FATHER JAMES NICCODEMUS ALCOTT,

     GOD'S MAD CLOWN

     While it is true that Father Alcott has been featured prominently in several stories published in our magazine, not every story circulated by the flamboyant priest's publicity machine maybe authentic. Yes, he did assist in the cleansing of vampiric entities from Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery (see: Johnson County Vampires, July, 1996, vol.3 Issue #7), and yes, there are documented accounts of exorcisms (see: The Devil Went down To Hopkins Grove, December, 1996, vol.3 Issue #12), but what do we really know about him? Uncovering the facts was more difficult than it ought to have been.

     He was born in Stuebenville, OH, in 1948. He had an uneventful childhood, and was raised in a Catholic home by strict parents. In his teens, he met a young Methodist woman named Alyssin Johnston, whose resemblance to Lillian Gish coupled with a promiscuity rivaling Mae West left Alcott devastated in a tidal wave of hormone-driven desire.

     Alyssin invited young Alcott to attend a Methodist Youth Fellowship retreat with her one weekend. Against his parents' wishes, he accompanied her and the other teenagers. After the cookout and ghost stories, Alyssin confided in Alcott that she believed herself to be a UFO abductee. She told him about being taken to the "mothership" and examined by the "Greys", who manipulated her sexually. She described in detail how the little men had probed her every orifice, leaving marks on her breasts and buttocks which she could not explain.

     Alcott, sweat dripping from his upper lip, asked to see the marks in the "interest of getting to the bottom of this." Her tale had aroused him, and the strange triangular welts on her bottom inflamed his rage. In the emotional confusion, something snapped in the poor boy. He broke with the Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian.

     Alcott would not let go of Alyssin's UFO story. He constantly prodded her for more details. He learned that her abductions began shortly after her widowed mother started dating a dark and mysterious man. Alcott contends that man was Hans Abbadon, editor in chief of Third Eye Over Iowa. This irrational claim is made despite the publicly verifiable fact that Mr. Abbadon is no older than 43. Any middle-aged consort of Widow Johnston in the mid 1960's would be over 75 years old today. Alcott "explains" this anomaly in his rant by stating "He (Abbadon) is a person who has been alive for literally thousands of years".

     Alyssin soon found Alcott's obsession with her uncomfortable as he made unwelcome and intrusive efforts to protect her from UFOs and their occupants. This ultimately led to his arrest for violation of a restraining order. A copy of the Stuebenville Gazette from 1964 recounts his declaration in court:

     "I have only acted as God has directed me," stated the 16 year old. "Since Kenneth Arnold first saw those flying discs in 1947, we have been at war. Not with aliens from Mars, as some would have you believe, but with demons. These space ships are under the command of an ancient evil; a stranger to Ohio who has come to steal our women and corrupt our girls. He beguiles them with hypnotic trances and lures them to his secret rape factories! The flying saucers are following me, trying to destroy me for what I know. Citizens of Stuebenville, you must awaken to the peril seeking to engulf you!!"

     This was entered as a guilty plea by the presiding judge. James Alcott finished his high school education at the Cleveland Home for Troubled Youth.

     In the wake of the trial, the mysterious stranger left the widow. Unable to cope with the loss, Mrs. Johnston committed suicide that summer. Six months pregnant at the time, Alyssin suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a state mental hospital. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, which was immediately put up for adoption.

     Alyssin claimed the child was divine in origin, although she conceded that it may have been an experiment in alien-human hybridization implanted during one of her abductions. Alcott contends that the child is the spawn of the Mysterious Stranger, and maintains it must die before it is allowed to help bring forth the End of the World. Most people in Stuebenville believed the child was Alcott's. The child is approximately 32 years old today, and the adoption records have been permanently sealed.

     When Alcott was released at age 18, he felt so "surrounded by evil" that he returned to the church. He was ordained as a minister on April 30th, 1975 at the age of 27. In addition to his becoming a minister, he served as a chaplain for the International Ministerial Alliance of Greater Cleveland and as president of the area Cap Agency Council No.7.

     In spite of all the religious education and medical supervision provided by the state during his incarceration, Alcott could not escape the mysterious beings he thought were haunting his life. He was fired from his post at a Cleveland church because his interest in magic and the occult, as well as his theories on the demonic origin of UFOs violated church teachings.

     During his tenure as assistant pastor, he reportedly led a Sunday School class in a ritual to identify "power animals" which would protect the children from devils. He also requested the church lead field trips for its adolescent members to the local mortuary where sex education classes could be conducted with cadavers as visual aids. "The corpses," Alcott is reported to have said, "would destroy the evil fascination these teens have with matters of the body, and would reinforce the lesson of mortality, thereby engendering thoughts which rise above fleshy delights."

     The final straw for the church came in 1978, when Alcott held a Halloween vigil in the bell tower. The following day he claimed dozens of angels, devils, and UFOs had swarmed overhead. In a letter responding to his dismissal, Alcott told church elders that they were unwittingly leading their congregation to the gates of Hell. He went on to say that "...because devils continue to harass me in the form of police officers, I must flee. I do this not as a cowardly act, but as a brave and necessary step. I am called to marshal the forces which will oppose those dark powers so thoroughly overrunning Cleveland."

     Alcott has spent approximately 33 years running from UFOs, demonic entities, and alien monsters. He came to Hopkins Grove 10 years ago and began exploiting the area residents, whose long tradition of superstition made them his ideal shield from any intrusion of reality. His church-lady press corps sit in the air-conditioned basement at All Saints knitting doilies containing protective sigils, sipping "medicinal juleps", and spinning wild yarns about their handsome priest who battles the Devil. These geriatric goody-goodies mimeograph slanderous attacks on our magazine and its readership. They distribute these scandal rags through church programs, community bulletins, and the menus at their ice cream socials. They have white elephant sales where fabricated occult artifacts, supposedly liberated from servants of the Devil and rendered powerless through prayer, are sold to gawking tourists as legitimate relics! This sort of fairytale marketing bonanza has raised vast sums of tax exempt money for their media campaign of hatred and fear disguised as "nonprofit work in the public interest."

     It would be unseemly of me to attack another's faith, or to respond in kind to the attacks this little cult makes against me personally, our publication, and its readership. I would advise them, however, that there are a lot of people even less stable than they are. And that one of these may well visit upon them the kind of action they advocate taking against us.