| Evidence | News Clippings | "The Film" |
The name MORTIS OMEGA may not be known to you. Nevertheless, according to my findings, this name represents a secret force that is closely tied to THE ILLUMINATI, GRAY ALIENS, the Egyptian PYRAMIDS, and the secret names of the ANGELS. I have researched this extensively and am left with no sensible option but to release the news to the general public.
Let me start at the beginning.
Until May of 2006, I was a journalist for the Columbus Dispatch, in Columbus, OH. In February 2006, I first came across unsettling evidence in the form of a lead for a story.
At the time, I had an informant named Leon, who lived in Columbus's Old Town. In 2005, Leon had tipped me off to a crack cocaine ring and a string of related homicides, whose stories would earn me the Press Club of Cleveland's Excellence in Journalism award. But at the time our story begins, in February 2006, Leon endangered his reputaiton by coming to me with something odd.
He looked like he needed money for a fix, but he said the tip was genuine. I was skeptical, and paid him only half of what he was asking (in the form of a crisp ten-dollar bill).
What he left me with was a crumpled photograph. I still have it, and it is reproduced below. It looked like a couple of soldiers in the desert. On the back of the photo was written in ball-point pen, "Cpt Eberhardt (l) w Col St-Bismarck (r), Dhahran, 1991."
It looked like standard dumpster-diver fare. I cursed myself for the ten bucks I would never get back, and the investigation might have ended there. But it was a slow news week, and I used the photo as an excuse to get out of the bullpen for an extended lunch. I brought my laptop and figured I'd see what I could get from a search of the usmc.mil's Marines Locator.
There were a few Captain Eberhardts in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and stationed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. But I found only one with a Franklin County home address, whose pic might've ended up in Leon's dumpster: Cpt. James Eberhardt, DD, in Groveport, OH. "DD"--Dishonorable discharge.
No Marine Colonel St. Bismark, though--or St-Bismarck, or just Bismarck, or any other spelling. Funny name to make up, I remember thinking. Maybe from another service, I thought? No insignia visible in the photo.
Over a post-lunch beer, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request on the both of them. Then I headed back to the newsroom.
A little searching gave me Jim Eberhardt's address in Groveport. I stopped by there the afternoon of the next day and knocked on the door. I was greeted by a sullen, slow-moving woman in her early forties. She had a drained look to her face. I asked for James Eberhardt; she said she was "the widow Eberhardt." Clearly I had missed something. I showed her my press credentials and the photo. She almost closed the door in my face, but I managed to convince her that I was friendly, and eventually she let me in.
Her lifestyle was pitiful. The smell of rancid cat piss stormed my nostirls--I figured 11 cats on the premises before losing count. A stack of rotting newspapers filled one corner of the living room; a heap of TV dinner trays filled another. She gave me a stained coffee cup full of liquid of an indeterminate color. I pretended to drink from it while I set my tape recorder on the table. She said her name was Jennifer. Then she sat down, smoothed her skirt over her lap, and said she wanted to tell her "side of the story." In light of the discoveries to whcih her story has led me, it seems only fair to give you her words just as I have them:
"Jim was a Marine to the bone. I wasn't worried when he was called up to Saudi Arabia. I knew he had good men with him, and of course I had the wives here. But he was different when he came back.
"Jim showed up at our doorstep ahead of Pentecost, in May of '91. He had just gone over in January, so I knew, in the back of my heart, that something was wrong. But he kept saying everything was different now, and he seemed happy, if rather high-strung, and I didn't ask too many questions.... The neighbors were thrilled, and not a little jealous. I don't mind telling you that we had a happy homecoming....
"Soon enough, though, and things started to catch up with him, with us. About four months after Jim returned, the Corps found him. I didn't even know he was hiding, and maybe he wasn't, even. A nasty man named Colonel Yip told us that Jim had been listed as killed in action, after his plane went down in Chad. Well what was he doing in Chad, I asked? The war wasn't even in Chad, it was in Kuwait, so he must be mistaken. No, this Colonel Yip insisted, his plane went down in Chad, and the responisble thing would have been to, well, I don't know. But that was when I started to look at Jim a little differently.
"Jim took it on the chin, but it was the hardest thing either of us ever went through, up till then. At times, it seemed like the Corps wanted to drag it all out and just drag Jim through the mud. In the end, they gave him the dishonorable discharge and wiped their hands of him. The wives were just mean-spirited. I lost a lot of friendships, all of them, honestly, over time.
"I expected Jim to mind it more, the isolation. But it was like he'd got religion. He spent a lot of time in the garage, he called it his work. He kept paying the mortgage, so maybe it was work after all, but after the DD, I learned to ask more questions. Well, I asked, and he showed me."
At this point, Mrs. Eberhardt got up and went into the bedroom. She returned with a battered, overstuffed shoebox and began to lay out its contents on her sloped coffee table. What I saw was, frankly, discouraging: Stained, torn pieces of paper in no particular order, covered in an impossible-to-read handwriting. She continued:
"This is just one of many boxes I saved. Jim had all these papers taped up and pinned up, all over the garage. What it all had to do with the mortgage I have no idea. That's when he began telling me, well, all this nonsense, just came pouring out of him, and frankly it just broke my heart. I wept, honestly I wept right there. He kept saying, We're on the side of the angels, he said, we're on the side of the angels, as if that made a lick of difference or a lick of sense.
"There were a few years in there that were nice, in their own way. He seemed happy, like I say. He even made a few new friends, though his old Marine buddies wouldn't touch him, but these new friends, they came over on Sunday nights for what he called it "church." I still went to Fellowship Baptist, just sitting in the back where no one minded, but Jim wouldn't go. That was just part of the "new Jim." I always made sure to be out for errands when his friends came over, but mostly they stayed in the garage, or out on the back patio standing around the, the birdbath Jim built. They didn't say bye when they left, and Jim didn't seem to mind that I had no use for them.
"Then, February ninth, 2001, there's a, well, there's a knock at the door. Jim answers it. Two men in black suits are standing there, I could see them through the front window. They say a few words to Jim, and then he just turns to me and says, I'm sorry, honey, but I have to go. I don't know when I'll be back. But don't you worry! We're on the side of the angels!"
Mrs. Eberhardt took a few minutes to recompose herself. Then she showed me out back to the "birdbath": a concrete pyramid, about four or five feet on a side, with a flat two-foot-wide top. She let me take a picture but made no attempt to hide her discomfort. To say she lived with a lot of ghosts would be criminal understatement. I left with the shoebox (and an unshakeable smell of cat piss).
Before driving away, though, I rang the doorbell next door. I don't have a tape of the conversation I had with the squareish woman who answered, but it ran something like this:
"Can I help you?"
"Yes, hello, I'm Jeffrey Rice with the Columbus Dispatch. I'm doing a story on the Eberhardts. Can I ask you a few questions?"
"Didn't you people get your fill fifteen years ago?"
"Excuse me?"
"Back when Jim came home all nutty with Gulf War Syndrome, you people were all over this place. Couldn't get enough of him. I've had all I can take, thank you."
"I'm sorry, I didn't know. I'm doing a story on his disappearance."
"Took you long enough. Ask the FBI. They're the ones who hauled him away."
"Excuse me?"
"I saw them. Men in black, in their greasy black limo. They must be rounding up everyone with Gulf War Syndrome, to hide the evidence. The noisy ones, anyway. His own fault for carrying on so. I'm sure most people are crazy, but not like Jim Eberhardt."
"Such as?"
"You never let yourself get caught in a conversation with him more than once, I can tell you that. But even keeping to myself, I could see him from my window, Sunday nights. Him, up on some footladder I expect, poking above our fence--we shared a nice tall wooden fence then, before she let it fall apart--for hours, every Sunday night, staring up at the clouds. I bet they could see him three houses away. Someone must have reported him. Lord knows what he was doing up there."
Clearly, I thought, a classic example of suburban paranoia. Thataside, the conversation rang a few bells. A south-city beat picked this up several years before: crazy Gulf War vet and his crazy ways. Lack of social services, real estate values going down, etc. I went and checked the back issues. A couple of the clippings I've collected are on this page, mostly serving to corroborate Mrs. Eberhardt's story.
I also looked up people from Eberhardt's unit, but nobody would talk to me. Finally--weeks later, the cat-piss smell of the as-yet-unexamined shoebox beginning to drift up from my basement, I got my FOIA request back from the military. Minus the terse introductory letter, this was the sum total of it:
About Col. St. Bismarck, there was no mention at all. However, this was in the introd. letter:
At this point, I decided to get to the bottom of the whole mess. I dug up and overturned the "cat-piss box," armed with rubber gloves and a prophylactic tarp spread over my kitchen table. What I then read was truly incredible--I've made digital images of a few--certainly not enough--you can see them on this page.
Several loose-leaf sheets of paper were covered in long hand, sometimes on both sides. Taken together, they made for an incomplete journal. Much of it was tantalizingly illegible, but here is a transcription of what I could decipher, arranged in order of the events described (as best I could guess, and according to Eberhardt's own idiosyncratic system):
For the record: We crashed in southn Chad. Savannah, open country. Pilots dead on impct, Col and I the only survivors. I still thought he was CIA. So strange. Standoffish, like spooks can [...] I with broken arm, Col w/ a broken leg, posible internal injuries. Still could almost outwalk me. For the record: I wanted to stay with plane: Shelter, best chance of rescue. For the record: I am not a deserter. Col St. Bismarck pulled rank. Not going to die on a butcher's table, Eberhardt. Not here, [...]
D Minus 5: Internal injuries [...] leaning on me. Near top of mtns. Lightning much, much worse. Col never slept [...] always kept his gun on me. Wished to God I could go back to the crash. If only [...] can't find [...]
D Minus 3: Camped out. Never be that hungry again.
D Minus 2: Date of The Film. All the home movies long gone, but thank God I still had the camera. Plus the other footage, meant as exhibit A in my defense for leaving crash site, incl. conversations w/ Col, all long gone. [...] Col? [...] matter. Col distracted w/ preparations. I shot footage, then immediately hid film in my pack. I knew no one would believe me otherwise. Still get queasy every time I watch it.
D Day: [...] his pyramid. Where [...] time? Nazis all "at school." Egyptian secrets revealed at the final hour. For the record: Col. [...] them. [...] Rev. 3:20. With his pyramid, the door opened. [...] I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Out of the spike proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices. And behold a great red dragon, having seven [...] his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the Earths: and the dragon stood before the child, for to devour her as soon as she was born. [...] And to one star, yet in heaven, did we travel. An highway there was, and shall be there again, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the [...] men, though fools, shall not err therein.
[...] This City had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. O Zion, thou hast put on thy beautiful garments! [...] on his way, and the angels of God met him. And when Saint Bismarck saw them, he said, This is God's host: and he called them by name the Mortis Omega, the End of Death. [...] drink. Saint Bismarck then put on the whole armour of God. [...]
[...] that I was falling. Then, for a moment, everything became muddled. All the light was green light that came through the leaves. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. [...] Stranger that I was, I did not lodge in the street: but they opened their doors to the traveller. Did I fear a great multitude, as I went in the door? Yea, he brought a bull to the doorway of the meeting house. [...] The waters are hid as within a stone, upon which the face of the deep is frozen. [...] without change. [...]
D Plus 34: New York. I have never known for certain that this is the same New York that I saw as a kid. Still, [...] Jenny was not the same Jenny that [...] only Jenny that [...]
D Plus 35: Ritz-Carlton. Here, I am under the [...] U.S. Bank. [...] Key is kept [...]
D+ 637: Minutes from the [12th? 17th?] meeting of the Church of the Acolytes of the Mortis Omega. Blessed relief is in the ritual. Oneness! Oneness! All is split asunder. But we have good news of Oneness! Morty and Frank were [...] as usual. Still behind on dues. [...] why [...]
D+ 821: [...] Cold out tonight. Could set your watch by the fickleness of the stars. Why do I [...] O faith!
D+ 1872: "The Film" starting to fade. Laserdisc options? [...] I remember something Victor said to me once. He said Jim, you have to go down from the mountain. Easily said in the shining city, but heartbreaking nonetheless. But we know where we do not belong. It is for those blessed Others to know the ordnance of heaven--to send lightnings, that they may go and say unto them, Here we are.
D+ 2866: Fuck the IRS.
D+ 3589: A premonition today. A glimmer of a blue pyramid, out of the corner of my right eye. After so long, know not to discount synchronicities, no matter how rare. [...] much time I have. Must [...] What to tell Jenny.
Despite various non sequiturs, these entries display remarkable internal consistency. Further, had Eberhardt left Africa by any ordinary means, he surely would have been detected. We are left to wonder at the implications.
Included in the shoebox was a tin of Super 8 film. I don't know if Mrs. Eberhardt ever watched it; I doubt it--it might have gone some way to mitigate her despair, or at least broaden her horizons. What was on it made my jaw drop. At some expense, I have transferred it to DVD and uploaded it to the internet. You should watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
I have since tried to contact Jennifer Eberhardt to no effect. Her "paranoid" neighbor says the Men in Black came for her.
Around that time, I filed a FOIA request on the "Mortis Omega" and got only this letter--in July 2008:
Despite the bizarre nature of this evidence, certain conclusions become inescapable. I admit I have been tempted to break itno the Eberhardts' house, look for the rest of the shoeboxes--maybe even the "key" that Eberhardt described. But I am doubtful, at this late hour, that I will find anything except cats starved to death. They will have left no trace. Perhaps, in fact, it is all bulldozed by now: the secrets of Heaven buried under tons of dirt, concrete and cat litter.
Will the angels come for me, too? My editor at the Dispatch was unconvinced, but said they'd "sure as hell better, or someone else would." A few low blows followed about my social drinking. Heedless of the small who cannot see, I am putting this evidence before the public. Let the gods take care of cares that come from them.