SAMUEL HAWLEY

My childhood home in Yonhui-dong, Seoul, South Korea was at the base of a hill we called Saddleback Mountain. Its actual name is An-san but we didn’t call it that. To the foreigners living around Yonsei University back the 1960s and early ‘70s, it was Saddleback Mountain on account of the distinct saddle-shape of its summit ridge.

This summit ridge was clearly visible because Saddleback, like most mountains around Korean towns and cities back then, was almost completely denuded of trees. The country was desperately poor and people needed firewood. Also visible due to the barrenness of the hillside were little depressions here and there, about halfway up. These were the remains of Korean War foxholes.

I sometimes tagged along with my older brother Jim and his friends to poke around in those foxholes. We found all sorts of things in them: cartridges, the rusted base of a mortar, a belt buckle, buttons, and bones (which I recall carting home to the displeasure of my mother). It was only decades later, when I returned to Korea to work as an instructor at Yonsei, that I learned that this area around Saddleback and descending into Yonhui-dong had been the main line of North Korean defense against US and South Korean forces as they pushed inland to recapture Seoul following MacArthur’s Incheon landing. The remains in those foxholes therefore had likely been North Korean.

Saddleback was once again the scene of military action—Cold War action this time, briefly turned hot—in January 1968. In that month North Korean leader Kim Il-sung dispatched a 31-man commando squad across the DMZ with orders to “cut off the head of [South Korean President] Park Chung-hee.” The commandos, sticking mainly to the mountains as they worked their way south, made it to within 800 meters of Park’s presidential palace, Chongwadae (the Blue House), before being discovered. In the days that followed, the mountains north of Chongwadae, particularly Inwang-san immediately behind, An-san (Saddleback) to the west and Pukan-san further north, were alive with South Korea troops and police searching for the infiltrators. They hunted down and killed 29 of them and captured one. Only one remained unaccounted for. He may have gotten away.

Evidence of Korea’s violent past in the area around Saddleback is entirely gone now. The hillside, churned up by cannon and mortar fire in the early 1950s and still pockmarked with foxholes in the late ‘60s, is now covered with trees, the saddle-shape of the summit ridge entirely hidden. The depressions of foxholes have completely eroded away, the war remnants they contained long ago scavenged. On Yonsei University campus, a smouldering ruin in 1950 littered with the bodies of 150 dead North Koreans, everything looks new now, prosperous and well-tended. If you look closely, however, at the Horace Underwood statue in front of Underwood Hall, you can still see the marks of machine gun fire on the base. Sixty years after earth-shattering events—less than one lifetime—and this is all that remains.

I've been reading up on Thomas Edison as part of some research for a book proposal. Here are a few interesting things that he said:

Here’s a shot of the Abrams Brothers of Kingston, Ontario, performing on August 21, 2011 at Snow Road Station north of Highway 7. That's James on the fiddle (he's just out of high school; starting Queen's U. in Sept.), his older brother John on the guitar (starting 2nd year at Queen's, majoring in English and film studies), and cousin Eli at the right on bass. These guys are young but they've been performing for a decade and it shows: They're great.. If you don't know about them yet,  stop by their website here and check out their cover of Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" on Youtube. Note: Their live performances of this song are even better now, two years later--better than Coldplay's original,  in my opinion. The energy they bring to it will blow you away. They have a bunch of original songs too on their new album, Northern Redemption. I particularly like "While You Sleep," written by Chris Brown of Wolfe Island, who also produced Northern Redemption.

Here is a link to a series of photos in The Atlantic magazine that were taken earlier this year by AP photographer David Guttenfelder. There is  nothing in the way of poverty in them--almost everything Guttenfelder was allowed to photograph appears to have been orchestrated by his NORK handlers. The images nevertheless have a otherworldly strangeness about them and are definitely worth viewing.

During a trip to Ubud on the island of Bali, I made several visits to the “Monkey Forest” at the south end of town to watch the Balinese macaques. They are a delightfully rambunctious group, grabbing visitor’s bags and water bottles, chasing one another about, diving into a little pond and sneaking up on each other underwater.

On my second visit to the Monkey Forest I wandered away from the central area where most people congregate and stumbled on a somewhat more subdued troop of macaques that particularly caught my interest. A number of them were fooling around with stones they had gathered, clutching them in their arms, scraping them back and forth on the concrete walkway and tapping them against each other. It was curious behavior that I have since learned has been identified as “stone play” by researchers studying macaques in Japan—the same macaques that have learned from one another to wash their food and soak in hot springs in winter.

Among this group of Ubud macaques, however, was one young fellow whose behavior seemed to be more than just play. He sat on the ground by himself, holding one stone in his foot while he tapped it repeatedly with another. Positioned on the lower stone, directly beside the point on it he where was striking, was a bit of dry grass which he held in place with his foot. I don’t know much about wilderness survival skills, but it looked exactly like he was trying to start a fire by striking two stones together to send sparks into tinder. He kept this up for several minutes, stopping occasionally to reposition the grass. Then he carried his two stones to a new spot, picked up a bit of dried leaf, positioned it on his lower stone in exactly the same manner and began to tap again.

This monkey tapped without let-up for the entire thirty minutes that I watched him from no more than three feet away, and was always careful to hold some dried grass or leaf beside the impact point between his two stones. If this behavior catches on—and another young monkey nearby was doing the same thing, but more clumsily and without any tinder—someday an Ubud macaque may just figure out how to make fire!

In the summer of 2007 my wife and I spent a memorable vacation in Vietnam that included a week on Phu Quoc island in the South China Sea. Now, we’ve traveled in Asia quite a bit and have had the pleasure of meeting a variety of interesting people, locals and expats alike. Awaiting us on Phu Quoc, however, was someone very special indeed.

The scene was set at our hotel, the Tropicana Resort, at the end of a perpetually flooded lane that one negotiated by wading. Then there was the Gop Gio Restaurant down the road, serving “grilled kangaroo,” “deep fried sea horse,” “drilled vegetable,” and “boiled stomach slowly.”

All this faded into the background, however, the morning when an elderly Australian of French extraction wandered into the Tropicana’s restaurant from his place down the beach. He was married to a Vietnamese woman and lived on Phu Quoc, and frequented the Tropicana in search of chess partners. In the course of several wide-ranging conversations I learned that he had taken up residence on Phu Quoc some years previously to escape the hounding of fans of a book he had written about some sort of prophecy. I assumed he was spinning a tale, and so didn’t press him for more information. At our final meeting, however, he made a point of writing down his name, “Michel Desmarquet,” on a scrap of paper, followed by the enigmatic word “Thiaoouba.” “Look it up on the internet,” he said. “But don’t tell anyone I’m here!”

My wife and I left Phu Quoc wondering about Michel. He was likeable, not a blow-hard, and we wanted to believe him. But surely his claim of being a popular author in hiding was too good to be true. Upon returning to Seoul and Googling his name and “Thiaoouba,” however, we discovered that what he said was not just true, but only the beginning of a truly fantastic tale.

On June 26, 1987, Michel was taken by aliens from his home in Australia to their luminous world of Thiaoouba, a category nine planet, the most superior category of civilization in our galaxy. During his nine-day visit the Thiaooubans, led by an individual named Thao, instructed Michel on all manner of subjects: how the Earth was populated 1.35 million years ago by beings from the planet Bakaratini; how the pyramids are actually devices for communicating with the cosmos; how other planets have destroyed themselves by technology run amuck; how the theory of evolution is wrong; and many other things.

Following the instructions of the Thiaooubans, Michel began writing a book about his experiences upon being returned to the Earth. It was published six years later as Abduction to the Ninth Planet, later reissued under the title Thiaoouba Prophecy. It is a premier alien abduction account salted with a compelling amount of specific detail. The length of a Thiaoouban year, we learn, is 333 days, divided in 26 periods known as karses; Michel’s weight on Thiaoouba was 47 kg. as opposed to 70 kg. on Earth; Thiaooubans wear clothes that match the color of their auras; they subsist on a drink called hydromel, a half glass every two days; they use toilets that vaporize waste as it exits the body, a device that Michel feared would zap his privates.

Abduction, however, is more than just an extra-terrestrial travelogue. It is a guide for the journey that, as Michel describes it, lays ahead for us humans, from our current lowly category one civilization, the “category of sorrow,” to a paradisiacal category nine world such as enjoyed by the Thiaooubans. It is a journey toward enlightenment that the Thiaooubans, through Michel, want to teach us how to take. Indeed, they have been trying to teach us for thousands of years: according to Michel, Jesus was a Thiaoouban—who incidentally lies buried today in Aomori, Japan.

The rest, as they say, is history. Abduction to the Ninth Planet became an international bestseller, translated into Spanish, Greek, Japanese, German, Russian, and several other languages. Thiaoouba grew into something of a New Age religion. Fans began clamoring for more information—and Michel began to feel the pressures of fame. Finally, in the late 1990s, he turned his back on everything, rejecting the material gain that his book, which condemns materialism, had ironically brought him. He turned over everything to a proxy and retired to Phu Quoc, where he remains to this day.

So why am I spilling the beans on Michel’s whereabouts after he told me not to reveal his location? Well, that was the one thing Michel may not have been entirely truthful about. I recently discovered on the internet a three-part interview he has done for Japanese TV, the cameras overlooking that same beach where I met him last summer. Michel, it seems, had been sending out feelers on that scrap of paper he gave me. The creator of the Thiaoouba Prophecy is ready to be found.