A fellow I’ve been fascinated with for quite some time is Will Jima, probably most well known (in a fifteen minutes of fame sort of way) for a twelve page pamphlet he authored entitled Elvis Presley Dead or Alive? that almost singlehandedly launched the Elvis Never Died Conspiracy.

According to this Elvis Never Died Conspiracy timeline at the Presley Assignment website, Jima’s seminal yet modest sized tome was published in 1977, a mere month after Elvis’s supposed death, and it seemingly spawned a cottage industry of other Elvis Is Alive imitators who continue to this day spreading the Gospel of The King that never died. The Presley Assignment refers to Jima “as a Tupelo based private investigator” and that Elvis Presley Dead or Alive?  was “So obscure, in fact, that it does not become part of the ‘is Elvis alive folklore’ although certainly appears to have been an inspiration and influence.”

Jima’s real name apparently was Alvis Howard according to this citation at Google Books. News clippings from the period state that he was a ship building executive based in Huntsville, Alabama, who quit his job to become a full time investigator of strange phenomena. Other reports state that he lived in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Jima was 41 in 1975, which would make him well into his 80s now, assuming he still roams the Earth.

While Elvis Presley Dead or Alive? was Jima’s major claim to fame, it certainly couldn’t be said that he was a one trick pony, as he had his hand in all manner of fun and frolic, including a three LP set released in the mid ‘70s dedicated to UFOs, pseudo biblical prophecy and the Devil’s Triangle, among other kooky things.

Jima also authored a book or pamphlet called Flying Saucers and Golden Ghettos that appears to be even more obscure than Elvis Presley Dead or Alive?, which was already obscure enough to begin with!

The first installment in Jima’s audio trilogy was UFO Message (1974) detailing his alleged encounter with ETs (who he calls “UFO People”) in November 1973 in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It was on that momentous occasion that Jima had delivered unto him the aforementioned “UFO Message.”

Jima’s encounter apparently occurred at the same location as that of the Pascagoula “abductees” Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, a story detailed in the book UFO Contact at Pascagoula and more recently, Calvin Parker’s recollections of the event in Pascagoula–The Closest Encounter: My Story.

In UFO Contact at Pascagoula there’s a reference to a preacher selling records about “UFO’s and Demons” which some have speculated was Jima. However, according to my friend and Jima enthusiast Rob Mitchell—who turned me on to Jima’s recordings a few years back—the preacher mentioned in UFO Contact at Pascagoula  was actually Rev. Bill Riddick, who produced a startling LP called Visitors From Outer Space – What Saith the Lord? that features on its cover not one, but three Pascagoula Monsters!

According to Will Jima in UFO Message:

“The earth was originally settled over 100,000 years ago when inhabitants were brought here from another world in the universe. A civilization far more advanced than the one we have now flourish for thousands of years. This civilization was totally demolished when a nuclear explosion destroyed the planet that orbited Mars and Jupiter causing a cataclysmic upheaval upon the Earth. Continents were shifted, oceans and mountains were formed, the almost total geography of the earth was changed. According to the UFO people, by some unbelievable miracle, a few earth people survived. However, they were few in number and left with nothing but the raw elements to survive under. These small bands of earth people soon adapted to life in an almost animal state. They roamed the earth for thousands of years, until some ten thousand years ago, the UFO people returned to the earth. They had returned after the earth disaster, but had found no trace of the people who had survived and they had waited for the earth to stabilize before they returned to inhabit it again. They said the problem began when some of the UFO people who came back to inhabit the earth began to mix with the more animalistic inhabitants on earth who had survived the catastrophe. thus began the long period of struggle on earth between the mixed strain of inhabitants and the pure strain that came from outer space. The UFO People have kept a hands off attitude towards these opposing forces because they say universal law requires them to do so…”

Later in UFO Message, Jima talks about how he received a series of predictions from his ET robot friends:

“The UFO people said there will be a revelation soon which will have an astounding effect on America and will be the cause for turning America back on to the right path. They said this revelation will come out of the Watergate scandal, will concern former President John Kennedy’s assassination and the energy crisis. They would not reveal more than this, but said that it would occur prior to the two hundredth anniversary of the United States in 1976…. They said I would run a great risk in making all of this information public. However, they said, that although I would run into some great problems that it would be alright in the end. They said that the animalistic forces would go to any length to stop the truth from being told. They said that they did not normally make future events known even thought they had the ability to do so. But, to provide me protection, they would revel certain events that would happen in the future so that when this information was released and these events happened, that people of the world would know the truth. They said the animalistic forces could stop me but they could not stop the events from happening…they said nothing could every stop the truth!”

There’s more predictions on UFO Message which I won’t bother you with now because none of them came true anyway, but the long and short of it was that the UFO People are engaged in a battle against “animalistic forces” who, if I understand correctly, created the energy crisis that was a big deal back in the ‘70s for those of us old enough to remember waiting in gas lines at the time. Even though Jima never came flat out and said it, I get the vibe that the so-called “animalistic forces” he was referring to were probably “International Bankers.”

UFO Message includes of a lot of your garden variety classic UFO contactee themes of how we humans have screwed up our environment with atomic explosions and such, which also has apparently thrown the universe out of whack, and that if we don’t cease with our “animalistic” impulses and stop with all the nuclear testing, then they, the UFO People, will intervene and stop them for us. In fact, we have so befouled the planet that the UFO People sent robots in their stead to interact with us Earthlings because if the actual aliens came here they would soon after keel over due to all the toxins in the environment.

Apparently you couldn’t find Jima’s offerings in record stores. They were only available through the mail, and also were available on 8 track tapes—once again for those of you old enough to remember that ancient audio technology that was invented by gonzo ufologist John Lear’s father, William Lear.

Throughout UFO Message we are treated to the dulcet tones of Jima’s southern drawl, punctuated intermittently with what this reviewer at discogs.com referred  to as a “random generated synth sound (I’m certain it was just an ARP Odyssey with the sample and hold feature) that for some reason gets loud and then fades, and the gets loud again, sometimes at the most inopportune time (sometimes it gets so loud it almost drowns out his voice).”

In these recordings, Jima comes across like a cross between Hal Lindsay meets James Shelby Downard with a little bit of Southern preacher vibe thrown in on the side. In fact, when he starts getting revved up he sounds a bit like JC of Art Bell Coast to Coast AM fame.

 

 

 

Next in this stunning series of albums was Revelation 666 (1975), which features a biblical revelations-numerology trip that relates—according to Jima’s vision—to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. I won’t even try to explain it further other than to say it all has to do with what the  Jima called “The Number 11 Vision.” You can listen to Revelation 666 here.

Jima’s third and final audio offering was The Secret Sea: Where are the Ships and Planes (1977), which I just posted to YouTube for your possible listening pleasure.

The news story below, from the back cover of The Secret Sea, givers a rundown of Jima’s UFO encounter, although if you look closely at the font in the article you’ll see that Jima altered his name—basically pasted his Will Jima handle over his real name, Alvis Howard. In this article, Jima states his UFO encounter occurred in October of 1973 as opposed to what he says on UFO Message that it occurred in November of that year. Jima also suggested on UFO Message that the ETs who visit Earth are robots, but in this news article Jima describes the ETs as having “finely chiseled features, their complexion was almond, their eyes were slanted and they stood around 5-feet-10” and wore “powdery-gray jumpsuits that had no seams.” The article goes on to state that the aliens “were built, in fact, like earth folk, the blonde [woman] rather more so, if you can correctly gauge Jima’s enthusiasm.” In other words, she was a hot alien babe.

 

On  March 6, 2016, Idaho state police launched a manhunt for 30 year old Kyle Odom, a fugitive in the shooting of Rev. Tim Remington, an Evangelical pastor at the Altar Church in Coeur d’Alene. According to news reports, Odom ambushed Remington in the church’s parking lot, shooting the pastor in the head and back multiple times before high-tailing it from the scene.

Remington, who survived the shooting, had appeared the previous day with Senator Ted Cruz at an event hosted by the Cruz presidential campaign, which led to speculation that the shooting was politically motivated. As it turned out, a purely political motivation wasn’t actually the case. It had more to do with Martians, one of whom was the aforementioned Rev. Remington, at least according to Kyle Odom. Odom, a former Marine, apparently shot Rev. Remington on the grounds that he thought he “was part of a vast alien conspiracy to enslave the human race.”

The same day of the shooting, Odom released a manifesto to the media which claimed that “Martians” had infiltrated Congress, and that he wasn’t going to let them get away with it! Odom’s manifesto included a list of “notable Martians” that was non-partisan, including both sides of the political aisle from Elizabeth Warren to Devin Nunes with a little bit of Mitch McConnell thrown in for good measure.

Needless to say, the Remington shooting launched a massive manhunt for Mr. Odom, who somehow eluded the Idaho law enforcement dragnet and made his way to our nation’s capital. On March 8, Odom drew the attention of Secret Service agents when he was caught tossing a thumb drive and some documents over the White House fence. Among these items was his aforementioned anti-Martin manifesto in addition to a personal letter to President Obama, who Odom apparently didn’t consider to be a Martian, and I guess was trying to enlist in his crusade to reveal the Martian menace threatening our nation.

In short order, Secret Service agents detained Odom, and when they ran his name through a  law enforcement data base were alerted to an arrest warrant that had been issued for him on the attempted murder charge in Idaho two days before.

There’s certainly a lot to unpack in Odom’s anti-Martian manifesto, but it’s basically a sort of mini-bio epic of his life after leaving the Marines, and his subsequent encounters with hypersexual Martians.

Apparently everything went sideways for Odom after he entered  the University of Idaho in the spring of 2014. During his final semester that year, Odom was getting stressed out from a heavy study load and to mellow his mood he began practicing meditation. “It became part of my daily routine. As I learned more about meditation, I became interested in consciousness and our ability to affect it. I kept working on my meditation techniques and began achieving extreme states of consciousness.”

One night in February 2014, Odom was meditating when he had an out-of-body experience. “I entered a space that was completely dark and had no awareness of my physical boundaries/orientation…I felt very peaceful there until a blue light began to approach me. As the blue light got closer, I realized that it was another being.”

At first, Odom’s encounter with this being, or alien, seemed like a “blessing” but over time these meditative experiences turned into a “living hell” as he came to the realization that mind-controlling Martians were entering his meditative brain space for malevolent purposes.

This perceived harassment included text messages from the Altar Church, who were inviting him to attend their services, and when he did so, Odom picked up an extremely bad vibe there, and soon became convinced that the church people were actually hypersexual Martins in disguise, one of whom became his future target, Rev. Tim Remington. According to Odom’s manifesto:

“When I went to The Altar for the first time…they started playing with me sexually. Both the males and the females would play out their sexual fantasies in my mind. This came with random and uncontrollable erections as well as extreme anal stimulation… The harassment continued for weeks and intensified as time went on. I did my absolute best to maintain my sanity and tried to avoid them. This worked for a while, but eventually I had a huge meltdown. One day, I was in the bakery at Safeway when I got surrounded by a bunch of old men. Some of them looked at me and sniffed, so I knew it was them. They started stimulating my penis and anus simultaneously, then they spoke aggressively. They said: ‘Humans are nothing more than the result of a successful genetic experiment.’ The rest of the night they continually stimulated my penis and I couldn’t stop ejaculating. It got to the point where I was in serious pain… ”

At one point, Odom got so freaked out about all of this (and can you really blame him?) that he lit a charcoal grill in his car and rolled up the windows, hoping he would fall asleep and never wake up again, which most likely would have happened had the Martian not butted in. “They woke me up in an extreme panic, which caused me to get out of the car.”

After being treated for charcoal inhalation at a local hospital, Odom paid a return visit to the Altar Church, where he found himself face-to-face with his perceived nemesis, Rev. Remington. “We were in mid conversation when he suddenly revealed himself to me,” Odom wrote in his manifesto. “I have no clue how he did it, but it looked as if his human face became his real face. His eyes were huge and bulging, the eyelids were darker green, and the irises were yellow/brown with slit pupils.”

Oddly enough, Odom might have believed he was also a hypersexual Martian, or at least was turning into one. Around the time Odom was knee-deep in his anti-Martian mania, he changed his Facebook profile photo to the portrait of the very same Martian from his manifesto, as revealed in the Washington Post article entitled Idaho shooting suspect’s ‘hypersexual’ Martian Manifesto Is A Window Into An Unraveling Mind.

At the time Odom’s story was making the rounds in 2016, my friend Richelle Hawks noticed how this photo of Odom, and the portrait of the Martian drawn by Odom, seemed so proportionally similar. Out of curiosity, Richelle decided to overlay the two images in Photoshop, and was quite surprised with the results. As Richelle noted:

“One of the weirdest things is that the overlay matched up exactly without having to do one bit of resizing as I assumed I would. The most remarkable thing I think, is the curve of the mouth being literally identical. But everything, really….

“I almost feel like someone else saw the resemblance and positioned the photos to draw attention to it. Of course in a regular news item, the poor dude could not very well do an overlay. It was just very blatant to me even at first glance.

“It’s very difficult normally to do any kind of overlays with faces or bodies because there is always a ton of matching up to do. Even if you were to take 2 photos of the same face, let alone even a drawing of a face and a photo of the same face. And then that this isn’t even supposed to be his same face. Basically, it seems impossible that they are even sized correctly. It might all be coincidence, but even that is kind of a weird part…”

 

A Los Angeles-based contactee with purported psychic powers, Maria Graciette billed herself as a countess and former Miss Portugal. A true renaissance lady of the new age, Graciette authored Astrology and Your Sex Life (1965) and recorded an LP called Astrology, Know the Language of the Stars.

As Graciette once informed The San Bernardino County Sun:

“Since I was a little girl, I’ve been able to see auras around people. When I was very young, my teacher gave me a mysterious box and told me never to lose it. I’ve had the box for a long, long time!

“I had always used it in my studio to store things. It was by accident that I discovered the mysterious power of the box. I had thrown some pictures in the box and when I took them out I could see auras around the figures in the image. I have always been able to see auras in photographs, but now it seems to me that it is much easier to read the auras in an image when it has been placed in the box…I do not know what it is, I cannot explain it but when I write a statement on a sheet of paper and put it in the box, the statement is always true.”

Graciette was a guest speaker at the 1966 Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention in addition to a number of other ’60s saucer happenings such as Daniel Fry’s Understanding Conventions. At the “Understandorama” in Harmony Grove, California, in November 1964, Graciette hosted a forum called “My experiences aboard a spaceship”—although I could find little in the way of specifics regarding Graciette’s purported UFO contactee experience.

Throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, Graciette made a series of psychic predictions that often found their way into the pages of The National Enquirer. Here are some tantalizing highlights:

*A UFO base, thousands of years old, would be found deep in the Mexican desert.

*Vice President Quayle, attending a World Series game, would impulsively interfere with a play.

*A meteorite would crash into the White House Rose Garden, placing President and Mrs. Bush at risk from radiation.

*Actor Tom Cruise would lose his hair due to a stress-related illness.

As for her title of Miss Portugal—and of being some sort of “Countess”—the excellent Mexican UFO website “Marcianitos Verdes” could find no evidence to back up these claims and suspected that Graciette  had constructed them out of whole cloth.