NO OTHER GODS
Break the Godspell
Janet Kira Lessin, contibutor Claudia Lenore
“I wasn’t born into my mission.
My mission is the reason I was born.”
— Janet Kira Lessin
❖
CHAPTER ONE
Meeting My Dragon
I. Kalama
In Hawaiian, kalama means “torch”. The flaming light. The sacred fire carried forward through darkness so others can see.
In 1995, a newly formed government contractor called Kalama Services began operating on Johnston Atoll — a two-and-a-half mile strip of coral and classified infrastructure sitting 825 miles southwest of Oahu in the Pacific Ocean. Kalama Services was a joint venture assembled specifically for this one location, this one mission. It reached full operational capacity on January 1, 1996. By December 1995, it had already begun recruiting personnel from Oahu.
I was one of them.
I did not know then that I was being summoned. I did not know that the contractor’s name was not a coincidence. I did not know that the island I was traveling to contained, beneath its chemical weapons disposal facilities and its military infrastructure and its carefully maintained civilian surface, an underwater base that had been in operation long before any human government claimed jurisdiction over it.
I did not know that the beings who had been waiting for me there had been waiting for a very long time.
I did not know that I was Ninmah.
Not yet.
II. The Night They Came
I woke up hovering.
That was the first thing — not the sound, not the cold, not the island night around me — just the wrongness of the air beneath me where the mattress should have been.
Then I heard the screaming.
A woman, somewhere close, screaming at the top of her lungs. The kind of screaming that lives below language, below thought, the body’s last honest transmission. I heard her, felt sorry for her, and wondered distantly what had happened to her, and then, very slowly, the way understanding sometimes arrives — not all at once but in increments, like lights coming on in a dark house one room at a time — I realized the woman was me.
I was screaming. I was also watching myself scream.
I had projected out of my body somewhere in the gap between sleep and whatever this was, and I hung there above myself, a witness, watching Janet — green nightgown, bare feet, face turned up to a sky that had no business being that close — being carried horizontally through the Johnston Atoll night.
I looked to my right. Three grey aliens, about five feet tall, held the right side of my body. Beside them, perfectly in step, marched three Army soldiers. I looked left. Same formation — three greys, three soldiers, arms swinging, faces forward, moving with the particular efficiency of beings following a protocol they had followed many times before.
I was on my back, face up, feet pointed in the direction we were traveling.
I thought: this island is one mile wide and three miles long. There are people everywhere. Someone will see this. Someone will come.
The grey at my right foot — the one in front, the one whose posture said in charge — turned his large head toward me without breaking stride.
“Go ahead and scream all you want,” he said, in my mind, the words arriving complete and whole. “You’re in an energy field. No one can hear you.”
I stopped screaming.
Not because he told me to. Because something older than fear woke up inside me and said: You know this. You’ve been here before. And I had. More times than I could count, going back to childhood, going back further than childhood if I’m being honest — and I am always being honest, that’s the whole point of this book. The Greys and I had history. Long, complicated, unresolved history. But history nonetheless.
My body relaxed. I let them carry me.
III. The Beach
They brought me down to the beach and held me there, still horizontal, still in the air, and that’s when I saw Vance.
His own procession was arriving from a different direction — six greys, six soldiers, the same formation doubled — and he was in his Army underwear, which meant they had pulled him straight from his bed just as they had pulled me from mine. I was grateful, in that particular sideways way the mind reaches for small mercies in large emergencies, that I had worn my nightgown to bed. I usually slept naked. That night, for no reason I could have named at the time, I had put clothes on.
Vance was fighting them. Every time a limb broke free, he used it — an arm, a leg, whatever the moment offered — until they contained him again. Despite their size, those little greys held their own. They were stronger than they looked and completely unimpressed by his resistance.
Vance was maybe five-four to my five-two — a nice match, we always said, and we meant it in all the ways you can mean a thing like that — with a round face and sparkling dark eyes and the kind of infectious smile that made you forgive things you probably shouldn’t. Incan, Mayan, Mexican, all of it at once, as dark as I was fair. Cute — not handsome in the conventional leading-man sense, but cute the way Davy Jones was cute, the kind of face that made you want to reach out and touch it just to confirm it was real.
Standing on that beach in his Army underwear, scrapping with aliens who were barely shorter than he was and completely unbothered by it — he was still, somehow, adorable.
They set us down on the sand and stepped back.
We stood there looking at each other. We didn’t discuss it. We didn’t ask each other if this was real, if we were dreaming, if the other one was seeing what we were seeing. We had both been through this before. We knew.
I had warned him, actually, early in our relationship. I had told him plainly: everyone who sleeps with me gets abducted by aliens. He had not taken this as the dealbreaker it probably should have been.
We reached out our hands and held on.
Just then, a small circular craft rose from the water — smooth, unhurried, inevitable, the way things move when they have never once doubted their own purpose. It floated to the beach, landed, and opened its door. More greys inside, waiting. The ones on the beach filed in behind us.
We looked at each other one more time. Still holding hands, we went aboard.
IV. Inside the Craft
The inside of the craft was much larger than the outside. I don’t mean a little larger. I mean the outside had no relationship whatsoever to the inside, as if the laws that governed one had simply chosen not to apply to the other.
Chairs appeared out of nowhere and molded themselves to our bodies the moment we sat — shaped exactly for us, as if they had been waiting our whole lives for this specific moment to be useful. The Greys who had filed in behind us disappeared. Not left — disappeared, as if they had never been there, as if we had imagined the whole procession on the beach.
And then the walls disappeared too.
Or rather, there were no walls. From the inside, the craft was invisible around us. We floated in open ocean, the reef below us catching whatever light reached this deep, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
I am not a diver. I have never been a diver. But I understood in that moment why people give their lives to the ocean — why they go back and go back and go back, chasing something most of them couldn’t name if you asked them. It was down there. All of it. Color and movement and life in forms so various and so extravagant that the word beautiful felt like an insult to what I was looking at.
Disney could not recreate the beauty of our planet. No artist could. You have to see it to understand that it cannot be captured — only witnessed.
I glanced at Vance. He was as captivated as I was. We said nothing. There was nothing to say.
And then the doors appeared — opening like giant jaws in the rock face below us, reaching out to receive us — and I felt nothing. No fear. No hesitation. Something that was almost the opposite of fear, something that leaned forward rather than pulling back.
I thought: Am I fearless because I’ve done this before? Or because they’ve programmed me not to be afraid? Or is it something else entirely — something I don’t have a word for yet?
I thought: Well. There’s the door. And we’re going inside. I guess we’re about to find out.
We went inside.
V. The Facility
The facility felt like stepping back in time. All the furniture and equipment looked like it had been sourced from the 1940s or 1950s — metal desks, functional chairs, surfaces worn smooth by decades of use. Mixed in between, with no attempt at aesthetic consistency, was technology no human being had ever seen. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t announce itself. It was simply there, doing what it did, functional in the way that things are functional when designed by beings who stopped caring about appearances a very long time ago.
All communication was telepathic. Not a word was spoken aloud the entire time we were there. Complete ideas arrived whole — the way sunlight arrives, without ceremony, without announcement.
They took Vance to a metal table.
He fussed a little — that same involuntary resistance, the body registering objection even when the mind has accepted the situation — and then the beings surrounded him, and I couldn’t see anymore. The tallest one was a grey-mantis hybrid, over seven feet tall, dressed in a long white lab coat, exactly like the ones doctors wear on television medical dramas. Something about that detail struck me as almost funny — this impossible creature, seven feet off the ground in an underwater installation older than human civilization, wearing a lab coat. Around him moved the five-foot greys — large heads, enormous eyes, deliberate and efficient. And around them buzzed the small ones, two to three feet tall, ferrying equipment, delivering what was needed, moving with such focused purpose that I couldn’t decide if they were alive or android.
I was directed to a chair. Army issue, metal frame, green padded seat, not particularly comfortable. I sat and watched, trying to see what was happening to Vance. He fussed a little more. Then he went eerily quiet, and I made myself breathe, and I could see enough to know he was okay.
Present. Just held.
Then the telepathic message arrived, directing my attention to a curtain on the right side of the room. Funny — I hadn’t noticed it before. I’m not sure it had been there before.
I got up and went to it.
VI. The Gown
Behind the curtain were gowns. Every color, every style, more than should have fit in the space they occupied.
I reached toward the nearest one, and it appeared on my body — instant, complete, no fumbling with fabric. Just: wearing it. I looked at another and wore that instead. I quickly understood that I had to slow down, to be intentional, because whatever I focused on manifested immediately, and I was not yet practiced at wanting things on purpose.
I thought: blue. Green. Purple. These have always been my colors — something in me that knew what they were before I had language for them.
What appeared was a gown whose main color was deep, jewel-toned green, with a bodice full of gems in blues, greens, aquas, teals, and every shade of purple I had ever loved. Stunning. The trim matched and enhanced everything. I thought about more color, and more color appeared. I thought about a necklace, and it materialized at my throat.
My chest was modest at the time. The gown lifted and shaped me so that I felt, fully and completely, like a lady. Not performed femininity. Not costume. The real thing.
The jewels at the bodice weren’t decoration — they functioned like a pacemaker, regulating my heart against whatever environment I was about to enter, steadying me against conditions my body had not been built for. I felt neither hot nor cold. They had thought of everything.
Then the shoes.
I looked at them and thought: Those are going to hurt my feet.
They appeared on my feet and instantly — instantly — it felt like a massage. Warmth moving up through my soles and into my legs, continuous, gentle, healing. I stood. I took a step.
One step carried me ten steps’ distance.
A glide, a propulsion so smooth it felt like intention made physical. I marveled at it but didn’t yet understand why I needed it. That would become clear soon enough.
I walked back out from behind the curtain.
VII. The Procession
The beings appeared gradually, their height increasing as we moved from the manufactured section of the facility into the natural cavern beyond — ancient, vast, the ceiling lost somewhere above us in the dark. The walls were carved with an artistry and intentionality that made my heart soar the moment I saw them. Anunnaki architecture illustrates function and beauty simultaneously. Always both. Never one without the other. Every surface is considered. Every carving meaningful.
Doors opened on my right, one by one, and the beings stepped through.
Backlit at first — silhouettes only, male and female, dressed for the grandest occasion I had ever witnessed or imagined. They stepped into the light and fell in behind me. And each one was more beautiful than the last.
Not beautiful the way humans are beautiful. Something else entirely. Something that operated above the register we normally inhabit.
You know how a song can be going along, doing what songs do, and then the singer shifts octaves — moves up into that higher register — and suddenly you sit up straighter, suddenly every cell in your body is paying attention, suddenly you think: oh, now this is really going somewhere?
That’s what these beings did to the air around them just by existing in it.
Flawless in the way that a frequency can be flawless. Each one more stunning than the last, until the word beautiful started to feel inadequate and I began to understand something I hadn’t fully understood before: we — humans — are not the standard. We are the echo. They are the original notes.
The height increased gradually, so as not to shock me. By the time I reached those who stood at six feet — the shortest in the assembly — I had already adjusted. By the time I reached eight feet, ten feet, I was comfortable. And then I finally understood why the shoes gave me ten steps for every one.
Walking at my normal speed — short woman, human speed — behind beings whose single stride covered more ground than I could cover in five of mine, would have been agonizing for everyone. Like walking behind a toddler. Like an entire royal assembly of galactic beings, dressed in their finest, shuffling along behind the world’s slowest creature.
The shoes weren’t just courtesy. They were practical. I didn’t know that until I knew it. That’s how a lot of things work down there.
And then Antu appeared.
She came before Anu. Almost as tall as he was. She stepped through the doors and I gasped — out loud, in an underwater alien installation, I gasped like a child at a fireworks show — because nothing in my life, in any life I could remember, had prepared me for her.
Her beauty didn’t land on me the way human beauty lands. It moved through me. The way sound moves through water.
And then Anu stepped forward behind her. Fourteen feet. Towering. The largest presence in a room full of presences that had already redefined large.
I was leading the procession.
They always treat me like returning royalty. I understand now why. I did not understand it fully then. I knew it on some level — the level that never forgot, even when the Janet avatar had to forget in order to function in the world above. But I had not yet integrated it. I had not yet given myself permission to hold it consciously.
VIII. The Assembly
The telepathic communication filled the space the way bees fill a hive — layered, constant, everyone speaking at once in a language that wasn’t language, thought moving through thought, meaning arriving complete and whole without the clumsy machinery of words. It was overwhelming in the way that standing inside music is overwhelming.
Maybe that’s why the bee is a royal symbol. Maybe they knew something about this kind of communication that we’ve been trying to remember ever since.
I looked out at what had gathered and tried to take it in.
The Anunnaki I recognized — from everything I had studied, from Zecharia Sitchin’s complete series that my brother had given me in the early nineties and that I had devoured, from the Penn State UFO Discussion Group I had run every Thursday in a room that held thirty-six students, from my brother who had come and spoken for hours without once looking at a notecard. I had the framework. I had spent years building the intellectual architecture for exactly this kind of encounter.
I just hadn’t expected to be standing inside it.
But the Anunnaki were only a portion of what filled that cavern. Greys — multiple types, multiple heights. Tall Whites, luminous and precise. Mantis beings, their movements deliberate and ancient. Pleiadians. Andromedans. Beings I had no names for, from worlds that had no names in any human language. Insectoids. Animal beings. Every one of them bipedal, every one of them with opposing fingers, every one of them with eyes — and I noted that, how eyes seemed to be the one constant across every form present, as if the universe had decided early on that seeing was non-negotiable, whatever else it was willing to experiment with.
And among them, unmistakably human — world leaders. Former presidents. People whose faces I recognized from news broadcasts and history books, standing in an underwater alien installation as if this was simply another meeting they had calendared.
I asked telepathically: Are these the Anunnaki?
Yes.
How many?
About a thousand.
I stood with that for a moment.
I had met Enki in my dreams — I didn’t know that yet, the memory hadn’t surfaced, hadn’t found its way through whatever mechanism keeps certain knowledge sealed until the moment you can actually hold it. But somewhere beneath the Janet avatar, beneath the woman who had packed her Sitchin books and her green nightgown and her curiosity and come to this island at the edge of the world — somewhere in there, the recognition was already running.
I just didn’t know it yet.
IX. The Obsidian Wall
The whole time we moved, the telepathic hum filled everything — that layered, buzzing presence of a thousand minds thinking simultaneously, the royal hive in full voice:
Is she the one? Is she the key? Is today the day?
And then we reached the wall.
Obsidian black. Enormous. Different from every other surface in that cavern in a way I felt in my chest before I could name it. A beam of white light descended from somewhere far above and made a perfect circle on the floor directly in front of it. The carvings around it were breathtaking. I was overwhelmed by the beauty — my heart soaring, the jewels at my bodice doing their faithful work, steadying it, keeping me present and alive.
The sound stopped.
Every voice. Every mind. Every thread of telepathic communication — gone. The silence arrived like a physical force, like pressure, like the moment after a thunderclap when the world is recalibrating. I stood at the edge of the circle and felt it land in my chest.
Was that fear?
Or excitement?
I have never been entirely sure those are different things.
I looked at the circle. I looked at the wall. I looked at the assembled thousand — the Anunnaki and the Greys and the Tall Whites and the former presidents and the insectoids and the beings with no names in any human language — all of them watching, all of them waiting, all of them absolutely certain about what was supposed to happen next.
And then it landed.
They want me to step into the circle of white light.
Me.
I stood there with that for a moment. Janet Kira. Born in Pittsburgh. Raised in Avalon, Pennsylvania. Currently employed on a classified atoll one mile wide and three miles long. Standing in a jeweled gown before a thousand assembled beings from across the universe.
I asked them — all of them, the thousand, the assembly, whatever intelligence was organizing this moment —
Why me?
And then I looked past all of them. Past the wall. Past the circle. Past everything.
I looked directly at you.
Yes. You. Reading this right now, wherever you are, whatever time it is, whatever brought you to this page.
How in the world did I get here?
To be continued…
❖
X. The Return
The next thing I knew, the six Greys were returning me to my bed.
They plopped me down. Not gently. With an oof.
I have thought about this many times. These beings can navigate interdimensional space. They can interface with the supercomputer of existence. They can dissolve obsidian walls and dress human women in jeweled gowns that regulate cardiac function. And they cannot manage a gentle landing.
The alarm went off almost immediately.
I had to go to work.
This is the human condition. We are, as I have come to understand it, the bravest souls in existence. We agreed to come into this prison planet. We accepted the truncated DNA, the minimized minds, the shortened lives. We took on bodies that are simultaneously miraculous and limiting. The beings who work with us know this. They admire us for it. Our souls are equal to any in creation.
And on the morning after I stood before a circle of white light with a thousand beings from across the universe waiting to see what I would do, I had to get up and go to work.
That is the work. That has always been the work.
❖
Author’s Note
The events described in this chapter are drawn from direct personal experience and memory. Some names have been changed to protect individuals who did not choose to be part of the public record. The testimony regarding the abduction experience on Johnston Atoll has been presented here for the third time in my public life. The first two presentations received, as Barbara Lamb — one of the most credentialed experiencer researchers in the world — observed when she heard it: shock, and the question of how I was still walking.
I am still walking because I married my shrink.
His name is Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
