1/2/98
    It happened on the morning of the above date.  A New Year's Eve party at my friend "A"'s apartment had continued through to the following evening.   The three of us that were left indulged in an LSD trip the night of 1/1/98.  We all reported medium-intensity effects from the dosage we took (unrecorded).
    A prevailing topic of conversation  that evening was the possibility of alien life.  I amused myself and my two friends by describing Zecharia Sitchin's -_Twelfth Planet_, a book which claimed that we are the genetic hybrids of a superior alien race and primates.  Sitchin interpreted Egyptian hieroglyphics to construct a scenario in which these aliens crossed their own genes with primate genes to create a slave race (humankind) to mine precious ores in the earth for their own purposes.  I had read the book with some skepticism, and mainly brought the idea out as a party favor.  It seemed a fascinating possibility in accounting for "the missing link" in human evolution.  We all laughed about it.  Eventually the drug wore off, and we went to bed.
    The next morning I went into town (Durham, New Hampshire) with my friend A, and we stood on the sidewalk by Main Street waiting for our third friend.  A and I discussed the alien theory some more.  She had been enthralled by the scenario I described from Sitchin book.  We were laughing about the possibility of it, and about alien paranoia in general, when A said something very close to the following words:
    "Now I'm waiting for the Men in Black to show up!"
    At that moment, with not a second in between, a man pulled up in what I recall to be a station wagon.  He parked at the curb right in front of us and got out.  Don't worry; he wasn't wearing black!  His manner of dress does not survive in my memory- only in that it wasn't odd enough to notice.  But this man approached A and I quickly, and very purposefully, with a magazine in his hand.  He was quite intense, anxious it seemed, and we recall that he was limping.  He handed us this magazine (shown above) and said something to the effect of:
    "Take this to the astronomy department at UNH.  Make sure you do it."  Both A and I recall that he took the time to stare each of us in the eye, making us promise.  We told him we would deliver it, and he got back into the wagon (?) and drove off.  As we watched him pull away, I noticed a couple of children in the backseat somewhere between the ages of five and ten.  They looked like a normal family: the father and his kids out to run errands.
    That was the end of the episode.  Dumbfounded, A and I looked through the magazine and found the below article inside, among several others that seemed even more like "pulp fiction."  The contents of the article echoed Sitchin's book, but lacked his depth of detail and really aren't worth reproducing.
 

 BEST SHOT AT ANALYZING THIS EXPERIENCE

    I point out that particular article from _UFOs 67_ because it coincidentally mirrored the conversation we were having at the moment we were handed the magazine.  Jungians call this sort of coincidence a "synchronicity," implying that enough evidence exists to suggest some larger meaning in the crossing of events.
Certainly there was no way the man in the station wagon could have known what we had been talking about, nor timed his arrival with A's exclamation about the "Men in Black" coming.
   Synchronicites are always experiential events, as a human or group of humans must experience them.  Therefore they are often reported to carry detail personal to the experiencer.  In my case, this event was rendered more "synchronous" by the nature of the magazine itself.
    Take a look at the above graphic (the cover of the magazine).  Have you ever seen a more ridiculous and untrustworthy publication in your life?  Not to mention its currency: 1967.  I suspect that this magazine was chosen as a prop for me, rather than as a fact-perfect document telling us the "truth" about our origin.  In my life, I have been an avid 1960s enthusiast.  I have done more reading about the 1967 "Summer of Love" than about almost any other topic.  This fascination lead me to LSD and a collector's appreciation of psychedelic art, especially that which was in vogue in its heyday.  The cover of this magazine, with red and blue pop-psychedelic swirls and the declaration of year ("'67"), was a curiosity seemingly designed to grab my attention.  I hadn't taken an LSD trip for months and months before the one I had just come off of.
    I felt I had been tipped off to either the truth of Sitchin's claims about the "slave race," or to the existence of alien life at the least.  Where were the flying saucers that readers of _UFOs '67_ wanted to hear about?  Why didn't they abduct me, like they supposedly had others?  Why was I only left with a hunch and a cheesy magazine?  The astronomy department at UNH would laugh at me if I brought this to them, especially after mentioning the LSD!
    But an element of my hunch is that the LSD was an integral component of the experience, not because I had "imagined it all."  I had A to tell me that wasn't so.
    There has been a lot of talk circulating around the internet lately- people recounting their own experiences with possible alien contact.  And more and more often, psychedelic drugs (not just LSD, but psilociben, DMT, and others) have been mentioned in relation to alien encounter.  The going theory is that aliens aren't beaming their messages from outer space down to our radio telescopes.  They're beaming them "up" from inner space, into our conscious awareness.  And in some unknown fashion, they are coordinating actual physical events (like our receiving the magazine) to stimulate this awareness.
    What role do psychedelics play?  This requires some discussion of what they do to the brain.  One popular theory is that they tear the "walls" in consciousness which separate the "useless" signals of sense information from the "useful," burying the useless in the subconscious.  Therefore the subconscious emerges under the influence of these drugs.  The signals become unfiltered and we are able to "hear" even those which will not aid in our survival (because those signals have been genetically selected against in evolution, as people have isolated the "insane" from the "sane.")
    Sanity is another main issue in this discussion.  If indeed aliens (any entity of an origin foreign to us, very likely from another "dimension") are making themselves known through our very consciousnesses, then those who detect the communication will instantly be labeled insane.  There's nothing worse than to spout off about the "aliens" with absolutely no physical evidence.  But if the aliens are from another dimension, the lion's share of the evidence is bound to be non-physical.  And those most likely to recieve these signals are psychotics..
    Or the temporarily psychotic.  Psychedelic drugs, before they were given that name by Aldous Huxley, were termed "psychotomimetics" (able to mimic psychotic states) by psychologists.  Therefore, under the influence of LSD or the like, experimenters become temporarily "crazy" enough to access signals normally interred in the subconscious as "useless."  But the expansion of consciousness may eventually allow us to understand and incorporate information from other dimensions into our entire picture of physical existence, which seems to be increasingly affected by activity "elsewhere."
    This is my best explanation of LSD's role in the synchronicity we experienced.  It allowed us to "see" how other-dimensional (alien) activity was influencing events on our physical plane.

    Just how and why this magazine ever came into our hands at the most poignant of moments will forever be a source of mystery, and a spur to inquisition, for me.