed and rippled outward from the impact, then they faded, too.

     "My vision ended before my snakelike companions reached the Earth and I was there on the sidewalk again, looking at that house where those murders happened. I couldn't shake my dread and the feeling of alien horror I had just been a part of. If what I saw means anything, it seems Brent Holcroft was in contact with creatures from space that lived underneath his very house."

     It seems, then, that the canals in Cholula and the lines marked in Holcroft's notes did represent shockwaves similar to those that a meteor would produce upon impacting with the Earth. Yet in this case the meteor may have been of a psychic sort, from the landing of a semi-material life form. Whether there are other spots like this in the world remains to be seen, and an investigation into possible similarities between Aztec mythology concerning the snake-god Quetzalcoatl and similar deities in other cultures may be the only way to proceed. One must wonder though: are there other creatures like the one that drove Brent Holcroft to murder his family yet lying dormant, waiting to rise again?