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New York City was scheduled to slide into the ocean on July 2. The contactees did not broadcast these dire predictions, yet the rumors snowballed. By mid-June nearly all of the hardware stores in the flap areas had sold out their supplies of candles and flashlights. Late that May, the UFO entities had also declared that Pope Paul would visit Turkey in the coming months and would be bloodily assassinated and that this would precipitate the blackout and the disasters. Weeks later the Vatican sud- denly announced that the Pope was, indeed, planning to visit Turkey in July. Panic prevailed in the secret contactee circles. I was astonished when I discovered that these same rumors were also sweeping New York’s hippie community. People began phoning me late in June to ask me where I was going on July 2. I was not going anywhere. I refused to join the exodus, and Manhattan did not sink into the sea. Other predictions received that month began to come true right on the nose, however. There were predicted plane crashes; a jet airliner collided with a private plane over Henderson, North Carolina, killing, among others, J. T. McNaughton who had just been appointed U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and the next day, July 20, an identical accident occurred in Brazil, killing some leading Brazilian politicos. I started to get nervous. What astonished me most was that these predictions were coming in from a wide variety of sources. Trance mediums and automatic writers in touch with the spirit world were coming up with the same things as the UFO contactees. Often the prophecies were phrased identically in differ- ent sections of the country. Even when they failed to come off, we still could not overlook this peculiar set of correlative factors. So convincing were these demonstrations that I finally packed up my equipment, rented a car, and drove out to the flap area near Melville, Long Island, to await the assassination and the blackout. Just before I left Manhattan, I stopped in a local delicatessen and bought three quarts of distilled water. I figured that a three-day power failure would certainly be accompanied by a water shortage. On my way out to Long Island I stopped in on a silent contactee, and he told me he had received a brief visit from a UFO entity a short time before. This entity had mentioned me, he said, and had given him a message to relay to me. The message didn’t make sense to the contactee. It was, ‘‘Tell John we’ll meet with him and help him drink all that water.”” (The water was in the trunk of the car, and the contactee had no way of knowing I had it.) The Pope was not assassinated that weekend, happily, but I saw Breakthrough! / 245