Man in a Jar without a Brain

 

 

“Man in a Jar without a Brain”

by

Dale W Tice

Copyright DWT 2020

 

What if I told you I was abducted by aliens?  I know what you are thinking right now.  It’s reasonable that you should roll your eyes and disbelieve me, I would do the same if you were the one telling me that you were abducted.  However, keep an open mind, and I ‘ll describe what happened to me and how I was able to get back to Earth from spending the last few days in a alien space ship with them studying my brain. 

I live deep in the country, twenty miles out of small town in Missississippi called Laurel.  You take Highway 15 south until you reach a place called Tucker’s Crossing then you turn left there and go another five miles then make a right.  This puts you on Freedom Road.  Freedom Road was where I was abducted.  When you make that right on Freedom Road you have to drive another ten miles or there about to get to my house.  Freedom Road has a long straight away of about two miles of just straight road then it hits the Bogue Homa Swamp and gets all curvy from there, like the makers of the road were following the path of a snake to make the road. 

As I turned on Freedom Road and then made the sharp curve that then put me on the straight away I just happen to see out of the corner of my eye an orange glowing light in the sky that looked something like a sphere.  It was moving right to left along the Bogue Homa Swamp.  I was tired, it was after midnight, I was coming home from work, so, I did not believe my eyes at first and told myself I was seeing a light reflecting from some car that I did not see.  The light was not a flame from some rocket engine but was just a glow, like it was an energy source.  I know, weather balloon, meteor, swamp gas.  Right?  No, I would argue, it was not any of that.  To fast for a balloon, plus it glowed, to slow for a falling meteor, no trailing flame, and I am not even sure what swamp gas is. I guess the government the swamp farts and lets out a ball of glowing light. 

As soon as the ball of light had appeared, it was gone.  I was not sure if I had seen what I had seen.  I slowed my car down trying to get a glimpse of it in the sky once more however, it had completely disappeared.  I tried to get it out of my mind, as my car creeped down the road with me turning every which a way trying to see where that light had gotten off to.  I pushed down on the gas to get back up to speed again.  I was about to enter the swampy part of Freedom Road when I saw two figures standing in the road.  I took them to be lost hunters or someone who had broken down in the swamp when I caught their images in my headlights so I slowed my car down when I got close enough and was planning to offer them a ride.  Strange things were happening now, I felt it in my bones, the light, now the figures, I sense of worried crossed my mind and I really just wanted to forget all of this and get on home but fate wasn’t going to allow me to that at this moment. 

When I got near enough the figures, with my lights beaming in their eyes, I could see they were not regular people, they looked strange in appearance, still I slowed my car down, because the closer I got the more they were able to control my mind.  When I noticed their weird appearance, I was going to punch the gas and get on home, load my shot gun and stay up until daylight, making sure they didn’t follow me but I was not doing that, I was slowing down.  Even with my headlights on them, I could see their heads were large, their bodies were long and thin.  I pulled up beside them, rolled down my window, looked into their black bug like eyes and asked them “do you need a ride?” Their faces were gray, maybe some sort of blue, their skin was smooth.  They had a line in their faces were a mouth shout be, two holes where a nose might once had been, earless, however, their eyes were large bug eyes that stretched long up and down and sideways.  They had no hair on their faces, or the top of their head.  Just smooth gray skin, long thin bodies, boney fingers, and cold to touch.

“Don’t be afraid,” one of them said to me as he opened my door “we do not mean you any harm.”  I felt my foot slip down on the gas petal and the engine rev like I had punched the gas, but the car was not going anywhere. I had put it in park, and I heard my voice screaming, loud, in fear as I felt the one nearest me take my wrist and pull me from the car.  I was complying and resisting at the same time, like they had control of part of my mind, and yet there was still a part that I was in control of.  

“Am I asleep at the wheel?” I questioned the veracity of the images my brain was telling me.  “Is this really happening?”  I wanted to run from them, however, I was walking at their side, with them guiding me, to a light in the middle of the road.  I heard myself screaming still and I remember turning to see my own reflection still setting in my car, screaming.  “What is happening?’ I asked myself. 

“The science is too advance for you to understand,” one of them tells me. I am not sure which is speaking because neither of their mouths move when they speak. 

“If you are searching for intelligent life,” I tell them “you should go get a doctor or a scientist.  I’m not smart enough to be studied,” I say to them.  I hear them both laugh at this. 

“You may be more interesting than you realize,” I heard them say as we stopped in the middle of the spotlight that had turned the night into day and then we started to rise upward.  My screams continued but they were getting softer the further I got away from my car and me. 

Maybe I passed out, I am not sure, but after we entered the white light and I felt my body start to rise, everything from that moment, I have not recollection of.  The next memory I have is me laying on a table, it was either white or silver. I cannot say for sure, but it was hard and uncomfortable.  It was like a table a coroner would but a cadaver on.  I was not tied down, but I could not move a muscle.  They had my mind bound in some way where I could not fight them off and resist their studies. 

“What is your name?” one of them asked me as he leaned down over me and attached something to my head, or I thought it was my head, in fact they had already open my skull and were  attaching sensors to parts of my brain. 

“Ernie,” I said.  “Ernie Redmond,” I told them.  “I live just a few miles from here,” I was referencing the point of where I had run into them in the road.  I had not realized that we had flown far from that point and now were on the opposite side of the sun from the Earth, so that they would not be detected by Earthlings. 

“Do you feel any discomfort?” they ask me.  I shook my head no.  “Good,” it said.  It spoke courteously to me as If were my doctor giving me an examination.  Its grasp of English was extremely good.  Apparently, they had been studied our species for a while to understand our language and how to approach us and try to help one stay calm as they conducted their tests.  “I know you have a lot of questions and that this is very strange to you, but we have not interest in harming you, only to study the human brain and try to understand how it works.” 

I then tried to move my mouth to say, “why me?” 

“Do no speak with your mouth.  We can read your thoughts when they form in your mind.   It is best that way because we have instruments attached to your mind which may, what is the word, lobotomized you.”  I heard the alien tell me followed by a quick whimper of laughter from two voices. 

It was at this moment, looking into the alien’s black eyes I was able to see what they were doing to me.  They had my brain attached to some wires and one of the aliens was prodding at my brain, sometimes extracting parts of it, with its instruments. 

“You still don’t feel anything?” it asked me.  I again shook my head no.  “Good!” it said then followed it with “human brains are some of the most interesting brains in all of the world. Ours are more advanced at many levels, however, yours are still primitive enough that we are able to understand more about ourselves but studying your brain being your barely more advance than the apes of your planet.”  It went on operating on me as it spoke.  “I wish we could share what we no about the parts of the human brain with humans because it would go a long way in solving many neurological problems, however, we can’t.”  It took my arm and raised it up and held it in front of my face.  “You don’t feel that do you?”  I shook my head no.  “We can stop your feeling not by using any drug, but by simply pressing down on a part of the brain that could stop a patient feeling pain naturally.  I would tell you that part, but then, I am sure you would run off and tell a doctor.” 

I was looking at my arm that the alien was holding up in front of my face.  It looked like a stranger’s arms and not mine at all, but it was mine.  I was able to follow it back into my own torso.  As I studied my own arm, I heard the alien tell me “eat it?”  I had to take a moment to make sure I heard it right and then it said it again “eat it.” 

“What?”

“Shhh!” the alien signed with its finger then reminded me “think it but not say it.” 

“I’m not eating my arm,” I think these words.

“It will not hurt,” the alien said. 

I guess it was part of the test because suddenly I begin to smell, friend chicken, hamburgers, and pizza.  I was now suddenly hungry, very hungry, and I looked up at my arm and no longer did my arm look like an arm but now reminded me of a hot dog and the next thing I knew I was taking a bite of my own arm.  The shoved my arm into my mouth and I willingly sunk my teeth into my skin and started to rip at it.  When I pulled the skin back to pull it away from its muscle it just stretched like cheese and would not break.  I tried to swallow it but I could not swallow it.  I just kept biting and yanking like a dog playing with a dog toy.  The aliens they watched, studied, wrote things down, I am guessing that was what one of them was doing.  After about ten minutes of this one of them pulls my arm away from my mouth, lays it back down beside me body, then adjusts the wires running into my brain. 

As the worked I was able to move my eyes about in my sockets and move my neck somewhat.  They did not like this when I did it, but I did not care what they liked.  They were the ones that brought me here, I just didn’t’ show up on my own free will.  I was able to move my eyes just enough that I happen to catch a quick glimpse of several human beings, full bodies, floating in jars of some sort of liquid salient solution to protect them from decomposing.   Their heads were still open, minds attached to wires, eyes closed, swimming in the solution, however, sensors below their jars showed signs of life.  I wondered was this my fate.  Would I remain just a human being stored in a jar for them to collect.  I wondered if we were not all nothing more than mankind preserved in jars without our brains.  Where the aliens kept the human brains, I could not say?  I could not see the whole room to discover this. 

At this moment, they begin to detach the wires from my brain, but I had not noticed it at that moment.  I only remember it in this recollection.  A fly caught my attention, yes, a common house fly, caught m y attention.  I was not thinking about the housefly as much as I was thinking about Emily Dickinson and her poem.  I am strange that way.  I can leap from one subject to another in just the frame of a heartbeat. “This is what we find so interesting about your mind,” the alien told me “and it is why we chose your brain to study.  Those we study are not necessary the most intelligent of their species, but their brains have wonderful maladies and interesting idiosyncrasies that we like to see why they do certain things and why they do not perform normally like other humans.  You humans think, something like lack of concentration, inability to focus, is a sign of a person that can’t focus when we see it as a person whose brain had advanced in one part of multiple thoughts and yet its physiological properties are still primitive.  That is why we don’t abduct just doctors and scientist.”  

I heard their words that they spoke but the fly, the fly was all I was focused on as I followed it around the room, circling and spinning, racing around the heads of the aliens like they were smooth gray moons.  I could hear the alien still explaining something to me.  I knew that I was free to go.  I was thinking about just jumping up from the table, running out of the clinic and getting in my car and driving away.  None of this caught my attention like the house fly that now landed upon the tip of my nose.  I was looking at it, it was staring at me.  We were eye to eye.  I noticed it had big black eyes like the aliens.  I wriggled my nose to try to get it off the tip of my nose, but it would not leave me.  I tried doing this once more and still it did not leave.  Eventually, without noticing I had done it to myself, not even realizing I could move my arm freely once more, I reached up to slap at the fly.  I missed and I caught myself in the face. 

The slap in the face woke me back in my car and I was moving, just woke up, about to go into a ditch, I swerved my car, to miss the ditch, and put it back on the road.  I was still screaming from when I was abducted, and I could not understand why I was screaming.  I stopped it immediately as I continued driving through the swamp, over the two bridges, out the part where strange Benny Taylor lived, left at the fork in the road, and back to my house. 

I had to set in my car for a moment before I went into the house.  I focused on what had just happened to me and sure it was happened, then, a part of me was already telling me, this did not happen.  I knew I was going to have to write it down, immediately, write it down, etch it into my

memory, never forget it.  I got out of my car, headed toward the front door of the house but as I walked across the drive, I paused, I looked up, I tried to see if I could see a top of a glass jar above me but I did not see nothing but stars and black sky.  “Am I just a man in a jar without his brain?” I wondered “or am I a man with free will living in a vast man-eating universe of blackholes and exploding suns, poisonous gas, or electrical storms that could sizzle me at any moment.”  I told myself I preferred the man-eating universe to the jar, but I was not so sure.  The people in the jar would live a life completely oblivious of all around them, in their own imaginary universe, while I, I would have to live my life in fine balance between life and all that can kill me. 

I stopped thinking about it, focused on recording my abduction, I rushed into the house, found a pen and paper and wrote down my abduction story and this is it.