The following letter includes extensive information and graphics from Ed's fictional Doppelganger Galaxy which may or may not be coincidental with people and events true to your experience in your galaxy. Jan. 1, 2004

Dear Friends:

Ed appreciates all of you who had the kindness to respond so positively to his Xmas card this year. Thanks for the appreciation. However, Ed is sorry for the perplexity caused those of you who, as several have told us, have searched the web, library and other references for some record of Princess Kisluk Punglowi. This letter is to clear up some of that confusion and to supply the background story for appreciating what caused that confusion. Ed would like, especially, praise the self-control of the rest of you who seem to have had the kindness not to say anything if you couldn't say something good.

Ed should have included a letter with his Xmas Card this year, if for no other reason than to explain his violation of the taboo on his web site: Yes, he pleads guilty to getting his Xmas cards on the web before Xmas for a revolutionary change. To explain his card, Ed needs to mention that during the past year Ed had responded to a poetry contest at Poetry.com on the web at a particularly vulnerable moment in his emotional life, when it had become clear that our self-proclaimed President was going to force a lot of Americans and Iraqis to get killed for no good reason. The contents of the Xmas Card were a consequence.

Contrary to popular opinion, our intelligence services knew they had no good evidence whatsoever that Madman Insane (the one previously in Iraq) was of any danger to the world (which is more than we can say for the Madman Insane in Washington). There was no good evidence of weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of connections with al Quaeda, nor even any evidence of a powerful military force to fear. It was clear to Ed that Iraq would be a pushover for our dumb bombs, and that the smart ones still didn't have the sense to stay home. Ed had recently written a couple letters to the editor opposing the madness. That set the stage.

For last Xmas Ed had urged people to collect mangled and maimed old Barbie Dolls to re-dress, further "wound", and paint as if wounded, as if they had been through the bombing and battles that were soon to be in Baghdad. He urged all to give these "Baghdad Barbies" to friends' children as protests of what was soon to be done in our and their names, not failing to include some dead and wounded GI Janes and Kens in the mangled menagerie. Although this was not to be an "equal opportunity" war, we knew a lot of our young people would be victims, and not just by becoming war criminals in "pre-emptive" crimes against humanity, against all international law. The war was against the Charter of the UN and in violation of the principle enunciated by Judge Jackson as the basis for the Nuremberg trials. Ed had also written a letter to the Editor calling for the impeachment and removal of our illegal President and his Veep, and calling for their subsequent trial, conviction, and execution for treason.

About that time, in that context, Ed had come upon a contest on the web to write poems to be included in a soon to be published book. Ed submitted one on a lark, "Dessert Storm Redeux" (No, not "desert"), just jotting down words that flowed from "Roses are red, violets are blue and so are the wounds of soldiers too..." and the rest, as they say "is history," albeit history that no one knows nor may care to know, so Ed will only mention that if you want to see a protest from the heart, go to Poetry.com and search under "Ed Marshall" until you are led to "Edward C. Marshall" to read it. Ed doesn't say it was good poetry, although Ed was surprised at how much he liked it when he later saw it in print for having spent ten minutes on an impromptu anti-war protest. But it is no more fit for kids than a Baghdad Barbie. (Update: that poem is now displayed here.)

Anyhow, Ed had pretty much forgotten that poem when an editor at Noble House in London who had seen that poem asked him to submit a poem to include in a new volume called Colours of the Heart due to be published this February. Ed didn't have time to write anything new while trying to make some progress on his own seemingly "impossible dream," a novel he calls his Doppelganger Galaxy, that is taking forever. But Ed was flattered enough to resurrect an ancient poem, originally called, "Epic," written as Ed's praise of life after he had almost lost his life two times in Alaska in the last 3 weeks in the Spring of 1963. Ed just prepared that poem as "My Last Rites of Spring." " Epic" was written in reaction to being frozen to death as an alternative to being eaten by a polar bear that had chased him for miles across the tundra, as well as a consequence of almost being killed in what promised or rather threatened to be the first battle of the first and last war of nuclear annihilation of all life. Fortunately, it wasn't.

At that time, Nigel Hillary, for the Noble House publisher, also asked that Ed write an explanation of the history and meaning of his poem for Colours of the Heart. That was what Ed felt people might find most interesting-not Ed's youthful effusions of an untrained poet and untrained artist. Included with that explanation that Ed wrote, which is the basis of thisletter, were various graphics here included: one was of the original water-colored "study" for the idealized portrait of Princess Kisluk Pungowi (by whom that youthful effusion was partly inspired) and the other was of the finished, idealized oil painting inspired by both the experience in which Princess Pungowi helped resurrect Ed from the dead, and by a thankfully aborted dog fight with the Ruskies involving about 50 aircraft, along with a map of where this happened over St. Lawrence, Is., Alaska.

In addition, Ed included there and here a copy of the original version of what is now "My Last Rites of Spring," typed in the immediate aftermath of several of the most profound experiences of Ed's life, first in choosing to freeze to death to avoid from eaten alive by a polar bear, and, secondly, within three weeks (even before Ed had recovered from frost bite incurred in being frozen to death to escape being eaten alive by a polar bear) by having fully expected death in a threatened nuclear holocaust. Those events contributed to Ed's enthusiastic embrace of life symbolized by this poem and the accompanying portraits he painted soon thereafter.

Ed wrote "Epic" in the spring of Ed's life 41 years ago as an intelligence agent on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, while he was posing as a USAF intercept and analysis technician. Ed had been frozen to death in an attempt, as hopeless as it was desperate, to out-think and outrun a polar bear across the tundra. Red was returning from an intelligence gathering trip to Siberia to satisfy his operational boss, Lee Harvey Oswald, who directed Ed's investigation of the subject Ed was studying for Lee's Majestic intelligence unit: UFOs. Oswald's had ordered, Ed to St. Lawrence Island because of the frequent observation of UFOs over that base. Oswald had recently returned to the states after several years in Russia looking for a Russian connection to UFOs. Lee Harvey wanted Ed to make one last observation to supplement Lee Harvey's own study of, and conclusions within Russia to, Senator Richard Russell's (GA) suspicions raised by Russell's observations of many UFOs during a trip of his through Russia in the late 1950s. Russell suspected that UFOs were Russian weapons or at were least working with the Russians. Ed had discovered the ancient connection between Pungowi's people and myths that UFOs were ships of the messengers of the Gods. Lee Harvey wanted Ed to see if the UFOs also came from bases in Siberia across the ice from St. Lawrence, Is. or if they had really a relationship to the indigenous population.(BR>

Collage of Some of the Graphics

on his was back from Siberia, Ed's cat track broke down. Rather than wait to be found, Ed had left his cat track when the power supply had shorted out. He tried to trudge the last 20 plus miles back to his base. However, after skirting around polar bear sow and its cub, he found himself upwind of a big boar bear that proved to be as hard to outsmart as it was to outrun. It had brains as well as brawn. Ed had finally tried to avoid the chase by wading through the rivulets of run-off melting snow from the mountains where it mingled on the tundra with the brine from the Bering Sea at high tide. He preferred, finally, to freeze to death rather than face being eaten alive by the bear. At the last moment, Princess Kisluk Pungowi's family's seal hunting party sought to harpoon a seal and found that it was Ed dead, floating toward the sea. They carried Ed back to their village where he was brought back to life by Kisluk and her mother in mysteries from times as immemorial and secret as their methods were effective.



So back to the days of yesteryear: During the ensuing weeks while Ed was recovering from the frostbite, one day he was sitting at an NSA voice intercept console, listening to Russian voice intercepts from a Bear (TU-111) bomber apparently lost and overflying Alaska. Fulfilling his cover in the USAF, Ed had reported his radio intercept of the lost, confused youngsters flying without sufficient training, calling on every frequency that they could think might be listened to, to find out their location and how to get home.

The Russian bomber had overflown Alaska. So now our boys wanted to shoot it down as it flew back toward its home. Upper echelons who could not hear the confusion onboard that plane said they thought this might be a soviet electronics warfare intercept plane measuring our response capabilities. So, in accord with the oxymoronic military mind and mindset: They responded to it with everything they had. That would have given away the farm just to try to close the door by opening it to let the horses out. Once detected, an electronic surveillance aircraft would have forwarded to base any precious data they had detected on which radar sites had detected them, and where aircraft would be dispatched from for interception, fulfilling their mission.

Pretending that it was crucial to national security to shoot the bomber down before it got back into Soviet air space, NORAD had launched a few fighters from Elmendorf AFB, Alaska. Naval aircraft carriers soon sent hordes of planes to intercept it right over St. Lawrence Island. The Russians had already launched dozens of their best fighters from Anadyr and Provideniya (which out-matched our aircraft both in numbers and technology) to defend the "Bear" bomber.

Before our fighters could reach the Bear, Russian Migs were all over the sky-a couple dozen of our boys trying to shoot their bomber down and a couple dozen of their boys arriving to shoot our fighters down. Ed witnessed on the radio and from sounds of a major dogfight over their outpost what threatened for half an hour to be the beginnings of the last World War-if any of the numerous air-to-air radar lock-ons and air-to-air missiles fired had found their marks instead of landing in the Bering Sea and on St. Lawrence Is. In the volatile political and military climate of 1963, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, had one plane succeeded to bring down an enemy, no one would have stopped before they all were downed and both countries ' Def Con 5 ("defense condition" 5-the highest) launch of nuclear bombers would not have been called back.

"Meanwhile Ed and a friend were too busy to feel while writing analyses and filing Estimates of the Situation calling for our upper echelons to call off our wolves because the Russian boys were just lost and trying to find their way back home. With every missile fired, Ed knew the added chances of hitting something (even if not the intended target) in the crowded sky-or even on the ground-brought all of us closer and closer to Armageddon. Our Joint Chiefs had recently failed to get Kennedy to let them annihilate the Russians in a nuclear holocaust because Russia had nukes in Cuba. They had notified JFK so late to try to leave JFK no option. The nuts really thought that they could win. Ed knew they had wanted an excuse to try again and had lured a series of Russian bombers all Spring into overflights with a secret magnetic plasma laser weapon that caused all kinds of false UFO reports besides messing up electronics as well as guidance systems. So Ed thought the powers that were would not call off the conflict.

Thankfully, even before Ed and his friend, Larry, were able to convince our upper echelons in time that the Russian bomber was on a training mission with students at the helm and had only accidentally overflown Alaska and was trying desperately to get home, they got a premature reprieve from Armageddon. Before any air to air missiles had hit and brought down dozens of planes in their wake (since neither side would have accepted defeat in such a large battle and both sides had already begun to launch nuclear bombers--not yet beyond the fail-safe point), someone up the line listened to the two men's analyses and Estimates of the Situation and called off Armageddon once again-but not the Joint Chiefs. This was but one one of many repeated overflights in 1963 which got some superficial attention in the media-without any mention of the dogfight that was almost the one to end all dogfights-and all dogs.

However, our salvation came from the fact that intelligence commanders on the carriers were routinely sent info copies of each EOS as it made its way up the chain of command. Since their planes were already running low on fuel and we had warned that they were about to face increasingly bad odds from Russian reinforcements pouring in from a nearby Russian fighter base by Provideniya (across from the end of St. Lawrence Island), the naval commanders wouldn't wait until our upper echelons called off the battle to take advantage of our intelligence alerts that the bomber was non-hostile. Having received no explicit orders to the contrary, they called back their fighters on their own initiative. When the naval aviators suddenly pulled out of the dogfight, the Ruskies did not pursue, but ceased firing missiles, if they still had any after the multitude pounding the Island and the Sea. Cooler heads had prevailed and Ed and his friends found that they could catch their breaths. Ed and his fellow spies, agents, analysts and voice language interceptors, soon were told that both sides Def Con 5s had been cancelled and the bombers all recalled both by ourselves and the Ruskies (Actually they used different designations, but to the same point).

To a man, the dozens of boys in Operations knelt down in tears, some sighing, some giggling and others laughing hysterically simultaneously in relief that their loved ones had been spared the nuclear nightmare that could have happened at any moment if one of either side's air-to-air missiles had found its way home and led to the destruction of our own. Ed, however needed to celebrate, to express his love of life that had come so close to being snuffed out three weeks earlier and then again in that latest threat to all humanity. "Epic" had been Ed's immediate reaction of relief when it had become clear that the dozens of planes in a dogfight directly over their Air Force Intelligence Unit on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, hurtling air to air missiles landing on the mountains, hills and sea, but thankfully not him, had been called off before anyone had been hit. Ed sat down immediately after sending off his final tech rep follow-up to his last EOS report and began typing his "Epic" through tear-blinded eyes right after that incident. He started typing "Epic" on one of the illicit originals of the six ply paper used for Top Secret Codeword Russian intercepts, right beneath the text which he had been typing on, analyzing and sending EOS and tech reps from his station.

This poem was written all at once at that time (now slightly revised for publication). Ed accidentally illegally carried the Top Secret Codeword six-ply paper that he had typed on (shown above) out of the intercept and analysis station. Ed had been so affected that he had not even realized that he had taken some of his Top Secret intercept and analysis documents with him from the intercept station along with his poem. Rather than return them, he took the chance to keep them to always remind him of the need to stop the madness and of the time he had almost failed and how it sometimes takes only one or two people who know that they are right to move the world from war. And a poem was born, and a song was written, as fast as Ed could type with fingers falling all over each other, in a rush born of enthusiasm for life and a second chance for man.

Why that poem took the form it did, Ed could only speculate since he had not planned a bit of it. Rather it wrote itself. He only served as a silent midwife standing by for a few minutes as it came to birth beneath his fingers. Ed realized that the sense of gratitude in resurrection came from his "near" or "through" death experience of three weeks before. And Ed felt his gratitude for Princess Kisluk Pungowi's part in helping bring him back to life without debilitating effects from the frostbite. In his enthusiasm for living after passing through the veils of the shadows twice so recently, Ed expressed his feeling in terms of an idealized vision of the coming of spring after the death of winter. Hardly original, but at least heart-felt and spontaneous.

That night Ed also started to chalk out and, in the ensuing days, began to paint the idealized portrait of that princes and the beloved land they shared.

Luckily, Ed had in his room a portion of a large canvas on which Ed had begun painting a resurrection scene (below, left). Ironically, when Ed's peripatetic Chaplain, Cap't. David Johnson (who Ed helped by running the Chapel program in Ed's spare time between the Captain's monthly visits), arrived for his last time before being transferred out, he had wanted to buy only the part of that painting showing devils dancing in celebration of life, leaving the "religious" part of the resurrection behind. It was that on which Ed then started to paint his portrait of Kisluk as he had earlier painted a portrait of his fiancee; (below left).

Who was Princess Kisluk Punglowi? She was the daughter of Clarence and Helen Punglowi, the Chief of the indigenous people on St. Lawrence Island who appeared much like many natives of the Chutkotsky Penninsula north of Kamchatka in Siberia, about forty some miles across the Bering Sea from the western end of St. Lawrence Island. Clarence insisted they not be called Eskimos. He felt it was an insult to lump these other people who his people's oral histories claimed had come from Korea and Japan after the flood of about 12000 to12,500 years ago with his ancient Aleutian people. That flood had wiped out most of his people's industrial civilization when the land-bridge north of what now is the Bering Strait had been swept away by warming waters that had been rising for millennia in the Arctic Ocean until it's sea level was a thousand feet above the sea level of the Aleutian Lake and Delta.

Thawing glaciers, along with drastic climate changes fed by the release, use and waste of thermal energies from vents in the Aleutian Delta and peninsula (which was then a volcanic southern semicircular mountainous ridge at the edge of the Aleutian delta), had led to increasing waters from the skies and land accumulating behind a thin land bridge (behind the unstable intersection of the tectonic plates of Alaska and Siberia), separating the Aleutian Delta (now the Bering Sea and Strait) from the Arctic Ocean. A similar land bridge between Greece and Turkey held the great Eurasian Sea back from the Mediterranean basin. Another land-bridge had protected the North Sea delta from that mighty Arctic Ocean that had inflated so drastically in the ten previous few millennia when the glaciers had been melting back, leaving landlocked Arctic and Eurasian Oceans a thousand feet higher than sea level in the Mediterranean, North Sea, Aleutian and other lakes and deltas.

Ed saw the remnants of some old giant whaling boats from that time that had washed up upon the mountains around Savoonga and Gamble, nearly a thousand feet above what had been sea level but days before. Ed brought back fossilized ivory implements from those boats, beautiful sentinels proclaiming the horrors of mankind's careless manipulations of nature. The warming climate raised by industrialization using thermal energy had melted glaciers and had raised enormous inland oceans across the Arctic and Eurasia, with large lakes covering much of North America and North Africa.

As more and more of the northern hemisphere (at least Punglowi's people had no specific stories about more southerly lands) became covered by water teeming with algae and water plants, the waters increasingly absorbed the sunlight and evaporated ever more water into the air, creating a thermal steam machine that warmed the planet within a century or two, eventually evaporating massive waters firstfrom sea and then from the consequential permanent cloud cover, causing unending rainfall cycles. In the midst of one such lengthy storm (which we now can speculate was world-wide), the weight of the backed up waters led to world-wide earth quakes. The quakes breached the land-bridge that was keeping the Arctic Sea out of the Aleutian delta as well the land-bridge by what is now Istanbul (between the Black and Aegian Seas) that had kept the Eurasian Ocean backed up, protecting the rich, highly industrialized Mediterranean basin, both then 350 to 500 feet below our present sea level, but then, like the North Sea, the continental shelf off Florida and the lands around the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, a thousand feet below the sea level of the swelling Arctic and Eurasian seas.

In any case, Clarence's "ancient people" (not to be confused with the later arriving Aleuts who now inhabit the Aleutian Peninsula) as he called his few forefathers who had survived the flood, made peace with their new neolithic lifestyle. They had to revert to whatever worked since their ancient civilization and sources of thermal energy were then, after the floods, at least 500 feet below the sea. Fluctuating but generally colder shifts of climate made life increasingly harder to survive for a millennium.

The Punglowi's have stories of messengers from the skies who came to teach them how to survive and how they had to respect the earth with new life-styles that were necessary for their survival, including behavior that for people in other circumstances is generally thought to be immoral, but which for Punglowi's people was the key to their ability to survive-including things such as the self-sacrifice of the elderly members of their families when they can no longer contribute to the group if food runs out in winter as well as freely sharing sex with visitors (essential for a wider genetic pool to keep them having healthy offspring).

One of many ships of the messengers of the gods which visited Pungowi's ancient people

Yet the elderly were among the most respected members of their families. They had an important job of sending on the stories and wisdom of their people; but when it came to a choice between traditions and starvation of them all (that would have surely snuffed out that wisdom), they were necessarily pragmatic that first things had to be first. The most productive hunters, youngsters and women of child bearing age, all of whom could rebuild their families in Spring, had the first priority to survive. And even with freely sharing sex, the family was the most important thing, but not our sort of "nuclear family." Theirs were all "extended families."

Among the many functions of the elderly among them is the passing on of their oral histories and folk wisdom, sort of like my Grampy's teaching me his Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea (much like Punglowi's stories which also emphasized the role of the messengers of the sky god-angels- which came in similar crafts of light). The elders job was to pass on whatever the messengers had taught that people needed for life, especially medicine, such as knowing how to revive a father who has frozen to death (aka a "popsicle" -just checking if you are still awake). Ed was lucky because Ed was found by the Eskimeauxs (as Clarence allowed Ed to call his people but only in lieu of every other name Ed could not pronounce) who knew how to resurrect even corpses such as Ed's if they had not been frozen for too long. Ed may or may not have been completely dead. Clarence's two sons who found Ed could not quite agree; one insisted that he felt some almost undetectable breath. Ed will never know, nor will he ever really know what Helen and her daughter, Kisluk, did to resurrect him although Ed did have delerious imaginings that masquerade as memories about what came afterwards.

As best Ed could figure out (at least what he could talk about): apparently each girl wrapped her bare body around each of Ed's legs with skin to skin contact transferring the maximum of body heat. As their fires filled their skin tent with heat it made them sweat profusely from their very hot and feverish flesh, leaving them very thin and frail after a week while Ed was beginning to mend. Kisluk, aka Sharon, had been so full of life when Ed had last visited with their family several weekends prior to this incident that Ed was shocked to see her in the week after she had helped save his life: She was so scrawny and ill for nearly a month. Ed recovered fully before Kisluk did!

Ed was told of other aspects to treatment for victims who are frostbitten above the knees, such as keeping the victim in a constant state of sexual arousal ASAP to keep appendages from getting gangrenous and falling off. Apparently movement too stimulates surface and other circulation and healing masculine hormones, high blood pressure forcing blood through swollen and inflamed blood vessels and tissues. But these topics are too raw to talk about, tabu knowledge no one asked for or wants to know about. But frostbite can be as bad as burning flesh. And just as immediate care is needed for the one, so it is for the other, without worrying about our moral nicieties especially among these people. For if exposed appendages were let to rot off such people, an important aspect of those people's families' social lives, as well as promotion of their greatly needed more diverse genetic pools, would be lost. What do you think those ancient people do to get through lengthy nights with large families shut up without privacy in small tents in winter in what is not the land of the midnight sun until summer? Play scrabble and take cold showers in snow showers all winter long? Ed doesn't think so.

While Clarence insisted that Ed marry Kisluk thereafter only because she had saved his life, she was only 13 to 14 years old, which was their age for sex and marriage; but that was a culture shock for which Ed was not prepared (even if he had not already been counting the days (literally) until he could return to the States to marry his fiancee). Besides, Ed was not open minded enough to have considered any marriage that Clarence and Helen would have recognized, for marriage to them really amounts to adopting a girl's mother's family).

The ancient indiginous people of St. Lawrence have a maternally organized and supervised society with the best male hunter serving as a figurehead king or chief. But all decisions are communal consensuses. Nobody abstractly "rules" anyone else. But if someone doesn't like what is going on as the communal consensus develops, he or she is free to "divorce" his or her family by moving out and "marry" into another family-if he or she can find a family to take him or her. Or if the consensus of the family is that someone is not pulling his or her own weight or can't fit in or is too quarrelsome to allow the rest to be happy, they can put his or her clothes and things outside their hut to tell him or her to take a hike and not come back.

Neither form of "divorce" often takes place because to be without a family is a death sentence in the winter in the Arctic. Willing cooperation and sharing with your family and tribe are essential to life. By the time Ed was scheduled to leave, Clarence had made his peace with the fact that Ed already had his own wedding planned for after he was to leave St. Lawrence. Clarence sent the puppy (later added to this painting), Kolya-Little Nickolas-home with Ed as a wedding gift for Ed and his wife since a great husky is the single most important possession that a man can have among Punglowi's people. So Ed arrived forhis wedding with a blue-eyed, white and black, drunk Siberian Husky, less than six months after almost dying twice within three weeks. Kolya was drunk because Ed had to sneak what had started out as a handful sized puppy (and had ended as an armful of dog by the time Ed got home to share him with his fiancee) on to airplanes in his duffle bag. The only way Ed could keep Kolya quiet was with a baby bottle full of margaritas, that he kept surreptitiously squishing down his (Kolya's) throat while Ed held his duffle bag in his lap.

Ed had suffered the frost-bite while nearly home from unintelligently pursuing intelligence in Siberia when his cat track broke down from an electrical short. Rather than wait inside until someone came to look for him, that bright boy took off trudging over 25 miles back to Northeast Cape AFS in almost freezing temperatures. While Ed had safely skirted a Polar Bear sow and cub, a big bear boar caught his scent and dogged him until Ed was almost frozen dead from sloshing through the rivulets running off the melting tundra snows as he tried to out-run and out-think the big bear boar, since the big boy had the advantage of "braun" and, as it turned out, of brains as well. Ed had only survived by taking to the water that slowed the blind bear down as Ed chose to freeze to death rather than be a live dinner for a Polar Bear.

As far as what Lee Harvey Oswald was doing there? Clear your preconceptions. He was the representative of the most secret codeword organization in our intelligence organization whose very existence is unmentionable and whose codeword may be known by only the handful who have the need to know. He had recently returned from Russia, expecting to be reassigned from UFOs to pose as an apparent Commie friend of Castro who might be able to get into Cuba to kill Castro with a cancer causing cigar.

A few years earlier Lee Harvey had recruited Ed to investigate UFOs which have been important to our intelligence communities since foo fighters flitted around fighters from both sides in WWII. Lee Harvey went to Russia to study whether UFO's were Russian weapons or were aiding the Russian military. During a trip across Russia in the late 1950's, Sen. Richard Russell (GA) had witnessed many UFO's and thought they might be Russian secret weapons. Lee Harvey had to decide for Majestic how to proceed. He had sent Ed to St. Lawrence Is. under cover as a USAF intelligence interceptor/analyst at N.E. Cape to study whether the extensive surveillance of that island by UFOs (actually by foo-fighters from the 2^nd WW on) were coming from Russia, or how they related to oral traditions passed down by the ancient peoples on the island who claimed the UFOs brought messengers of the gods (angels) to their ancient people.

The final irony of all of this writing is that when Ed submitted "My Last Rites of Spring" to the publisher, he found out that it was supposed to be only 24 lines or less, and Ed had to substitute another poem, the first one he wrote, called, "My Epitaph" (above) in place of it.

However, although Noble House is this not registering Ed's copyright for "My Last Rights of Spring" for use in their volume, Ed retains all rights to it as well as to "My Epitaph." Ed has included "...Rites" and the background material here discussed in his forthcoming Doppelganger Galaxy novel. So Ed retains all copyrights to all written content and graphics contained herein. However, any resemblance in name, image or information of anyone or event here alluded to, to any person not yet born, living or dead, or anywhere in between in your Galaxy of experience is surely coincidental and misleading. My Doppelganger Galaxy is a fictional universe to everyone but me. I make no claims to its truth beyond the fact that it is my personal experience. If my universe is delusional, so be it. As my novel challenges you to do, you must research to decide for yourself, what in Ed's /Red's galaxy is true in your's as well.