...Tehaccipi (a landmark that features prominently in indian legends of "winged ones" from the constellation of the Great Bear).
The oldest case was that of Mike Childers. In 1919, while hoboing across the country, Childers spent what he thought was a night in the woods near Tehacippi. When he awoke and set off on his way, he discovered that the year was I934 and America had passed into the Great Depression. Childers made a small media splash as a modern Rip Van Winkle, but was never able to discover what happened to the fifteen years he'd lost. It wasn't until 1990 that the decrepit Childers began to have nightmares that hinted at forgotten memories. Having seen Dr. Denton Schaeffer on a tabloid talk show about repressed memories, he mailed Schaeffer a description of his experience and dreams (along with his collection of journal articles and news clippings about him from the mid-1930s). Schaeffer interviewed and hypnotized Childers on thirty occasions before Childers' death in 1995 and was able to uncover a vivid tapestry of dark and horrifying memories in which Childers was taken beneath the ground by chattering alien creatures who surgically removed his brain and transported it to alien realms.The most disturbing part of this case is the medical evidence that Childers was subjected to extensive and inexplicable cranial surgery sometime during the 1920s.
The second-oldest case centers around Janet Chappel, a member of the ill-fated Elysian Fields hippie commune, which settled in Kern county in 1969. One weekend during the winter of 1972, Chappel went to Los Angeles for supplies (LSD was one of the few things they couldn't produce right on the farm) and returned to find the commune abandoned.
Chappel's attempt to enlist the aid of the authorities resulted in her arrest and conviction for possession of LSD. The Kern County Sheriffs investigation concluded, rather perfunctorily, that the hippies dropped acid, wandered off into the woods, and died of exposure or fled the county. No sign of Elysian Fields' thirty-four residents was ever found.
Nor was that part of any argument.