OUTTAKES 1: The Curious Case of LA Times Copyeditor Phillip Krapf, Groomed as a “Deputy Envoy” for an Upcoming Event When Earth Would Be Joined into an Intergalactic Federation….?

There was an abundance of material to work with in writing THE SPACE PEN CLUB, given that the book is an historical, cultural and personal memoir dealing with paranormal and UFO/UAP topics. Years of memories, notes and conversations on the personal front, and literally boxes of books, magazine and newspaper articles on the historical and cultural front, plus many printed email exchanges from everywhere and other related ephemera.

For the sake of not making an already long book even longer, some first-person interviews and or stories from third-party sources occasionally had to be jettisoned. But these items make for perfect “outtakes” – a term used widely in the entertainment world for music tracks that don’t make it onto albums, or scenes that are cut from TV shows and movies. In this first of what will most likely be many Outtakes on the Chronicles blog, this content will still align with the themes and stories running through the book.

“Hardboiled” Newspaper Guy Meets The Verdants (not another cool LA band)

In Outtakes 1, we meet Phillip Krapf, a former Metro section copyeditor for The Los Angeles Times, one of the nation’s leading newspapers. According to the press materials for Krapf's 1998 book, THE CONTACT HAS BEGUN, Krapf spent 25 years of his career on the Metro Desk of the Times and shared a Pulitzer for the paper’s work on the Rodney King police brutality case and riots: “He was a hard-boiled newspaper man who scoffed at stories of alien abductions, but he learned the truth the hard way.”

Oh yeah, he did! Or did he?

Krapf claims that at age 62 on June 11, 1997, he was taken aboard a large spacecraft a mile-and-a-half in diameter called “Goodwill” for three days by “the Verdants,” who inhabit a planet in a solar system 14 million light years from Earth. His wife was out of town. They have been monitoring this planet, Krapf writes, for 1,000 years and they had finally determined that the planet and its people were ready and worthy of induction into “the Intergalactic Federation of Sovereign Planets (IFPSP) – a consortium of approximately 27,000 species on as many worlds scattered throughout the universe.”

To prepare for that momentous occasion, for 50-plus years leading up to the copyeditor’s far out personal experience in 1997, the V’s had been conducting benign and “unsolicited visitations” (they don’t like the term “abductions,” he says) of thousands of people, especially visionaries, including “hundreds and hundreds of the world’s most prominent citizens from every field” who have the credibility and power to influence others. The Verdants dubbed these luminaries as “Ambassadors.”

Krapf’s mission – (and it looks like he accepted it)? To become one of many “Deputy Envoys.”

Personal Interview Yields Little Insight into A Key Detail that Could Seal Krapf’s Credibility

I quickly read Krapf’s book when it came out, by then having had 5 years in the UFO ghetto/community and my own share of strange events – although none as detailed as his. Among other things, the former newspaper guy claims he met a very high-profile Earthly figure while on his 3-day sojourn aboard the same observational star cruiser. Krapf says in the book – and later in a personal interview that I did with him on June 15, 1998 – that this person, one of the chosen “Ambassadors,” was so well known that once this man came out with his story, people would find the revelation about the Verdants and our invitation to the IFPSP credible and convincing.

As I told the author-cum-Deputy Envoy, it would be a lot easier for readers -- and maybe even hardened skeptics like the one he had once been – to have the writer finally name this individual and have him corroborate all the revelations shared in THE CONTACT HAS BEGUN. It would also immediately give Krapf instant credibility. But he wasn’t having it. I never published the interview, saving it for a rainy day like today to discuss it at all. There was a lot to savor – and question -- in Krapf’s ET account, however, his Close Encounter of the 4th Kind.

Quirky details like how he met an onboard Verdant whose job title was “Sexperimentor” (the author kindly refused that kinda kinky engagement) and the timetable for establishing Earth’s advancement to the Intergalactic Federation (before 2010). They stick in your head, even many years down the road. A lot of information about how the craft makes its way across the vast distances of the universe echoes other stories about interstellar travel capabilities using systems and technologies generally out of our grasp – at least in the public domain.

Krapf went on to write two more books; your chronicler may eventually get to them over the winter. Or not. As some have suggested, this book sounds like fiction, cooked up by a bored and retired newspaper guy who was a lifelong skeptic about the whole “alien thing,” just out to a run a fast one. Still, as outrageous as some his claims are, I have to remind myself – and do so on the printed page with the readers of The Space Pen Club – that whenever such a story is encountered, one must set aside judgment (especially if your own experiences tend to align or reflect the radical reality that other experiencers have described in depth, often risking ridicule and rejection. How does that old song go…? “it’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.”

Just ask Phil Krapf. Or not.