Another, although lesser-known, New Mexico figure of this sort is El Abuelo—“the grandfather,” the bogeyman. Known with variations as El Agüelo, El Cuco, El Coco, El Cucuye, and so forth, the idea of El Abuelo undoubtedly originated as part of the traditional, masked Matachines dances performed annually in so many rural New Mexico villages and pueblos—dances incorporating Native American dance steps and European costumes, music, and history. At these events, the aggressive but clownish figure of the dancing Abuelo can seem especially frightening to young children, with a power that seems to extend far beyond the dance; he appears, as folklorist Thomas J. Steele wrote in 2001, to somehow have “a life outside the theater.”

This frightening extra dimension may be thanks in part to such ominous sayings as “Si no te sosiegas, llamo el Abuelo”—“If you don’t behave, I’ll call in the grandfather.” And more than one traditional lullaby, such as the following included in Rafaela G. Castro’s Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans, tells of this bogeyman as well...

A la ruru, mi hijito,
Duérmase ya,
Que viene el coco
Y se lo comera!

(Lullaby, my little son,
Sleep now,
For the bogeyman might come,
To eat you up!)

In northern New Mexico, the image of El Abuelo—striding across the ground cracking a whip, yelling about various children’s behavior, his face unseen behind a mask or slathered-on makeup—has long been used to frighten children into obeying parents or going to bed on time. In some tales, under some names, accounts of him seem to blur with stories of giants, and with stories of Bigfoot. Today, as El Kookooee, this traditionally feared and revered bogeyman meets a fiery death every October, when residents of Albuquerque’s South Valley construct a twenty-foot-tall wooden effigy of the figure, and then burn it to the ground.

In 2006, the October 24, 2007 Albuquerque Tribune recounted the words of local artist Tom Powell that “as El Kookooee was in flames, the image of [his] face came out from the smoke and started to glow”—as if the old bogeyman was trying to say that they might burn him, but he would be back.

And the following October, he was.

Then there are los duendes—“the dwarfs.” In an article in the July-September 1910 issue of the Journal of American Folklore, Alexander F. Chamberlain described los duendes as “Elves and fairies, little infant-faced angels, who cannot reach either heaven or hell, but must inhabit the air. They are said to be either male or female, some black, etc. Again, they are said to be just like gnomes.”

Author Stephen Ausherman recently resurrected the notion of los duendes in his terrific new guidebook, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, in which he credited los duendes for certain anonymous acts of trail maintenance in the desert east of Albuquerque.

Ausherman wrote:

I had driven along [the Golden Open Space’s] barbed-wire fences perhaps a half dozen times in as many years, assuming it was private ranchland. But then small Open Space signs mysteriously appeared on the posts of its padlocked gates. Later, pink and orange survey flags sprouted from the gritty earth, forming a dotted line that wended through juniper savanna. Unable to locate anyone willing to take credit for the trail work, I reached the only logical conclusion: the land was beset with los duendes.

Some people describe them as industrious elves, others as evil dwarfs. In his 1910 paper, “New-Mexican Spanish Folk-Lore,” Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa identified los duendes as “individuals of small stature who frighten the lazy, the wicked and in particular the filthy.” Their origins and motives remain a mystery.

Espinosa’s paper, which Ausherman cited, also tells of a Santa Fe woman who claimed to know almost for a fact that los duendes live communally underground in houses built inside of caverns, venturing out only at night to steal food and clothing or to go shopping.

And in support of the view of los duendes as helpful elves, Espinosa wrote:

The following story is one well known: A family once moved from one place to another, and, on arriving at the new house, the mother was looking for the broom to sweep. Her daughter, a lazy and careless girl, had forgotten it in the old home. Presently a dwarf appeared, descending slowly from the roof with the broom in his hand, and, presenting it to the lady, he said, "Here it is!"

(If any reader of "My Strange New Mexico" knows a word meaning something along the lines of “creepy, yet hilarious,” consider e-mailing it to mike@mystrangenewmexico.com. This column may have a use for it.)

If the idea of El Abuelo helps get one’s kids to sleep, and the idea of los duendes helps keep them clean and hardworking, then the idea of el basilisco—“the basilisk”—may be ideal to keep them crying softlyin their rooms, with their doors locked, feeling too paralyzed by fear and anxiety to do much of anything.

El basilisco, in most New Mexican accounts, is born as the result of a hen impregnated by an aged rooster; in some accounts it resembles a one-eyed feathered worm, in others, an almost shapeless black mass, or a cross between a snake and a chicken; in almost all of them, it takes only a single glance from its lonely eye for it to kill you. Legendary New Mexico historian Marc Simmons wrote about el basilisco in Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, recording that its “roots revert back to a fabled reptile of the African desert with a breath and look said to be fatal.”

In a recent personal interview with “My Strange New Mexico,” Tom Romero—a former resident of the town of Chico, in northeastern New Mexico’s Colfax County—recalled being told as a child that, once a basilisco hatches, “It gets out, burrows down, then peeks out of the ground, and anything it sees dies. ...In the northeast part of New Mexico and southern Colorado, people still talk of it. There’s no La Llorona away from the river, so that’s how they keep the kids home on the prairies.”

Romero recalled that whenever a farm’s lamb would die without an easy explanation, the basilisco would be blamed, and he recalled hearing that the only way to kill these wormy creatures was to show them their own reflections. He remembered hearing that some kids, before beginning to play a game of baseball or something called “Fox and the Geese,” would walk around through the fields first, holding mirrors at an angle, so that the creatures would see their own selves and wither away, instead of seeing the children and inadvertently murdering them all.

All of these entities—from the ghostly La Llorona, to the ever-evolving Abuelo, to the mischievous duendes and the deadly basiliscos—still receive a degree of belief from a number of New Mexicans, usually from those who grew up being told of them—and no doubt their believers’ worldviews are all the stranger and more interesting for it. The rest of us, however, can still enjoy a certain strangeness as well—that of a world in which people choose to terrify their children with the fear of ghosts and evil dwarfs instead of, say, teaching them to stay out of ditches so as not to be killed in a flash flood, or to work hard simply because there’s work that needs doing.

***

Be sure to check out the newest feature of Mystrangenewmexico.com—“The Daily Strange’’!

Updated once every weekday at Mystrangenewmexico.com/daily, “The Daily Strange” features a short posting about one of New Mexico’s strangest current events—from the woman who thought she saw her boyfriend in a pornographic film—to a recent attack with a barbecue fork. 

And, if you get a chance, pick up a copy of the May 2008 issue of New Mexico Magazine, for an article by Mike Smith about a very strange 1940 symphony concert performed deep in a historic mineshaft.

***

In particular, the plan involved the Mexican free-tailed bat—a medium-sized species chosen for its ability to fly while carrying more than twice its weight—and chosen for its vast, millions-sized colonies, which even today form the largest gatherings of mammals on the planet.

In the plan, members of a top-secret World War II-era unit of the U.S. Air Force would net literally millions of Mexican free-tailed bats, from Texas or New Mexico caves, before gluing a tiny, specially-made napalm time-bomb onto every individual one. More than a thousand such armed bats would then be hung beneath stacked trays, inside a hollow, five-foot-tall bombshell perforated with air holes and equipped with a parachute. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these bombs would then be loaded into planes. The bombs’ temperatures would be lowered enough to send the bats into temporary hibernation—to eliminate the need to feed and calm them—and the “bat bombs” would then be flown, via the Micronesian island of Tinian, into the early-morning darkness over Japan.

The bombs would then fall through the air until, triggered by an altimeter about 4,000 feet up, their parachutes would bloom, their sheet-metal sides would fall away, the pins of the time bombs would pull out, and the bats themselves would awaken and emerge. The moonlit sky would fill with leathery wings, and the bats would fly down to roost before dawn, down to the eaves and overhangs of the city of Osaka. Fanning out for an estimated twenty miles in every direction, the bomb-bearing bats would roost all over the overcrowded city, before settling into the nooks of the city’s picturesque but notoriously combustible wooden buildings—shifting into sleep, and then exploding—bursting into flame, and burning down the city, a city that at the time boasted a population of approximately seven million people.

The idea for these bizarre “bat bombs” came to be known as Project X-Ray, but was initially known as the Adams Plan. Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a Pennsylvania inventor and dental surgeon, thought of the idea in December of 1941, shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In the April 1948 Bulletin of the National Speleological Society, Adams recollected, “I had just been to Carlsbad Caverns, [in southeastern New Mexico], and had been tremendously impressed by the bat flight…. Couldn't those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?"

By January of 1942, Adams had gotten a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had responded with a brief note to a top military official, writing in part, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

Thus encouraged to make the idea a reality, teams of bat experts and chemists were assembled, to determine such things as how much a bat could carry and what kind of explosives should be used. Bats were netted from Carlsbad Caverns—caves wrongly believed at the time to contain the largest population of bats in the country, an estimated 8.7 million—and successful tests using unarmed bombs were conducted just outside of the caverns’ namesake, the town of Carlsbad.

During one particular test in early July of 1943, six bats were armed with bombs and released for a photo-op. The bats proved livelier than expected, however, and quickly flew to the buildings of a brand-new auxiliary air field of the Carlsbad Air Force Base. They roosted on a barracks building, on a control tower, on an office, on an airplane hangar—and, according to some accounts, on a general’s car and a fuel tank. Then, they blew up. The fires they caused sparked other fires, black smoke rose into the sky, and the entire complex burnt to the ground.

“After that test, [the project] did go in a different direction,” said Jack Couffer, Project X-Ray’s youngest member, in a recent personal interview. “That test was carried out by the Air Force. We were all in the Air Force. When that mishap happened, they took it more seriously than they probably should have. That was kind of the final straw.”

Infighting among the project members followed, as did the ouster of the project’s founder, a takeover of the project by the Marines, additional tests in Utah and California and Texas, the construction and bat-induced immolation of a fake Japanese village in Utah, the ordering of a million bomb-equipped bats for an actual planned attack, and finally, the sudden and insufficiently explained shutdown of the project—which coincided, interestingly enough, with various successes in New Mexico’s other top-secret project—a little something being worked on a bit farther north, in Los Alamos.

The year before, 1942, word of that project had drifted down to the men of Project X-Ray. The wonderfully eccentric 1992 book Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer, recounts a conversation about the two projects, and is well worth quoting from at length.

“I heard the damnedest thing while I was in D.C.,” Doc [Adams] said when he got back from Washington. “Some general I met regarding appropriations confused our secret project with another secret project that’s apparently going on somewhere. It’s the silliest nonsense you ever heard of. And evidently this project has got the backing of the president and they’re blowing millions of dollars on it.”

[Jack] Von Bloeker [a bat authority and the project’s physiologist] looked up through his smoke and frowned.

“This general practically threw me out of his office, he was so enraged at the waste of time and money. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the one promoting that crazy notion of making bombs out of atoms?’”

“I had a hell of a time convincing him I had nothing to do with that kind of fraud,” Doc continued.

“What are atoms?” [project member] Frank Benish asked.

“The smallest particles of matter. You know, everything’s made out of cells. You break down cells and you’ve got something even smaller—atoms—something like that.”

“And they think they can make bombs out of them?” Benish shook his head. “Man, they don’t know sic ‘em from come here.”

“Can you imagine such an idea?” Doc said. “They’re throwing away millions, and I can’t get a staff car and driver!”

“Where’s all this happening?” [Von Bloeker] asked.

Doc shrugged. “As soon as he found out I had nothing to do with it he clammed up. But he first got the idea I was involved when I said we had some work to do in New Mexico.”

“Unbelievable!” [Von Bloeker] said.

“Yeah! We got a sure thing like the bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they’re jerking off with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry.”

New Mexico’s other top secret project—the atomic bomb, for you slower kids—ended World War II in August of 1945, with the dropping of two such bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ended the war, and in mere minutes it also ended more than 220,000 human lives, with thousands more to come due to the bombs’ radiation.

Had bat bombs been used instead, with the bats burning down nearly everything within forty square miles, such an attack would have incinerated almost ten times the area that was burned when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Radiation poisoning would not have been an issue, and though the effects on the American Southwest’s bat populations would have been inestimable, it’s fairly certain that fewer people would have died, as theoretically they could have dived into any of the numerous canals that criss-crossed the city of Osaka, and avoided burning to death.

“I can say that I think it would have worked,” said Jack Couffer. “We were really on the verge of making it happen.”

***

Be sure to pick up a copy of the terrific new hiking guidebook, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, by Stephen Ausherman, which gives a gracious endorsement of Mystrangenewmexico.com in its tour of virtual New Mexico. Fans of the state's strangest and quirkiest will find something wonderful on every page; the entire book serves as a transformative reintroduction to the wonders of central New Mexico. Don't wait! Pick one up today.

For 926 miles, from the Sangre de Cristos in the north, to Carlsbad in the south, to its junction with the Rio Grande in southwestern Texas, the Pecos River winds steadily southward, through mountains and desert, ranchland and towns, cottonwood bosques and limestone cliffs. Over the centuries, the Pecos has quenched the thirsts of enormous herds of buffalo, coursed past the once-thriving Pecos Pueblo, and likely slipped beneath New Mexico’s very first bridge—a wooden span built by explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s 1540 expedition. The river has been called the Río Cicuyé and the Río Salado, been dubbed the River of Cows and the River of Sin, and throughout the mid-to-late-1800s, to head “West of the Pecos” meant heading west of all things safe and civilized.

In its long and winding course through centuries and the desert, the Pecos River has tangled inextricably with the lives and fates of natives, explorers, colonists, cattlemen, miners, oilmen, lawmen, travelers, outlaws, cowboys, preachers, and buffalo hunters—flowing in and out of folklore and legend and history. Long ago, a giant serpent rumored to have been as thick around as an ox was said to have escaped into the river from a chamber beneath the pueblo. In the 1870s, self-proclaimed prophet Hugh Leeper, the “Sanctified Texan,” prophesied that the river would rise up and flood a certain adobe saloon in Fort Sumner, in the east-central part of the state, which allegedly it did. And, in 2001, a photographer named Farrell Eaves unintentionally knocked a camera into the river’s waters, reached in to get it, and pulled out a miracle.

From 1994 to 2003, former National Geographic photographer Bruce Dale taught a week-long advanced photography class he called the Pecos River Photographic Workshop, at a tiny retreat near the river’s headwaters. Farrell Eaves—a then-sixty-eight-year-old Tennessean, retired safety engineer, Korean War veteran, and talented amateur photographer—took part in the workshop in August of 2001, excitedly learning how to better use his recently acquired Nikon Coolpix 990, a fairly expensive digital camera given him by his son. Toward the end of the workshop, with a group of fellow photographers at the Iron Gate Campground north of Pecos, Eaves set up his camera on a tripod by the river. A man stood fly-fishing in the water, others milled about, and Eaves stood intently on the riverbank, studying a clump of potentially photogenic river grass. Without noticing what he had done, Eaves bumped into his camera, knocking both it and its tripod over.

The camera fell. It hit a rock. It splashed into the river. It sank.

“Farrell, your camera!” shouted a female classmate.

The camera sank deeper into the river, its memory card compartment clacked open, and if even a single part of its internal workings hadn’t already been completely soaked, within a moment it was. Eaves waded unhappily into the river, recovered his camera and tripod and memory card, and dried them all off with a handkerchief. When he shook the camera, it sloshed. Its lens and flash and viewfinder, its monitor and its control panel, all fogged completely over from inside.

“Of course, it was totally waterlogged,” Eaves said, in a recent personal interview. “I immediately tried to take a picture—and it was hopeless.”

Bruce Dale, who had had to deal with wet cameras on innumerable occasions while shooting for National Geographic, suggested Eaves at least dry out the camera. Eaves set the camera in his car, with the car’s windows rolled up, hoping the sun would help bake it dry. He blasted it with compressed air, set it near a gas stove’s pilot light for several nights, and even sped around the desert for days with the camera tied to his windshield, with onlookers laughing at the sight. A phone call to Nikon revealed it would be at least $300 to replace even a single part, and Eaves began thinking his approximately $800 camera would have to be thrown away.

Finally, a week after the incident, the lens and the viewfinder of the camera cleared. Eaves pointed it at a random wooden chair in a Pecos coffee shop, pressed the shutter release button, and stared in awe at the camera’s screen.

“I took a picture,” Eaves said. “And when I saw what it did, I felt it all the way to my toes. Well, the only thing I could compare it with was when I had back surgery and was given morphine for the pain. …It was, as the kids say, a rush.”

What the camera did was to take pictures unlike any that anyone had ever taken before. The camera, baptized and reborn, now changed every color, added auras of hazy light, and flooded skies and surfaces with kaleidoscopic streaks and bands of startling brightness. It took normal photography and turned it into something more like abstract impressionism, using pastel shades, wild bursts of neon, and a strangely two-dimensional feeling.

The camera failed to work well in bright light, and its flash never recovered, but when the camera did work, the images it created made its shortcomings irrelevant. Everyday buildings rose stark and black against skies of rainbow-colored static. Winter trees and windmills bled streaks of blood and oil. Sunsets became malignant and terrifying, and almost everything the camera took in became strange and wonderful, causing many people viewing its images to ponder the natures of perception and reality, the differences between what we see and what is.

“From then on, I called [the camera] a ‘she,’ because she may or may not perform at any time,” Eaves said. “She has a mind of her own. Hardly any functions of the camera work. It’s just very temperamental. She is.”

The amazing changes in the camera may have also been caused in part by its period of drying out—in particular by the heat of the stove which may have warped the camera’s sensors.

“Scrambled electronics,” was Bruce Dale’s verdict.

Dale has also suggested that the high elevation of Iron Gate Campground and the salinity of the Pecos River could have been factors in the super-powered camera’s origin story.

Bill Haddad, Sales Manager of Kurt’s Camera Corral in Albuquerque, suggested recently that “the image processor may be fried. Basically, that’s a small computer inside your camera that processes the light that comes in.”

Farrell Eaves himself sees something miraculous in it all, citing the way his camera adds a feeling of otherworldly spirituality to religious items and scenes, the way it transforms the rooms of his hometown Methodist church, the walls of New Mexico’s ancient missions, certain altar vestments—and everything else.

“I was asked by a reporter, ‘Do you think God pushed the camera in the water?’” Eaves said. “‘Well, no, I did.’ But if you look at the images of churches in the Southwest and so forth, there’s no doubt in my mind that God had a lot to do with drying it out.”

Whatever the cause of the camera’s uniqueness—whether an unseen deity with an interest in digital photography, or the camera’s having been dropped into a river—the phenomenon has certainly changed Eaves’s life. Since the camera’s metamorphosis, Eaves’s surrealistic images have emerged as the subject of countless newspaper and magazine articles—including features in Wired and the Associated Press. He has shared his photos in numerous lectures across North America, seen them featured in galleries and art shows, and had his work published in PC Photo, Outdoor Photographer, and National Geographic. His serendipitously altered images have made their way onto framed prints, onto postcards, onto greeting cards, and—after Eaves proved to his stunned publisher that they weren’t at all Photoshopped—into Mr. Eaves and His Magic Camera, a visually stunning little book co-written with author Cindy Cashman for Andrews McMeel Publishing.

(Cashman, using the pseudonym Dr. Alan Francis, also authored Everything Men Know About Women—a completely blank 128-page book that sold more than a million copies—and is planning later in 2008 to become the first woman to get married in outer space.)

“Who knows why Farrell’s camera fell into the river that day, and who knows what happened inside that makes it do its magic,” Cashman wrote in the preface to their coauthored book. “…What matters is that what was once ordinary is now extraordinary because a man was willing to find the good in something that seemed like nothing but an expensive accident at the time.”

Farrell Eaves came to New Mexico as a man entering retirement, and left with one of the most interesting chapters of his life suddenly still to come. He came here as a hobbyist, and left as an artist. He came here with a camera, and left with something truly unique.

“It really has transformed him,” said Bruce Dale, laughing good-naturedly. “Farrell wears a beret now!”

***

Consider picking up a copy of the newly published crypozoology book entitled Boss Snakes: Stories and Sightings of Giant Snakes in North America, by Chad Arment, which may very well be the first book to cite a "My Strange New Mexico" column as a source.

Another great book that gives a gracious shout-out to both "My Strange New Mexico" and Mike' Smith's Towns of the Sandia Mountains is the excellent and eminently readable guidebook, Moon New Mexico, by Zora O'Neill—a book that could teach even lifelong New Mexicans quite a few things about this amazing state.  O'Neill's obvious affinity for the strange and the sublime seeps onto every page of this terrific little book.

*** 

Last month in “My Strange New Mexico,” we explored the unusual history and beliefs of a small religious sect known as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps.  (Click here to read that first installment.) 

Inspired in part by the Salvation Army, this little group was born of an alleged 1979 revelation, in which God Himself purportedly commanded Jim and Lila (a.k.a. Deborah) Green, two 1960s hippies with notable tendencies toward the extreme, to found and lead a spiritual army—the “Army that Sheds No Blood.”

Jim Green is described in Donna Kossy’s book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief as boasting about nights of his youth spent strung out on crank, howling at the moon, wearing only a loincloth, hurling a hunting knife, and yelling “KILL, KILL, KILL,” making it seem almost natural that his shift from drugs to Christianity would happen in a similarly grandiose manner—would happen with the founding of a uniformed corps—a spiritual army—a self-proclaimed “Cult of the Living God.”

In Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, author-historian Philip Jenkins wrote that one modern-day study showed that “...if we allow for population sizes, the highest concentrations of cult headquarters were actually in Nevada and New Mexico,” and he stated that this may have been partly due to New Mexico's history as a “largely unchurched territory,” its high percentage of New Age and mystical "healers," and also the “continuing vigor of Native American and Hispanic occult traditions.”  So it's somewhat understandable that a group such as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps would settle here.

Originally from Sacramento, California, the group eventually fled the area due to an ex-member's highly-publicized lawsuit that resulted in the seizure of the sect's property—running first to northern California, and then to Oregon, and then to two consecutive sites in New Mexico.  In the 1990s, the sect’s membership soon outgrew its first New Mexico compound, in Berino, not far from Las Cruces, and subsequently relocated to Cibola County, just south of Gallup.  There, in the little community of Fence Lake, population 187, they established the intensely private Shin Ra Na Holy Tribal Nation, from which they continued to bake $10 loaves of bread to sell in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, raise crops and garden, and engage in mail-order missionary work.

The group produced and sent out literally thousands of miracle prayer cloths, religious audio programs, and various forms of religious literature, including leaflets defining their role as God's spiritual generals here on earth, and newsletters proclaiming the evils of television, rock music, communism, psychiatric medication, ties to non-sect family and friends, and just about every religion beside their own.

“We've got pretty boys with velvet lips and painted up harlots running the house of God,” wrote Jim Green in issue 116 of the Battle Cry, one of the sect's many publications.  “...I've been in many churches where lust runs wild.  Homosexuals hang out in churches, especially the ones where 'love is.'  They like that closeness.”

In another sect newsletter, issue 7 of Acts of the Spirit, a photo caption read, “By a beautiful Act of the Spirit, as a sign of his presence within our camp, Jesus Christ made this wild deer walk peacefully among us for 12 hours (3/07).  Here the wild deer stands beside General Deborah Green.”

In November of 2005, the group made headlines again, when the Corps’ internal politics spilled over into the public, after General Jim Green claimed he had suggested that the group make some reforms, including not only allowing former members to return and re-enlist but also permitting non-member families to visit their children in the compound.

“Those reforms divided his followers and angered his own wife, who claimed that Green wanted her dead,” reported Albuquerque's KOB TV, that November second.

Following these disputes, police arrested Jim Green on charges of assault, for allegedly attacking two dissenting members with a homemade scythe after telling the two and his wife that they needed to take a walk with him to be murdered.  Green's alleged violence was reciprocated, though, when the two men struck back with walking sticks, beating Green about the head until an armed Cibola County Sheriff intervened and drove Green to a hospital to receive forty staples in his scalp.

Jim Green denied wanting to murder his wife, and was soon bailed out by a group member.  His wife, Deborah Green, quickly retracted her claim that her husband had threatened to murder her.  The two revised their story to say that Jim Green had merely struck one of the men to make him leave the Greens' house.  And the Generals announced in the Gallup Independent that they were “trying to tone things down.”

Toning things down, however, will very likely always be a challenge for the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps.  A group whose thirty to forty members still consider themselves soldiers in a spiritual army, whose leaders have declared themselves Brigadier Generals, whose ex-members have appeared on the Dr. Phil Show (as one did in September of 2006) to accuse the group of brainwashing and kidnapping, and whose very name includes the words “Aggressive Christianity” and “Corps,” is a group that just might not be able ever to stay low-key very easily.

About nineteen miles south of Las Cruces, near the southern edge of our state, lies the mostly flat, wide-sky, desert town of Berino, New Mexico. There, cotton fields sprawl into the distance from the edges of dirt and gravel roads, the cars of Interstate 10 and the waters of the Rio Grande border the horizons to the east and west, and an old red-brick school building with a bizarre history slumps beside some railroad tracks.

In 1993, that little schoolhouse became the compound of a semi-obscure fundamentalist sect known as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps. Wearing military-style uniforms, and awarding rank to members of the group based on their dedication, the group considered themselves a spiritual army, preparing the world for an apocalyptic war against the evils of society—against rock and roll, homosexuality, television, psychoanalysis, medication, karate, and more.

“In 1979 James and Deborah Green entered the prayer closet and God was there,” wrote the group in a brief introduction to its history. “Speaking to them prophetically, He made it clear that He was raising up an army—His Spirit army. True, there had been other armies claiming the Lord's name, but this was something new. ...Yes, God is raising up His army, an army of fearless, obedient disciples—The Army That Sheds No Blood! This is how the Aggressive Vision came to be.”

By 1983, the group’s founders, husband and wife Jim and Lila Green, two former 1960s-era hippies, had established a communal compound of four barracks-style buildings in Sacramento, California, named it Fort Freedom, and named themselves Free Love Ministries. Starting out as an extreme but orthodox Christian ministry, by 1984 the group had amassed approximately fifty followers, a body of increasingly unconventional doctrine, and a great deal of unwanted attention. Parents noted major personality changes in their adult children who had joined the group; Christian watchdog organizations documented the group’s cult-like encouragement for members to sever all connections with family and friends; and a local radio station, KFIA, dropped the group’s daily radio show due to the Greens’ almost rabid preoccupation with demons.

“Basically, what [Jim] Green was saying was that any particular problem was controlled by a demon,” KFIA station manager Tom Wallace said in a September 25, 1984 Sacramento Bee article. “Colds were caused by a cold demon. And if you needed deliverance, you just had to attend a Jim Green service.”

Early on, the group obtained much of its funding from the profits of three Sacramento-area print-and-frame shops, owned by one of its members—stores in which employees were instructed to censor all images of frogs, owls, and unicorns, due to these creatures’ supposedly satanic traits. Rock and roll music was decried, wrote Donna Kossy in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, because the group believed that covens of witches were placing spells intended to demonically possess everyone who listened to many popular songs. Lila Green declared herself to be God’s number one prophet, and she and her husband began publishing her alleged revelations in a globally distributed output of ‘zine-style pamphlets and newsletters. In the July 1984 issue of one such newsletter, the Battle Cry, she even wrote out a recipe that she claimed God had given her for “travel bars.”

“Although the devil tormented me, I obeyed the Lord and the results were delicious, nutritious, and kept very well under conditions of extreme heat and humidity,” Green wrote. “The Lord told me these travel bars were an excellent item to carry when traveling.”

As the group’s beliefs and behaviors grew more radical, darker and more alarming stories came to light as well. In 1985, neighbors of the group reported to the sheriff that the sect’s members had been engaging in militaristic war games in the northern California desert, using real weapons, though these charges were never proven. Over the years, the group sent missionary “soldiers” out all around the world, and in 1987 they found themselves in legal trouble when one missionary died of malaria in Malawi, Africa and the group made it difficult for his family to recover his body. And then in 1988, Sacramento woman Maura Shmierer filed suit against the group, claiming that Free Love Ministries had kept her virtually imprisoned in a backyard shed for six months, for the crime of “spiritual adultery”—for loving her family more than God. During that time she claimed the group—then consisting of about twenty-five members—forced her to wear a black scarf and a sackcloth dress, changed her name to Forsaken, and forbade her from making eye contact with her children. Schmierer said they even pressured her into divorcing her husband and signing over custody of her kids, and she claimed that the group accused her occasionally misbehaving five-year-old son of being possessed and changed his name to Demon.

In July of 1987, Jim Green ordered Schmierer out of the compound, but without her four children, and it was not until three months later that a court order returned the two youngest to her. When the group refused to show up to trial, the court awarded Shmierer $1.2 million, and as a result of their failure to pay, the Government seized the group’s art stores and property. Most of the sect fled to the town of Cool, in northern California, and then to Klamath Falls, Oregon, before ending up, in 1993, where so much of this world’s strangeness sometimes does—New Mexico.

In the former Berino schoolhouse, renamed and repackaged as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps, the group generally tried to keep a low profile. By that time, Lila Green had changed her name to Deborah, and both she and her husband had taken the title of “Brigadier General.” The group’s remaining ten or twelve members kept mostly to themselves, according to a June 26, 1995 El Paso Times piece, spending much of their time in frenzied meetings in which members spoke in tongues and rolled around on the ground. Members were also sometimes spotted in their all-black uniforms and berets, selling homemade bread in the nearby cities of Juaréz, Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Las Cruces.

Many Berino residents considered the group to be good citizens who just liked to keep to themselves, but many others were openly relieved when the sect eventually outgrew their compound and moved away.

They moved...but they didn’t exactly leave.

They moved...but they actually relocated much closer to the majority of New Mexico’s population, and it was there, at their new location, that things really started happening—that things are still happening—things we’ll explore further, next month.  (Click here to read this story's second half.)