“Incongruity is the basis for jokes, and what could be more incongruous than a short, fat, bald man telling a middle-aged woman with a limp that she was a half-breed space alien who needed to stop an interplanetary war?”
Diplomat to the Galaxy is the memoir of a woman who, in her fifties, finds herself drawn into the study of UFOs after a strange man tells her she’s needed to mediate between warring planets. Crazy, yes, but sometimes crazy has unexpected reality buried in it.
Like most people when they first begin investigating, Glenda assumed believers were all dingbats. But Diplomat to the Galaxy shows that when there is truth, even dingbats can uncover it. Experienced researchers say her story mirrors their own journey as they sought answers about flying saucers and extraterrestrials, including the shock when they finally realized "they are here." Technically, you may not learn anything new from this book, but it is almost sure that by the end you will see it all differently.
--Glenda Pliler is a former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) field investigator, writer, and social commentator.
This book has 4.8 stars on Amazon.
“Incongruity is the basis for jokes, and what could be more incongruous than a short, fat, bald man telling a middle-aged woman with a limp that she was a half-breed space alien who needed to stop an interplanetary war?”
Diplomat to the Galaxy is the memoir of a woman who, in her fifties, finds herself drawn into the study of UFOs after a strange man tells her she’s needed to mediate between warring planets. Crazy, yes, but sometimes crazy has unexpected reality buried in it.
Like most people when they first begin investigating, Glenda assumed believers were all dingbats. But Diplomat to the Galaxy shows that when there is truth, even dingbats can uncover it. Experienced researchers say her story mirrors their own journey as they sought answers about flying saucers and extraterrestrials, including the shock when they finally realized "they are here." Technically, you may not learn anything new from this book, but it is almost sure that by the end you will see it all differently.
--Glenda Pliler is a former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) field investigator, writer, and social commentator.
This book has 4.8 stars on Amazon.
Aha! Don’t you just love eurekas, peak moments, and epiphanies when pieces fall together and, suddenly, you get it? But this was not an aha! It was an oh no. It was a heart-stopping, bone-chilling, breath-sucking oh no. While I was preparing lunch on a bitterly cold day in the spring of 2005, the old mystery surfaced. I didn’t pay it any attention. I’d given up trying to solve it so it had become no more than the chitchat the mind finds to entertain itself with as it wanders from thing to thing like a child left unattended. But then… oh dear God. With no warning buzzer, no screech from a jump across record grooves, no posted sign to warn me that I was nearing a precipice—memories collided and my mind popped open like a soda can. All the parts and pieces snapped into place and I could almost see Tom shaking his head as if to say, “I told you so.” Why, why do all these crazy things keep happening to me? Had I come full circle and still failed to understand this mystery? Or was this the answer I’d been looking for all along and I just didn’t want to believe it?
***
Back in 1997, I expected that leaving Fairfield was simply the next step in a well-thought-out plan. Fairfield was home to Maharishi International University (MIU) and to thousands of people who practice Transcendental Meditation (TM). I graduated from there with a bachelor’s in Western philosophy, and then a master’s. Between times, I’d worked on staff and on projects for world peace. More recently I’d been working on a Ph.D. in psychology and I’d been doing so well. TM increases intelligence and overall abilities so by age 52, I’d overcome enough handicaps that I was poised for late-life success. I’d landed a contract to write a book using the same research needed for my dissertation. If the book did well, it would pay for my schooling and launch me into a career as a respectable expert. Cool, huh? I was so proud of myself. Neither of my parents had even graduated from high school.
The problem was that I needed money. To get it, I intended to sell my former home in Joplin, Missouri. But, as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” While waiting for the sale, I fell off a neighbor’s horse, fracturing my spine and messing up my hip. It left me unable to sit upright for more than an hour and my productive, service-oriented life crashed to a dead halt. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program and pass the book deal on to another writer. Over the next two years, unable to work and with dwindling savings, I plummeted into despair. In a cross between a whine and a prayer, I’d limp up and down my tiny trailer asking over and over, What should I do now? What should I do now? One day I heard an angelic voice in my head say, “Well, what do you want to do?”
Hearing that voice wasn’t schizophrenic. After years of practicing TM, sometimes a gently guiding voice was how answers came. Even so, I couldn’t have been more startled. My gratification in life had come from seeking enlightenment and working for world peace while dreaming of greater contributions as an author and authority. Outside of those goals, a personal want seemed frivolously unimportant.
It took about two weeks after hearing the voice to realize that my bones had been sending me clues all along, in the guise of memories of sun and sand. Back in the hippie days, I’d traveled around Florida in a VW van with my dog, Daffy. A year later I did Navy boot camp in Orlando, followed by training school in the Florida Keys. Yes, I know that “hippie” and “boot camp” hardly belong in the same paragraph but I’ve always been an odd mix of stubborn and flexible. When I can be nudged off my fixed position long enough to see things through a different lens, I’ll follow the next set of “vibes.” The hippie trip led to an experience of enlightenment, and the enlightenment experience made me realize that I needed to go back to college. To get funds for college, I joined the Navy, specifying a non-combat position. Like that, the way a surfer shifts with changes in the tides, I shifted with the times.
But shifts where we can’t see any steps ahead of us, like when you can no longer work, that’s hard. When the memories first came of how the air smelled in Florida, of how warm sand felt between my toes, I thought they were just random. Those memories would come and I’d think, “ooh, that was nice.” I finally realized those memories were memos. They were how my aching bones were telling me I needed to get away from the cold, to go get some of that healing warmth.
I didn’t know what someone formerly dedicated to world peace would find to do in the middle of Florida, but in November of 1999, I moved to Avon Park, a little town about ten miles north of Sebring. It was just the next logical step.
***
To my surprise, where the old life had been full of purpose and meaning, the new life was rich with unexpected pleasures. I found a cottage rundown enough to be affordable on Lake Lotela—800 acres of a lake so clean you could see shells eight feet below the surface. I found a used jet ski at a garage sale and found myself awakening into a life more gratifying than I had thought possible. I fell in love with sunrises and sunsets, balmy breezes and year-round greenery, fits of afternoon rains that cooled the heat and washed the air, fresh avocados from my own tree, and, most pleasurable of all, frequent swims in the curative waters of the lake.
The biggest problem I had, other than pain and poverty, was that I was intellectually bored. Humorist Dave Barry, noting that Florida ranked 47th in intelligence, called it Flori-duh. I asked the octogenarian at the desk of the local library where I might find mental stimulation and she suggested I check out Reverend Andy at Unity Church in Sebring. At the mention of church, I hid a frown. I didn’t like dogma. I knew that Unity’s perspective was more suitable for me but my ex-husband had formal training in Unity teachings. He’d called it, “entry-level metaphysics” and I was well past entry-level. Ever since I’d had a direct encounter with enlightenment three decades earlier, I’d been a seeker of wisdom. With the degrees from MIU, extensive meditation retreats, and insatiable reading in both ancient and modern knowledge, I was educated enough that later that year I would teach Metaphysics part-time at the local college. It was just natural to assume that I was more educated than the average reverend.
Still, my choices were so limited that when another person praised Reverend Andy, I decided to give it a try.
***
What happened was funny. Who would have dreamed that in a relatively obscure part of Florida, an area whose only claim to fame was oranges, car racing, and burglary, that in a concrete block church on the edge of town, one might find a spiritually advanced minister and such a wonderful group of people as had gathered around him? While I stood in the entry looking at cheap carpet in an unremarkable interior, an ambiance hit me so powerfully that I felt mildly stunned. I didn’t recognize at first that what it was, was love. There was so much of it in that little church that it was palpable. Then I discovered I adored Reverend Andy. He married inspiration and scholarship so well that I was never bored. Hoping for even more stimulation, I joined the adult class that met before Sunday services. Do you see anything in those decisions that suggest it would lead to anything weird? I didn’t.
The first morning I stepped down into the add-on classroom that had been built between the sanctuary and the sidewalk, eight or nine people sat around four pushed-together folding tables. A woman dressed in a silk caftan said in a warm tone, “Come have coffee and donuts.” This was Joanne. Of all the characters I came to love at Unity of Sebring, I would especially love this woman. Like most of Unity’s characters, she’ll remain in the background except for key moments but these people were to become the joy of my life. I would say to her that someday I’d have to write a book to tell the world how great she and my dear Unity friends were.
“Just stick to the truth,” she said. “Don’t make us seem too saintly.”
We both laughed but for different reasons. Her laughter affectionately chided me for possibly thinking too highly of them while I was laughing at the irony that the ordinary people who attended this class—retirees, educators, homemakers, secretaries, shopkeepers—were angels unaware. They did indeed have faults. JoAnne was a former alcoholic. Juta’s temper was as snappish as a spoiled dog. Mr. Butler, a church board member, was notorious for obstinacy. A few had exotic interests such as the guide who organized expeditions to Bimini, the area Cayce believed Atlantis to rest. Most were ordinary citizens who were there because traditional Christianity had left them unfulfilled. Bertrand Russell might have been referring to them when he said, “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.” Rather than promote some orthodoxy, some fixed way of believing to which they try to convert others, these people were here to discover truth inside themselves. They filled me with inspiration and admiration as I saw them wrestle with new concepts. Mozart wrote, “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together are the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” I was the best educated in the group but these geniuses were to become my teachers in matters of the heart. I loved and respected all of them with something that bordered on adoration.
All of them, that is, except Tom.
“…And this is Tom Banks,” Mr. Butler said, making the rounds of introductions. It still strikes me as odd that I, who detested dogmas, and Tom, who seemed so incompatible among that sweet, sincere group, were both there at the same time. But isn’t life like that, full of miracles and curses that we do not appreciate until it is too late? How often do we take for granted common marvels such as the patterns of bright and shade that filter through our blinds and ferns and philodendrons, flung on the wall by light that has, in a mere eight minutes, traversed 93 million miles? Likewise, when we experience remarkable timing, we typically don’t respond as if we are in the presence of signs and portents; we merely call it coincidence. Was it marvel or coincidence that Tom and I, who were so opposite in so many ways, intersected at Unity of Sebring?
At his introduction, Tom stood up and half-bowed, waving his hand with a flourish as if he had an imaginary plumed hat. In a tone that might have won him a role as the unctuous Uriah Heap in a Dicken’s drama, he smiled and said, “Thomas Hershel Banks at your service, Ma’am.”
I wasn’t proud of my reaction. Years earlier, during precious minutes in a higher state of consciousness, I’d seen that hidden underneath our layers of stress, confusion, and distortions, we are all Divine. That experience had given direction and meaning to life. I became committed to treating others with as much respect as if their divinity was out in the open for all to see. Gandhi expressed this philosophy when he said, “If you don’t find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.”
However, I did not find God in Tomas Hershel Banks. My dislike was instantaneous and intense. Dislike went deeper than his looks but his looks didn’t help. I wouldn’t say he was as repulsive as Jabba the Hutt, but close. I tried to remind myself that on the other side of the blubber and greasy pleasantries, there existed the beauty and wonder of living Divinity but on his five-foot-six frame, rolls of fat made him look, at first glance, so much like a misshapen, overinflated Michelin Tire Man that it was hard to not laugh. Looking again, seeing how the largest portion of his fat slithered under his belt to spread around his hips like a tutu around a hippo, it was hard to not feel revolted. His hazel eyes were vague and his once-red hair was thin and yellowish, worn in a comb-over. Later he would say to me, “I’ve always been attractive.” Maybe he’d always been in denial, too, I don’t know.
Have you heard the saying, that to assume makes an “ass out of u and me”? I made two erroneous assumptions that Sunday. I came consciously expecting that compared to Reverend Andy I might be disappointed in this group when what happened was that they were to become dearer to me than family.
The second assumption was that if I ignored Tom he would fade into the background. His looks suggested fading but he had no intention of disappearing. In the Sundays to come, he would attack me as if I was the very devil… or as if he was.
In 1999, Glenda Pliler arrived in Florida to recover from a serious injury. She has what’s called an ABD—All but Dissertation—Ph.D. in Psychology. She joined a church and enjoyed the deep discussions of the community. However, one man scoffed at her knowledge and discussions. No matter what topic she shared, whether it was psychology or theology, he was ready with an insult. Then he invites her out to the movies, and she isn’t prepared to tell him how much she can’t stand him.
That date began a two-year friendship that she describes as “trauma-bonded over their disagreements.” During lunch at a local restaurant, Tom of the Comb-over tells her aliens exist and that they’ve chosen her to bring world peace. He won’t let up and dares her to find out more.
Unusual experiences are simple to dismiss as cognitive distortions. Rather than listen and learn, it’s easy to relegate that person to the dingbat category. Pliler plows into the research on aliens in order to refute Tom’s claims.
She soon learns that 70% of internet information is sensationalism or an excuse to sell merchandise. As she refines her research, she learns some scientists studied UFO phenomena. The government put out a report that said 6% could not be explained. That was enough to keep Tom a believer, but not Glenda.
Besides accounts focusing on unexplained lights, abductions, or animal mutilation, one detail stood out to her—the unexplained loss of time. When she explores her own memory, her life as a serious ufologist begins. In her quest for answers, she grapples with fear and her own purpose for being.
Whether you believe in aliens or not, you will become enlightened. Glenda S. Pliler is an accomplished writer, thinker, and wit. The insights she gained from her years studying and practicing Transcendental Mediation gave her the tools to work through all her doubts.
The author shares so many methods of scientific reasoning (like the Gedanken experiment), that I hope she writes a book outlining them. Her method of discussion brings a rare clarity to complex concepts. It would help students to study any discipline.