NO OTHER GODS, CHAPTER TWO: PART II: INSIDE THE CRAFT
By Janet Kira Lessin
Johnston Atoll, 1996
[EPIGRAPH — to be selected]
IMAGE PROMPT 1: Two human figures — a young woman and a young man — standing just inside the entrance of a small oval spacecraft. The interior is vast and luminous, far larger than the exterior shell suggested. Soft ambient light with no visible source. Seats sized for humans appear along the walls. The Greys who carried them are gone — the couple stands alone. They hold hands. Their faces show quiet wonder rather than fear. Render in a painterly, cinematic style, with a muted oceanic palette and 1990s-era clothing.
[Previously in Part I: Six mid-size Greys lifted Vance Murillo and me from our separate barracks in the middle of the night, carried us face-up like surfboards to the beach at Johnston Atoll, and set us down as a small oval craft landed at the water’s edge. We found each other. We held hands. The door opened.]
The craft was small from the outside. We stepped through the door and everything changed.
Inside, the space expanded far beyond what the exterior suggested. This is standard. Every craft I have entered works the same way. The interior holds no obligation to the shell around it. I stopped trying to reconcile the two and accepted where I was.
Seats appeared — sized for humans. The Greys had none. They needed none. The moment the door closed, they vanished. No transition, no exit — present one moment, absent the next. Just the two of us.
Vance Murillo and I sat together and held hands. The environment responded to thought — temperature, light, everything adjusted without a word. A need formed at the edge of awareness, and the craft met it, the way a replicator reads body and mind at once and delivers what is required.
Johnston Atoll drew a specific kind of person — Army, Navy, Air Force, likely some Navy SEALs, plus vetted civilians like me. Every soul on that island had been screened, assigned, or approved by the US Government. It was a classified military installation. The public had no access. Visitors arrived only with federal sanction — entertainers flown in and flown out, zero access to the island itself. Even the international presence — Russians, representatives of other nations — arrived by government arrangement. Johnston Atoll was a controlled territory at every level.
Vance stood apart even in that company. He volunteered for hazardous duty so his friends would face less risk. Toxic waste work came up — he put on the suit and did what needed to be done. Older men and younger ones both followed his lead. He told me he was twenty. He was nineteen. It made complete sense either way.
We were genuinely friends. We liked each other. That sounds simple. It is not. Love can be chemical, karmic, or compulsive. Liking someone — truly enjoying who they are, wanting their company just because of them — that is rarer. There was no drama between us, no obsession, no one trying to complete the other. We had known each other before. I am certain of that. Past life recognition feels exactly like this: familiar, easy, no performance required.
The craft moved. No vibration, no sound, no sensation of speed. One moment, the surface of the Pacific. The next descent.
Then the hull of the craft ceased to exist.
For one split second, the primal brain took over. I gasped. We grabbed for each other. The Pacific Ocean pressed against us on every side with nothing between us and it, and every human instinct screamed that the water was about to come crashing in and consume us whole.
Then we looked at each other and busted out laughing.
That is what genuine friendship does in the middle of the impossible. It laughs.
IMAGE PROMPT 2: The interior of a transparent spacecraft descending through the dark Pacific Ocean at night. Two humans — a young woman and a young man — sit side by side laughing, hands clasped, surrounded on all sides by open ocean through invisible walls. Their faces are lit by sourceless warm light. Outside, the ocean is dark. The moment feels simultaneously terrifying and joyful. Cinematic, painterly, deep ocean blues and warm interior light.
And then we saw what the hull had been hiding.
The middle of the night. Black water. Instead — light. Sourceless, total, reaching every depth and corner of the reef around us. I have thought about that light many times since. It came from nowhere I could identify. It simply was.
Some of the most beautiful coral reefs I have ever seen surrounded us on every side. Colors that had no business existing at that depth in that darkness. In the shallower formations, the diurnal creatures held still — fish tucked into crevices, parrotfish sealed inside their mucus cocoons, the daytime world at rest. Deeper down, the night shift ran at full motion. Moray eels on the hunt. Octopus threading through the coral. The ancient nocturnal life of the reef goes about its business, indifferent to two humans suspended in a transparent craft watching from inside.
The light disturbed none of it. Sleepers stayed asleep. Hunters kept hunting. Whatever illuminated that water existed only for us — calibrated to let us witness without interference. No human technology does that.
Nature beats Disney, Spielberg, and Avatar, hands down. There is simply no comparison to what our dear planet — Gaia — produces when no human is watching. The reef simply was what it was: alive, extravagant, completely indifferent to our categories of beauty.
Vance squeezed my hand. We both understood we witnessed something most humans never see and never will.
IMAGE PROMPT 3: A breathtaking underwater coral reef seen from inside a transparent spacecraft at night. Sourceless warm light illuminates every color of the reef — vivid corals, sleeping parrotfish in mucus cocoons tucked into crevices, deeper down, a moray eel hunting, an octopus moving through formations. Two human silhouettes visible inside the craft, holding hands, faces turned outward in awe. The contrast between the warm craft interior and the cold deep ocean outside. Painterly, luminous colors are extraordinarily vivid against the surrounding darkness.
The installation extends approximately thirteen floors below the ocean floor. Billy Hayes, who had direct knowledge of the structure, confirmed that number. It may go deeper. The entry worked like an airlock — water out, water back in, the base stays dry. We passed through.
The decor was the first surprise.
When the island above got new furnishings, the old pieces went below. 1940s chairs. 1950s desks. 1960s lamps. 1970s lava lamps. Decades of hand-me-downs — military issue and personal items alike, things soldiers and civilians left behind across every era of the base’s existence. All of it still in decent shape, all of it relocated to the underworld rather than discarded. Sitting alongside that retro accumulation: technology with no earthly origin, equipment that belonged to no decade, no country, no human manufacturer. Retro and otherworldly in the same room.
Something about those 1960s couches and 1970s chairs pulled at me. A recognition that had no business being there. I had seen that furniture before. I felt certain of it. Somewhere specific I could not yet name.
That feeling had a name, though I had no word for it then. I would find the word years later. A bleedthrough.
[See Glossary: Bleedthrough]
The Greys reappeared the moment we landed. One group took Vance to the left. A single Grey approached me — I believe the same one who had held my foot on the beach and told me to go ahead and scream. This time, there were no words. A soft telepathic touch to my mind, gentle as a nudge. I knew where to go.
I recognized him.
How can a Grey be familiar? I was in the middle of an alien abduction.
And yet. There he was. A presence I had known my entire life in this body, a guide who had been with me since before I had language for what he was. Of course, he was there on this most important night. He would have been nowhere else.
I call him Aril.
Vance and I held on.
We held tight until all I felt were his fingertips desperate against mine. Then we were apart. The separation hit like a physical blow — the last connection to another human being, gone in an instant. The most profound loneliness I have ever known in this lifetime crashed through me. A loneliness I recognized from somewhere much older and much further away than 1996.
The Phantom Zone, you ask? The Void? Yes — that is real, I have been there, and that is a tale for another time.
IMAGE PROMPT 4: Two hands — a woman’s and a man’s — at the moment of separation. Fingers stretching toward each other as they are pulled apart in a stark underground corridor. The lighting is institutional, cold. Grey beings are visible at the edges of the frame, leading each human in opposite directions. The focus is entirely on the hands — the last point of contact. Emotional, intimate, cinematic. The moment of separation is rendered as the most human thing in an inhuman place.
Aril led me to a room and handed me a gown. Then I sat in a cold green metal chair, and I watched.
Three types of beings worked on Vance. The small two-to-three-foot Greys moved around the examination table with instruments, assistants to whatever came next. The mid-size five-foot Greys handled medical support. And the tall one commanded everything.
A mantis hybrid. Easily ten feet tall. And wearing a long white doctor’s lab coat.
I stifled a laugh. I caught myself thinking about whoever had to sew that coat. Someone, somewhere, had sat down with yards of white fabric and produced a doctor’s coat large enough to fit a ten-foot mantis hybrid. I named him Harry on the spot. He was anything but. And the image of Harry’s tailor — measuring tape around their neck, squinting up at their impossible client — nearly finished me.
I found humor everywhere. I chastised myself immediately. Janet, what the hell are you doing?
The Greys let Vance have his reaction — twice — before they moved forward. They held complete control at every moment. They faced zero danger. They simply allowed him his response, as if they had all the time in existence, because they did. Whether that was calculation or something closer to patience, I cannot say. I only know they chose it.
The man who put on the hazmat suit so his friends would face less risk did not want to be on that table. His body remembered how to object. It objected.
They have a method for the body’s resistance. A touch to the head, something sent below the level of conscious thought. Fear drains. Movement stops. Vance went still.
Terrifying, comical, and extraordinary all at once. I had no idea what they were doing to him.
I would find out five years later when Vance came to visit. But that is another chapter entirely.
IMAGE PROMPT 5: An underground medical facility, institutional and oddly dated. A young woman sits in a green-padded military metal chair, observing from across the room. On an examination table nearby, a young man lies still, surrounded by small Grey beings with instruments. Commanding the scene is an extraordinarily tall mantis-hybrid being wearing a crisp white doctor’s lab coat. The coat fits perfectly despite the being’s ten-foot height. The woman in the chair has her hand over her mouth, suppressing a smile. The scene is simultaneously clinical, alien, and absurd. Cinematic, painterly, underground institutional lighting.
Then they came for me.
What happened next is Part III.
GLOSSARY
Bleedthrough
A moment when a memory or experience from a past life, parallel timeline, or alternate incarnation spontaneously surfaces in present awareness. Unlike a simple memory, a bleedthrough arrives with full sensory and emotional weight — as real as the present moment. Often triggered by a familiar location, object, or soul encountered across lifetimes.
Metagene
A genetic marker present in certain humans, believed to amplify psychic sensitivity, contact experiences, and multidimensional perception. Those carrying the metagene tend toward lifelong ET contact, bleedthrough experiences, and what researchers call anomalous cognition. It is not acquired — it arrives with the body.
Retrocognition
The ability to perceive or re-experience events from the past through consciousness rather than conventional memory. Documented in remote viewing research and described in ancient Indian texts as accessing the Akashic records. Brain imaging confirms that vivid retrocognitive experience activates the same neural networks as actual memory retrieval.
Aril
The name I give to my primary Grey guide — a being who has accompanied me throughout this lifetime and across others. His true name exists in a frequency that human vocal cords cannot reproduce. Aril is the closest approximation in human language. He was present on the night described in this episode. He has always been present.
MILABS (Military Abductions)
Abduction experiences involving both military personnel and extraterrestrial beings operating in coordination. Documented by a growing number of contact experiencers. The military component suggests governmental awareness of and participation in ET contact programs, possibly under agreements established as early as the Eisenhower administration.
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Janet Kira Lessin is a lifelong ET contact experiencer, researcher, radio host, and co-founder of the World Polyamory Association. She documented her experiences at Johnston Atoll beginning in 1996. Dragon at the End of Time is part of her transmedia memoir series No Other Gods.
IMAGES
Two human figures — a young woman, long, sandy blonde hair, bangs, blue eyes, 30-something, and a young man, dark hair, brown eyes, hispanic, native american mix, 20, standing just inside the entrance of a small oval spacecraft. The interior is vast and luminous, far larger than the exterior shell suggested. Soft ambient light with no visible source. Seats sized for humans appear along the walls. The Greys who carried them are gone — the couple stands alone. They hold hands. Their faces show quiet wonder rather than fear. Rendered in a painterly, cinematic style, muted oceanic palette. She is wearing a long, sleeveless emerald-green nightgown, and he is in military-issued army-green underpants, 1990s-era clothing.
