Report on the Incident at Lo-oc

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One ……………....Revelations

Chapter Two ……………...Rehabilitation

Chapter Three ....………….Recruits

Chapter Four ……………...Rapture

Chapter Five ………….......Resignation

Chapter Six ....…………….Resolution

About Gregory Truman

Preface

I am a retired commercial pilot, not a writer. I was compelled to write this report under the circumstances described in the text. Along with recounting these events, I have tried to include relevant conversations and my own thoughts and feelings as they occurred, to the best of my recollection. This report is not a novel or a travelogue and it was not intended to be read by human beings. But what the heck, I decided to publish it.

Chapter One

Revelations

We would usually meet between 10 and 11am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It was something to do that provided us with a schedule during a long sequence of days that had little other punctuation.

We are three retired foreigners, self-exiled into a small town in the Philippines. We each have our reasons, but they are not part of this report. I’m Canadian, Carl is from the U.S. and Blake is a returning son of the Philippines whose father was German. This country has many western tourists and residents. But no tourists come around here. We live far off the beaten path in the little harbor town of Dapitan on the northwestern coast of Mindanao Island. Not that many people live around here. There are only a few foreign residents like us.

I would meet my friends at our favorite eatery, a four table café that spilled out onto a busy sidewalk in our little town. This was our hangout as we idled away our retirement years, a few hours at a time, on three days a week. We drank coffee and talked, sometimes we argued. With the internet, there were always plenty of topics to discuss. During lulls in the conversation, we could watch the humanity passing by.

There was never much talk about our past. That was all water under the bridge over a dried up river of time on the other side of the world. We had moved on from those times. I know Blake used to be some kind of corporate attorney and Carl was an entrepreneur with some failed ventures but others that were successful. I had been a glorified bus driver.

We have enjoyed this social pastime spent at the eatery for the past few years. We are content to watch the world go by from the sidelines. We have become good friends. I think we agree on most things that are important to us, and fortunately our disagreements have stimulated the conversations.

But I have long been frustrated by an ongoing disagreement I have had with Carl that I wouldn’t even mention except that it is relevant to this report. In fact he is the root cause of all that follows here that I am trying to document. I’m not going to blame him for everything, he being who he is, one thing just led to another.

In the same way that I like to think of myself, Carl considers himself to be a rational person, not taken in by extremist dogmas or superstition, and not too far out with conspiracy theories. But he does have extreme opinions about one thing. Carl believes in unidentified flying objects. He thinks they are real spaceships from another planet, even though we both know there is no evidence to support that conclusion. He has explained to me many times that it has nothing to do with belief, because he knows they are real. He claims to have seen two of them at different times in his life.

I was a commercial pilot before my retirement, with 25,000 hours of flying time, and I never saw anything I could not identify or explain. I should have seen at least one of them during all that time in the air, if they were real. I questioned their very existence. I know that people often see what they want to see and are easily fooled. But I didn’t know much about the UFO phenomena and I didn’t really care about it either. I told him early on that they had been a mystery for many years and whatever we thought about them would only be conjecture. It was a boring subject; we would never know the truth about them so it wasn’t even worth talking about.

The three of us know about the light speed limit and the distances between the stars. We knew of the improbability that any aliens, advanced enough to get here, would be expecting to learn anything worthwhile from primitives like us. But Carl told us what he saw during those two instances, ten years apart, profoundly affected his perspective on almost everything. He liked to ruminate out loud about the possibilities. There were a lot of what ifs and could bees that would only lead to pointless discussions. I had no interest in those kinds of conversations. One time, he said to think about all the things they could teach us. I told him that we don’t try to talk with ants and no aliens would want to talk with us either, trying to shut down that particular conversation. But Carl would go on and on with his speculating sometimes, and it bothered me. Our arguments amused Blake. He wouldn’t take sides. Carl would eventually fall back on the only facts he had. He says he knows what he saw with his own two eyes. And he told me there are hundreds of reports of UFO sightings every year, and gave me some internet sites to look at. I checked out a couple of them. After viewing a few videos of blurry lights in the sky and some obviously photo shopped videos, and reading some unbelievable eyewitness accounts, I remained skeptical of the whole subject. We finally learned to avoid the topic in our conversations to maintain our equanimity.

But one morning Carl broke that unspoken agreement. Looking back, I can see that was the moment to mark the beginning of this story I must tell.

I arrived to find them sitting at our favorite table. They were smiling at me while I ordered a round of coffee. Carl had a squinty look in his eyes. I was mildly curious; they seemed excited to tell me something.

Well, what is it then?

Carl began to quietly sing a few words from a tune I recognized, Hey Mister Space Man by the Byrd’s, from the sixties or seventies. Oh no I thought, not UFO’s again.

You want to tell him Blake?

Go ahead, it’s your baby.

Don’t tell me this has something to do with Mr. Spaceman Carl. We have exhausted that topic. He cocked his head and laughed.

Not quite.

He told me that Blake had been visited by a friend, a barangay captain, who told him there was a mambabarang, (a person who casts spells) living out in the forest near Lo-oc. He was a dwarf and he could put people to sleep when they came across him out there. He could put several people to sleep at the same time, and they would wake up thinking they had just fallen down and stood right back up again. But one guy’s watch had shown them that more than an hour had passed. The dwarf was gone by the time they woke up.

Oh boy, here we go. I wasn’t ready for another conversation about aliens.

Just listen to the story Greg. You can criticize later.

After a few people complained about this to the barangay captain, he sent his son out with some of the villagers to tell the mambabarang to stop putting people to sleep like that. Of course they all fell down asleep before they could tell him anything. He stopped talking and smiled at me questioningly. He must have thought he had found something significant. I was afraid he was going to tell me all about it. Here we go again I thought.

This isn’t the end of the story is it? I mean if this is true. You know the people here believe all sorts of nonsense about witches and spooks in the forest. Carl leaned across the table and spoke to me conspiratorially.

Okay Greg, this is the end of the story and the best part. No one has ever talked to this mambabarang, and no family is missing a dwarf. But many people have seen him and he has a big head with no ears, and big black eyes.

I couldn’t help but laugh. These people who believe in UFO’s usually believe in aliens too. Carl certainly did.

You’re telling me it’s a grey aren’t you?

He’s not gray, he has brown skin said Blake.

It’s a brown grey then, right.

Well what do you think it is Greg? Carl was exasperated that I could not see what seemed so obvious to him. But in the way that I viewed our world, which didn’t include an alien Mr. Spaceman; I had to guess there was a schizophrenic dwarf living in the forest with a big head and small ears. And I told him so.

He’s a schizophrenic?

If he lives out in the woods with no family around, he probably has mental problems

And causing people to fall to the ground asleep? I said I could not explain that, if it was true, but I doubted that it was.

Okay, I’m going out there to take a look at him and I want you to come with me Greg. I smiled and said I expected a full report when he got back. I tried to change the subject. Blake laughed and said the two of them had already worked out a plan and I was part of it. He was conveniently excluded.

You know, I can’t walk that far with my bad hip.

I told them I had no interest in searching for that dwarf. But Carl said he had a strong feeling about this story and insisted it was important to find out what we could. I laughed at that too. We all knew that Carl thought he had found an alien in the forest.

He would need back-up he said. He wanted to get video of the dwarf on his smart phone, that’s all. I would lag behind and follow five minutes later to watch over him until he woke up, just in case this mambabarang could actually put him to sleep. Blake laughed at what must have been the expression on my face.

I told Carl that I knew he didn’t believe a mambabarang had the power to do that, any more than I did, and that I knew he thought the dwarf was an alien, marooned here I suspected. Carl wanted to know how else I could explain it then. These reports were documented at the barangay captain’s office.

Look Greg, when was the last time we had a mystery like this fall into our laps? And we can solve it by simply going out there and checking it out ourselves. We can take a tricycle most of the way there, and then it’s just a short walk in the weeds to the creek where the little guy hangs out. We’ll be back in a couple of hours. A short hike will be good for both of us. You got a lot on your calendar for tomorrow? Put on your boots and bring water.

Well, I didn’t have anything on my calendar for the next day. I don’t write anything on a calendar. Each day is much like the day before, unless I can think of something to do.

Okay I’ll go then. It’s something to do.

The next morning we met at the eatery at our regular time. We each have Filipina wives, (although Blake's wife died about a year ago) and any variation in our normal behavior arouses suspicion. Before I left home my wife asked me why I was putting my hiking boots in the truck. I told her we were going to look at a piece of property in Lo-oc. A white lie was far easier than telling her the truth.

Blake and I climbed into a tricycle and Carl rode his motorbike. We headed down the road to pick up the barangay captain’s son. It was a tight fit in the tricycle; Blake is a big guy. I didn’t know he was coming with us. He said he wouldn’t miss it; that he was almost as excited about it as Carl was, and that Carl really thought the dwarf was an extraterrestrial alien. I asked him why an alien would be living in a Philippine jungle. He told me he was keeping an open mind about it until we knew more, and would it be less strange if an alien was living in New York City? Sometimes Blake just likes to play with my mind.

After a couple of kilometers on the coast road, we had left our little town far behind. Infrequently we passed a nipa-hut home huddled close to the road. On our left were beautiful pristine beaches studded with coconut palms. A few overturned dugout canoes were visible, pulled up on the sand. We came to a junction with a road headed towards the mountains and there was the barangay of Lo-oc; a couple of sari-sari stores, an eatery, a bakery and a pool hall were clustered on one corner. There were a few other structures scattered down that road, which was unpaved after about 10 meters. Maybe 50 people lived around there.

Blake asked for directions to the captain’s house in the Visayan language, and we found it down a short barangay road. The captain wasn’t there, for plausible deniability reasons said Blake, but his son was ready to go. The boy wanted to bring a gun, but Carl was adamant; a gun would not be necessary.

With the boy on the back of Carl’s bike, we followed the junction road about another kilometer and by then the road was very bad. It was a bumpy ride in the tricycle with the driver complaining about damage to his vehicle, until Blake told him we would pay another