Throughout history, we asked ourselves many questions. For the majority of those questions, we did not have any answers, no explanations. We had no way to confirm certain things. Up until only recently with the scientific method could we start to explain the world around us, and use nature for our gain with great efficiency.
Yet, even today we have questions that can’t be answered effectively, questions that are relegated to theories and speculation, conspiracy theories.
Now certain people came into this world with a special ability. An ability to look at this chaotic world and make sense of it like no other before. To see the world in a new and novel way. Some people had the luck of experiencing things that could only be described as supernatural.
Of course, many of those things were explained by science. But many things still remained unanswered. The Roswell incidents, sightings of UFOs, miracles and legends, myths of eldrich beings and Gods.
The following is a transcript of an interview with a man who was not a special individual, but a man whom through certain circumstances came to know a man who was unique.
The interview was conducted sometime during the summer of 1998. The man interviewed was a retired police investigator from Oklahoma.
Here is the transcript in full :
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*sound of ruffling papers*
A voice of an older man “Here are the papers, not all of them. What I managed to dig up through the years, can’t read them anyway…”
A voice of a younger man “Mr. Staten, I began the recording, uh… If you can just introduce yourself and who you are once more so I can have it on tape.”
”*sigh* Alright… My name is Francis Staten, I am… Rather was an investigator for the Oklahoma Police Department from 1959 to 1990. I was born and raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma. There I attended the Oklahoma Territorial Agricultural and Mechanical college… Today that’s the Oklahoma State University. Though life went down a different route and I ended up in the police department. Hence why I’m not in agriculture” *chuckle*
“Thank you Mr. Staten… Now, let us get to the meat of the reason why I am here. As you claimed, you knew one Micheal Rogers? Correct?”
FS - “Yeah, at least I think he was called Micheal Rogers.”
Interviewer - “How so?”
FS - “Well, during the end of his escapades he referred to himself by many names. It could’ve been his mania at the time. But, despite my connections and position I couldn’t so much as find his birth certificate.”
INT - “But he did work in the department?”
FS - “He was working as an investigator, he led most of the interrogations. Yes.”
INT - “Can you describe how you’ve come to meet him? Tell me about what you know.”
FS - “Well, he came to the job around… 1961 if my memory serves me right. He just came into the department. His background was unknown, from what he told us he was from Dallas. But his accent was more… European. There was an inside joke, that was half-serious… That he was a Soviet spy, a communist in disguise, or whatever. But, the higher-ups negated those rumors. As for how I met him, well it was when he first came into the station. I was given the task to show the rookie around and tell him where everything was, to show him to his office and such.”
INT - “Can you describe what he looked like?”
FS - “Tall, over six feet, lean… Brown eyes, dark hair. He was very well kempt, well dressed, and uhh… Yeah, he always wore these leather gloves. I remember the first time I met him he stood tall in the hallway and had a stoic expression. Once I came to him and introduced myself, extending my hand to greet him. He simply said his name with a smile… It seemed forced but alright, he left me hanging on the handshake.”
INT - “Not a very sociable type I see.”
FS - “You would be surprised! He was not the type for chit-chat absolutely, but when it came to work, and some certain topics he would turn into a completely different person. At the drop of a hat, he would completely change his entire demeanor, to the point where even his body language was completely different. I remember we were investigating an armed robbery, and we had a suspect up for an interview. Now, we played the good ol’ good cop bad cop. It was me and Mike, and uhh… Once he got into the room, he was playing the good cop. He was playing it extremely well. Now I’ll spare you the details. In the end, I was certain he was the guy.
But once we exited the room, after around 30 minutes of interrogation… Mike just looked me straight in the eye and told me ‘He didn’t do it’… He was right, we caught the real robber a week later. I asked him how he knew, and the only response I got was… ‘I just did.”
INT - “He was very good at his job as you describe it. Do you have any more stories like those?”
FS - “Yeah… In 1967 we had a murder case that went cold. We suspected some of the family members of the victim were to blame for the murder… Inheritance was at play, a bunch of stab wounds can’t remember the exact number. Brutal stuff. But when Micheal got in on the investigation he simply looked at one of the photos of the crime scene. The immediate question we got was ‘Was the victim left-handed?’. We didn’t know at the time, so we had to ask around. It was confirmed by multiple family members that she was right-handed. We also asked the rest of the family, all of the immediate members were right-handed… In the end, it was the neighbor, who was left-handed… How did he come to that conclusion? Well, in the photograph was a cup, now bear in mind we had no fingerprints and this was before DNA profiling. The cup handle was turned to the left… The guy had a drink after he committed the murder. There are a lot of details to that specific case but I won’t bore you with them. In short, he was indefatigable in his job. When he had his sights on a case he would not stop until it was solved.”
INT - “Okay, now that we have all that out of the way. Please tell me about Micheal’s ‘descent into madness’ you told me about.”
FS - “Right… As I said he opened up only when certain topics were brought up. Now, most saw him as a madman from the start. He was weird, eccentric. He had his idiosyncracies, he was afraid of germs, and most likely had… What do you call it? OCD?”
INT - “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, yes. A person who has it can be described as a perfectionist, he or she needs to do things in a certain order for example.”
FS - “Yeah! That’s it. Now, I was probably the only person who listened to him when he went on to ramble about outer-space, human psychology, and religion. He was interesting to listen to. But after some time his weird stories and theories turned into… I don’t what to call it. They stopped making sense.”
INT - “Can you give me an example of some of his ‘ramblings’?”
FS - “Sure, for example, he would tell me constantly about some of the books he got his hands on. Some Grimoires he read on demons, some conspiracies that he heard… Most of them went over my head to be completely honest. Now, the only one that comes to me at this moment is one… The last story he told me before he completely isolated himself. He told me of some book he got from some hippie or something. It was a text from some Greek monk about demons, he kept repeating this word then… Lei- something something.”
INT - “Can I look at the papers? You said you can’t read them.”
FS - “Be my guest, you can take them for all I care.”
*ruffling of paper*
INT - “Thank you.”
*silence*
INT - “This is Greek… Yeah, I see why you couldn’t read it.”
FS - “Can you?”
INT - “My grandmother was Greek, I know some of the language. But this looks… old.”
*silence*
INT - “Just a hunch, but I see a word repeated here a few times… ‘Leliurium’, could that be the word he was saying?”
*silence*
FS - “… I think… Yes, sounds familiar. Excuse my memory, I’m getting old…”
INT - “No problem. Do you remember anything else? You told me about visiting his home once actually. Was that before or after he went into hiding?”
FS - “After… Let me elaborate, around January of 1970 he stopped coming to work under the pretense that he was sick. Which was unusual, because he never took sick days off, he never took a vacation for that matter. Months went by, he said it was bad… Then he stopped picking up his phone and we went to investigate what was going on. Of course, we tried to knock on his door before, but he would just tell us to go away so we don’t get sick… We listened to him and went back home each time. But after he stopped all communication we went to his apartment, and knocked on the door *sigh*… There was no answer so we broke in. Inside was a complete mess. The immediate thing that hit me was a sense a horrible sense of dread, like something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what exactly. At least in those first moments…
The walls were painted with what seemed like blood… Symbols, what looked like some kind of maps. Paper and books were strewn across the floor. And for Micheal himself, he was nowhere to be found. Now I did what I shouldn’t have done, and I took some evidence from the crime scene… Those are some of the papers you hold here, others I managed to get hold of at your request.”
INT - “I see… These are copies of the original text. You said I can take them right?… Anything else?”
FS - “We wanted to open up an investigation on the disappearance of our colleague… But another agency was quick to step in… FBI. To be honest, after that I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from… that. I had a feeling I would be swimming in foreign waters. That room… Something was really wrong in that room. And Micheal… In hindsight the man was different, but I’ve never experienced something so… Excuse me.”
*silence*
INT - “Right… Okay, I’ll wrap this up now. I’ll take a look at these texts, if you find anything else give me a call.”
FS - “Alright, will do.”
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That is the end of the interview with Francis Staten. Francis passed away about a year after this interview due to heart failure.
After this interview, the man who conducted it, whose identity is unknown as of the time of writing, did further research on the papers from Micheal Rogers.
The text written in Medieval Greek was a handwritten copy of the original text from a book written by an 11th-century Byzantine monk named Micheal Psellos.
His text was about Demonology, specifically where demons reside. His classification was divided into six.
Leliurium, are the most powerful demons. They reside in the “ether”, a place described as being beyond the Moon. This type is also the only one referenced by Micheal Rogers.
Others are “Aerial”, which reside in the sky, “Terrestrial”, which reside on the Earth, “Marine” which reside in the oceans, “Subterranean” which reside beneath the Earth in caves and caverns, and finally, the “Lucifugous” which reside in the deepest pits of Hell and are the weakest of all the demons.
The interviewer had written further comments on the texts where he elaborates his thoughts on them, and adds that Micheal had added some text in them alongside the original Greek text. He came to that conclusion since some of the text written there is not in the original book, the “De operatione dæmonum” in translation “On the Operation of Demons”, was incomplete.
From the research done by the interviewer and myself, the conclusion we both came to was the following; He somehow found the rest of the texts. How many are there in existence is unknown, only a few? I, unfortunately, do not have any physical copies (save for the publically available translated version), so I can’t say for sure if those were forgeries or not.
Leliurium, as described in the book itself is a place beyond the moon where the most powerful demons reside.
This may be conjecture, but from what I was able to connect. Around that period, the eleventh century, there seemed to be an increased number of “sightings”. Some of them have been simply attributed to comets and other natural cosmic phenomena. But some, I do not have any idea.
You can look at some medieval paintings from that period and beyond, strange shapes and objects can be seen in those paintings. Accounts from the 8th century in Ireland also describe some sort of sky ships…
Now you can guess where I’m going with this.
In the end, I can’t know for sure. But whoever Micheal Rogers was… He was probably unto something because you don’t get that much attention for being a simple lunatic. Not at all.
You can come to your conclusions.
But at the end of the day, the question of what lies beyond the Moon, or more specifically what lies on its dark side, remains a mystery. Despite us mapping it out and having rovers there exploring, we may never know what truly is out there. At least within our lifetime.
What’s the best way to hide, if not in a blind spot within our garden, under our noses?