-Caveat Lector-
[Sent with permission, with original email blanked by request - jt]
----- Original Message -----
From: <email blanked per request>
I would like to tell you something that happened to me when I was
in college. It was in the spring of 1969 when I was a freshman at the
University of Iowa. It was during the Vietnam War and there were
protests every day after class. The meeting place was in front of a
building on campus that was called the "old capital". Before Iowa
became a state, this building was the capital building for the
territory. When Iowa became a state they moved the capital to another
city & made this into the state university instead. Now the building
was where the president of the university had his office. There was a
microphone and loudspeakers set up on the steps and a large gathering
of people to listen to the speeches. On this day, I got out of my
last class and headed over to this area. I saw three of my friends
standing in a line by the bottom of the stairs. So I went to join
them. There was a large crowd that was between 3500 to 5000
throughout the afternoon.
There were a number of speakers. Anyone could speak. You stood
in line in back of the microphone and when your turn came, you could
say what you would. A young man named Hayes started speaking. He was
from the Black Student Union and he had sun glasses that looked like
blue mirrors. He said some things, then he asked for everyone who
agreed with him to raise their hands and give the power or peace sign.
Almost
everyone in the crowd did this. The power sign was a raised fist.
The peace sign was two fingers forming a V. Then he said that we
should go inside and talk to the president about what we thought. I
followed inside. I assumed that my friends were right behind me. But
they weren't. I just wanted to see what would happen. I had noticed
that what the news reported as happening, wasn't true.
Inside there were only about twelve of us. Many of the Black
Student Union members were male athletes and their girlfriends. The
president's office wasn't open. A basketball player who was listed as
6 foot 11 inches tall was there. I'm about 5 foot 9 inches tall. He
leaned against the door to the president's office and it broke open.
We went inside. Hayes wanted to occupy the office but the others
weren't so sure. Outside the large group of people were just standing
there watching us. They were like they were frozen. Hayes broke out
a window and called out to them to join us. But no one moved. We
talked a little between ourselves and decided to leave. I went out
the front door and got in line to speak. The others went out the back.
When my turn came, I gave a short speech and joined my friends.
Later we all went home. The next day in the newspaper, the headline
read. "Student protest turns into violent riot." There had been no
riot.
Two days later I was at the demonstrations again when I saw my
friend Marsha coming toward me. She was a tall young woman, 6 foot 1
inch, and she had red hair so I could always spot her in a crowd. She
had a young man with her and she introduced him to me. He said that
he was writing an article for an underground newspaper. He looked
like a student so I trusted him. She had told him that I had been
inside the president's office. He didn't seem very interested in my
story when I told him that nothing had really happened except for one
broken window. I had only said about four sentences to him when he
walked off.
The next morning I saw the newspaper. The headline said
"Exclusive interview with student leader." I thought this would be
interesting, but when I read the story, I found that the student
leader was me. The man I had talked to the day before was really a
reporter for this newspaper. I had made the mistake of giving him my
real name. He had rewritten my four sentences and now had a two page
interview. He had lied to me and made up a bunch of stuff in the
story. The story had me talking like a little child. It was
embarrassing. After this people started knocking on my dormitory room
door and calling on the phone. Some of them weren't happy about this
interview. I started not going home so much and spent more time in
the Student Union building or in the Library. Everyday my roommate
would tell me about who had called or knocked on the door.
One person that started knocking on my door was someone I had
gone to school with in my hometown. We knew each other, but were not
friends. He sort of kept to himself. His name was Greg. Now he
started coming over regularly, about once a week. I thought he was
lonely and didn't think anything of it.
About a month later I received a call from the police. They said
they wanted to talk to me, so I went to the police station to get it
over with. I was there for about two hours. I had decided to play it
like I was stupid and didn't know anything. I told the detective that
I was just a freshman and was at the demonstrations because I didn't
have anything better to do. He had a large stack of pictures and he
showed them to me one at a time. Most of the pictures were of the
crowd at the moment that Hayes had asked everyone to give the power or
peace sign. They must have used a motion picture camera and then made
the photos from that. They must have had more than one camera too.
Because they had pictures of the whole crowd in close ups of about
four to six people in each picture. They were raising their hands. I
don't know how else they could have taken so many pictures in so
short a time. I looked at each picture and said that I didn't
recognize anyone. They had a picture of my friends standing in a row
and raising their hands, but I didn't recognize them either. This
picture ended before it got to me and I wasn't in it. There were also
pictures of everyone who spoke at the microphone. Again there was a
picture of every speaker except for me. Then he brought out some more
pictures, showing the people who had been in president's office as
they were leaving the building. Again no picture of me. He also
brought out the newspaper interview. I told him how the reporter had
lied to me and he put it away. He didn't seem to be upset that I was
playing stupid. He started showing off how much he knew about certain
students. He told me that Hayes was not a student, but was in fact a
provocateur. A provocateur is someone who works for the police, but
poses as something else like a student He tries to stir things up and
get people to do something illegal so the police can arrest them.
Then they let me go. I was glad to get out of there and hoped I
wouldn't see any of them again.
The next school year, in the fall, I was sitting in the Student
Union with some of my friends when there was a flash like the flash
bulb from a camera when it takes your picture. It looked to us like
someone had taken our picture and then disappeared around the corner
of the door going out of the room. For the next six weeks or so our
pictures were taken many times like this. Sometimes it would be when
you were by yourself. For example I was going out of a book store
when the flash went off right in my face as I opened the door. Other
times it would be when you were entering a building or going down some
stairs with the flash coming from up above. Or walking down the
street from a passing car. None of us ever saw the person who was
taking these pictures clearly. But there was always a flash. Mostly
the pictures were taken when there was a group of us at the Student
Union. There would be 8-12 of us and we'd all see the flash at the
same time.
So it wasn't a hallucination. The room in which we would meet was a
large one with many tables and chairs. There was also a juke box and
some concrete pillars. We assumed that it was the police trying to
scare us. So when we saw the flashes, we would all laugh and make
jokes to show them that we weren't afraid.
Then the whole thing changed. The flashes started coming from
the ceiling and the pillars instead of around the corner. We would sit
at a different table every night, but the flashes would still find us.
We examined the ceiling and pillars, but couldn't figure out how
they were doing it. After about six weeks it stopped. I've since
found out that this same thing has happened to other people. There is
even a name for it. They call it "the phantom photographer."
All this time Greg, continued to visit me. But he wasn't one of
the ones who would meet in the Student Union. He would knock on my
door about once a week and talk. Then at the end of my sophomore
year, he came over one evening. He told me that he was an informer
and that he had been visiting me as part of his assignment to gather
information. But that now his assignment was over and he wouldn't be
seeing me any more. He was serious. He wasn't joking. Then he told
me. "Don't worry Steve, I wouldn't give them anything they could use
against you." Then he left. He was right, I never did see or talk to
him again. The last I heard, he was the principal of the very grade
school that he had attended as a child
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