An interview with Morris about his 1963 meeting with Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert, and his subsequent journey with and observations of L/L Research.

I am here today with Trisha Bean in the house of Morris and Linda Hoagland in southern Louisiana. They’ve been gracious to host us for the weekend on a southwest road trip that Trish and I are presently undertaking. And even more graciously, Morris has allowed me to grill him with questions. Why would I want to ask Morris questions? That is because he holds a unique piece of L/L Research’s story and history. You’ll see what I’m talking about pretty soon.

This evolved out… if you remember, Morris, you were living at Jim’s for a couple of months in 2019?

That’s right; I had some business to wrap up in Louisville.

While you were there in September–October, we had our friends up from the Asheville Law of One Study Group at Trisha’s and my place for a weekend. You came over and I started asking you questions about your relationship with Don Elkins. I was just enthralled. From then on, the evening was magic with conversation as you were very gracious in sharing with me and us your firsthand experience. I lamented then that I didn’t record it. Ever since, I have wanted to get you on tape. In fact, I wish I would have done so when I created the Tilting at Windmills interviews.1

Yeah, but they were the target, for sure, then. I’m just an outlier.

Morris is a very modest person. Though he is right, of course, that Don and Carla and Jim are the reason we’re all gathered, but Morris has been along for and contributed in support of that journey. So, we will get underway. And because I’m an ordered/planning person, I like chronology; and I will start not at your birth, but…

The beginning.

Meeting Don and Carla

…at that first moment when you met Don Elkins. In what year did you meet Don Elkins (and Carla, if she was there)? How old were you and where was this?

Okay, I will give you a bit of a story that ties all that together, and you will be getting a separate document that has a lot of this information. It was in 1963 that we had had a UFO encounter. I don’t know that I want to go into all the UFO encounter here because that’s in a separate document. But we had a UFO encounter where we see a UFO—it actually lands. And we see an entity from within the UFO, which is a pretty big deal. We run to tell my mother about it. We’re all excited. And it’s kind of an interesting, obtuse story, but that’ll be in a separate document without spending 20 minutes going into that.

We go tell her about this amazing thing we’ve seen. What does she do with this? Who does she call? I mean, you don’t call the police, there’s not a crime going on. She actually called the Kentucky Air National Guard station that was at Standiford Field to tell them what had happened… They respond, “Okay, lady. We’ll check into it.”

Then her next call was to the University of Louisville. Why would she be calling the University of Louisville? Maybe the academics are interested? Well, that call happened to go to the Speed Scientific School Dean’s Office instead of scores of other offices that call might have been routed to. The receptionist picks up the call, and here’s this woman talking about some UFO landing in Fern Creek. It’s the University of Louisville. What’s the connection?

About that time, as [the receptionist] has hung up the phone, she’s taken this information politely, Don Elkins walks into the Dean’s Office. This receptionist knew that Don Elkins was one of those weirder young professors who was kind of into this UFO thing. And she said, “Hey, Don, I just got this strange call from Fern Creek. They saw a flying saucer.” So that’s how it kicked off on that day. What are the odds of all of that coming together?

We’re not going to relegate that merely to a separate document. I do want to dig further into that, especially the metaphysics of it, a little bit later on. So, this is what year?

1963

And you’re how old?

Eight years old.

And you said, “We told my mom.” Who’s “we”?

Okay, there are four of us out in a field that all the timber and topsoil had been cleared out from behind our home. It used to be forest, and someone sold off all the trees and all the topsoil. So, it’s just a barren field. And we’re out there playing in the dirt when a cigar-shaped flying saucer appears overhead.

The “we” is…

The “we” is my brother (who is seven years old), a next-door neighbor, Eric (who is seven), and Keith (who is also about seven years old). So, there are four kids who are too young to have any credibility. But we know what we saw.

So, you tell your mom. Your mom calls, first, the Kentucky Air National Guard, and also receives a prompt to call UofL, which we’ll go into that momentarily.

Just a little bit on the setting. Fern Creek, is a suburb of Louisville today. At the time of the sighting, Fern Creek was a “one-stoplight farming town” a dozen miles south of Louisville. So, this is all very local. Standiford Field, it was the Louisville airport, which today is an international airport. It was both a Louisville civilian airport and the National Guard airport, except the National Guard portion was called Shumaker Field and Standiford Field was the name of the civilian portion, but they used the same runways. (Which is now Muhammad Ali Airport.)

We will explore more in depth what you guys saw, what you personally didn’t see (at least at first), and the metaphysics of that, and then the implications that had for your own journey. For the time being, we are at the moment when Don, through a receptionist, learns that there’s been a UFO sighting out in Fern Creek, Kentucky. These kids have seen something, the mom calls it in, and he’s an investigator. So, this is 1963. He began his investigations in ’55.

Correct.

Don is eight years into looking into these things—UFOs and the paranormal, specifically. And this is his backyard. So, Don, shows up.

He calls first and arranges an appointment to come out and visit.

What is your first impression of Don Elkins?

That they seem to be genuinely interested. Being eight years old, you’ve got the story running around the neighborhood, and it’s not so well accepted. “These kids have been watching too much TV” is the general response. You had Don and Carla basically interviewing us separately to see how consistent the stories were. They were two people that were intently interested in what was taking place and not ridiculing us as everybody else outside of the family was pretty much.

That registered with you that here are two respectable adults who were treating me with respect and believing my story; or believing what happened to me.

Yes.

Beyond the respect with which Don and Carla were treating you, did your eight year old mind register anything else about them that sticks out in your memory?

I can’t say it registered at that time, but there were some things that followed up very quickly after that that probably I hadn’t discussed with you, because Don was very interested in what was taking place in a positive way. He had extensive conversation with my mother and two older sisters about the research he was doing and why he was interviewing these kids. He talked about the meditation groups that they had and the meditations that were going on with Hal Price.

So, my mother and two sisters started going to those meditations regularly. In fact, some of the meditations were held at our home, where Hal Price and others would come to our home; and they would have those meditations or channeling sessions. That took place for at least a couple of years… not my parents, my mother. My dad obviously wasn’t going to get involved with this for various reasons. My mother and two older sisters, Beth and Dot participated in the channeling meetings.

Beth and Don and Carla actually developed a bit of a relationship over time [later on]. But for a couple of years, now, they’re going to these meditations, these channeling sessions. I wanted to participate, but because I was 8 years old going on 10 through that period, they considered me too young to participate, so I was not allowed. I thought that was kind of a bummer since, you know, we [were the ones who saw the UFOs] and then all this developed. It didn’t seem fair to hear “No, you can’t participate.”

“How about some credit here?” Yeah.

I remember being kind of annoyed by that, especially when they were meditating or channeling in our home, and I had to be out in the yard. This is going on at night, and I can’t even be in the house while this is going on.

So, your mom, then, immediately respected Don and had a resonance with his work, as well.

Yes.

And Carla, I presume.

My mom was a little bit “crazy” because she was reading things like Urantia and Oahspe and Edgar Cayce and things that just people didn’t deal with at that time.

Had you had any sort of paranormal or UFO experience before this moment?

Absolutely not. No.

So, this is a first for you.

Yeah.

We’ll revisit what you experienced later. I want to move on and ask if you stayed in contact thereafter. It sounds like—and this is news to me—those meditations were held at your house. And that your two sisters and your mom attended meditations at Hal Price’s, you mentioned.2

For several years, yeah. Over that period of time, Beth, is actually spending more time with Don and Carla because they’ve become friends. Don was pretty affectionate toward Beth, to the point that it actually created a little friction with Carla, until Beth recognized that and backed away. Again, being a relatively naive young lady, she wasn’t recognizing what Carla was recognizing. So, that created a little friction at one-point, which Beth felt terrible about once she recognized it.

Carla had a sense that “I’m number one”?

Well, not really. Carla had already been dumped by Jim D. and had been treated terribly.3 She’s now in a relationship with Don. She’s seeing Don, who’s at that time a 30ish something professor and dealing with an attractive young lady who looks up to him, because he’s dealing with all of this… he’s smart, of course, and he’s a nice guy. So, they’re developing what Beth is perceiving as a friendship, that Carla’s perceiving as not looking quite like a friendship, and probably feeling a little insecure because of her history.

This is just a little bit of background that was happening. Beth explained this to me years later when Jim came on the scene, because she was thinking that maybe what was going on with Jim and Carla was probably creating a problem for Don; I don’t think was the case. But she was thinking it was likely the case, because she liked those people a lot. She recognized that three-way relationships tend to be problematic. So, this is just some stuff that we’ve never talked about before.

I appreciate knowing this. So, this is late ’68 that Beth is having this experience.

Yeah, ’66 to ’67, along that time. When Beth went to Lexington to the University of Kentucky, she would be back for summers and participating again in the channeling sessions.

Morris Joins Meditation Group

After all the ridicule being a child and the UFO story, you really kind of get beat down by it; it was almost like a curse rather than a positive for a long time; it was not something you wanted to talk about up until, say, 1974, probably 1973. In 1973, Don is teaching a class at Jefferson Community College. He contacts me about talking to this group about my UFO experience. I just haven’t been dealing with anybody about that.

Of course, I remembered Don—he had been at our home often, and I knew the story behind Don. Don was always very positive. He wants me to come talk to the group. And I’m, you know, I’ve not had anything positive happen in my life out of this sighting. It’s all been sort of like a curse. But I go to deal with this request. I’m talking to his group one evening at Jefferson Community College, and I’m describing this story. It’s feeling okay because people here are truly interested. This is ‘73, so I’m 19 years old. I speak with them, and I’m getting reacquainted with Don. Don reminds me that they’re still having their meditations. After that, he reached out to me and had me come speak with his meditation group. I started going to the weekly meditations and have been involved ever since. So that was end of ’73.

This is filling in holes for me. Thank you so much, Morris. So ’73, ten years after your UFO experience, and Don has invited you to speak to the group. You begin attending meditations thereafter. What was the group like in the 70s from your perspective?

Not so different from the group that we’ve seen over the years. It grows bigger and then shrinks, grows bigger and shrinks as people come through, get what they need, and then they move on. But you always had a core group. At that time, Don lived on… Let’s see, what was the name of the place? This is before he moved out on Watterson Trail. Oh, in The Highlands.

It’s by Twig & Leaf.

Douglass.

Douglass Boulevard, yes. At the time, Don and Carla lived in an apartment on Douglass Boulevard. So, the meditations were held at Hal Price’s typically. We would go to the meditations at Hal’s. The meditations didn’t move to Don’s until they moved to Watterson Trail4 where they had a bigger place to accommodate the number of people wanting to participate.

I remember Jim being around at that time. This had to be ’77-‘78 because I remember that Jim and I moved them from the Douglass Boulevard apartment to the Watterson Trail home. I recall Jim and I taking a refrigerator out of that upstairs apartment, and it is falling on me. [laugh] “Are you okay?” [laugh] [comical fake cough] “I’ll be okay.“ [laugh]

We moved everything out of that upstairs Douglass Boulevard apartment. Don wasn’t even there. He was an Eastern Air Lines pilot flying 727s and was away that week. Carla was there. Of course, she can’t do a whole lot due to her severe arthritis. So, it’s Jim and me moving everything out and into the Watterson Trail place. That was the first time I spent much time with Jim. I mean, he had been on the scene just very recently at that time. He had just shown up. So that was the first time that he and I were spending quality time in the sense that we’re working together to accomplish a goal.

First time in this incarnation, at least.

Yes. A handsome young guy he was, you might recall from some of those pictures. Not that he’s not a handsome guy now, but he’s an old guy now. [laugh] He was a rather dashing young guy then. He and I were both less than 150 pounds. And we’re carrying things out like refrigerators and huge boxes and stuff. But we’re getting it done. [laugh] So this long hair, bearded, hippie-looking Jim version. Not real long hair at this point. He had had long hair, I know, before. But it was a more respectable length in the sense of regular society. It wasn’t the hippie look. But he did have the beard.

Did you have any romantic feelings towards Carla?

I would say I probably… I don’t know if I would use the R-word. I was definitely attracted to Carla. The R-word—romantic—suggests the potential of a relationship maybe developing, and I never had that feeling. I had a strong attraction to Carla. She radiated this energy that was extremely attractive. So, to answer your question, it is an attraction that was quite strong. But I wouldn’t use the R-word because I didn’t know necessarily romance at 24 years old. I was still trying to figure stuff out. But I did recognize a strong attraction to her.

Linda, has he since learned romance?

I have no idea. [inaudible] [laughs]

Yeah, that’s a good question. Thank you for asking it. Regarding Don, he was famously asexual as well. So, the affection that you [had previously] described Beth as receiving, was that just by way of emotion or attention or…

Well, I’m not sure, I couldn’t say that. Beth didn’t pick up initially that there was any… Carla was the one that… because that was where the rub came when Carla’s insecurity came to the surface. Beth, apparently, either through a conversation with Carla or finally, “duh,” it hits her that Carla’s not liking this, the way Beth is relating with Don. And I don’t think Beth ever perceived that Don was hitting on her. And I’m not saying Don was hitting on her, but Carla was feeling like Don was hitting on her, if that makes sense.

That’s not a shot at Carla. She’s a young lady who’s gone through a divorce with Jim D., who treated her like crap. So, there were some dynamics going on that are just human.

Yeah, I think it’s well for anybody to contemplate when they look at other people who they perceive as spiritual, or even spiritual teachers, or people offering spiritual service, that all the chakras are in motion and in action. Humans relating to humans are bound to run into these sorts of situations—especially regarding sexuality, and attraction versus repulsion, attachment and needs and…

And you’ve got the spiritual attraction going on at the same time, which is at a deeper level. I mean, this is back to Linda’s comment. Was it romantic? I wasn’t identifying it as romantic because she’s with Don. It’s not crossing my mind that she could be a potential girlfriend. And again, she is ten years older than me or something. But the attraction is quite strong. So, you’ve got to recognize Beth is in the same clan with those folks,5 and she’s feeling that tug and attraction and wanting to be around them. She’s not trying to hit on Don. She recognizes Don and Carla are together. But she really feels good in their company. You’ve got the superficial stuff that we all consciously recognize, but the unconscious stuff that’s going on that we don’t even recognize.

That’s where a lot of the best comedy and drama comes into play—what Ra would call “catalyst” for sure. So, moving forwards.

You participated then, and I asked, “What was the group like then?” You said it’s very much like it is now, or in the intervening years between then and now? It just waxed and waned in size?

More young people then than now. Now, on average, we tend to have an older seeker. Again, Don had been a professor and was a younger man at the time. The contacts Don and Carla had that might be hearing about this, it tended to be a little bit of a younger group. Initially, it started with students, Don’s students at the engineering school and their friends coming in as they hear about things.

So, the early years, it tended to be a younger group. And that morphed into a more mature group later, as you find that wanderers take a while before that seed of desire to seek something more than what’s happening in my life. That tends to lead to an older group that have had some experience in finding out, “Gee, going to the Catholic Church isn’t cranking my tractor,” or, going to the Baptist Church, “I just don’t see a vengeful God.” It’s these people that, after a while, they’re not getting the spiritual things they look for. They might not even be looking for a spiritual stuff with a meditation group dealing with aliens. But you’re getting a spiritual message there, and you leave that feeling good.

One other thing that I think is an important to add here regarding this early group: the UFO phenomena was really important to Don at this point, and that was kind of important to everybody else. So, they’re asking lots of questions about UFOs and alien-related stuff like “How do you get around?” and “How do things work?” and “Why are you contacting us? Why don’t you just land on the White House lawn?” “Are we going to destroy ourselves?” “Are you going to stop and save us from destroying ourselves?“ It was all of this alien interaction with the earth people stuff—not that different from what you see in the TVs and movies—and it didn’t get into the spiritual stuff, I would say, until several years later. I mean, I noticed the change from when I was there; late ‘73-‘74, it’s all alien stuff. Although the message is coming through, they’re answering it sort of without giving you too much. But that was the focus of everything. Until, as we moved on, Don started evolving and recognizing that we’re getting spiritual information.

It was at least ‘78 before it even became 50% spiritual. It was definitely heavily oriented to the phenomena prior to that. By ‘78, it began to shift more toward recognizing the spiritual value that led to a little bit of a different mix in the group, not quite so young. Now that it’s moving more spiritual, you tend to get older people because the young people are interested in “Let’s learn about UFOs“ aren’t so much into the spiritual stuff, because they’re not seeking yet. That leads up to 1981, when it’s moved more spiritual, and you’ve got this connection between Don, Carla and Jim, which creates a ripe opportunity because we’ve been putting the call out for the Confederation for every meditation. Along the way, we went from Hatton to Latwii to one… I’m missing right now… begins with an “O”…

Oxal?

Yes. And then eventually, Q’uo comes in.

’86.

Yeah, that was later.

That is just personally edifying to me to know this. Really grateful for this interview. So, you tagged ’73-’74 as when you first began to notice the shift.

Oh, that’s when I first got involved. That’s not when the shift happened. When I first got involved in ‘73-‘74, it is about the phenomena. I mean, the focus… it’s not a spiritual pursuit… It is, “When are you guys going to come down?” You know, “What’s taking so long?“ “There’s disruption in the Middle East that could break into another world war. You guys going to stop it?” You know, these kinds of questions to this much more powerful alien race. “Are you guys going to come and bail us out?”

Sometimes when the Confederation would get into the dialogue as “Yes, we’ve sort of answered all we can answer on that,” and then they’re just trying to move the conversation into what’s really important. And [in response], “This is boring. Let’s ask another question about the phenomenon.”

So, it was morphing, I would say, by late ’74 toward ’78 when it began to evolve into recognizing a lot of this stuff is not so important. The real jewels are the stuff they keep coming back to after answering your question that we were ignoring. It was a transition over, I would say, three to four years, that it began to move into more of a spiritual recognition, which changed the nature of the people coming, too.

I love history generally, but I also I love the history of the organization that I have given my life to. What you’re sharing, gives me a lot of contrast from now… from then and now, and it shows how the seeking and the mission evolved. Because the types of questions you’re describing, I can’t imagine us asking them…

Anymore, no.

Maybe a random one here or there. Or somebody attends a meditation, and they ask. You know, we can’t filter that. But us making that a focus? The organization has an institutional memory. It has learned that lesson. It is now our trajectory and mission to focus on spirituality and…

But that wasn’t even on the radar then.

’73 or ’74 is an interesting year, too, because ’74 is when Carla began channeling. And she was the one who innovated what would become the hallmarks of L/L Research channeling: the challenging and the tuning. So, she probably really upped the game, so to speak…

Definitely.

Or upgraded the channeling and made it a more… what’s the word I’m looking for? Raised the vibration of the channeling.

Oh, absolutely.

Made it a more tuned and focused effort, away from the distraction. Do you… since you were around then, the story that I’ve heard about Carla learning to channel was that Don’s original group of engineering students and whoever else joined that, they had graduated, they were moving on to other jobs, other cities, or were just fading away from the group generally. And he ran out of…

Channels.

Channels. So, he told Carla that, “My experiment is dead without you. Would you channel? Would you take this up?” Is that your awareness of what happened?

I wasn’t aware of that particular conversation. Now you had Hal Price who also channeled. And there were some other folks that were associated with Hal Price’s groups that channeled. I don’t recall the names anymore, but I do recall other channels before Carla was channeling.

Was there anything special that drew Carla into doing the channeling?

Don apparently asked her to channel. I mean, she’d been around the group at that point for over a decade and had not channeled. But he asked her to channel, and she did. She just wasn’t feeling drawn to it, apparently.

Upon being given the invitation though, she, wanting to support Don in his effort out of lifelong devotion and love to him, took up the practice. And obviously, in retrospect she was, I would say, born for it.

Oh, yes. Yes.

A natural. And loved, loved it. I mean, the Carla that I met in 2002… it was 16-18 years after Don had passed that she was still continuing to channel because it was… it gave her one of the strongest, most powerful places to express her gift. Which is vocal, which is giving voice and articulation to the Creator, to spiritual principles.

Don’s Experiment

We’ll rewind the clock back a little bit. Late 1961, Don meets Hal Price and learns about the Detroit Group. Flies up to Detroit. Learns their protocols. Transplants those protocols to Louisville to conduct his own experiment.

Do you know anything about that inception moment? The genesis when Don rounds up his engineering students and says, “We’re going to try forming a meditation group.” And meanwhile, he’s trying to get them to channel without telling them to channel?

That’s right. Now I wasn’t involved, of course, at that point. But just the stories that I know. Don described how he was bringing them together and let them know that this is sort of an experiment. He can’t tell them a whole lot about it. But because he was a bit more charismatic, at that age than when you knew him… He was a professor, a young professor in engineering school, where you’ve got a bunch of old stodgy professors. This is a professional who will go out and have a beer with you when classes are over, you know? So, they kind of liked him. He was cool. And he’s suggesting this, and they’ve got some free time.

These are folks, all guys, that hang out… and when I’m saying, “all guys,” Carla was a woman as one of their girlfriends, but engineers at the time were all men, there were very few women engineers when I was at Speed School. We had 1,000 students—five were women out of that 1,000. So, it was an –almost exclusively male study. So, you’ve got a bunch of guys who are all nerds. You kind of hang out together with other nerds because we’re going to engineering school. Then you’ve got Eastern Parkway (a local road) between us and the rest of the campus, it might as well have been a minefield. [laughs] Engineers just hung out together. The regular campus girls didn’t want to hang out with engineers unless they were getting ready to graduate. All through school, they’re not going to hang around with engineers because they’re nerdy. [laughs]

It’s just such a strange thing to do, invite your students into a blind experiment.

It is strange. But you’re dealing with guys that didn’t have anything else to do. They like their professor. These are folks that hang out together anyhow. And he’s trying something new. What the heck, you know? It’s not like you had Xbox to go to. You didn’t have computer games to go to back then.

You had three channels on TV. It’s not like they had a lot of better stuff to do. There weren’t any pool tables around. Cool professor. He’s going to have some beer after this thing. Maybe he’ll order pizza. We’re all starving students. So, “Sure, we’ll hang out!” [laughs]

Well, it didn’t last long in that phase before Walt Rogers came down from Detroit…

That’s right.

And broke Don’s quote-unquote “scientific experiment”—its protocols or validity, as Don saw it.

It was no longer an experiment.

He let the cat out of the bag.

Yeah.

And they learn that they’re channeling. But they still stuck with it.

Well, they were really interested now because we’re not looking at spiritual stuff. We’ve got twelve engineers, and we’re talking to aliens? How cool is that?

Yeah. [laughs] I think your channeling… I hope you’re channeling their enthusiasm.

Well, they don’t… Think about it—you’ve got twelve nerdy engineers who would be reading science fiction for fun. And here we’re talking to aliens.

Yeah, living out their sci-fi dream.

Right. So, it’s not a stretch here, if you kind of look at the options. [laughs]

The L/L Research library—our Transcript Library currently available on the site—begins in 1974, for all intents and purposes. (I mean, there’s a straggler from ’73 or ’72.) And ’74 , when the Transcript Library begins, is also when Carla began learning channeling.

Do you know why Don seemed not to have preserved anything, for the most part, from pre-’74?

He just really didn’t know where it was going. He didn’t have a vision for what L/L was to become. In fact, prior to that time, there was no discussion about L/L. I remember me eating pizza with them, and “L/L” was mentioned a couple of times. I’d ask them what “L/L” means, and they wouldn’t tell me. It’s a secret. [laughs] You know, it was sort of between him and Carla.

Well, “Love” and “Light” is what it ends up… But they wouldn’t tell me that. I did remember hearing the “L/L” coming up.

That’s weird and funny.

And he would say… “Alrac”—he would be talking about Carla. You’ve heard of “Alrac”?

Yeah. He says it at the end of the Ra sessions.

He used these anagram-type… he did that sort of thing a lot.

Carla’s name backwards.

Yeah. And at that time, too, you had the EFTSPAN stuff that was still being dealt with in an uncomfortable way. We don’t need to go into the history of that. But that was the spiritual community that failed.

Yeah, well, it would make sense why, from ‘74 onward, he would want to keep the sessions because that’s when Carla began, and obviously [her channeling was very good]…

Carla was a record keeper kind of person; Don wasn’t. Don was interested in learning about the phenomenon. He would keep some notes, but I don’t ever remember… Well, of course, I wasn’t around much before. Even back when my family was involved early on, I don’t ever remember anybody talking about recordings.

But if you’re conducting research, and you’re trying to obtain information from these extraterrestrial sources, you would think you would a record at least. So, my only theory is that he felt it was insufficient quality to hold on to…

It just wasn’t part of the way you operated back then. Back then, you go to lecture, and you write down a few notes of the key things. What were recorders? You didn’t have many cassettes back then. These were big tape reel-to-reel recorders that plugged up and twisted all the time and are a pain in the butt to operate.

It was hard to record back then. My mother had a recorder. She would get things from Edgar Cayce’s group. They would send these tapes in these expensive postage packages. She’s trying to play them and she’s at it all afternoon, trying to get through an hour because the tape twists and hangs up and freezes. She’s trying to rework it and then splice the tape back together and make it work. I mean, it was difficult to work with recorders back then. Recording now is easy! That didn’t exist back then.

Well…unless there’s somebody that exists out there that can answer that question, that’s going to be the best headway we can make into it.

I would say Carla was the stimulus for recording stuff, because she was a Library of Science major. Keeping track of stuff like that was sort of her gig.

Yeah, the Carla that I knew loved record-keeping, loved organization.

Don had lots of notes. I mean, he kept notes, and I don’t know if those are things you still have access to anywhere.

I wish they did exist.6

But he had lots of notes that he was jotting down what he got out of meditations. I mean, he would do a meditation, and he’d have a yellow pad on his lap. He would actually be jotting down some ideas he had before the meditation started. After a meditation, when everybody else is going into the kitchen and grabbing a coke or a cookie, you’re carrying on some conversation, Don is jotting down the last notes that he got out of that particular session. So, recording things wasn’t easy to do then.

Morris’s Foray Into Channeling

Getting back to an earlier line of questions, did you channel?

Well, that’s a little bit of a side story.

Morris, how did you get into doing the channeling?

Yeah, side story. Let’s hear it.

Well, we’ve got this primary group that’s meeting at Watterson Trail every Sunday evening. This is a time when the group has kind of grown. You have some folks that are really caught up in this and they’re thinking about creating some community. We’ve already had EFTSPAN7 going on down by Bardstown, which was really a failure in the sense of what it was set up for. So, Don and Carla were a little disenchanted with the thought of community. But this was a group of folks that were mostly in their 20s were interested in this information we’re getting. They are likeminded people who enjoy each other. They decided to create a group home of folks that just move in together who were kind of following this.

We were at Sunday meditations at Don and Carla’s. Now [this other group] starts to have Wednesday evening meditations. This not with Carla or any supervision; it is us sort of winging it and doing it on our own. This is a group of about, say, eight or, well, closer to ten people that are getting together every week on Wednesday nights and trying to do the same thing that’s happening on Sunday. Of course, we don’t have skilled channels.

It was out of this particular satellite group that Pooh Corner developed like Winnie the Pooh. This is where several people got together and decided to rent a big old house, three stories tall. You had Glendora who moved in with her son. Sheila with her daughter and son, Amy, and Leonard moved in to the house. So, you’ve got two women with their children, another single woman, and Leonard, all love-oriented people moving into the same house who are part of the satellite group. It becomes sort of a commune-ish kind of environment. They’re sharing utilities, sharing workloads. It’s supposed to be a little bit of utopia. But then we start having some emotions kind of getting frayed.

So, it was getting complicated. While it was all love-oriented, the difficulties with ego and being human ended up fracturing Pooh Corner; then it all kind of fell apart.

What did that have to do with you channeling?

Oh! So, we didn’t have [trained] channels, we just did it. Some of us were better than others. Anybody can potentially channel, and we had several people channeling. The quality of the channeling? Not really good. [laughs] But we wanted more. So, this was a satellite group that spun out. It was in 1981-82 and was a positive experience until it got emotionally complicated. The Ra contact had already started at that point.

Community is the perennial impulse of spiritual seekers. And statistically, its outcome is…

Poor.

Yeah.

Because the emotions get in the way. The humanness gets in the way.

So you’re not living there?

Oh, I wasn’t. I’m with that meditation group, but at that point, I have my own home, I’m married, and I’m participating in the meditations, and sometimes when there are parties or people are going out together, I’m with that group. My wife Kathy was with that group, too. So, we joined the group. Kathy participated in the meditation groups. She was never a channeler. But she always came to the meditations.

Were you all not feeling fed by the… we’ll call it the “main group” with Don Carla and Jim? Or…

We were enjoying that, but we wanted more. And they only met on Sundays.

Oh, okay. Did the channeling that took place, was that under the tutelage of Carla and Don?

No.

Had anybody received any training from Don or Carla?

No.

Wow. Just winged it?

Yeah.

How did Don and Carla, and Jim, to whatever extent he intersects, how do they relate to it?

Well, they knew what was taking place. And I don’t think they gave a whole lot of parental advice because, obviously, parental advice typically doesn’t go well, you know. Yeah. “You guys aren’t ready for this.” That’s not something that probably we were ready to hear. This is a group of young people that are excited about what’s taking place. They’re spending time together, and they choose to live together. They’re have formed a satellite group. On Sundays we would share with the whole group what was going on. Everybody’s kind of excited about it. I’m sure behind the eyes, that Carla had lots of questions because she was incredibly wise. But she wasn’t putting that out there.

Yeah, I don’t know her attitude then. But she would evolve an attitude about a channeling that is very cautious and protective.

I’m reminding you: feed the dogs.

They agree. [laugh]

We will welcome Alexa, our fifth member, into the interview.

So Carla felt channeling was a very serious business that had serious risks and wonderful reward, but…

But that wasn’t recognized… If she recognized it, that hadn’t been shared with us at that point. And she may have, well… I can’t say what she recognized and when she did, but she was not discouraging it. Had she tried to, I don’t know that she would have necessarily been successful because, hey, we’re ten feet tall and bulletproof at that point. [laugh]

Well, I appreciate, and I find that beautiful that you still maintained harmony between the satellite group and [the main group]…

Oh, yeah!

You’re all friends, and you all still love one another?

Absolutely. We just wish that the Sunday group met more often. We were being inspired by it. And of course, by this time, it’s much more of a spiritual message. There’s still some of the UFO phenomena stuff going on, but it’s not 100% that like it was back in the earlier 70s.

That group disbanded, and that the quality of the channeling was poor. Do you have any recollection of your own channeling experiences?

I think that I was probably as good as the other channels but recognized, compared to what I was getting on Sunday night [with Carla and Don], that I was really, really not very good.

I recognized that I was overthinking what was coming through, which was interfering with my ability to channel. I remember, we talked with Carla about our channeling; she would listen. I don’t recall that she gave a whole lot of advice. But that was what I struggled with. We did have the example of Sunday, so we kind of knew how it would work. You start to feel your throat maybe tightening and [clicking noises] kind of stuff going, and then somebody gets the message that, “We are Hatton. We greet you in the love and light of the infinite Creator.” kind of stuff. You kind of knew how to get started because you heard it all the time. As you kind of get going, then you let it flow. You just go with the ideas as they come to you.

It wasn’t so different from what you’re doing with your channeling classes, except you’re much more supervised and get a chance to gain confidence in what you’re doing. I don’t think… I shouldn’t say any of us… There were some folks channeling that were very confident of themselves. I wasn’t very confident.

The mouth sounds that you made come from a different era when…

Tuning is what they would be doing to us. They’re adjusting our… so we understand that when you were getting ready to channel, you would feel some tightening in your throat and a little bit of movement as they’re trying to work with you. It’s triggering you to let you know that they’re contacting you. We have seen all of this before, so you’re expecting that it’s going to start coming through. Whether that was necessary to channeling or not, I don’t know, but it was part of the trigger we expected.

Yeah, it was unique to that time and got lost along the way, maybe as a result of Carla’s improved methodology? I don’t know.

Very possibly. It wasn’t necessary with trained channels. Again, this was happening with Don’s engineering students when they were first picking it up. They were doing [mouth click], feeling something. They were getting ideas, but they were not confident speak up in front of their friends and say something stupid.

That’s terrifying!

That’s when the Detroit contact came down. Hatton advised us, “We’ve been trying to contact you guys for a long time. You just got to let it go.” And then, some of them did start channeling.

Yeah, your experience of overthinking it is still a part of my experience. I don’t know if that’s true for you, Trish, as well. But it’s difficult to shut off that inner critic that’s watching what’s being channeled and judging it. It can definitely be a stumbling block and get in the away.

Yes.

Carla described it as “needing to put one’s ass over the line.”

That’s right. She’s so good with words. You are, too. You’re both very good.

So alright. A little bit more about that 70s group: Was there a sense of camaraderie and friendship among its members? A mutual group spirit?

The group that broke off to do their own channeling; there was a lot of camaraderie with that group.

I mean, the main ones with Don and Carla.

The main group, you’ve got the main group back then might have had 14-16 people on a given Sunday.

In that Sunday group, you had this generally 20’s age group that were kind of excited about what was taking place. You also had some others that were older or less connected to this younger group. But the 20-somethings’ group were very close, others just came in on Sunday.

So there [were] circles differentiated between a core, steady group who has the responsibility and the commitment and the stability to continue…

Which was Don and Carla really.

So that’s just two people, essentially.

Yeah, because Jim wasn’t on the scene yet.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. And Beth, to a degree?

Oh, Beth, at that point was living in Canada; she wasn’t around anymore.

So Don and Carla were the core group. Okay.

That was it. For years there.

Don, Carla, and Jim as People

I’d like to explore a little bit about those three entities—Don, Carla and Jim—with a disclaimer at first [that this exploration] is not to glorify them. Or to put them in front of the message.

They wouldn’t want that.

L/L Research’s mission and message is always to look to the material, to look to the message, to the principles, to the philosophy, and let the people be footnotes. But there is a segment of the readership who are interested in footnotes, and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re building those footnotes out here. I know I have a personal passion for it. It helps me to understand the context out of which arose this message and these principles. Nothing happens in a vacuum. What L/L Research gifted to the world happened through certain circumstances, events, energies, intentions, and people. We want to know a little bit more about the people. In Tilting at Windmills, I interviewed Carla and Jim directly. So, we’ve got lots of their story—seven days’ worth. But you were witness to their activities and to them as people, along with being a friend. So, you have a unique point of view.

If somebody wanted to know who Don Elkins was, how would you describe him?

Somewhat as an elder in a group. He felt a bit aloof. He didn’t relate with us probably the way he related with the folks back when he was an engineering professor where he’s having a beer with his guys that he was teaching. This is 10 years later. He’s now an Eastern Air Lines pilot. There’s not this sense of commonality that we’re buddies. He’s doing this as a researcher and to learn in something he’s passionately interested in. But he wasn’t relating with the group in a buddy sort of way. I mean, he was always very good to me, but there was never this sense that we’re buddies.

On the other hand, Carla didn’t have this perceived barrier at all. She was so open to everyone. But Don… I mean, I’m in engineering school, and I’m sometimes chatting with Don, and a technical issue comes up that the rest of the crowd wouldn’t necessarily have an opinion on. And he’s asking my opinion in front of other people. Again, this guy’s a professor, and I’m an engineering student. I would find that terribly intimidating, because anything I answer, even if I’m almost correct, he’s the professor, and he’s already got the answer. He’s just asking the question. It never felt like he was asking to really find out. It was almost like testing.

But he was always very, very good to me. I remember one time he really helped me out. I used to ride a bicycle back and forth to work when I was doing co-oping at Colgate Palmolive. Remember that big clock across the river? I was living near Central Park in Louisville, and I would bicycle every morning across the mile-long Second Street Bridge in heavy rush hour traffic to work and bicycle back. A bicycle was what I had. I didn’t have a car. There was a time, later on, Don gave me his car, a Cadillac, to use for, like, close to a year! You know, he’s paying the insurance and repairs and stuff. And he just gives me that car because he knows I need it. Not that I couldn’t get by without it… I would never ask for it. But he was always taking care. You know, when I’d be coming over, he would order extra pizza. They get two large pizzas—Don and Carla would eat a large pizza and I would eat a large pizza.8 [laughs] Because I hadn’t eaten a whole lot in a while. [laugh]

I remember Carla telling me that story. Because, I mean, you’re a broke college student who’s eating the equivalent of ramen noodles for….

All the time. [laugh]

Yeah, so they really wanted to feed you.

They did! [laugh]

But I don’t hear much about Don’s generosity. So that’s really…

Oh, he was very generous. But he was not chummy. He wasn’t the guy that you felt close to. You respected him, and you kind of looked up to him. But it always felt a little distant. I don’t think he intended that. It’s just the way he is. An airline pilot. He’s a professional. He is a bit of a perfectionist. He is a deep thinker. And it always felt like we just aren’t where he’s at, you know. It’s just… you’re not going to sit down and talk about the ballgame or even have small talk with Don. Don wasn’t a small talker. He was a deep thinker, and… He always felt a bit removed. I mean, I’m a pretty bright guy and a pretty deep thinker. But I didn’t feel like I could hold the candle to The Don. [laughs]

As I look back on it, I wish I could have. But it was a little bit intimidating. Not his fault. It was just the dynamic.

So, he didn’t foster an air of condescension or intimidation, or “I’m superior than you” in some way…

Not his fault. It’s just the way it was perceived. Not just by me, I’m sure by others as well. I mean, nobody would have a technical conversation with him that wasn’t a technical person. At that time, I was the only engineer or aspiring engineer that was attending. So, if he’s talking technical stuff, well then I’m the one he’s going to discuss it with. But he already has his mind made up, so what am I going to add to this? [laughs] He’s probably been thinking about it three days, and he asks me on the spur of the moment? [laugh] Quantum mechanics, for example. Let’s talk about that. Well, you know, that was pretty new stuff then.

Did he put you down?

Never! Other than maybe once or twice, saying, “Well, I thought you’d have known more about that.” Being in engineering school, and he was a professor. He only did that a couple of times, and I’m sure it was quite innocently. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He would never intentionally put somebody down.

Has it ever been discussed if he might have been on the spectrum?

On the spectrum?

Autism.

Right.

I could certainly imagine that being a case. He was brilliant. I could imagine him being autistic as I look back on it. We didn’t know that word back in the 70s. I mean, one of the things he did working on his research thesis when he was going to engineering school was proving that metal was a liquid. [laugh] You know, glass is a liquid.

You can see how an old pane of glass flows, since it becomes “wavey”. Don proved it even though his professors said that’s impossible, because metal is crystalline. Don proved it was a liquid. How he proved it was by taking a piece of iron, then using a high-powered rifle, and firing a bullet at it, and showing how this instant impact, how the metal flowed as it deformed. He was right. Materials science at the time didn’t recognize that. He’s a college student and comes up with this idea and correctly proves it. So, was he autistic? Well, you hear about savants.

He certainly was able to communicate. I mean, he was an airline pilot, and obviously good at what he does. We had some talks about flying—because I wanted to be a pilot—about how most of the pilots weren’t really bright, you know. They got their military training, and they knew how to fly, but they didn’t understand flying at all. [laughs]

I went on a number of flights with Don from time to time, which would be kind of interesting. He would let me fly the plane for a while, just to kind of get a feel for it. I remember once, as this was happening, Carla’s in the backseat. I am at the controls and it’s doing this kind of up and down thing. When Don is flying he just barely touches the wheel to fly the plane. He explained, “You don’t have to push or pull. You just think it.” Because you’re moving along at 200 miles an hour, and just the very slightest pressure on the wheel is going to make it go down or up. I’ve had the wheel for 10 minutes or so. And Don says, “Maybe I should take this back over.” Carla goes, “Oh, gosh, I was about to throw up.” [laughs] And of course, she didn’t want to say anything. She knew that I was intentionally trying to get something out of this. So, if her gills were getting green, she wasn’t going say anything, but was really glad when Don took the wheel back. [laughs]

Did he have a private plane?

He rented them. I did, by the way, get a pilot license, but it was much later.

Yeah, so he flew for an airline that… went bankrupt in the ’80s, I think?

Eastern Air Lines. Taken over by Delta.9 Delta bought it out. He flew 727s. It’s what today would be the Boeing 330-320, except that’s even a bigger plane. His plane flew 98-122 people.

There were two seats on either side of the central aisle. The plane was built to fly basically 100. It had three engines: two on the back and one in the tail. When they stretched it to accommodate 120 people, he said that was called the “Lead Sled”, because you had the same engines, same airframe, except longer, and now it was heavier. The pilots called it the Lead Sled. It drops like a rock, and it’s hard to take off because you’ve got all this extra weight with a plane that was designed for 100 passengers and their gear. Now you’ve got 20% more weight. He hated the Lead Sled. Trivia, trivia.

Carla had some fantastic stories about him. I don’t know if they’re apocryphal or authentic. Did you know about his crack shot abilities as a marksman?

He was great. I mean, he had the medals to prove it from his time in the service.

She tells a story of his training to become a pilot. He leaves professorship in order to be a pilot to facilitate his research into the paranormal, and I think maybe to make more money and have more time off too.

Exactly, all of the above.

Carla told the story of his training whereby he was in a simulation that was designed to cause failure. Like, no human was supposed to be able to achieve…

And he recovered.

And he did. [While remaining totally calm and unflustered, apparently.] That happened, as far as you know.

Well, that’s the story as I remember the story. He’d been working out at Bowman Field (which is the small airfield, not Standiford Field). He’d been working out there. Before starting work as a professor and during summers after he starting teaching, he worked for a flying company doing “pick up” flights. He basically got free training because pilot training can be quite expensive. That’s where he was working with an outfit where he could pile up some flying hours. He was getting some training flying with other guys, and then they would let him fly some.

He was getting in his hours that were actually being paid for by customers of the company. You’ve got the lead pilot, but as long as he hands over control to the co-pilot, then the co-pilot gets to take those hours. Since the lead pilot has plenty of hours and doesn’t need them anyhow… they’re working to help this young man be a pilot.

So, he develops his skill and has his pilot’s license and eventually gets his commercial pilot’s license. Then he goes to Alaska to do… not barnstorming.10 What do you call it? Bush flying? This is where you’re going to remote places and landing in spots that are not airfields. The kind of pilots that do this would be like the crop duster pilots—the pilots that are used to landing on things that are not solid [laugh]. He was flying up there for a while because it was only summertime when he wasn’t having to teach, when things were happening in Alaska, or the times when the snow and the ice would melt. He was up there flying for the summer, making some good money. I remember him once flying somebody out to some site he was supposed to go to. They’re flying over this river and the passenger asks, “What river is that?” Don looks down; he is not sure. So, he deftly glances at the map tucked into a pocket on the door. “That’s the Yukon River.” [laughs] He didn’t know! [laughs] He would land in some pretty difficult spots.

Earlier in his life, I don’t remember the year… young, I presume early 20s… he made a conscious decision that he is going to be an observer and be unmoved by the world. [Whether at the time he felt, or sometime later he came to feel] that the world was a crazy place, and he was lucky to have a private room.

Don Elkins decides, “I’m going to be an observer. I’m not going to be moved, neither high nor low, neither happy nor sad.” What, in shorthand, could be seen through the lens of being a Vulcan or a…

Very good! Yes, very much. That is the best example I can think of from pop culture.

In the Star Trek series, the Vulcan race has abandoned and rejected emotion because, I guess, it’s risky or dangerous, and decided to live and operate by logic and rationality only.

You can see how that kind of separates you from everybody else, too, as the observer.

True. Yeah.

He was very much the Spock-type character.

And that decision seems to have gone into effect soon thereafter. He really lived it. It wasn’t just like a New Year’s resolution.

No, no.

It would later come undone in the final year or two of the Ra contact that would lead to his demise or contribute to his slide into mental illness. Long before that…

[Interruption from the dogs]

So about his Vulcanism (just for shorthand, it’s not how he identified it), could you give any witness to or insight into that dimension of Don, his emotionlessness?

He didn’t show… I mean, you might see him smile about something. That somebody else might laugh at, he might smile about. But he was very steady. You never saw him, of course, panic about anything. Never obviously worry about anything. Never hear him really complain about anything. He seemed dispassionate.

Dispassionate, another great word.

And Carla wasn’t that way at all.

Carla described Don, as did Jim, as a rather melancholy person. Did you see that in him? That sorrow or sadness?

I saw the lack of emotion. I didn’t see what I would have described as sorrow or sadness. It was just a lack of demonstrated emotion. Why they might have seen that is because they were living with him and conversing with him on a more intimate level than I would, because I was seeing him at meditations, and then when we would see each other at times, outside of those groups for various reasons, if I might be going over. So, I never saw that in him.

What was he like in the circle, in the meditation circle? Did he stay quiet…

He’s sitting in a corner chair, and he’s kind of observing what everybody’s talking about. He’s not necessarily participating in the conversations, he’s just observing. He’ll jot something down on his yellow pad. He’ll observe, and another idea will come. These are things that he’s going to ask questions about when we get to the question and answer period.

So, he’s observing, not just from an attitudinal standpoint, but he’s literally in a social setting watching.

Yeah, in a social setting. He was not a social guy.

Carla would describe how, at times, if somebody showed up at the house that he wasn’t particularly interested in seeing, he would go out through the back door and let Carla do the social footwork.

Which, again, might have been spectrum, as you’re talking about it.

Don would, obviously, near the end, develop acute…

Paranoia.

Delusional paranoia, yeah. Yeah, you knew where I was going. But even prior to it becoming what we would call a mental illness, Carla and Jim described how he would, like, if they would go to a restaurant or a movie, he would be mapping out where the exit was, or how to get out quickly, or how to find the defensible position. He was always, I guess, thinking that way. Did you see any paranoia in him in your interactions?

Well, the paranoia developed toward the end of the Ra contact. I had been around for the first year-plus of the Ra contact. But at this point, because of the career disaster I spoke about by making myself come back to Louisville, and then getting laid off during an economic crisis and searching for a job, and [trying to hold] two homes, no job, wife’s not employed, first child—a stressful situation! Finally, I get a job and moved to Texas. Don’s illness is taking place after I moved to Texas. I only saw him once during this period. Amy, one of the girls from Pooh Corner, was getting married in Ohio. So, I had a little two-seater airplane and flew that from Marshall, Texas to Dayton, Ohio. I wasn’t yet licensed to fly. I was getting my license, and you had to take three cross-country trips. So, this is one of my cross-country trips. I’m not licensed yet. And I’m flying all the way to Dayton, which has a Strategic Air Command airbase there. I won’t go through the whole story, but the situation was that I’m flying in instrument conditions at times. I’m not even a visual pilot yet. And there are times I’m flying over the Ohio River or Mississippi River so that I know where I am. And there are times when I’m flying along by dead reckoning, because this little plane doesn’t have the instruments for telling you necessarily where you are. There were times when I would swoop in and read the name of the town off the water tower so I’d know where I was. I made it to Dayton and landed on a runway that was created out of a two lane county road; it was the first crosswind landing I had ever done.

Anyhow, on the way back from that trip, I landed in Louisville and stopped by to see Don and Carla. This is when he was sick. He called and told his friend out at the airport, “Do NOT let this guy leave.” The guy out at the airport, trying to be a friend of Don, did everything he could do to talk me out of leaving. But hey, “I got to get home. I got to go to work.” Of course, No one knew I wasn’t licensed at that point. [laughs] When you’re not even supposed to have anybody else in your plane with you, yet my wife Kathy is on this trip, too.

Anyhow, there were lots of adventures on that flight, like almost running out of gas before I got back, because you know, there are only so many gas stations, like you’ve got to land and gas up. When I went past what was going to be… turned out to be the last one… I was about at half a tank. Well, half a tank takes a long time, right? Half a tank to empty went really fast! I remember, as I was coming into Marshall, Texas, and pulling back on the fuel, pulling back still a little slower and a little slower, looking for places I could put down, because the fuel needle already was not bouncing at empty anymore. It was stuck on empty. [laughs] My airport is still beyond the horizon. I’m gradually losing altitude, cutting back on power, trying to squeeze this plane in.

Oh my god.

Finally, the airport’s in sight. I keep waiting for the engine to kick out because it’s been stuck on empty for a long time. I land that plane. This is little two-seater plane holds twenty gallons. They put 19.9 gallons in. I had six minutes of fuel left.

Honey, you’re supposed to be talking about the Ra Material.

I know… It’s just Don was thinking I wasn’t quite ready to be flying yet. [laughter] It was just a little side story. Thank you for bringing me back, Linda. [laughs]

I felt lucky previously to be having this interview. But I didn’t realize how lucky I am that you’re still here! [laugh] Good lord.

Yeah, that’s when I saw Don. Don did look different because he’s there…. when I’m sitting with Don, Jim, and Carla, and kind of just kind of catching up, you know. Carla in particular is trying to find out what all’s been going on with me, and she’s her normal, inquisitive self. Jim to a lesser degree, I mean, because Carla’s kind of leading the show. Don’s in a chair a little further away with kind of a… that look in his face like things just aren’t right and not communicating with me very much at all, other than to ask a few questions about my flying and wondering why I’m taking these chances and suggesting that maybe I should rent a car. So, he was sounding a bit paranoid, but it was all justified paranoia, because he’s a commercial airline pilot, and he recognizes that I’m just pretty new at this stuff.

Oh, I wouldn’t call that paranoid. I would call that good prudence.

Reasonable. Yeah. So that’s the only time I saw him during the time that he was sick. I did know that he had not been feeling well, that’s all they revealed to me at that time. They did not reveal to me, at that time, the degree of their concern.

When was that?

This would have been… Gosh, I don’t know what month it was. It would have been early springtime of the year that he killed himself.

’84.

Yeah.

Okay, so they went back to Louisville already.

Yeah, they’ve come back from Atlanta.

Okay. I wanted to ask about that, too, but we’ll table that for a moment. Is there anything else before we move on to focus about Carla that you wanted to share about Don? Anything that comes to mind about who he was? Or what your relationship with him was? Or…

Well, that was… You had talked a little bit about the relationship. He just… I never felt close to Don.

Close to Carla—she was very easy to get close to. And Jim seemed someone almost that could be your buddy, you know? But he was not as chatty as Carla. So, whenever these two are together, who’s carrying the conversation? Jim was quite content to be sitting there and listening. He might have a stray question or two, but he’s just along for the ride, it seems.

The Carla that I knew from 2002 onward was a chatterbox. Loved, loved to talk. It’s interesting for me to consider, is that her inherent nature? Or did that evolve out of being in a trio with two other guys who said few words?

I would say the latter, just because she had never been a confident woman, and probably didn’t start out having the confidence to carry on, not just small talk, but even, you know, curiosity. She was very curious woman. But I would say the latter—it was the environment she was in.

Anything else about Don that comes to mind?

Not immediately.

Well, it’s impossible to know, of course, but what would, if you could guess, how do you think Don would feel about what came of L/L Research and his life’s work after 1984? After he passed?

I think he would be pleased that it’s still going. I’m not saying what it became, but he’d be pleased that it’s still going. His vision was different than what has happened. He thought that this was supposed to go worldwide. He tried to make a movie once—we can talk a little bit about the movie. He wanted to get it out there in a big way. And he talked with people like… who was the Star Trek creator?

Gene Roddenberry?

Yeah, he talked with Roddenberry.

He met with Gene Roddenberry?

Yeah. And other potential movie producers with his outline of a script. Now he had done the one movie, which was not very successful, which was supposed to be a sort of intro. But that was sort of his learning attempt. It cost him a fair amount of money because he’s doing this out of his own pocket. Based on what he learned from the first movie, he had a more sophisticated script outline that he would run by some producers. He had spent some time in California talking to folks and having some folks be interested, that’s how he met Roddenberry.

Do you think that the internet would have fulfilled Don’s vision of making it worldwide?

Don would have used the internet a bunch. But he was… he thought it was his mission to get it out there. When you asked what he would think about where we are today, he would be happy that it’s still alive, that it didn’t collapse after he died. That he would be happy about. He would not think that what it has become was what he envisioned, because he envisioned that it was his place to bring it to the world.

Well, yeah, that’s why I’m a little bit puzzled about. I think there’s something that I’m missing. He felt it was his mission, as you’re saying, to make it global.

Yes.

To make it more known.

Yes.

I would see the internet as having fulfilled that vision in that it’s literally available around the world to the interested seeker. [Not to mention that as of the publication of this transcript, the work is available in 23 different languages and growing.]

Are you saying that the spotlight on the Law of One isn’t as big and grand as Don had hoped? He thought it could change the world?

That would not have been his vision. His vision was to change it much more quickly. He wanted the world to understand so that once people understand, “Well, they can land on the White House lawn now.”

Because everybody… it’s no longer scary. “This is what the Confederation are about. They’ve been here for a long time, all the way back to the Egyptians and before. We’ve been communicating with them since the 50s. This is what’s coming down the road here. We’ve got this movie and that movie. And there’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind—this kind of thing is conditioning the population to recognize that nice aliens are out there.” Don’s vision was big. We have gone… L/L has gone into making it available for the serious seeker—not the same vision. We’re feeling good about it, and probably Ra would feel good about it. Ra wasn’t attached to a movie. Don felt that was his mission. To save the world.11

So, L/L Research now may be more dispassionate in the way it offers the material than Don would have otherwise chosen.

Absolutely. Don was goal oriented. He wanted to get the world “on board” now about how the Confederation were benevolent aliens. If the world would accept that extraterrestrial were here and benevolent, then the Confederation could reveal themselves. He believed this would effectively end all war on our planet and launch us into a new age. Don was the researcher, he discovered this stuff, and felt it was his place to get it out there in a big way so that we could get on with it.

Yeah, I’ve said before about his mission that it wasn’t for self-edification alone.

No, not at all.

He wasn’t just trying to… Of course, he wanted to satisfy his own questions, but in order to help humanity out of its… however you want to describe it… state of sleep and suffering.

He was not an ego-centered guy.

No. Well, I get no sense from his biography that he was. It was not about Don Elkins himself, per se, but about bringing humanity out of the darkness. And he saw this as his key.

In a way, while it may be naive or optimistic, I have to agree with him in that, Disclosure—as it’s known with the capital D, that event whereby the governments of the world, particularly the United States, disclose what they know about UFOs and alien visitation of planet earth—would be the biggest paradigm game changer possible on planet earth, short of an asteroid headed for the planet. I can’t think of a single event that would upturn governments, religion, culture, and the way societies are structured and built than that event. If Don had a sense that this information could contribute to that type of event, then that’s big. [laughs]

Very disruptive, and that’s… he wouldn’t have used the word disruptive, but that’s what it would have been.

Yeah. Interesting…

He would not have felt like we accomplished his vision, but he would be pleased that it didn’t die with him, which he probably thought it could have because he was the researcher and he was the driver up to that point. Then Carla stepped in to be the driver.

I hear what you’re saying about the scale of his vision. However, he didn’t, from anecdotal evidence about his story, and from triangulating from other people who have met him, he never tried to push or proselytize. He didn’t want to argue with anybody. He didn’t want to convince them. He just had a faith…

He had a story to tell.

…that the veracity and power of this information that he was getting, that he thought it, of itself, would be apparent and illuminating. And he told Carla that she gifted him, or helped him achieve, his life’s work. There was a sense of completion about it.

Alright, how about Carla Rueckert? You’ve already said a few things a few things about her.

She was brilliant. The writing, I mean, she was just a prolific writer. She was the open-hearted face of the group. You had Don as the Vulcan, well described. We might call Jim “Scotty.” I mean, he’s the scribe, but he saw his role as a supportive role.

Don’s a thinker. Carla’s the channel. And this places Jim… “admin” is not a good term, but it’s filling in, doing what needs to be done.

Support, yeah. Something he stayed true to. All along. To the last moment.

So, Carla on back. Gosh. She had such wisdom and insight. You know, she would talk to people that had problems and provide wise counsel. She was really wise. She could see through bullshit really, really quickly. But she wasn’t particularly judgmental.

Now, I do recall one interesting event that was a little bit surprising to me, but now I understand it. I mean, when Linda met Carla… we were meeting at a pizza joint someplace. Don and Carla are there, and I forget who the third person was. Linda and I come in. I introduce Linda, and all of them are, “Nice to meet you,” yada, yada, yada. But Linda felt like Carla really didn’t like her too much. She thought in retrospect, that Carla had seen that I’d gotten kind of hammered in my first relationship with my first wife and probably felt protective.

[To Linda:] Is that the way you would describe it? And nobody was going to be good enough for Morris. [laughs]

So, Linda was not embraced by Carla initially, or didn’t feel embraced. I was oblivious to that probably because I’m glad to see my friends, kind of focused on that, and not really aware of the vibes that Linda’s picking up on. So that was the only time I’ve ever encountered anybody that had not just felt an open heart from Carla.

She had great insight. People would bring their problems to Carla quite often; she never seemed to tire of giving what she felt was the best advice she could.

Yeah, she had… Among her sacrifices to join the group, to work with Don, to go on this mission with him, included not having children. I think she said she wanted a dozen or something.12 But I think she had a maternal instinct that became kind of universal in that she wanted to just nurture and be a mother in a way to others, though not explicitly. Just to receive people and embrace them and care for them in her heart. Last night, when you, Trish and I were out for dinner, you said that you thought Carla was your best friend.

At that time, yeah. And she would have never known that. I was going to school and working. Actually, for a while I was president of the student council of the engineering school. So, I had lots of acquaintances and people that knew me and probably thought I was a buddy. But I had a connection with Carla that surpassed any of them, even though I only saw her once a week for an hour or two.

Morris, even when I met you, I remember asking you who was the female in the world that you felt the closest to; you said Carla.

Past-life Regressions

It’s not that we spent so much time together… It was that resonance that was beyond anything you could consciously put a finger on. Then, as things turn out, well, we’ve probably got a common background, because… This is before Jim comes in, when they had Carla’s regression, and Carla recognized [in her past-life regression] Beth [Morris’s sister], and Sallie. Then Beth and Sallie heard the story and [they too] were regressed and saw the same things described differently that Carla was talking about. And then Beth had recognized me. Sallie and Beth wondered: “Is this real? Or am I seeing what I expect to see?”

But I was regressed [independently] without hearing the story, and I’m describing the same place. That was kind of nifty that came out of Carla’s regression, which kind of explains the resonance that we had was deeper than we could consciously recognize, because we had spent a past life together; we apparently had a “clan” connection.

Although in that past life, I wasn’t hanging around Carla, which is probably why she didn’t recognize me, she recognized two other people that she had spent more time with. But since, on that planet, I wasn’t with Carla, I was with Beth

Yeah. We won’t have time for that today. But I do want to bookmark it here, because it’d be great if there was some way to follow up down the road. But this has gone into in some depth in pages 135–188 in Secrets of the UFO. And then the original The Law of One Book One Introduction, pages 36–42. 13

You did that all from memory? [laugh] Wow!

Of course. I memorized the page number of every book I’ve ever read. [laughs] No, this is from my notes in preparing for this interview with you because I wanted to explore that. Those are your transcripts, essentially, or your regressions of another density

The transcripts don’t tell you ten percent of it. Not even five percent.

I want to ask you more about that—what you saw.

The regression… You’re being regressed, and you are there. The regressor is asking you a question, and you are answering that question. But you’re aware of all of this other stuff going on. You’re not talking about it because you’re in hypnosis. You’re there. And they ask you another question, you answer that question. So, the transcript, I read it a while back, it’s nothing. The memories you have are as if you were there, because you were. There was such rich fabric to the experience. But that doesn’t show up in the transcript.

It’s a fascinating subject worth contemplating. Of course, we’re here to do work on Earth in this moment and fulfill opportunities for service here, but it still can be a point of inspiration, when we’re trapped within what sometimes seems like a material prison, to see a view into another world and what the organic universe is like when there is no veil and no separation, in heart, at least. The Law of One gives us very little to go on [about the lived experience outside of the veiled space/time conditions in third density]. There’s a couple paragraphs where Ra describes what fourth density is and fourth density is not. They indicate that beyond fourth density, it gets more difficult to describe in words.14 They speak a little bit about fifth, sixth, and seventh density, but not too much to paint a picture, really. Not something you’d find in a travel book about fifth density or fourth or sixth.

[Morris shared the following anecdote after the interview. In the future I hope to conduct an interview with Morris about his, Carla’s, Sallie’s, and Beth’s experiences with their past-life regressions.]

Don was interested in learning if there was a connection between this group and the sources we were channeling. Don learned about Larry Allison who specialized in past-life regressions. He arranged for Carla to be regressed by Larry on Sept 25, 1975.

Carla described living on other worlds. In those other worlds she came from a spiritual community and recognized some people in this life that she knew from her previous life. She identified two people specifically: Sallie D (a regular from the meditation group) and Beth P. (Morris’s sister). Carla also described her work then. She was a missionary of sorts going to other planets to help developing populations find their spiritual path. I won’t go into here story here, but her “recognition” of people in this life that she knew in a past life set events in motion.

Don arranged for Sallie to be regressed on October 7. Sallie described living in a spiritual compound apart from most of the rest of the planet’s population. Her description of that community did not sound like anything on our world. She described her work with the community and their lifestyle.

These revelations excited Don. He arranged for Beth to be regressed on October 13. Again, Beth is describing an idyllic environment living in a spiritual community. I won’t go into their regressions in this interview; those regressions are available in the L/L files.

There was a concern about the reliability of these remarkable stories from the regressions. Both Sallie and Beth had already heard Carla describing her regression. They were concerned that they were describing a world that they “wanted” to see, after hearing from Carla’s wonderful description.

During Beth’s regression, she identified me in her past life. In this life, Beth is my older sister, so we were close enough that she could recognize the “spiritual signature” to know who I was in the past life. We know people in this 3D life by their names and what they look like. In the previous life, everyone had their personal spiritual signature that you could clearly feel.

Consequently, Don wanted to have my regression but insisted no one talk to me about their regressions in advance to avoid another case of possibly preloading me with things I had heard about from the earlier regressions.

In my regression I discovered that Beth and I were husband and wife. We both instructed young students in this spiritual compound. Imagine a monastery or abbey, except that it was not just one gender. This was a spiritual community living and working together. I won’t go into the remarkable clan that I lived with in this interview, but it was certainly not here on earth.

It turned out that all of our regressions were speaking about the same experience. Beth and Sallie described the community where we lived and how people worked together. I am an engineer and described architecture and how things worked. I saw Don in that life; he came to speak to a large congregation assembled in the temple. I could read about things I saw and knew from Sallie and Beth’s regressions, while they could read in my regression about things, they knew but did not describe in theirs. This was the confirmation Don hoped for. It was apparent that the five of us had shared at least part of a past life together. The Creator had brought us all together in this life.

[Interview resumes.]

We are exploring that entity known as Carla Rueckert. Did she strike you then, in the 70s/80s, as an empowered woman?

That wouldn’t strike me as a proper word at all. She struck me as a servant of the Creator. I mean, the closest thing I could think of would be a Mother Teresa type; not that she was taking care of the destitute, but she was always looking to serve.

The Carla that I knew and understand was a very devotional person. Did she exude that even then?

Yes, yes.

Ra said multiple times that it was due to the instrument’s purity, and the group’s harmony and support, that enabled this thing to happen. She radiated spirituality, then, to people who knew her?

Mmhmm.

Were her health limitations… were they a big component of her story then, too?

Well, I wouldn’t call it “big.” I was certainly aware… I remember, as I was developing my consciousness, and probably by ’75, I was meditating daily at that point, and had a prayer ritual. Carla was a key portion of my prayer ritual, because if faith can move mountains, I'm going to heal Carla. I believed I could do that if I had strong enough intention. For years I was doing what we today would call remote Reiki with Carla to heal her, and could not understand why it wasn’t working, because I believed it would. So, the faith part was covered. I knew it was going to work. I could feel the flow of the energy, but it didn’t happen.

It wasn’t until we learned later on that it was a preincarnative choice that healing wasn’t going to happen. But yes, she was handicapped. She didn’t show it off, but I was certainly aware that she had limitations. She already had wrist surgeries at that point. Her fingers were being deformed by the arthritis. I remember once, even after I was living in Texas, when I was back visiting, walking two or three miles with her on a fast walk because she was doing that exercise every day in order, as Ra had told her, to help alleviate some of her physical symptoms. She was working at it. But yeah, it was a big impediment to her freedom. I wouldn’t call it an impediment to what she could do, because she was very prolific at whatever she set her mind to. But it did limit her. She struggled with it physically, but did not let it get in the way of her work with the group.

Even then, would you say that she exemplified the ability of spirit, or mind, or attitude, or heart to transcend the limitations of the physical body?

Definitely. She never let it stop her. She suffered with it, but courageously.

It’s always been such a visible part of her journey, even to the end, you know? As you know, her final four years were in the hospital bed with an open wound.

That wouldn’t heal.

And still smiling every day.

Every day. Incredible.

It’s really interesting and salient, I think, that you choose the word “freedom,” that it limited her freedom, because that was a process that would only increase in the coming decades. It was as if one thing after another would be subtracted from her. She had such a joy and a passion for doing a multitude of things: cooking and singing, gardening, dancing, being social. And slowly…

These are all being eroded away.

But she kept her connection to the Creator very much alive. I never saw her really become a victim or complain outside of the humorous normal sort of complaining. Or just, “Yeah, it hurts,” sort of complaining, but really didn’t make an identity of it. I think it all bespeaks of what Ra identified as the purity of the instrument.

For sure.

What was your observation of Don and Carla’s relationship? How did you see them interact—interact in a social setting or when hanging out with you? And then what sort of deeper currents did you sense between them?

He was not an affectionate guy, you know?

Concurs with her testimony.

They were often together. But he’s just not an affectionate guy. In terms of, “What did you perceive?” You just perceived they were together like a married couple, although they weren’t married. That was not something that people would have necessarily even been aware of, because, you know, they lived together, they’d been together for a long time. People coming into the group, unless they asked, “Are you guys husband and wife,” that just wouldn’t have ever come up.

It was just assumed they were together. She was an outgoing, open-hearted person, and he was reserved. We see couples like that, of course, in everyday life. You just don’t think about it much beyond “that’s just their dynamics.”

Did you see them…

I never saw the kiss, for example?

Yeah, that would have surprised me if you had. In fact, while I didn’t ask her that question, she never said that. I don’t know that they ever actually did kiss, which is kind of tragic in a way. One thing that stood out to me when I interviewed Carla and Jim was the clear sight that Carla had for Don’s limitation combined with compassion [for him]. Between the two of them, in their own unique codependency, it was Carla who really strove to meet Don where he was, not so much the other way around, right?

For sure.

She saw him as, I don’t know if she would use the term “broken,” but somebody in great need. She saw that she loved and adored him and could tend to that need and support that need.

Well, “support” I would use… is the stronger word because she was so supportive, not only of Don as a person, but the mission.

Right.

She was the great collaborator. He would have this vision, and she would work with him on how do you get from point A to B to C.

In fact, that book, The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater, emerged I don’t know if immediately is the right timeline or just very soon thereafter those two committed to their mission and made a conscious decision “We’re going to do this for life.” What would become L/L Research.

Right.

Then it’s, I couldn’t tell you the Q&A number, but Ra describes what happened. Like, this nexus or portal, they don’t say those words… this magnetic opportunity was opened. Then they each have this vision, independent of one another, of the very same story that is The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater.15

They wrote it together quickly—a very short period of time, it came out.

It would be years later they would publish it. Carla helped to fill in the characters and the settings, Don had the plot, but it was the same story. It will also magically predict elements of their journey to come.

It did. But they thought that Carla was going to be the one that was killed…

That’s right. They thought that the end of the story ended with one of the two main characters dying through martyrdom.

They didn’t think it was going to be Don, yet it turned out to be Don.

They both… I don’t know how soon into the story they saw themselves in the characters. Maybe they realized that it right away. They felt that it portended something about their coming journey. That, like you’re saying, it would be as Carla described in the Tilting at Windows interviews, that she was the frail one.

That’s right; and Don was the strong one.

Like you were saying to us yesterday about how you just have never really gotten sick, outside of a couple major more recent things.

Unusual things, but not sick, colds and flu type normal stuff.

Don had never been sick. He was just, Carla described him as preternaturally strong.

[A post-interview insert about the ending of the book and its connection to the conclusion of the Ra contact:] In #68.14, Ra said:

“Time had become available in its present-moment form. The scenario of the volume went smoothly until the ending of the volume. You could not end the volume, and the ending was not visualized as [was] the entire body of the material but was written or authored.”

Meaning that Don and Carla saw the entire story up to the ending. They each sensed that one of the characters would conclude their incarnation, but not who. “This was due,” as Ra says in the same quote, “to the action of free will in all of the creation.” In other words, their preincarnational will had set the stage and designed a blueprint for a mission that could be followed in the upcoming incarnation. The incarnational will would have the opportunity to activate the program and, while within the bounds of the illusion, determine how it would end.

So, back to Carla and Don, she was meeting him where…

Where he was. Again, he was the guy that was working, bringing in all the income, and having to do a lot of travel; it was a lot of extra travel in order to be in Louisville. Don had some physical issues, too. I mean, his feet hurt and his back hurt. And he would never complain of that to others. He had these pain issues that just made all this extra travel he had to do to be in Louisville a burden.

Every time he went to work, he had an extra flight to Atlanta and an extra flight home. He just didn’t get a car to go home when his shift was over, like most people. When he landed back in Atlanta after completing his routes, he still had another four hours or so to wait to catch a plane and then get to Louisville and get his car at the airport to go home. All of that were things that led him to go to Atlanta in the first place, because he thought that would make it easier. You already know the story of Atlanta.

I was hating to see them relocate to Atlanta, because I thought that’d be the last I’d be seeing them. Until, of course, I was delighted to see them come back.

Yeah, cockpits don’t look like fun places. A cramped little box that you’re in for hours and hours.

Well, for him, he looked at it basically as a flying bus. Imagine being a school bus driver or a city bus driver—to the next stop, to the next stop, to the next stop—because intellectually, it was not stimulating, you know. As an engineer, you get to actually solve problems and work with people. But here, you’re dealing with air traffic control, like driving your car back and forth to work.

He’s got multiple stops. Then you’ve got to stay in a strange hotel someplace. The next day, multiple stops and strange hotels someplace. This was his routine. It was mind numbing to him, the actual work part. Sure, you think flying a plane takes a lot of intense attention.… Well, when you’ve been flying a plane 10,000 hours, it doesn’t take a lot, you know. “Start the engines, check your gauges, take off.”

He’s a highly intellectual Spock type person and he’s basically watching “tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.” [laugh] As far as today, there’s nothing going on. Boring!

So, when they’re together, she’s outgoing and gregarious, where he’s reserved, quiet, observing.

Right.

Did you see them relate at all? Did they literally talk to one another?

A little bit. But not in a particularly affectionate way. You just knew they were a couple, but they didn’t necessarily seem to fit. Any given day you see people that don’t seem to be a good fit. So, they didn’t seem to be good fit, but they had like-minds. How many people are into this paranormal stuff? You don’t see a lot of couples. In fact, here in our local groups of twenty to thirty people, there’s maybe three couples. Everybody else, it’s the guy or the woman coming without a spouse. So, you’re very, very fortunate when you happen to have a spouse that’s on that path with you. It’s not so common.

Yeah. And beyond just a general seeking, they had a very specific, I guess you could say, mission together that they preincarnationally arranged. It would have been interesting to see them together. I mean, we have that one video…

You say, “Yeah, it might be interesting to see them together… if you want to look at a TV that is turned off.” There’s not any action going on is my point. [laugh] You weren’t seeing any real relating. He was not an affectionate guy. Not a guy that talked a lot. He was an observer. There was nothing to see.16

Then one final question about the dynamic. We’ve already touched on it a little bit. There is the devotional component that Carla cultivated and owned as her free will choice. She was very consciously devoted to Don. Don, obviously devoted to her as well. Was that visible or manifest in any way to your senses?

You just knew they were a couple. And you never saw anything beyond that because they weren’t showing any of that. I want to add another salient point. Don was highly intelligent and a deep thinker. Carla was Don’s intellectual equal! She was likely on the genius spectrum. Hardly anyone could keep up with Don on a deeply intellectual topic, but Carla could.

Carla was putting the energy into the relationship on an emotional level. Don wasn’t. Don was providing the income to support them, and in a very generous way. Carla could have had anything she wanted, but her needs were simple. So, Don, with his good salary, because airline pilots back then made a lot more than the average Joe, so he could afford to invest in things like making his own movie and printing some of their books on his own dime. If they needed something, Don paid for it.

And then enters Jim McCarty. He hears Don and Carla on his battery powered radio, living in a log cabin.

Off the grid.

Off the grid. Naturally, he wants to meet these two people. He discovers he has some mutual friends through a co-op. They facilitate some introduction. He meets Carla at a Ken Keyes Center in St. Francis, Kentucky, I want to say, and Don shortly thereafter. So, he enters the stage around ’78. What was your impression of young Jim?

Well, I mean, we’ve seen so many people come in and out and in and out; our group grows and contracts. Jim is just another one coming in who’s inspired by this interesting message. By this time, it is going more spiritual, of course, than just the UFO phenomena. But he’s coming in, and he’s hanging around for a while. You’re not assuming whether he’ll last or not. But it just… This is a new guy. I think about [mentions several people who have come and gone over the years] how long did they stay? All of these people, they come in and are very interesting, and then they’re gone [after some time]. So, Jim is the latest. Most of the time, key people didn’t live with them, but there’s several cases where they did live with them; rarely did that work out well.

Yeah, as we were talking earlier, I got my own taste of that in 2003, when I moved in with a few others. I was the last one standing. Since that time, we’ve seen…

How many have come through?

Friends come and go. People that feel like family and then, if they head their separate ways, then the vast majority of the time, it’s a harmonious parting of ways and just a changing of directions. But sometimes there’s unfortunately a disharmonious parting of ways.

But not often.

No, no. It’s the exception to the rule. Certainly. So, the new guy Jim is there and giving you a basic good impression. He is another person.

Another seeker.

Another seeker. However, sparks obviously fly between Carla, Don, and him. You and Jim help them to move to the home that would become the Ra contact home on Watterson Trail where 105 sessions of the Ra contact.

Jim’s not living with them at that point [before the start of the Ra contact]. He’s invited in sometime later. But he’s very active. I mean, for example, we were putting out this newsletter every quarter or so. You know, there’s going to be [letters to fold and envelopes to stuff] so pizza party over at their place. They order a bunch of pizzas and cokes, and you go and you put together The Light/Lines Newsletter.

Of course, I remember when he came in and, you know, he’s part of the assembly line as a bunch of us are putting that all together. Jim is just another guy that’s shown up lately. You just had no way of knowing that he was going to stick around, because think about it, this is late 70s, and we’ve had scores of people come through. Who’s been around very long at this point? Well, Don and Carla were always there. Who else? Well, I happen to have been around early on, and I’m happy to still be around, but I’m also off living a life. I’m just there when I am living in Louisville… but there wasn’t anybody else, from way back. Not that it’s something I even thought about then. But now that we’re looking back, in retrospect, there haven’t been people that stuck around until… I mean, you did, obviously. But all of the people that you were hanging around with and have known since then, how many of them stuck around?

Was Beth invited to move in with them?

Not to live with them because she lived in Canada. She was married and then ended up having family in Canada. Beth has always been a friend but not active in L/L. She’s from the same clan, but her circumstances have not allowed her to participate, really, nor have mine other than I had a desire to, from a distance do what little I could. The Creator took us on different paths. You have been there in the way that you were needed in a very intense way, and Austin after you. But that wasn’t my path. Still isn’t and probably won’t ever be, is my guess. I’m just in a little more active role only because the way things developed.

Brief Morris Bio

I was going to weave it in at some point that you had really wanted to dedicate your life very similar to the way that Carla and Don did theirs.

Well, more in the way that you have Gary, in the sense that I was going to still have a career. At the time, L/L was small, and I would have liked to be playing a supportive role, weekends and evenings, because there was only so much work to be done then and because I was excited about working with them. This was all inspiring, I would have just been, had I been in Louisville, much more active. That obviously wasn’t the Creator’s plan. We didn’t need a full-time staff at that point, of course.

Right. So even if it’s less hours, still, you wanted to devote, at least a portion of your life, but for the long haul to that mission and to lend support.

Yeah.

You were talking to Trish and I about how you really tried to make that happen by moving back to Louisville.

I forced that move. Cratering my career for a while. [laugh]

It just proved disastrous. Instead of bemoaning your fate or shouting at the stars, you said you saw this as, “Well, I’m needed elsewhere.” “This is the Creator’s will.”

I did. But kept hoping that sometime along the way, I’d get an opportunity to come back. I mean, I was still reading the hiring opportunities in the Louisville area for quite a while. It never happened.

It took 30 years.

Well, I’m still not back in Louisville. [laugh] But it’s easier to communicate now. [laugh]

It sounds like at the end of the 70s into the early 80s, you didn’t have a lot of personal contact with Jim, per se?

In ‘78, I moved to western Kentucky, which did allow me, since I was in Kentucky, to be in Louisville from time to time. Whenever I was in Louisville, I would always touch base with them. Then I got myself moved back to Louisville in ‘81. That’s when I accepted a job that I probably shouldn’t have. I was there for 16–17 months or so. Then, of course, I was active with them all the time, including with Pooh Corner; this was the spiritual side of my life. I still went to church on a Sunday mornings.

I wanted to be back with this group. Until I had to leave to accept a job—I mean, in order to try to be in Louisville I ended up with two houses, a baby, a wife not working. I got laid off due to the economic downturn, so I’m not working. Savings are gone. They’re going to start repossessing my home, if I don’t get a job quickly. Then I took the first job I was offered. That took me Texas. Obviously, I’m not supposed to be in Louisville anymore. But I kept looking for a way to get back to Louisville. Then there are a series of job transfers. The next place is Jacksonville, Florida, and then Atlanta, and then Lake Charles, and then Chicago, and then Lake Charles again, and then Singapore, followed by China, Scotland, Malaysia, and Dubai before coming back to the USA. It was just on and on and on, next city after next city. But I ways stayed in touch.

I just couldn’t directly be part of L/L.

So, on a functional level, you weren’t participating.

Not participating on a functional level. On a metaphysical level, it has always been part of my prayer ritual, my intention, financial support, writing checks every month. Not big checks, until it got to where I’d only write one larger check a year, which came later. That’s in my heart of hearts and in my spiritual work. That’s the only connection and nothing that anybody consciously knew about.

Well, L/L Research and the people—Don, Carla, and Jim, even after Don passed, even after Carla passed in 2015, L/L Research, the people, The Law of One—it was never a phase to you, it was never, “Yeah, I was interested in that in the ’70s and the ’80s. But you know, I have other passions that fill my life now.” You’ve always kept that connection alive in your heart.

It wasn’t The Law of One. It was the connection.

To the people, primarily.

To the clan, or our family, for lack of a better word. Yeah, well, there’s The Law of One, and there’s the Q’uo contact. There’s all this wonderful information. But it’s not the information. We already “knew” it before it came through.

Would you say it was the mission, then? The mission of service to others. To share love and light on planet earth.

Yeah. And feeling the resonance with this particular family. Apart from the family, I’m on assignment wherever I am, but it’s still the family. I’m closer to this family than to my biological family, probably. Although, I mean, I’m still close to my sister Beth, who was part of that clan and my other sister, less to, perhaps my other brother. My parents, I was not particularly close to.

That’s true for a lot of wanderers.

Beth is an example of a clan member who never got the opportunity, after she left, to be back and has always been spiritually supportive. But just being part of the same clan doesn’t necessarily guarantee you get to hang together. Which for many wanders, there may be lots of clan members all scattered around the world.

Yeah, I would imagine there are members of our own group right now…

That don’t know anyone else.

And we’re not aware of each other. Could be anywhere.

Well, I wanted to ask a little bit more about the Ra contact years and Don’s decline, and then maybe dinner break. If you still have juice, no worries if not, we could explore your close encounter in childhood and some of the metaphysics and impact of that event, because your childhood event is brought into the Ra contact, along with the [artificial horizon] incident. [See below.]

Oh, that’s an interesting one. Yeah.

Then just personal bio—some of your own journey, which we’ve talked quite a bit about the past few days. I wish we would have just had a recorder then. Does that sound like a plan?

OK! I’m not sure that all of this is particularly interesting to anybody, but I’ll certainly share anything you think might be interesting.

Well, among my motivations for the Tilting at Windmills interview was a sense that this story needs to be documented for future generations and historians. Which isn’t to say that this will become some great new global following.

It won’t be.

Or super important.

It will be important maybe to a handful who are inspired by the message.

To those handful, the historic data will have been captured. Then they can draw their conclusions and study it as they will. I mean, we’re gifted, of what we know about history, from…

People that recorded it.

…intentional or inadvertent documentation.

[During the interview, I wasn’t able to circle back to the intended question about the artificial horizon. Fortunately, Morris shared post-interview.]

This is probably a good time to mention the extraordinary event that occurred as we returned to Louisville from the MUFON conference.17 Don had rented a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron to make the trip to Little Rock, Arkansas. We had a problem on the return trip. We were flying in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) conditions on a flight plan that Don filed before takeoff. Shortly after crossing the Mississippi River, the horizon instrument failed. It is a gyroscope instrument that tells the pilot the attitude of the plane and provides an artificial indication of the horizon when flying in the clouds. This is a critical instrument when flying IFR.

Don says “Oh, that’s not good!”. Don taps on the instrument a couple of times, but the gyro has turned on its side and is resting on the bottom of the instrument. Don says, “We have to get below this cloud cover now.” Don radios air traffic control to advise them he is cancelling his flight plan due to instrument failure and will descend to find VFR (Visual Flight Rules) conditions.

Don Slowly descends until we break through the clouds, which is only a couple thousand feet. He radios for weather conditions and learns it is IFR conditions on to Louisville. He is going to have to find an airport to set down. It is about quarter to one central time and suddenly the horizon jumps up off the floor of the instrument and appears to be working again! Don taps on the glass a couple of more times; that horizon instrument appears to be OK now. Don doesn’t trust this instrument now, because once it loses orientation, it can’t just start again.

Don heads to the closest significant airport, which is Evansville, Indiana, and puts down. He rents a car and we spend the night in Evansville. The next morning the weather is fine and we fly back to Louisville. When he lands in Louisville and turns in the plane, he explains what happened to the horizon instrument to the manager. The manager exclaims that can’t happen, but says he will check it out. We head home.

That would have been the end of the story. However, Don went to visit Uri Geller in Las Vegas about a week later. He was visiting with Uri in his hotel room when Uri asked Don, “What is a horizon?” Don asks, “What do you mean”? Uri says: “Something happened about a week ago. I got this flash ‘Horizon is Out’ and felt a surge of energy like when I am bending spoons or fixing something like a watch, then I thought of you.”

Uri reaches over to the table and picks up a manila file. He has written on it “Horizon is Out” and the time 10:44 PST. Don immediately recognizes Uri is talking about the problem with the horizon instrument during the trip from Little Rock to Louisville. It seems Uri fixed the instrument, which explains why it suddenly started working again.

Anyone who has familiarity with Uri Geller knows fixing watches and bending spoons was part of his “act” for demonstrating his amazing abilities. This particular case illustrates how interconnected we all are. We were in a plane at 15,000 feet and Uri Geller is in his hotel room thousands of miles away. Yet, he knew we needed help. It was like he was there with us, not consciously aware, but on a subconscious level quite aware.

[Resume interview.]

The Ra Contact Years

The Ra contact years, you were…

I was only in Louisville for a year and a half during the Ra contact. I knew the Ra contact was going on, but I wasn’t invited to participate in it for lots of good reasons. You had that threesome. You recall that they did try to bring in one or two other people that were involved, and it wasn’t necessarily great for the contact.

[laughs] They had to have very limited attendance there. Two or three people had the opportunity, one of whom slept through it. [laughs] What was your memory when you first heard about the Ra contact?

I think this was at their kitchen table. We were talking about this new contact that they were still being a bit quiet about because this was something pretty special. They just didn’t want to put it out there and have a whole bunch of people trying to get involved with this. They recognized that this was something that was a new, higher-level contact. They were really excited about it. This is a more informed higher source than we’ve ever had at this point. Of course, we’ve gone through Hatton, Latwii, and Laitos.

So, it seems like we’ve learned at this point that the level of contact you got was limited by the level of the least consciously evolved person present. Sometimes you’d be at a group channeling, and the message just wasn’t particularly great. What you had were some newbies there. When you had smaller groups of people that had been around for a while, you got some really good stuff. We had learned by well before this point that when consciously evolved people gathered it really ratcheted up the quality of what you were getting. So, everybody’s aware of this.

Then you had the three of them who had been working together, as we all know. You get this Ra contact coming through. It’s like, “THIS is cool!” You know you can’t be bringing in our normal meditation group because it’s just going to crater; they were quite aware of that. When they brought in a couple of people, they thought they were bringing in some people that were pretty consciously evolved.

Now, they didn’t invite me in; I never suggested or even expressed an interest. I was certainly interested in what they were talking about, but again, never necessarily feeling worthy of working with these high levels. I always saw myself as, you know, there’s Don, and he’s a teacher and is supporting Carla and maybe a little bit of surprise that this newbie guy (Jim) is part of it, but he’s living with them. So, he’s in a relationship. They’re sharing and talking all the time about things, so maybe he is pretty highly evolved, too. I didn’t know how highly evolved at that point. I knew I’m somebody working in the “real world.” My focus is doing my career work. I’ve got a family at that point. Certainly, involved to the degree that I can be, but there was never a sense that, “Gee, I wish they would invite me in.” That was never a thought that crossed my mind. I was interested that they had higher-level contact, though, and they were excited about it.

The audio will record that Morris put “real world” in quotation marks.

[laughs]

So, you’re at the kitchen table with them, and they tell you that they’ve got a new contact on the line. It’s a higher level. Oh, and about the invitation: I think that the only person that Don actively sought to invite may have been Andrija Puharich. I don’t think they invited anybody.

There were a couple of other people that showed up one time or another. But I don’t know the circumstances.

One of whom, Leonard, as mentioned. He falls asleep during the session.

That was the Leonard from Pooh Corner, by the way. [laughs]

Yeah, I figured as much. Which I can totally understand [him falling asleep] because it’s the slowest most monotone delivery in all of human history. That Don was able to hold on is part of his ability there.

Well, he could get the laser focus going. He was good at that. Puharich was quite an evolved character. Don had spent a fair amount of time with Puharich and Uri Geller, and considered Puharich a friend and somebody on his level, not in a condescending way to everybody else. Puharich was just a high-level guy. Don thought of himself, in a sense, as… not in a pretentious way, but he was getting this kind of stuff because he was ready for it.

He probably saw Puharich as a peer or colleague.

Yeah, peer. That’s a good word.

And engaged in much the same work: research beyond the illusion. Working with ETs and so forth. You know, Carla describes Puharich as a brilliant person.

This meeting when they tell you about it, do you register anything about their attitude, emotions, words?

Now, I couldn’t quote anything other than the obvious excitement that we’ve got something new and special. Of course, this is at a time when Don’s still thinking about movie opportunities. At this point, anytime you have a small enough group of intimate or longtime friends, you always got to, “Where is the next project?” Planning that at this point, so it wasn’t uncommon to talk about the next movie and where it might be done. For example, going to Arkansas and to that MUFON conference. There was part of it that was filmed for Don’s second movie attempt. I’m assuming that you probably had access to some of that film.

So weird. [laughs]

I remember them setting up the tracks for the cameras to go around, while the guy from Wyoming, the regressionist…

Dr. Leo Sprinkle.

Yeah, Leo. You know, while he was talking to Charlie Henson, doing a regression for him. I remember, as they were setting up the tracks for the cameras to go in, and how they would zoom in on the mouth of Leo…

Don’s there watching the film crew. There’s somebody that’s got some directing experience, and Don’s too amateur to be doing this sort of thing, and he’s explaining to Don: “We’re setting the tracks up here, and the cameras going to come around this way. It’s going to zoom in, and he’s talking.” It’s actually zooming in on Leo’s mouth, and you see the lips going, you know. Don’s thinking, “Is this really…?” [laughs] “That’s not quite the way I would do it.” [laughs]

There’s this kind of dynamic that’s going on where this Hollywood west coast guy’s telling Don how all of this should be done. Don’s acquiescing, but ultimately, he wants to get the project done. He knows he’s already shot this Esmerelda Sweetwater movie that’s gone through several configurations and ends up being released under some strange name. It never was particularly successful, so he knows he needs some experience on this next one. When we’re in Arkansas and you’re just kind of scratching your head, “Can this really happen?”

Because again, we’re folks from Louisville, Kentucky. And you’re talking about a Hollywood release here. You never thought Don couldn’t do anything. You just wondered how do you get from point A to Z? [laughs] Don will figure it out. But gosh, it just looked like a leap. By the way, Don had Leo regress me for a portion of that film. I am sure my part was only to be added as a “filer” to the regression scene.

It’s such a weird, for me, from my standpoint in the story, it’s such a weird thing that they pursued this movie. I don’t know how…

Think of how expensive it is. He has a film crew, a director and all this equipment flown into Little Rock, AR. Don has no experience; he’s an airline pilot. He just has a strong desire to make this happen, but he has no skill set for making it happen.

Talk about quixotic. I mean, it would make sense if you’re going to reach the mass mind through movies as a primary way to have some kind of impact. But that he thought he could pull it off or they could pull it off…

He was focused like a laser on making this happen. He was working to make it happen. Nobody doubted it. Don could do anything Don wanted to do. From here to there, you just don’t see it. [laughs] Never ever even verbalized something like that, because you wouldn’t even put into the universe that Don couldn’t do something because Don was brilliant. But you just didn’t see how it was going to happen.

Well, fortunately he threw his energy into the Ra contact, because that’s had far more of an impact than any movie would have.

Even during the Ra contact, he’s thinking about, “How are we going to make this into a book?” “How are we going to get it out there?” So that part of his vision was never left behind.

Yeah, Carla said after she awoke from the first session, he’s pacing the room saying, “Alrac, we’re going to write a book.” (Or “make a book” or “produce a book”) So, he knew from square-one that something special was there.

Yes. Now that excitement came through. In the very beginning, they knew they had something.

I have questions about those years, because it was a very, very special thing that happened—the Ra contact. It’s L/L Research’s most impactful work; most transformative and powerful. There’s something special about it. For those few for whom it resonates, when they encounter those words, it holds the potential to change their life.

Mmhmm. During that period, we still had our weekly meditations. The Ra contact was going on the whole time. But they weren’t talking about that. The only time they mentioned it was after everybody leaves, and there’s just a couple of us left. They would bring out a bottle of wine. Me being a poor college student… I’m never passing up a free glass of wine. [laughs] So, I happen to be there often a little later than some others. That’s when you might hear, “Oh, how’s it going?” And they might give a few little pieces. But they never were putting it out to the group. When it was only a couple of people around that might have known what was going on, then you might get a little bit of the flavor. It was always exciting.

You said you were there for the first year and a half.

Yeah.

That is when nearly all the sessions happened.

That is when most of it was done. So, I was there. while it was taking place.

Yeah.

Well, they weren’t giving me transcripts to read. I was just getting some very tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.

That is a good question about transcripts. I’m going to ask that in a minute. But first, do you remember anything from their reports of what was happening in the Ra contact? Anything that any of the three of them might have said about it?

They didn’t give a lot of information at that point. So, I don’t think I remember anything that is of value here. Certainly, they were talking about some of the stuff that was going on, but not giving you anything to run with. However, there was some discussion about the effects of psychic greetings.

When’s the first time you saw an actual transcript?

It was after the Ra contact was over. I don’t think I saw a transcript before. I think it was after the contact, when it was over.

Then session 106 happened in the beginning of ’84, I want to say. It was the only one that happened in Georgia, outside of the Watterson Trail house in Louisville.

I certainly remember having conversations about it, when they got back to Louisville, about what had been happening in Atlanta and why they had to come back. Some of the stuff that Ra had told them about. They described the cleansing rituals they used and the parts of the property that the energies would be coming in and using salt and garlic and those sorts of things. I remember having conversations about that and wondering, “Why does garlic work?” and, “Why does sea salt work?” Those were part of the mystery. But those were some conversations we had. Again, nothing of value for what you’re trying to do. I was on the outside, but close enough to where they could share some of what was going on that they wouldn’t share with everybody else, but nothing like a transcript until it was all put together. I don’t know that they shared a portion of a transcript with anybody. Are you aware whether they did? In other words, they’ve gone through sessions one through fifty and let some folks read that, I’m not aware that that happened.

No, I have no knowledge of that.

I only remember once it had all been put together that I had a chance.

I mean, other than publishers and literary agents. Also, Ra didn’t specify sea salt. That wouldn’t become popular, I think, until the 2000s. Ra just said salt.

Okay, maybe I put the “sea” in. [laughs]

[laughs] Just a dumb detail. You, however, did have a question that Don relayed to Ra about the densities and their vibrational characteristics.

Okay, I don’t recall right now what that question was.

I’ll make a footnote for the Q&A.18 So then, I guess there’s really not much to mine about your awareness of the experience of the Ra contact.

Because they weren’t sharing that with anybody outside of the three. Maybe Puharich. And maybe they shared with. I’m gathering that Leonard was more of a party crasher that happened to be around “We’re getting ready to start this,” “Hey, can I sit in on it?” [laughs] As he slept through it. So, you know, Leonard had been around for several years with the group. He was somebody that was obviously interested. But I gather he was probably crashing it rather than somebody Don would have reached out to. Don, again, was too gracious to say no, probably. [laughs]

Don’s Decline

I’m not sure when it began… I think symptoms of Don’s decline began prior to Atlanta.

Prior to Atlanta.

Atlanta was seen as a potential solution by Carla and Jim. “If we could make Don’s life less stressful, then…”

Well, he was feeling more stressed. “Let’s relieve the stress of him having all these extra flights that are required for getting down to Atlanta.“ But the Atlanta airport is on the southwest side of the city and he moves into a house that is on the far north side. How much sense does that make? Having to drive straight across the city of Atlanta could take over an hour in terrible traffic? [laughs]

[Insert post-interview:] As an Eastern Airlines pilot based out of Atlanta, Don’s flight routes flew out of the Atlanta airport, but he lived in Louisville. So, when he would depart for a trip that would last several days, he needed to drive to the local Louisville airport, then fly down to Altanta, and repeat the same in reverse when his trip was over. Today’s commercial flights are about 1.5-hour duration between Louisville and Atlanta.

The goal, therefore, was to reduce that commute time and effort by relocating to Atlanta. But the home they chose did the opposite—it actually took Don longer to reach the Atlanta airport by car then it did flying from Louisville. Like many major cities, Atlanta is notorious for traffic congestion. Open a map app and look at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport on the south end of the city. Now get directions from Cumming, Georgia. The picture becomes clear.

Don is a professional navigator who was quite familiar with Atlanta. Also, real estate agents local to Atlanta with knowledge of traffic existed. As did maps. How did this happen? Morris seemed just as puzzled as me. This was a gap in my memory. I pinged Jim about it afterward who graciously filled in the gap.

Regarding why we moved to the Lake Lanier House north of Atlanta: We had initially found a house just three miles from the Atlanta airport, but when we returned to Louisville after seeing that house with the intention of moving to it, Don misinterpreted the meaning of the huge hawk that landed outside of our front door just as we got out of the car and went inside the house.

The landlord of our Louisville home was selling the house and we had to move somewhere as we had run out of alternatives, so after Don made the decision not to move to the house three miles from the airport, he looked at a number of houses on his own and finally decided on the house in Cumming. Carla and I had never seen it and didn’t know where it was located. It was our way, during the Ra contact, to go with whatever Don suggested as he was quite wise and his suggestions usually turned out very well. This was certainly the exception, and I got a good indication of that as I began my journey to the new home in a 24-foot U-Haul truck. Just a few miles outside of Louisville the brakes on the truck locked up, and I had to have it towed to a repair shop before I could continue the journey. Looking back on that, I am sure that was a sign that this move was not a good idea. But we forged ahead, hoping against hope that this move would somehow work out, but it turned out to be a disaster.

I first saw the house at midnight, and I performed the cleansing procedure that time. Then I returned the truck to the local U-Haul and flew back to Louisville. Then Don and Carla and our cats flew down to the house while a friend of mine drove Don’s car, and I drove a second U-Haul to our new house. I believe that all of this took place in November of 1983.

On Dec. 2, the temperature went down to 2 degrees, and our pipes froze and burst. Our carpets were soaked and soon developed mold that Carla was allergic to. The kitchen/living room had a 17-foot tall ceiling, and the heat vents were at 10 ft., so it was a chilly time for all of us. Gandalf passed away while we were there. We never really unpacked but had most of our boxes of belongings piled in the office. Don finally realized that we needed to move back to Louisville, so he flew back and looked for houses on the east end of Louisville because he and Carla had always enjoyed taking rides in that neighborhood in the years before I met them. Happily he found a house the day after it went on the market and, without consulting us, purchased it on the spot. We left Atlanta and moved into the new home in April, 1984, and we’ve been here ever since.

When he asked Ra about it in Session 105, and it became obvious to Ra that Don had misinterpreted the meaning of the hawk, Ra refused to give clear information about its meaning because they didn’t want to infringe on his free will.19 However, Don’s misinterpretation of the hawk was a signal to Carla and to me that there was something going on with Don that eventually led to his mental and emotional decline.

Well, he had always felt stress from this long commute. He was a little bit more fragile at this point. He was getting a little older. He’s having some of the pains I’ve talked about. I wasn’t aware of the paranoia coming through at that point.

What were you aware of about the final chapter of his journey that ended in the tragedy?

I wasn’t really aware of that. I did know that he had been sick, and that he was going into a psychiatric hospital at one point and discharged himself right away. Now, I actually saw something on Facebook a while back said he was in a psychiatric hospital for three months, and I thought, “People put this crap on Facebook.” Anyhow, but he checked himself out right away because he felt he didn’t need that, didn’t want that, and he was going to be okay.

One doesn’t need to be informed to post to social media.

No.

I was aware that he was under additional stress, and that they were concerned about it, and they weren’t quite sure what was going on. Whether they recognized it as negative greeting or not, I don’t know. But there were concerns. He, at least, from what I was hearing, was downplaying it.

None of them could have predicted the outcome.

Yeah. Again, this is a guy that’s always got it together.

Somebody to whom they looked up and was their leader and competent in so many ways.

Now, I remember him having the thought of bowel blockage, because he wasn’t eating right and then sometimes could only eat ice cream or something to get at least some nutrition. And that the bowel blockage was just creating… making him incredibly uncomfortable and irritable. Even though I’m not intimate with them, I’m close enough to where I’m even getting some of this information, it’s not something they’re sharing a whole lot about. That’s normal. People don’t share their problems.

To the reader: this is explored in depth in Chapter 26 of Tilting at Windmills. [That will provide a primary source, whereas these Q&As just offer some additional small details.] They do talk about that episode where he goes into the psychiatric institution of his own volition. But with their support, maybe suggestion, he checks himself out.

Insistence.

If memory serves, the psychiatrist who he’s supposed to be working with was on vacation while he was there? So, he really wasn’t being seen.

Seen, no. He was just basically in a prison cell, so he felt, and nothing is getting done. “So, I can do this at home.”

Is there anything you would like to share on a personal level about losing Don?

Well, I recall that, obviously, Carla was just devastated by it for a long time. A long time. I wouldn’t say Jim was devastated because he doesn’t show the emotion to the degree that Carla did. I mean, they were a tight, tight group. I recall that period and the shock of it. Of course, a lot of prayer going into Don for his transition.

A difference, though, just on an aside, I mean, Don passed on, and there’s the love and light going to support him. But at some point, that connection just didn’t seem to be there for me. Carla passed away quite some time later [6.5 years prior to this interview], but I still feel that Carla is present. So, that is a difference. Don moved on, but Carla’s still around. How can I be sure? I feel it! [laughs] I didn’t feel it with Don.

I’m just saying, at the time, we’re all praying for Don’s transition. For a while, you can feel him. Then, there’s comes a point where he just doesn’t seem to be there. At some point, he just… Actually, I didn’t ever stop having him in the prayer ritual, I just stopped feeling him.

Carla is still present for us to have contact with on a metaphysical level. I’m feeling her, but I’m not feeling Don. He’s a part of the prayer ritual, so there’s some energy going out into someplace. No energy is wasted. But Carla is there. It’s being accepted. When you’re doing Reiki, and you’re praying, sending it, you can feel that flow if it’s being accepted or if there’s some kind of exchange. That’s taking place with Carla. That’s not something I get with Don and haven’t for a long time. But never stopped praying for him.

Yeah, Jim has said that he is far more emotional now—following Carla’s passing, actually—about Don’s death than he was back then in the ’80s. Jim has had a, you now, big heart opening since that time.

Big. Because we all continue to evolve. He is spiritual… his opening of his consciousness, the evolution that he’s going through is completely separate, I think, from the conscious stuff that’s going on. I mean, consciously, Don dies, and he’s feeling some things about Don and breaking up our group. But as Jim has continued to evolve, he’s reaching some parts that he wasn’t even tapping into before.

So, this is just a rough sketch. There’s not anything I can add to their story. They were there.

Not to their story or how it happened or why it happened, so much, even though I was wondering if there was any insight from your perspective, but maybe just the impact on you. You may have already sufficiently addressed that.

Sad to see him go. Kind of shocked, because we always thought of him as this strong one. Definitely wasn’t expecting it. Then, initial concern about what happens with L/L. Because Don was the driver.

Moving Forward & the Mission of L/L Research

You feel that Carla picked up the baton well?

With the support of Jim. But Carla was the intellectual one and the planner, and Jim was the doer; it was a good team.

And a power provider.

Jim’s more highly evolved now than he was then. A lot of that is because he’s needed to. As long as Carla was out front, then he could do his supporting scribe stuff. When Carla was gone, “It’s you!” Now of course, he’s got his supporting team, which you’re the lead of. But he began to recognize his responsibility or obligation to pick up the baton, and he’s done it in his way. By the act of him doing that, he’s evolved in a more accelerated way than when he was sitting back in a supportive role.

I’d like to get to your experience with your close encounter and your own personal bio. But anything else that comes to mind about anywhere from 1963 to 1984? Or L/L beyond ’84?

Let me give it just a couple of moments of thought. I doubt that we’ve missed anything of great importance. Because really… ’63 was [my UFO] contact. It wasn’t until 1974 when I re-engaged with them. While there were channeling sessions going on during that period, I wasn’t in those channeling sessions and was largely not wanting to deal with this “curse” [of being stigmatized from the contact]. Then from ’73 on, I was actively involved, on a weekly basis until I left Louisville. I think the important thing was they went from a phenomena-investigation group to recognizing this is a spiritual message, and that was a complete paradigm shift.

That can’t be overemphasized. This is a group of people [who at first are] interested in UFOs. No spiritual interest really. Not that they didn’t somewhere inside have it, but that wasn’t what was driving it. All of the pursuit was on the UFO phenomena and what’s going to happen to our planet, and how we’re going to adapt. That was the whole focus—a UFO researcher. Then by 1981, it’s largely—not completely, but largely—spiritual. So, between those years… 1974 to 1981… those seven years is when that transition is taking place.

It took some time for L/L Research to find the heart of its mission.20

Oh, absolutely. It was the phenomena that attracted Don’s attention. It was only through the repeated, you know, “This isn’t really important information.” [laughs] The Confederation gives a brief answer. Then their dialogue goes on with all of this good spiritual stuff…. I mean, none of the spiritual stuff’s going down in Don’s notes. Don’s got his little yellow pad there, and he’s looking for the questions and answers having to do with the UFO phenomena. All the spiritual stuff isn’t even on his radar in ‘74. I’m talking about from the late ‘50s until the mid ‘70s, you’re looking at twenty years of focus on the UFO phenomenon. All of the mission stuff we’re involved with today has very little to do with that stuff, [which at this point is] just an aside.21

So, that is the real inflection point… even as late as ‘74, there’s no real interest in the spiritual side. Even in the transcripts that you get, there’s very little spiritual stuff there. There’s some, but very little. Nobody’s tuning into that. Then by ‘81, it’s largely spiritual. So, you’re having a paradigm shift occurring. You can go through, just randomly pick out a channeling from each year, from ’74 to ’81, and you can see that transition taking place.

That’s probably the most valuable thing I can share with you in this interview. That’s when the “it” happened.

The true mission was born.

All of this other stuff was the history of how Quixote stumbled into what he was looking for, not knowing that’s what he was looking for. Twenty years of stumbling! The movie was part of the stumbling.

[laughs]

Because that was never meant to be. That was his vision, but that wasn’t important to the spiritual story. There was nothing about the movies on the spiritual stuff. Even through Esmerelda Sweetwater, you could read some spiritual stuff into that. But that wasn’t the intent.

Yeah, I’ve had this general understanding that the research transformed into the channeling effort to ask Confederation sources about the nature of reality. That became a spiritual service and a spiritual research.

After 20 years.

I didn’t quite have this frame that you’re giving it, nor the emphasis placed on it. That’s really illuminating. I think it’s good to highlight that as important. I’m glad that you did.

That was never recognized by Don for a long, long time, even though he was part of the clan. Way back there, he had to know all of that. But that wasn’t getting through.

[The Confederation philosophy is] a message to the dreamers inside of the dream. You’re having a dream of separation. And that dream, if not pierced, generates suffering for yourself and for others. But there is a larger vision. There is the possibility of waking up to the truth that all things are one. You are not the role that you’re playing within the dream.

That’s where L/L is right now. But that was not being picked up on in the early years. After twenty years of his research, not an inkling that that’s where it was going.

Twenty years of stumbling. Yeah, interesting also that you call it “stumbling” because that data that he gathered then, what exists of it, is not really useful, per se, to us… except insofar as it helped to prime Don for the more spiritually focused journey to come.

The Confederation contacts were saying so all the time! “This is not terribly important, but..,” and they provide some kind of minimal answer. This was happening virtually every channeling session. “Well, that’s not terribly important, but…”

I remember hearing this stuff and thinking, “I know how that question is going to get answered.” [laughs] “I’ve only heard it twenty times.” [laughs] But the resonance with the group kept me coming back. The intellect assumed, “Well, I’ve seen a flying saucer. I’d like to learn a little bit more about this.” So, they’re asking flying saucer questions. I keep thinking, you know, “They’re going to drop something here.”

I remember having conversations with Don and actually jotting down what these engine drives probably looked like and how they worked and black hole and gravity stuff and folding space. I had all these conversations with Don, which are technical and kind of interesting. We’re trying to get this from them in these questions, which they’re, of course, not answering. [laughs] Somewhere, I just knew that this wasn’t going anywhere. [laughs] But it never stopped Don from pursuing it.

Until it gradually began to dawn on him that he was barking up the wrong tree. To me, that is a significant realization, because the Ra contact wasn’t going to happen until he had that recognition. Don is not a dense guy, but he was focused on the phenomena.

Yeah, the Ra contact is kind of the white hot center of white. It’s a rather pure focus. Very laser-like, with little margin for deviation. It seems that they purified their focus, and they found the center of the bullseye in terms of spiritual inquiry.

Then, along with the convergence of other circumstances, Ra was able to reach out and say hello.

  1. In July 2014, Gary interviewed Carla and Jim over the course of seven days about the life story of L/L Research and the personal biographies of Carla, Don, and Jim. The transcripts from these interviews became the book of the same name, available for free at www.llresearch.org/library/tilting-at-windmills. ↩

  2. The following section was a side tangent that was relocated from the flow of the interview to this endnote:

    For the reader, Hal Price was an individual who worked for the Ford Motor Company up in Detroit, and he was a member of a group that we know now as the Detroit Channeling Group. This group began as a result of a close encounter. The (founder of the group?), Walt Rogers, had a contactee experience where he was given instructions about how to receive telepathic contact—what we know as channeling—from Confederation sources. And the Detroit group was practicing this channeling, channeling sources like Hatonn and Latwii and maybe…

    Latwii wasn’t around then. Just Hatonn initially.

    And Hal Price was an attending and participating member of this group. He moves to Louisville, Kentucky. He works at the Ford plant in Louisville. He has a mutual friend with Don Elkins. This mutual friend tells Don, “Hey, I’ve met this guy at the Ford plant, and he’s a member of this channeling group up in Detroit.”

    So, Don makes the connection to Hal. Hal gives Don what we know now is The Brown Notebook (because it was brown in color), and that brown notebook contained transcripts of the channeling that they were doing in Detroit. Don devours it quite quickly, I understand, and says, “This is the glue that brings my research together.” This was a year and a half to two years prior to your experience, when Don meets Hal and realizes that channeling is a way for him to effectuate his investigation into the mystery and put the puzzle pieces together. So, some backstory for the interview, however relevant it may be.

    Sidenote: Latwii made their first appearance in L/L’s archives on October 9, 1978. However, they appear even earlier in the Detroit Group’s channelings from the 1960s, available in The Brown Notebook. ↩

  3. Jim D. was Carla’s first husband and not the same as Jim McCarty. This relationship was explored in Tilting at Windmills, and many times elsewhere in Carla’s writing and talks. ↩

  4. Where 105 sessions of the Ra contact would take place. ↩

  5. In past-life regressions with Carla, Beth, and Morris, conducted independently of one another, each had overlapping, mutually corroborating memories of a past life on another world where they were members of the same clan, as they described it. This is excerpted in Secrets of the UFO, pages 135–188, and in the Introduction to Book I of The Law of One pages 36–42 of the old format softcover books and the pdfs on the website. ↩

  6. If those notes did exist, they did not survive, unfortunately. The one thing in Don’s own hand that did make it through the decades is a notebook with handwritten questions for Ra. You can see the entire thing scanned in Don’s Notebook section of the LLResearch website. ↩

  7. A land-based community that Don and Carla attempted with some others of their extended community that they eventually left. Discussed more in the book Tilting at Windmills. ↩

  8. Carla would talk how they would try to satiate Morris’s enormous appetite because he was a poor college student living on pennies. When she told the story, I always had a sense of a deep loving-care of Morris. ↩

  9. Eastern Air Lines went bankrupt and was liquidated. Its competitors, including Delta, acquired various of its air craft and routes. ↩

  10. Don was asked by the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to head up an engineering school. It was that opportunity that took him to Alaska for a short time. ↩

  11. Don’s desire to change the world, as Morris describes it, was also tempered by a calm and dispassionate approach that he demonstrated in interviews, written work, and in his general approach of sharing the material. This is carried through in the spirit of L/L Research. Encoded into L/L’s DNA is the desire to avoid the pitfalls of proselytization in deference to the sovereignty of the seeker’s journey. As Ra shares:

    “We, ourselves, do not feel an urgency for this information to be widely disseminated. It is enough that we have made it available to three, four, or five. This is extremely ample reward, for if one of these obtains fourth-density understanding due to this catalyst then we shall have fulfilled the Law of One in the distortion of service.

    We encourage a dispassionate attempt to share information without concern for numbers or quick growth among others. That you attempt to make this information available is, in your term, your service. The attempt, if it reaches one, reaches all.”

    The audiences receiving teach/learnings without stimulus from publicity will be more greatly oriented towards illumination. Therefore, forget you the counting.

    A similar dispassion is also visible in the following portion of Don’s question to Ra:

    After this introduction to the Law of One, as I call it, I would like to get directly to the main work, which is creating an understanding that can be disseminated to those who would ask for it—and only to those who would ask for it—for an understanding that can allow them to greatly accelerate their evolution. I am very appreciative and feel it a great honor and privilege to be doing this and hope that we can accomplish this next phase.

     ↩

  12. This is true, but also funny because, in my experience, Carla wasn’t great at meeting kids at their level. She expected them to act like adults and seemed to have difficulty with their presence at times. But she also had a maternal instinct toward others at times, particularly the readership. ↩

  13. In 2020, the publisher of the Law of One books released a hardcover anniversary edition; and in 2022, they released a newly formatted softcover edition to match the hardcover. The page numbers will be different for those. ↩

  14. About the difficulty of speaking to life in higher densities:

    We ask you to consider, as we speak, that there are no words for positively describing fourth density. We can only explain what is not and approximate what is. Beyond fourth density our ability grows more limited still until we become without words.

    That which fourth density is not: it is not of words, unless chosen. It is not of heavy chemical vehicles for body complex activities. It is not of disharmony within self. It is not of disharmony within peoples. It is not within limits of possibility to cause disharmony in any way.

    Approximations of positive statements: it is a plane of a type of bipedal vehicle which is much denser and more full of life. It is a plane wherein one is aware of the thoughts of other-selves. It is a plane where one is aware of the vibrations of other-selves. It is a plane of compassion and understanding of the sorrows of third density. It is a plane striving towards wisdom or light. It is a plane wherein individual differences are pronounced, although automatically harmonized by group consensus. #16.50

     ↩

  15. Restoring “full memory of the dedication of this […] mission.”

    We have been speaking almost precisely of the portion of the Esmerelda Sweetwater book which we wrote having to do with Trostrick’s misplacement of the space girl’s mind/body/spirit complex. What is the significance of that work that we did with respect to our lives? It has been confusing to me for some time how that meshes in. Can you tell me that?

    I am Ra. We scan each and find we may speak.

    Would you please do so now?

    I am Ra. We confirm the following which is already, shall we say, supposed or hypothesized.

    When the commitment was made between two of this group to work for the betterment of the planetary sphere, this commitment activated a possibility/probability vortex of some strength. The experience of generating this volume was unusual in that it was visualized as if watching the moving picture.

    Time had become available in its present-moment form. The scenario of the volume went smoothly until the ending of the volume. You could not end the volume, and the ending was not visualized as [was] the entire body of the material but was written or authored.

    This is due to the action of free will in all of the creation. However, the volume contains a view of significant events, both symbolically and specifically, which you saw under the influence of the magnetic attraction which was released when the commitment was made and full memory of the dedication of this, what you may call, mission restored.

     ↩

  16. Even that would have been interesting to see! ↩

  17. MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) is an International Organization that investigates UFO reports from around the globe, according to their website https://mufon.com/. ↩

  18. The question that Don asked on Morris’s behalf:

    I have a question that I couldn’t properly answer last night. It was asked by Morris. It has to do with the vibrations of the densities. I understand that first density is composed of core atomic vibrations that are in the red spectrum, second in the orange, etc. Am I to understand that the core vibrations of our planet are still in the red and that second-density beings are still in the orange at this time/space, or space/time, right now? And that each density as it exists on our planet at this time has a different core vibration, or is this incorrect?

    I am Ra. This is precisely correct.

     ↩

  19. Ra’s reply in the following exchange is enigmatic, though it definitely does not seem to be a confirmation of Don’s interpretation. Who knows what the underlying meaning or intention of the visiting hawk was, if any; the salient point for the story is that it was indicative of the fear-and-worry-based lens through which Don was viewing events.

    I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of the hawk that we had about a year ago when we started to move the first time had to do with the non-benign nature, in the metaphysical sense, of the house which I had picked for the move. If it isn’t a problem with the Law of Confusion I think that it’d be philosophically interesting to know if I am correct with respect to that.

    I am Ra. What bird comes to affirm for Ra? What bird would be chosen to warn? We ask the questioner to ponder these queries.

     ↩

  20. Sidenote: I wonder if this general arc of L/L’s journey from the outer, more superficial aspects in its opening chapters, to the deeper inner inquiry & meaning in its progressive journey, has some parallels in the dynamic of sexual/romantic attraction. Often, particularly in the less mature entity, the senses and the eyes are enticed and excited, but those initial electrical and chemical firings are only the invitation to the deeper journey of discovering self and other-self as the Creator. This is most accelerated through the mutual service of the bonded intimate relationship. ↩

  21. In the interviewer’s opinion, Morris may be overstating the case here a bit, because starting with the Detroit Group and eventually moving forward into Don’s “experiment,” the Confederation sources being channeled were speaking about spiritual evolution, love, the dawning of a new age, the philosophical meaning of life, etc. It is just that perhaps Don’s (and the group’s) focus was slow to shift fully into inquiry centered more squarely in philosophy and spirituality. Don’s was always a quest for truth; and over time that seeking took a different direction, shifting from the mysterious outer phenomenon to the center of it all: consciousness and the Creator. This definitely amounted to a paradigm shift, and set L/L Research upon the heart of its quest. ↩