DAY 1 · Part I: Prelude to Ra Contact

CHAPTER 2

Don Meets Carla

Gary Okay, Carla, when did you and Don meet and through what circumstance?

Carla I met Don by being the girlfriend of Jim D.,^* who was a student of Don’s at Speed Scientific School. Jim introduced me to him in the course of lunch one day. We were eating at the same place.

Gary Did that meeting strike you as unusual? Did you feel that you had just met an important person in your life?

Carla No, I really didn’t; I thought he was a very interesting cat, and I wanted to get to know him better. Don tells me now—or told me later on [laughs], much later on (after a marriage and a divorce, and he and I had gotten together and spent quite a bit of time together), sometime in the ’70s he said—“Well, I knew the first time that I met you that I would be with you.”

Gary So at that lunch Don had that realization, but didn’t communicate it . . .

Carla Not a bit of it. Of course Don never communicated.

* Jim D. and Jim McCarty (the Jim in this interview) are two different Jims. The latter Carla would meet in 1978 and marry in 1987.

Gary That would be an odd thing to communicate to somebody the first time you met.

Carla Well, it would unless you had an object to pursue.

Gary I have a series of questions now about your relationship with Don that we’ll explore in more depth in the personal biography section. I leave these questions in this section as well, because these dynamics had a direct impact on the success, and eventual end, of the Ra contact.

Just to briefly touch on the highlights: You and Don did not join upon first meeting; instead, you had a four-year detour. Can you briefly describe that?

Carla Surely. Jim D. was an excellent guitar player and singer, and he had been part of a Kingston Trio knockoff, the Jamaican Trio (or something like that), in high school with some of his high school buddies. And when he found out that I had a higher score than he did on an IQ test that everybody took at the school we both went to, he said, “I’ve got to meet her,” because I was the only person who ever had a higher score than he did.

So he did. He met me, and at that point he decided to go and get me. So we sang together and practiced together. I felt he was just a nice guitar player, but I loved singing with him and creating songs together. It was an incredibly great musical relationship. I made the best music I think I’ve ever made in my life. We made what ended up to be about 60 songs together that we created ourselves, so we had a great deal of original material ready to go.

I went—probably every Saturday of this world for years when I was in college—over to Rick Crampton’s house, a mutual friend, and practiced with Jim D. Rick had an interest in recording and he recorded us. The early recordings that I have came from Rick recording us at those Saturday rehearsals.

Gary And then you later married Jim D. and he took you away from Louisville. Is this correct?

Carla Well, we were heard on local TV by a producer who was getting together a tour for Peter, Paul & Mary. It was their very first tour and they had just made a hit with one song or another, and the producer thought that they were going to be big. So he saw Jim and me—originally enough we were called Jim and Carla—and we really impressed the guy, so he asked us to sing for him some more, and we did. We met and shook hands with him, sang for a couple of hours for him, and impressed the heck out of him. He said, “You know, if the rest of the people that are producing this thing agree, you’ve got a job opening for Peter, Paul & Mary on this tour.” He wanted us to tour.

So D. was of the opinion that it was immoral to go out of town with me if we weren’t married, so he determined to marry me. I resisted and resisted and resisted. Finally he stopped the car in the middle of Shelbyville Road in rush hour, threw the car door open, and got down on his knees on the pavement and said, “Will you marry me? I’m not getting up until you do.”

And I said yes. And so we set our date for the wedding as well as our date to go see these people in Chicago to get the okay for touring with Peter, Paul & Mary. This was in 1964.

Unfortunately, Jim got halfway to Chicago and realized that he did not want to become famous. Unfortunately enough, somebody had asked him for an autograph, and he said, “I don’t want to give autographs. I don’t want people to get to know me—that makes me feel badly.”

So then he wouldn’t get out of bed¹ until I said okay. So here I was married to this guy but, unfortunately, no longer going to sing with him. There was no real reason for me to be married to him any longer.

So these two very good friends, who made beautiful music together, became one married person. He distinctly hated being married and wanted nothing better than just his freedom; and I, who did not feel that I should break a promise, stuck with the marriage until he asked me for a divorce years later.

Gary So prior to that point you and Jim D. were participants in Don’s channeling group. You attended those, then Jim proposes, and off you go, headed to, at first, Chicago, and then you’re stuck in this marriage after he bails on the whole singing venture?

Carla Right.

Gary Do you return to Louisville or do you go off to—I believe Canada was your next destination.

Carla Well, I went back to Louisville and enjoyed D. leaving me for a total of seven times in the next three years, and the last time that he left me, the seventh time, he made it. He got all the way to Vancouver, Canada, and set up shop there with his lover.

He said that I was finally free to be free of him. I was thrilled and I was finding a job for myself and letting everything old go away. I was as happy as a clam. Then he called me from Vancouver and said that he needed me. He couldn’t find a job, so I would have to come and take care of him. Again, I reviewed the marriage contract—no small print, [it was] “for better or for worse”—so I dropped all my plans and went to Canada and took care of him. And that was finally where he asked me for a divorce.

Gary You were then able to return to Louisville.

Carla I was then able to divorce him. I did not want to return to Louisville, and I had a good life for myself up in Vancouver. But once more he made one of his famous pronouncements that he would not divorce me unless I came home to “my people,” who had never taken care of me a day in my life—I was a little mother and took care of them for the most part. It was ridiculous, but that was D.

Gary So his terms for divorce were that you must return to Louisville?

Carla I had to return to Louisville. So I returned to Louisville and got the job that I had had before. They were thrilled that I came back. The person that they’d hired couldn’t do it and I loved it, so I went back to enjoy my work and not being married to D.

Gary So you get back and you’re divorced. Do you immediately resume attending Don Elkins’ channeling experiments?

Carla Well, I attended them when I could. They were having them once every two weeks for a while at Hal and Joe’s. But it was pitiful. The group had dwindled to be a very small group. I wasn’t a channel myself—I wasn’t interested. So the reason I became a channel was that he asked me to continue the experiment: his experiment would die unless I helped him out.

Gary This is a bit further down the road, in 1974?

Carla Yeah, this was in 1974.

Gary And we’re still in 1968, I believe. You’ve come back to Louisville.

Carla Right. So I hung out and by the end of 1968 my divorce became final, and, I think the day after it became final, Don asked if he could move in with me.

Gary [laughs] Don was waiting patiently.

Carla Yes he was. As a matter of fact, he asked me to marry him, but I looked at him and saw that he had his hat in his hand and a suitcase. I realized he perhaps did not want to marry. So I asked him to go ahead and go on his trip. (He was a pilot and would be gone for three days at a time, usually). I said, “If you come back in three days and want to marry me, then I’d love to—otherwise no,” because I’d just gotten out of a difficult marriage.

Gary So my next question was going to be how and when the intimate relationship with Don began, and it seems like right then and there, Don makes it known that he wants to be with you and is interested in you.

Carla As soon as the divorce became final we became an item.

Gary So at that point, if I understand it correctly, you had six months of attempted intimacy, and then Don opted for celibacy and decided that he did not want to marry. Why did Don decide that he wanted celibacy, and how did this affect your connection?

Carla In another person it might not have ever affected anything, but I was the kind of person that wanted more clarity. I always wanted more clarity, so rather than just allowing things to dwindle between us, I said, “I’m kind of getting that you don’t really want to have sex—kind of getting that you’d like me to not approach you for sex.” Because he never approached me, so if we were going to have it, I approached him. So it was easy enough to stop if he wanted me to.

He said he’d like for me to stop and that would be preferable. He never gave me a reason, though I deduced the reason easily enough: He was a very fastidious man—he did not like anything sloppy or messy or that smelled bad or was full of the juice of life the way sex is. I mean you can’t help it. It smells questionable: as soon as you have sex, you get male and female mixing together, and their scents mixed together are not wonderful. Then everybody has to go wash, and it’s like, [laughs] he didn’t like any of that. He didn’t want to have to go wash. I think that was pretty much it.² He wasn’t gay in any shape—I never spotted any gay behaviors or leanings in him whatsoever.³ He was as straight as an arrow, and I was his choice if he was going to have one. He thought I was nice.

At one point he said I was a 9.0 in Louisville and a 5.5 in Hollywood. So I think that was a high piece of praise there. So he liked me just fine, but he just didn’t like messiness—he thought it was tacky. I didn’t let it affect anything having to do with our relationship, which was metaphysical in nature.

Don never spoke to me much personally at all, but I knew how he felt about me and it was very clear. He took care of me and he loved me dearly, but he didn’t speak about feelings to anybody. Not his feelings. In terms of being able to talk about sex, to be a regular guy, he was one of the best. But he just didn’t share personal feelings.

Gary So as a result, you said you didn’t let it affect your relationship because it was a metaphysical one, but you did try celibacy for two years.

Carla I sure did. I gave it everything I had. [laughs] I’m not, by nature, a celibate person. I don’t see the benefit of it. I see sexuality as a sacred and wonderful way of expressing love, and I never felt any other way about it. It’s just always been very straight with me. I never even dated until I was engaged for the first time at the end of high school. I waited until I felt all the things that you’re supposed to feel before I entered into sex for the first time. So for me sex always had all the positive values, and I never had sex with anybody that I couldn’t have a positive value with.

Gary It was never just the physical . . .

Carla Never, not ever. That would have—well, I didn’t have to. I had other things to do if that was all it was going to be. [laughs] I could take care of myself, no problem—I always had lots of people that wanted to date me, unless I was involved.

Gary So you gave it your best—two years of celibacy—and you concluded that this wasn’t for you. What arrangement was made then?

Carla I went to Don and I told him that celibacy was not for me, and he nodded. He said that he’d noticed that, and I said, “How would it be if I took a lover and you weren’t ever involved in having to be embarrassed or anything like that, and I made sure that it was discrete and I would tell you before I took a lover? I would tell you after I dropped him.” That was always our arrangement and his only answer to that was a grin and wiggling one ear at me, which was a private signal involving intimacy and love in Don’s way, and meaning have a ball.

Gary It sounds like that may have been a precursor to the appurtenances of the Ra contact. Ra gave you signals through the incense and the chalice.

Carla Well, I guess that’s the way his mind worked.

Gary So, when you and Don first attempted a physically intimate relationship in 1968, was that also when your work collaboration (that would later evolve into L/L Research) commenced?

Carla Yes. Everything commenced at once. [laughs] And the first thing we did was write a book together. And it was called The Crucifixion of Esmeralda Sweetwater.

Gary Which ties right into my next question. So something interesting happened when you two made the commitment to work together. Later on in the Ra contact, Ra spoke to this moment in time (emphasis added^†):

RA 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 [The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater] 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,⁴ and the ending was not visual-ized as 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 [between Carla and Don] and full memory of the dedication of this, what you may call, mission restored. 68.14

I have a few questions that I’d like to ask about that. Firstly, Ra says, “When the commitment was made . . . this commitment activated a possibility/probably vortex of some strength.” Did this happen in a moment,

† The emphasis in the quoted material throughout this book is an addition of the interviewer.

or over a time, and was it perceived by you?

Carla It was perceived by us in a general way in that we commented again and again on how easy it was to write, because he would just start talking and we were both seeing these things that were happening. Everything sort of fell into place—the characters, the plot, and . . . Don fiddled endlessly with the plot to make it tighter and so forth. But the story itself was just like, as Ra said, almost as if we’d seen it before.

Gary Did you say that you both saw it? Or just one of you saw it and communicated it to the other?

Carla Well, the way we wrote was this: Don wrote the first draft. He was just strictly going for plot—he was telling the story. The second draft I tweaked, and I was going for character and for comments and for good communication within the book between the characters and so forth. So I added huge amounts of my own stuff but it wasn’t instead of Don’s stuff, it was embroidered around it. So I was adding to the basic bones—the characters, the way the characters talked and reacted together, and so forth.

Gary So both of you were drawing from this moving picture, this almost complete story, and each of you was drawing from it in different ways, but it was a common vision that was presented to both of you.

Carla It was. I can still remember—normally I would just lie on the couch with my head in Don’s lap while he worked the tape recorder with one hand and talked and then waited and talked and then waited, and it would come pretty quickly. He’d do a whole chapter at a time, and then he’d go off on a trip and I would work on it.

Gary So as he’s speaking this into the recorder you’re kind of corroborating it yourself in your own mind because you essentially see what he’s seeing?

Carla Exactly. There wasn’t a point where I said, “Don, I don’t see it that way.” It wasn’t like that.

Gary That’s fantastic. Can you somewhat describe how it predicted the events that would come later on in your life?

Carla Well, there were a couple of levels to that. One had to do with details of the plot. The space girl and the space man—I think those were pretty clearly our expressions of ourselves being in love with each other and how we saw each other. Pretty idealistic, but he really was that way. He was really a space man, and he thought that I was a really high example of womanhood, and pure. It was the purity of the space man and the space woman that interested him. So those came clearly.

But other things were most peculiar. When we met Andrija Puharich in 1974, we looked at each other and could not believe it because he was Pablo Padeyevsky, a character in the book. And I saw the house that we had seen—I had seen it very clearly, and we had seen it in the book as the result of making a movie about the Old South—and it was a beautiful antebellum-type mansion. And when we drove up to Puharich’s house, I looked at Don and said, “That’s the house.” And he said, “I know.” [laughs]

And so I said to Andrija, “Andrija, this house . . . everything is the same as in our book, but there’s one difference: I saw peonies all around the parking circle.” And he said, “Oh, those. Yeah, I had ’em cut down a couple of years ago.” Which works: we wrote it before 1970,^‡ and this was in ’74, so they would have been there when I saw them.

Gary In the process of giving voice to this vision that you’d both received, and in creating this book, you came up to a certain point where that vision ended, which was the conclusion of the book. Why couldn’t you see the ending?

Carla Well, it didn’t make any sense—it wasn’t logical, and we were both very logical people. Don was preternaturally healthy. His vision was 20/10. When he was in the Army, he could run rings around his unit all day while he was running them on a ten-mile hike and never run out of breath. He was just so healthy—incredibly healthy—and was never sick. He’d never. been. sick. He’d never had a cold.

I was very, very frail. There was no question about it; I accepted that much myself, although I didn’t accept anything more. I was normal. It just took a little bit of skill to stay normal. There was this way and that way I could screw up, and then I would be having a problem because of earlier sickness (kidney problems, rheumatoid problems, that kind of thing). But just seeing that I wasn’t long for this world—I was just frail. So it made sense that this person most like me in the book would die,

‡ The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater was written in 1968, refined in 1969.

whereas Don’s character would not. And we worked with that and worked with that and worked with that, and that’s the way we wrote it: the space girl, Esmeralda, dies at the end.

Gary Through the choice of being a martyr?

Carla Through being a martyr, yes. And Pablo and his friend Josh—Josh was Don’s character—are left sitting there watching the dead leaves blow past them.

Gary Were you conscious then that you had the impulse of the martyr within you?

Carla No, I didn’t think about it. I knew that I didn’t know anything else but to do the whole hog, that I was always absolutely honest, and that I was always absolutely loyal. I had, for instance, realized that my best friend in boarding school wanted to be first in her class but didn’t have a prayer, so I missed my own final, took it late, and made 100% on it; but, because of the fact that I had to take it as a make-up, I got a lower grade and she made it to be first. That kind of thing you can look at in retrospect and say, “Well, yeah, she’s got the seeds of that within her. She doesn’t care what happens to her as long as somebody she loves is happy.” Yeah, that’s true. But I never analyzed it or thought about it in any way, no.

Gary Your motivation for martyrdom was pure in that you were willing to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of another?

Carla Yeah, it wasn’t just, “I want to be a martyr.”

Gary It wasn’t some complex like, “I will achieve glory, if I . . . ”

Carla [laughs] No, not in a million years! I wanted to live a long, long life and have a wonderful time. Fun will be had.

Gary So you just explained why you created the ending the way you did because it logically made sense. You weren’t healthy, your body was frail, and Don was extremely healthy. Did you create the ending into a vacuum? Was there nothing for the ending that you had received, or had you received an alternate version, or a muddied version?

Carla Well, no, we’d received the version that somebody had to die—that was the dictate of the book. It was the way it shaped up, so it was a matter of choosing the person.

We couldn’t figure why it was so difficult to do that part. It was peculiar.

Gary You probably saw yourselves in these characters at the time but you didn’t know that you were writing about your future in some ways.

Carla Not at all. It only came to us in retrospect.

Gary In the quote that I had read when Ra is talking about The Cruci-fixion of Esmeralda Sweetwater, Ra says that “full memory of the dedication of this mission was restored.” Did you have a sense at the time that you and Don were on a mission?

Carla Yes. And I was perfectly happy with him dictating just how that would go. I was Don’s loyal assistant.

Jim Tell about jumping over the sword and never seeing dry land again.

Carla Ohhh. I had a dream shortly after Don and I decided that we would jump over a sword together.

Because it meant so much to me to be married, he explained how in Scotland if you jump over a broom (well, it was a sword but we had a broom)—we jumped over that in the hall one day, and I knew and he knew that that was our marriage. And so shortly after that . . . [turns to Jim] what’s the rest of it?

Jim You’d never see dry land again.

Carla Oh, yeah, shortly after that I had a very, very real dream, very clear. And it starts out with me going down the river on a great big, four-story houseboat with a paddle wheel. And since I lived by the Ohio River, what could be more natural than seeing that form of transportation? I’m on the top floor and the houseboat starts burning. Don sees me from the shore, jumps in, comes over to the boat, and he grabs me and saves me from the fire. Then we’re sailing down the river on his boat, which is not burning, and he looks at me and he says, “Do you want to get off? Because, if you stay on this boat with me, you’ll never see dry land again.”

And I was sure at that time in the dream that I wanted to stay with him. And that was when I woke up from the dream. So that was my dream.

Gary And that speaks to the situation very powerfully.

So you, in your conscious, waking life, weren’t . . . you didn’t join Don for the moment but you knew you were committed to something larger and that you and he were doing a Work (with a capital W) together?

Carla I knew that we were working for spiritual reasons rather than for earthly reasons. I didn’t really think about how big that was; I just realized that we weren’t working towards any earthly goal: no house, no children, nothing to own or have but each other and the work. The work was everything.

Gary Looking back, what would you say was that mission, and do you feel that it was fulfilled?

Carla I never tried to identify the mission at the time. Looking back on it, I would say that the mission was in two parts which tied into an experience that I had when I was 13. At that time I had what is known as a near-death experience. In the non-physical realm where I found myself, I was given the possibility of allowing my body on Earth to die, and then coming back again in two different lifetimes because I had taken too much on my plate in this lifetime in terms of catalyst. The guidance I received suggested that I would do better if I had two different lifetimes for the two different parts of the mission that I had undertaken.

And I said, “No, I want to go back and do everything now,” because I didn’t want to die and then have to come back and have another childhood. I was 13 at the time; I was almost done with childhood. One childhood was enough for me. I had had a horrible childhood.

So I knew from the beginning that I had a mission to fulfill and my feeling was—after meeting Don and after all the experiences that I had with him, more and more the feeling continued to grow that my mission would be fulfilled with Don.

So I felt that one part of it was finished when Don died and The Ra Ma-terial was completed. I felt that the other is still being fulfilled, and that I will continue fulfilling it as long as I breathe—that is to be the spiritual mother of a spiritual home for those who wish to serve planet Earth as wanderers. It’s a spiritual place rather than a physical one, but we happen to have a beautiful house that Don bought shortly before he died, so it’s nice to have a real house that seems to fill in that. But the actuality of it is that it’s a spiritual place.

Gary That’s quite the journey. We will explore the art of channeling in greater depth in the section of the same name, later on. For now, I would like to ask at what point you were asked to become involved with the channeling experiment and why was that?

Carla It was in 1974. Don asked me to begin to learn to channel because otherwise his experiment would die. I just felt that, well, his experiment can’t die, so I told him that I had no feeling for it, I don’t want to do it, but I’ll do it for you. So I was strictly doing it to help him out. I gave it my best shot, and it turned out I had somewhat of a gift for it.

Then, I’d say about the middle of 1975, I had gotten on my feet and was doing a competent job. So it was during that time that all of the channeled information that is featured in Secrets of the UFO is taken from. Had I not used the channeled material for Secrets of the UFO it would be lost forever because we had a habit of reusing tapes at the time.⁵

Gary That brings up a good point. Don had to have been conducting this channeling years before 1974 when you first learned how to channel, but the L/L Research Transcript Library essentially begins in 1974. I think there are only a handful prior to 1974. Why have no transcripts come to us from that period prior to you channeling?

Carla I don’t believe that he felt the group had produced anything worthy of taping before then.

Gary That is serious dedication on Don’s part to continue year after year, hoping for something of greater quality to come through with the faith that it would, eventually, but not knowing how.

Carla Yeah, his faith was absolute, especially after he knew that I was going to come back and be a part of things. He just had a feeling, I think, that I might be good at it, and it was worth a serious shot by really giving me the old push. [laughs]

Gary So, we’ve already established that Don was very trusting of these sources—at least he found them worthwhile enough that he spent years channeling their messages. How about yourself? Did you have any doubt or skepticism about the sources and what they had to say and who they said that they were?

Carla Well, ya know, I’ve been asked that many times. It’s not that I don’t contemplate things or think about things. It’s just that nothing ever sent up a red flag and said, you don’t agree with this, you’re gonna have to think about this, etc.

It was quite beyond me, the stuff that I channeled, so it wasn’t like I had it in me just waiting for a reason to pretend that I was channeling. And when you’re really channeling, when you’re really doing a serious job of it and your tail is hanging right over the line—which is what I’ve always said was the hard part for people: they don’t want to embarrass themselves; they don’t want to start channeling and then all of a sudden you’re channeling nonsense; and oh, dear, but that only happened to me at various, isolated times and always for a reason—so when you’re doing a sincere job, you finish the job, you finish your session, and that’s the best you could have done. So what do you have to think about? There it is. It didn’t trigger any red flags—you’re not unhappy with the session; it’s just that it’s a peculiar kind of way of gathering information where there’s not any way to check it.

So you just have to collect it. Don always believed that the important thing was to collect the material, as much material as possible, because he said it would be the denseness of the material and from the things which were repeated that you would get the gist, the heart of the material.

Gary One of the things that most stands out to me and speaks to the integrity of this multi-decade experiment in channeling is its consistency over the years. I think it’s very difficult for a person to have a consistent single opinion for that long, much less to have multiple people channeling a variety of sources all conveying an entire cosmology and philosophy of the same internally consistent message over and over across the decades.

Carla Right, and to respond to your feeling that I could not possibly have generated it myself, I can’t remember what I’m talking about half the time.⁶ I’m pretty spacey. [laughs] The idea that I would be able to retain a huge body of material like that in my head is just ridiculous. That is not part of who I am.

Gary So once your collaboration with Don was formed, where did your adventures take you?

Carla All over the place. At first we thought, well, we’ll write a bestseller. We couldn’t get it accepted anywhere. I began papering my bathroom—a small room, mind you—with the rejection slips I got, [laughs] and after about a dozen attempts to get the thing published, Don and I decided, “Well, maybe a movie.”

I don’t know how many versions of The Crucifixion of Esmeralda Sweet-water we made in screenplay form, and every time I would finish writing a version up, Don was helpful about it, but then it wouldn’t fly. So we’d go back to the drawing board and try to do our best to make it another way that would be more useful to Hollywood. And we’d try again and we’d fail again.

Finally, I think we decided that in order to make a movie, we were going to have to learn the business and do it ourselves. So we did. We made the most ridiculous movie that you could ever imagine.⁷ I wrote it with Don’s help. I did all the casting, I did all the producing, I did the shooting script, I did everything—the sets, everything to do with the movie I’d done.

But my part was supposed to be behind-the-scenes. The one thing we did not figure was the lady that we had hired as the star, Ruthy, was a woman with an enormous rack and a very small IQ. She read the screenplay the day before shooting began and quit. She said, [haughty tone of voice] “I am not a comedian: I am a star.” And she quit on the spot and walked off. All of the sudden we needed a topless woman.

I am the most modest of topless women—I had a “rack-let” at the time. It’s generally known that as you get older you get larger, but at the time I was tiny. Not tiny tiny, but tiny in good proportion to the rest of my body, which was slender. It just seemed like a silly idea to take my shirt off and film me, but we couldn’t find anybody else willing to do it.

Of course I did know the lines (having written them), but I did not even have 15 minutes to rehearse. All of a sudden, in addition to being the script secretary and having to write down all kinds of numbers and do figuring in my head going from 90 to 60 (90-something of film to 60-something of time)—I didn’t have a stopwatch so I couldn’t know how to time it out; I just knew how long, how many, how much film was used, so I figured out the time from that.

So I was figuring that out in my head at the same time I was writing down takes—we did so many takes of this. That’s the way the editor edits: you have to write it down every time. If you do 14 takes you have to write every one down. I had writings on my bosom and they could not be messed up because the continuity would have been destroyed, and so I couldn’t really put a shirt on, so I walked around topless for days. That experience was one of the more interesting aspects of me being in the movie business. And I was the worst actress you ever saw in your life. But the one thing about the film that you can say is that I got it out of the can and onto the screen and it did play for drive-ins in the South in the summer.

Gary So making movies wasn’t exactly your and Don’s forte. What were some of the highlights of other areas of your investigation during the ’70s?

Carla Well, it was just mostly investigating hard cases of UFO sightings—talking to the people, the experiencers, writing it down, writing it up—and then sending it to the people like APRO and MUFON.⁸ There was a British group we sent it to also—I’m not remembering the name of it.

Jim Flying Saucer Review?

Carla Thank you. It was Flying Saucer Review in Britain, and we sent our reports to those places.

Gary So you and Don were mavericks out on your own, but you also participated in the larger research effort?

Carla Right. I read a great many of the UFO journals at the time, along with the books of the day, and then would report on them to Don. It was my job as his research assistant to do all the research and then report to him. He would pick the little nuggets that he liked out of them and he would memorize them. That would give him his tools for talking to people and giving them evidence on various subjects. When you read widely, as I did at the time, you have all kinds of nuggets. So he could talk for probably—the longest I ever saw him do it at one time was 6½ hours. But he surely could have talked three times that before he ran out of original material.

He also decided to investigate psychic surgery, including the Philippine psychic surgery. We went there in ’75, and I had experiences as one who was operated on. He didn’t prefer to be the one. I was the easy one, always, because I had things wrong with me that we could see if the Filipino knew about, and that would be part of the evidence there.

Then in ’77 and ’78 we investigated a Mexican psychic who used an actual knife and allegedly cut through her patients to excise material that was bad and make them well. That was a lady named Pachita. We went there and stayed there for probably the better part of two months.

Gary And how did that transpire?

Carla It was very interesting. I had two operations from Pachita, and for the first one she said, “Well, her kidneys are not good, so I will take the two, make one good one, put it back in, and see if it works.”

I came back after five weeks and she decided it wasn’t working, so she said, “Well, we’ll just have a new one.” And they had looked all over Mexico City for a kidney and could not find one. It is a huge place. It’s like seven million people. Could not find a kidney because there are people—there are waiting lists, and they’re assigned to people. Couldn’t find one.

Gary She was looking for a physical organ?

Carla Physical organ. Couldn’t find a physical organ so she just opened her refrigerator and pulled out some tissue that looked to Andrija—who was a doctor, medical doctor—like the tissue used for kidneys. Anyway, she held it near the body and it was sucked into my body as if by a magnet. So I had that one. And I will say that I have not had serious problems with my kidneys in all the years since then.

Gary So you travel to the Philippines and Mexico; you travel to speak with abductees and others who have had UFO experiences, and instrumental to all of that was an airplane. Don was a pilot and would fly where you needed to go?

Carla Right. He didn’t have a lot of money in his family. He generated the funds for that by doing work as a pilot. The private airport Bowman Field became a place where you could rent an airplane and go somewhere. So he would take people where they wanted to go and he would never take the money for it; instead, he would put it back as credit, and then spend it out renting airplanes to go wherever he wanted to go.

That reminds me, one other aspect that he investigated was psychic healing, and there was a Kathryn somebody that he was especially impressed by. She had a television show at one time. She would touch people and seemingly the power of the Holy Spirit would touch them and they would keel over, one after the other. So he took me to a great big place in Chicago to one of her meetings, and I was touched. It felt like an electrical charge, but it didn’t knock me over, and I didn’t feel anything else besides that. It was just like nothing to me, so there you go.

Jim Kathryn Kuhlman?

Carla That’s it, Kathryn Kuhlman.

Gary So your life at this time was anything but ordinary.

Carla [laughing] I really wasn’t going for ordinary. After Don I gave that up.

Gary So he’s putting together these puzzle pieces as best he can, and channeling seems to be the primary focus or the main avenue through which he’s obtaining—

Carla Right, right. He became more and more interested in channeling, but he wasn’t convinced that it was the aspect until the Ra contact. When the Ra contact happened, everything else stopped cold, and that’s all he wanted to do.

Gary So in your collaboration, as you began to touch on, you did a lot of the writing and the research in terms of reading. What specifically was Don’s role in your collaboration?

Carla I think he was in charge of sharing it and also piloting our ship together, deciding what we were going to do and when we were going to do it. Then he told me—he said, “I want you to do my writing and to create this material and make it available for free, worldwide.” At that time we didn’t have computers and I was like, “How am I going to do that, Don? I don’t know how to do that.” But I said I would try, and then he said the other thing was to be the housekeeper for a spiritual house.

So he was still thinking in terms of physical house, but not really—it was a spiritual-physical house. He didn’t like the idea of getting a nuclear family going. He wanted a spiritual family, and so I think he got exactly what he wanted.

Anyway, those are my two goals. One of them is finished; you can’t do anything more with The Ra Material. I can certainly do more channeling when I get done with this health thing, but until then, no outer work like that. But the other is something that I can do all my life, and I will, every day of it. I’m so glad I have the opportunity; so few people have something to do that they love so much.

Gary In your work with Don, at what point did you form the organization L/L Research and why?

Carla We formed that in 1980 because Don felt that it was time to create a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible-type charity.

Gary You mean 1970? You said 1980.

Carla Well, 1980 was when we founded L/L Research as a non-profit charity. Before that it had been a partnership. [Somewhere around 1968] Don got me to write up a little piece of paper that said that we were partners and any funds we got from The Crucifixion would be split 50/50. So not too long into that we decided to call it the L/L Company. So it was the L/L Company and then, as you noted, there was a changeover to L/L Research, but it was still completely private.

Then in 1980 we created a public entity with Jim McCarty, and we used the papers that Jim had because he had already created a 501(c)(3) organization. We just piggybacked onto that because it had very compatible reasons given in the document of creating that entity, Rock Creek Research & Development Laboratories, as he called it.

Gary The research aspects seem pretty self-evident. What does the “L/L” signify? Why was that chosen?

Carla That signifies Love and Light, or Light and Love. I’ve always felt that Love came first just as it does in the Distortions—if you look at the Distortions, Love comes before Light—so, Love/Light.

And the logo that we use, which is Pablo Picasso’s drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza chasing windmills—I had it over my desk in college, I had it over my desk all through my marriage, and after my marriage. I love that image and have always felt that was me right down to the ground. I really identify with good ol’ Quixote and dreaming the impossible dream. I’ve always known that was me.

So Don liked it too and decided that we would use that as our logo.

Gary You anticipated my next question which was about the Don Quixote logo. So you felt that was you and that it was emblematic of dreaming the impossible dream. What does it mean to dream the impossible dream?

Carla Well, I think it means to bring truth, beauty, love, light, and understanding to Earth, and to make it the way people live. It’s always felt to me like the right way to live, and I’ve always tried to live that way—and I know it’s impossible.

Gary Is there a reason that that is an impossible dream?

Carla Well, it seems to be impossible in terms of the way the world wags. If you look at the way the news is organized, for instance, it’s always . . . if it bleeds it leads. The bad news comes first. Service to self rules. [chuckles] And if you’re going to be a clever person and join politics and really make changes in the world . . . I discovered very early on in college you can’t do that without learning to lie, which I don’t do. I have no capacity to lie. I just don’t lie, except for white lies that are necessary, like “what a beautiful hat,” or “no, your tail does not look large in that; you look fine.” [laughs]

Yeah, I had an experience in college with someone who went on to become a prominent politician in which he simply told me, “If you want to join politics, you have to be able to lie.” He told me that, and I dropped political science and joined the ranks of arts and became an English major. I was going to be joining those who wanted to help with statesmanship. I wanted to be a statesman, I wanted to make a difference in this world, and then I discovered, “Oh, you can’t make a difference in this world.” The two things that are apparently the essence, the essence of politics, are lying and committee meetings. I do neither well so I had to change my goal. I couldn’t work in the world; I had to decide that my kingdom was truly not of this world.

So that’s the impossible dream, really. And it’s not necessarily a Christian dream, although I am a wholehearted Christian—I love Jesus with all my heart, and I know that my kingdom is not of this world. I identify with that.

Gary Were there any other parallels between Don Quixote’s journey in the novel and what L/L Research hoped to stand for or hoped to do in the world?

Carla I don’t identify with the particulars of that story, which is a peculiarly befuddled story of people that are genuinely not seeing what’s in front of them. I don’t think I’ve ever fooled myself about anything like that, but it’s just that desire to remain pure and true to my standards and not compromise them, regardless of how the world wags. It’s often inconvenient to do that.

Gary And the world will tell you otherwise, that what you are doing is foolish.

Carla The world always tells you otherwise. The world will always tell you otherwise in increasingly strident tones, yes.

Gary And you had to learn to trust yourself and follow your own heart.

Carla Yes, and that’s something that’s never been a problem for me. I have always done that since I was a baby. It’s the truth.

Jim Tell him what your first words were as a child.

Carla Yeah, my first words were to my mother and they were “put me down,” as Mother wrote in her journal at the time. Not mama, not dada, but “put me down.”

Gary I’m glad, for what it’s worth, that you differentiated yourself from the Quixote character because you’re not . . . though you want to act in a noble way and though you want to serve others, you’re not doing so by being belligerent and seeking fights with people, or by being less than 100% sensitive to other people.

Carla Right.

Gary So obviously, a little bit further down the road you and Don invited Jim to join you, but prior to that point, had you considered that L/L Research would include other people?

Carla Yes, we had indeed, and we invited people at various times. For instance, Beth—we invited her to live with us at one time but she couldn’t because she was in the middle of having children. All of a sudden she got pregnant. On her way to getting divorced, she got pregnant. It happens. She did not want to bring a baby into our home, and Don was grateful. [laughs] I thought it would be a gas! But I like kids. Don did not. So it didn’t happen.

Yeah, we had invited her, and Don was always on the lookout for people that he wanted to be part of our household, our spiritual family.

Gary Did he have a certain type of person or certain criteria for whom he would ask?

Carla I think it was just a matter of who felt right to him. He really trusted his instincts and what he saw in people. He looked right through them. He looked right into their hearts, and he knew them. It didn’t take him any time at all. He had a gift that way, and most people simply didn’t make it, or they were okay but they weren’t people he wanted as part of his household.

Let’s put it this way: Every Sunday he would look out the front window to see who was coming to meditation. If certain people were coming to meditation, he went out the back door and he was gone until their car was gone.

And then there were the people he was perfectly happy coming to meditation.

So there were three categories: worthy of being asked to join us; okay, fine, normal people; and those he just didn’t want to be with. And most people were in the second category. Jim was the only person in years that made it into the worthy category.

Gary So you began channeling in 1974 and you first received Ra in 1981?

Carla That’s right.

Gary Did the Confederation’s message change or evolve during that time? And did Don’s questioning evolve?

Carla Oh, I imagine they evolved in response to what was channeled. But I think that the only other evolution was of my channeling itself. It evolved because I figured out, gradually, how to make a good session. I still feel that I have work to do to become a better channel in terms of how to tune myself and so forth. I’m never satisfied. I always want to be a little bit better, and so I’m always trying to do my utmost to achieve that. But I don’t think the message itself evolved too much—maybe in terms of detail, but not in terms of heart.

Gary So the same essential message that was there in 1974 was the same essential message that came in 1980?

Carla Yeah, I think so.

Gary All right, for our final question in this section: How did the information that you and others channeled affect your own spirituality and Don’s (if there was any discernable effect)?

Carla I don’t think it really made any change in either of our spiritualties. I had always been a Christian, and I continued being a Christian to Don’s complete befuddlement. He could not understand why I went and spent all this time being a Christian, and being in the choir you spend more time than most people. You don’t just go on Sunday. You have choir practice, you have funerals and weddings where the choir is just part of it, so you go in and you do that strictly as a volunteer. All that time that you spend—and of course I was also active in church work, so that was more time.

He was really jealous of it and he was jealous of me singing in the Bach Society, which I did surely for the love of music, to be part of the music. (And I know you’ll understand that, Ken.^§ Ken is a trumpeter, a classic trumpeter.) To be part of a classical piece—it’s bigger than you could possibly express yourself. It goes beyond your limitations as a singer or as a trumpeter, or as a producer of sound of any kind. All of the sound is all around you and it comes out and it’s magnificent. Somebody’s written this magnificent work of art and you’re part of it and it’s just such a joy, I can’t express it.

I entered into that for over 30 years. I was a member of the Louisville Bach Society, and Don was really a little bit jealous of that, especially after the Ra contact started. He didn’t want me to go to rehearsals, he didn’t want me to go on Sunday. He couldn’t understand why I spent this time doing something besides the Ra contact, basically, [laughs] and yet it was part of my spiritual walk and I stuck to it. It did not make him happy, but my goal was not to make him happy [on this point]; my goal was to follow my bliss, I guess you could say.

Gary So you’re receiving this information from these alleged UFO sources, or sources of intelligence not local to Earth, and they’re describing this universe built of love and light where free will reigns and the whole function of life is spiritual evolution and—I don’t know if the idea of wanderers came through at that time or not. That didn’t have much of an impact on your spirituality?

Carla I thought it was fascinating, and it helped me to shape my goal after Don died, certainly. I could see that what was left for me had to do with making a spiritual home for all these people that felt so isolated and so miserable, and so many wanderers do. I wanted them to know they were not alone, and that somebody loved them very dearly and wanted to support their work wherever it brought them to, that somebody thought they were doing a good job. I think that when you have a homecoming here every year and you see the people that come, filtered through the lens of The Ra Material, you see people that are all perhaps isolated in their

§ Referring to Ken Wendt, our good friend and talented videographer filming the interview.

homes, in their home environment. And in coming here, all of sudden they have all of these people that are interested in what they have to say, and that don’t tell them that they’re crazy, and that listen to them and love them, and they love the people so much right back—and it’s just an incredibly glorious experience. I wish we could do it 52 weeks of the year.

Unfortunately, as you know from being the producer of so many of these events, it takes a couple of months to prepare for a weekend like that, as far as the logistics of what we do together, how we feed that many people, get the house clean, and all that. (We haven’t started getting the house clean yet this year by the way. Time to think about it.)

Gary It would be dramatically simpler if we hosted at a hotel or a conference center, but using your own home as the venue for these . . .

Carla I’ve always wanted to open my home and let all that Jim and I have breathed into this home be a part of what we had to offer, because it’s part of that little bit that you can manifest on planet Earth. And Jim does the most incredible job of manifesting an atmosphere of wonderful gardens where you can walk and meditate and think and experience—between the water treatments and the fish and the water splashing, and all the meditation you can have with that. And you can look at any one of his rock plantings, how each individual one is built, how the rocks are, how the plantings are, how they’ve grown up together, and all they have to offer. Or you can just walk along his little paths and use the whole garden at once. It’s almost like a feast! And you can get indigestion. [laughs] You can’t see it all. People’s reaction to the garden is, “I’ve got to come back. I haven’t seen half of it.” And you haven’t unless you’ve spent a summer or so here. It’s following the bloomings and getting to know all the plantings separately.

Gary Yes, this isn’t just an empty venue—just four walls and a roof to host an event—it’s a character on the stage. It’s an active element in the coming together and, like you were saying, people that are sensitive to the energy when they come here—I’ve heard many speak of how they can sense and feel the joyous energy and the light-filled nature of this particular place and this particular gift that you and Jim have offered.

Carla Yeah, a lot of people try to create a home that’s just a perfect home. They get a lot of antiques and art, and do it that way; or they spend a lot of money and have the latest and make it great as far as what money can buy, and do it that way. Or, what Jim and I do is, we love the things that we have and we don’t put them away. They’re out where you can grab them and use them, and every book is loved.

I suggested to Ken that he just go around Jim’s room—this is the room that Jim and I have been in together for the last three years, more or less? [Jim confirms.] I have in this room since 2010’s operation. I thought I was going to go back to my own room after it, but I didn’t get a chance to because I had something else go wrong. It’s been that way ever since I’ve been here, and I will probably be here . . . So this is a very small example of what you can put into a room if you don’t put things away [laughs], if you just arrange them neatly and know where they are and can go get any one of them at any time.

Gary Well, that concludes this section coming up to the crossing of paths between Jim, Carla, and Don. That section will be the final one before we dig into the Ra contact itself.

Notes

[1] The manager for Peter, Paul & Mary asked Carla and Jim D. to come to Chicago for an audition to be their opening act. Carla and Jim D. stayed in a motel in Chicago the night before the audition. In the morning D. said that he would not get out of bed until Carla agreed that they would not audition for this job. ↩

[2] See page 266 of A Wanderer’s Handbook for more about this dynamic. ↩

[3] A disclaimer, for what it’s worth: Carla never exhibited any bias against homosexuality. She embraced it as she did everything else, with love. She’s stating here simply that to whatever degree Don possessed sexuality, it was of a hetero nature. Though ultimately Don seemed an asexual person. ↩

[4] “Indeed, neither Don nor I was subjectively happy with the ending. However, all attempts to rewrite the ending so that The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater would be an incorrect title were complete failures. After ten tries at rewriting, all of which ended up yielding much the same material as the ending you now see, we decided that the source moving through us to show this point of view was attempting to include within that point of view the acting out of the answer to the question, ‘What would happen if two perfectly “good” beings were brought down to this complex and dualistic planet?’” ↩

Don Elkins and Carla L. Rueckert, The Crucifixion of Esmerelda Sweetwater (Louisville: L/L Research, 1986), 19–20.

Note: Conceived and written in 1968, the book wasn’t published until 1986.

[5] Much to the dismay of Law of One material purists, they had the same habit with the cassettes used for the Ra contact itself. Fortunately, one of the three sets was preserved, but the other two sets were recycled. ↩

Those second and third cassettes used during each Ra session would be helpful to have now, as they recorded portions that were missed during the process of flipping cassette one from side A to side B.

[6] Fortunately there is no evidence of this in the entire interview. . . . ahem. ↩

[7] Originally titled The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow, this movie was written by Don and Carla and directed and filmed by Lee Jones. It was purchased by a distribution company and released on VHS as Invasion of the Girl Snatchers in 1985. Carla’s assessment of this movie is not far off, though it is rumored to have gained a cult following over the years. ↩

[8] APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, was an UFO research group started in January 1952 by Jim and Coral Lorenzen of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. ↩

The group was based in Tucson, Arizona, after 1960. APRO had many state branches. It remained active until late 1988.

APRO stressed scientific field investigations and had a large staff of consulting Ph.D. scientists. A notable example was Dr. James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona, a well-known atmospheric physicist and perhaps the leading scientific UFO researcher of his time. Another was Dr. James Harder of the University of California, Berkeley, a civil and hydraulic engineering professor who acted as director of research from 1969 to 1982. McDonald and Harder were among six scientists who testified about UFOs before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics on July 29, 1968, when they sponsored a one-day symposium on the subject.

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek cited APRO and NICAP as the two best civilian UFO groups of their time, consisting largely of sober, serious-minded people capable of valuable contributions to the subject.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization,” accessed February 15, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aerial_Phenomena_Research_Org anization&oldid=704792709.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, is a US-based non-profit organization that investigates cases of alleged UFO sightings. It is one of the oldest and largest civilian UFO-investigative organizations in the United States.

MUFON was originally established as the Midwest UFO Network in Quincy, Illinois, on May 31, 1969, by Walter H. Andrus, Allen Utke, John Schuessler, and others. Most of MUFON's early members had previously been associated with APRO.

The stated mission of MUFON is the study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity through investigations, research, and education. Along with the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), MUFON is part of the UFO Research Coalition, a collaborative effort by the three main UFO investigative organizations in the United States whose goal is to share personnel and other research resources, and to fund and promote the scientific study of the UFO phenomenon.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Mutual UFO Network,” accessed February 15, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mutual_UFO_Network&oldid=69 8561700.