Earth (22 page)

Most members of the group felt uneasy about Rapas, his threats, and the “New Generation” and their platitudes. The building contractor, for instance, had been asked to pay thousands of kronor without knowing what he was really supporting. And Höglund, thoroughly disillusioned, became reclusive. As a result, the group split up, though Tryggwe Glantz continued to act as spokesman. Interviewed by a Swedish newspaper in mid-1968, Glantz was quoted as saying that the now 600-member organization had
been created by “the West Indian peacemaker Ra Paz” as “a worldwide peace movement in the spirit of Martin Luther King.” The article went on to mention the organization's plans for a large meeting in the fall that year, to be attended by the singer Harry Belafonte; Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the American civil rights movement and assistant of Martin Luther King Jr.; and King's wife Coretta. The meeting never happened. In the article, Rapas is referred to as a wealthy industrialist who, during his travels around the world, had seen so much misery that he decided to devote his wealth to charitable causes.
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Back in the Bahamas

The aliens encountered by Richard Höglund in the Bahamas were of human appearance, with “thin, pointed features, deeply tanned, with a somewhat Oriental look, long tapering fingers and dark eyes,” HÃ¥kan learned. “They all seemed perfect—not a blemish on their skin. He never saw the beings from the initial contacts in Sweden again….”

During the New Year period of 1968–69, Höglund and his wife returned to the Bahamas. One night, he told Gunvor that she could meet one of his contacts at a discotheque in Nassau. Gunvor protested at visiting such a venue, but her husband insisted. They found a table on the second floor and Höglund began looking around for the man. He left the table and returned with a man dressed in an ill-fitting brown costume, Håkan learned from Gunvor:

“The man just nodded his head in a short greeting to Gunvor. He was rather short, his skin had a peculiar suntan, and he had a slight Mediterranean or oriental look. The clothes were too large for his rather thin body. The man returned to his table. Richard explained that the man was one of ‘them.' When Höglund and Gunvor started dancing, the man came up and watched them very closely. He looked straight into Gunvor's eyes. There was a sort of hypnotic power in his eyes. ‘I will never forget those eyes,' she said.”

The man showed Höglund a photograph of his family and house, supposedly on another planet in our solar system, which Gunvor recalled her husband referring to as either Venus or Saturn—she couldn't be sure which.

During this and another trip to the Bahamas (there were three in all),
Höglund met others like himself who acted as couriers for the “space people.” One was a Russian, another an African-American named Loftin Anderson, with whom he became good friends. Anderson, it transpired, was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. During 1968, Little Exuma was swarming with CIA agents, HÃ¥kan reveals. “Anderson had informed the CIA about the [alien] base. Later he was found dead with a bullet hole in his head. He had been killed for ‘treason.'”

Several photographs were taken of Höglund in the Bahamas. The entities themselves, however, could not be photographed. “Instead, there was an illuminated square on the photo where one of them had been,” HÃ¥kan explains. “Höglund remembers one episode when he sat on a bench, talking to one of them. Suddenly a stranger walked by and Höglund felt very embarrassed as it appeared as though he was talking to himself. These people had the ability to disappear into thin air.”

Another peculiar feature of the aliens was that they never seemed to sleep or eat, though they did drink—and even smoke. Also, Höglund never met any women among them.

A coincidental element in this saga is the Mafia. “Lou Chesler was the front man in the Bahamas for the big Mafia boss Meyer Lansky,” HÃ¥kan told me. “Richard and his wife found an ad in a Swedish newspaper in the autumn of 1968 about work in the Bahamas. They applied, and as they had been there before they got the work through a Swedish man. Richard was to be butler and his wife housekeeper at the Chesler residence in Nassau. They worked there for a couple of weeks before being forced to leave because of new laws by the government. During those weeks Richard met the visitors several times.”
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Höglund was allowed the use of their cars and drove an unused but old model of a black Cadillac (like those reported in other cases involving the proverbial “men in black”). “The strange thing was that it couldn't be crashed,” said HÃ¥kan. “It had a sort of magical ‘eye' that steered it. When you learned the trick it was very easy, he claimed.”

In a letter sent from the Bahamas in early 1969 to a friend in Sweden, Höglund wrote: “I cannot and am not allowed to disclose what we are doing here, but I can tell you this much: we are in a school here, and as you can
understand, the teachers are interplanetary.”
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Disturbing Developments

The building contractor having withdrawn his financial support, Höglund had to rely on his alien contacts for funding. “Obviously,” HÃ¥kan commented, “this group had unlimited economic resources.

“One day a man from a car firm visited Höglund and gave him a new car. He said it was paid for and was to be delivered to him. Before the third trip to the Bahamas, Höglund contacted a friend who was to take care of his apartment, pay the rent, and care for the indoor plants. The payment for this service would be sent from the Bahamas, to a special bank account. Höglund paid just five kronor into the account before he and his wife left. On the very day that they went to the Bahamas, someone paid 1,000 kronor into this account. Every week it increased by a few hundred kronor, but the receipts never stated who had put the money there. No money ever arrived from the Bahamas.

“When Höglund and his wife returned, they were very anxious as they thought they must owe their friend [who had looked after the apartment] a lot of money. When the friend explained that there was always money in the account, they first thought he had given it himself, but later they realized that some of their [‘space'] contacts must have made the payments.”

Following the leak of information about the Bahamas base to the CIA, the aliens moved their base to an area outside Mexico City. Henceforth, Höglund's foreign trips were to Mexico. He was often away from home for a month at a time. After the third and final trip to the Bahamas, Gunvor no longer accompanied her husband. In October 1968, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Höglund claimed to have been taken to the new base. He became very upset as he was not allowed to attend the Games!

“I had the feeling he was afraid,” Höglund's friend Dr. Karl Svensson revealed to HÃ¥kan. “He told me in general terms that he had been in Central America. I don't think he really knew where he was….”

Further contacts also took place in Sweden. Höglund's wife always knew when a visit was forthcoming because her husband became restless and got up early. He claimed to have been taken on board spaceships during this period, but information on these contacts is scanty. “He took
his car to a secret location south of Stockholm, where he was picked up by a craft,” HÃ¥kan told me, referring to the first trip. “He was blindfolded and had to lie down on the floor. The craft was very small—he couldn't stand up.” After that first trip, he became nauseated, but later adjusted to these experiences.

In the early 1970s, Höglund said that he had been operated on by his contacts, as Gunvor related to Håkan:

“He had a lot of headaches before, and took pills. One day, when I was going to work, he said that someone is coming and something is going to happen. He didn't always tell me when they were coming, but this time he told me not to come home too early from work. After that day he never had any headache. They did something to him and he said he would not have survived otherwise. It was some form of tumor, which was removed. I looked at his head but there was only a slight blemish. He was a bit pale and tired afterwards, and was told to rest a few days.”
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Höglund's contacts reportedly continued until his death, from a heart attack, on October 23, 1977. He was sixty-four.

Alternative Scenarios

There is the possibility, of course, that Richard Höglund might simply have been insane, or been suffering from delusions engendered perhaps by the tumor that had been “operated” on. This might explain at least some of his claims, but not according to those closest to him, including his wife. Nonetheless, there are a number of alternative explanations for his seemingly fantastic and farcical assertions. First is a hypothesis that he might have been spying for a foreign power such as the USSR, using the “alien” element as a cover.

Höglund was a Communist, HÃ¥kan told me. There was much Soviet infiltration of Sweden at that time, he notes, and Höglund had a friend who worked at the Swedish Navy base in Musko. He also had Soviet contacts. “Was he just a member of the Communist party, or an agent?” asks HÃ¥kan. After all, he had been asked by his “alien” contacts to obtain a map from that base. It is not known if he succeeded. But in any event, such a request, combined with his “translating” or decrypting some form of codes, raises suspicions, as does his trip to Mexico City in 1968 during the Olympic
Games, when Soviet penetration and subversion were at a peak.

“Höglund acted as a courier for his contacts,” HÃ¥kan emphasized. “He translated coded messages in the form of numbers. The codes disappeared in a few days (invisible ink?). He went to different places, like airports, to deliver envelopes with information for his contacts. Many of his activities sound like ordinary espionage. I believe the UFO story was a cover for probably Soviet espionage. His order to start a peace movement also indicates this.”

What of the car given to Höglund in Sweden? In checking Soviet activity at the time of his contacts, I noted that the KGB (the national security agency of the USSR from 1954 to 1991) had an auto dealership in Sweden—the Materco Bil Ab—with offices in four cities, used as a cover for espionage activities. In 1971, the Swedish newspaper
Dagens Nyheter
reported that police frequently followed Soviet “car salesmen” to “mobilization centers, radio stations, and other sensitive defense installations.” Pilots complained that radio transmissions emanating from the auto company, beamed to Soviet warships in the Baltic, disrupted their communications.
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Prior to the contacts, Höglund and his wife had seen an advertisement for land in the Bahamas, and he wanted to build a hotel there. Håkan wondered if the order to go to the Bahamas might have been a cover to persuade his wife to accompany him. The fact that one of Höglund's financiers was a building contractor also raises suspicions in this connection, though that financier had withdrawn his support after the first Bahamas trip.

There is also the question of Höglund's psychic abilities. By all accounts, he was a gifted telepath, and in my opinion this might have been a reason for the contacts—whatever the nature of those contacts. Moreover, he had other paranormal abilities. “I thought, before, that there was no psychic component prior to the contacts,” HÃ¥kan said to me, “but his wife told me that he sometimes went off and talked in a strange tongue. Also, he wrote a strange story about nuns and monks in the Middle Ages during one of his previous incarnations. So, he was, after all, a mystic. That changes the whole picture….” Also, Höglund excelled at telling stories (not lies), according to some.

Although HÃ¥kan believes the espionage hypothesis to be a possibility,
he concedes nonetheless that there are aspects of Höglund's story which are difficult if not impossible to explain exclusively in terms of Soviet espionage, a vested interest in the Bahamas, his psychic abilities, or his talent for telling stories. In June 1984 he interviewed Gunvor, then in her fifties. “Like her husband, she is very down-to-earth and practical,” he explains. “She confirmed almost all the details of the contacts.”

When Gunvor first heard about her husband's experience in 1965, she was stunned. “I believed him, though,” she told HÃ¥kan, “because Richard never lied to me. He was almost cynical, and believed neither in God nor the devil.”

“If several of the people involved in the affair hadn't been very close friends of mine, whom I have no reason to doubt, I guess I would never have started an investigation in the first place,” HÃ¥kan declared in 1984. “But there are just too many witnesses involved to dismiss the case.” Gunvor herself not only encountered one of the extraordinary beings in the Bahamas—which left her in a state of shock—but also with Richard at their apartment near Stockholm. She described these men as “beautiful, and tanned,” though, unlike the man in the Bahamas, “extremely well dressed.”

No Way Out

Most of those who knew Höglund—including his wife—were reluctant initially to go on the record under their own names, out of what seems a genuine fear of his sinister contacts. Höglund himself was both afraid and mistrustful of them. “I'm not allowed to say anything,” he admitted to HÃ¥kan, during their one and only communication, by phone, in 1973. “People would be shocked if they knew of these things. I've already said too much.” Fourteen months before he died, he reiterated these concerns in a phone conversation with a friend of HÃ¥kan's. “What I have gotten into is negative,” he lamented. “You become very isolated. I warn you against going deeper into this.”

Asked why he did not simply stop working with the beings, Höglund explained that he “would go the same way as Loftin Anderson. There is a way in but no way out.” During the first few years of his contacts, he felt that he owed them some help in return for healing his kidney. Later, things got worse. “You don't know what kind of a hell I'm into,” he remarked. In
the event he could take it no longer at some point, he carried a suicide pill around with him.