On the road to a parallel universe
Lance Schneider
One of the strangest Highway Space Warp (HSW) cases took place in
southeastern Utah near the railroad crossing of
Modena, on the edge of the Escalante Desert.
There's a slickrock canyon just north of Modena that bears the name of
Gadianton. It's a name that brings a shudder to
God-fearing Latter-Day Saints.
"Among the freighters who hauled supplies to Pioche (Nevada) in the
seventies (1870s--J.T.) there grew up a legend that a
rocky gorge near the Nevada Line was haunted by the Gadianton robbers, a
terroristic brotherhood which the Book of
Mormon explains as having sprung up among the Nephites and Lamanites in
the century before Christ."
The Gadiantons were a mysterious sect of assassins quite similar to the
Bruder Schweigen of Germany or the Crna Ruka
of Yugoslavia.
"Wide-eyed freighters told tales of rocks closing the way, and of the
canyon folding up to entrap them."
Eventually the old Gadianton tales were forgotten in Utah's Iron County.
Until May of 1972, when four coeds from
Southern Utah University (SUU) were driving back to their dorm in Cedar
City after spending Saturday at a local rodeo in
Pioche. (All names have been changed to protect the witnesses'
confidentiality--J.T.)
Janna North had the wheel of her father's 1971 Chevrolet Nova, and Carol
Abbott was in the passenger seat. Sitting in the
back seat were Lisa Rochefort and Bethany Gordon. It was after 10 p.m.
when the girls crossed the Utah-Nevada state
line nine miles (14 kilometers) east of Modena. And they were anxious to
get back to the campus before their
housemother, Mrs. Mortensen, locked the dorm doors.
That stretch of Utah Highway 56 is pretty desolate, all sand and
sagebrush and ocotillo and Spanish bayonet, with the red
sandstone bluffs on the northern horizon. So the girls were pretty happy
when they finally spotted the Union Pacific
railroad crossing at Modena. But just past the rails, Janna noticed
something strange. Two sets of blacktop highway headed
off into the desert--one veered sharply to the southeast, the other
shooting northeast toward the canyon country further
north.
"Which one do we take?" asked Carol.
"Left," Janna said. She knew that Cedar City was 46 miles (73
kilometers) to the northeast, and she guessed that the
canyon road would bring them home much sooner.
Five minutes later, the Chevy entered the red-rock canyon. Janna, who
had been chatting with her friends, suddenly
noticed that the car's headlights were shining more brightly on the
pavement. Looking closer, she let out a gasp. The white
centerline was gone. Instead of black asphalt, they were driving on
white cement..
"Janna, up ahead!" Carol exclaimed.
Janna gasped. The highway ended abruptly at a rocky cliff face. Janna
stepped down hard on the brake pedal. Fishtailing
slightly, the Chevy screeched to a stop in front of the cliff.
"Oh, great! A dead end!" Putting the gear into reverse, Janna swung the
car's nose around. "You'd think they'd put up a few
warning signs."
"Now we've got to go all the way back to Modena," Bethany complained.
"We're never going to make curfew," Lisa said.
"We'll make good time once we're back on the state highway," Janna
assured them.
Tense minutes passed. Janna began to feel uneasy. They were still
rolling along, hemmed in by red canyon walls. But they
should have been back out in the open desert by this time.
The canyon gradually gave way to open country. The girls gasped. Instead
of moonlit desert, they saw grain fields on the
right and a large like, with stands of ponderosa pine, on the left.
Carol looked around in awe. "This sure ain't Modena!"
"We must've gotten turned around back there," Janna said, her gaze
darting back and forth. "Where the hell are we?"
Up ahead Janna spied a roadhouse (tavern--J.T.) and an adjacent parking
lot. It seemed to have a neon sign, but she
couldn't red it. What should have been letters were brightly-lit
squiggles and curlycues. Some men came out of the
building.
"There are some guys," Carol said.
Bethany let out a giggle. "Are they cute?"
"Let's find out." Lisa began rolling down the rear passenger window.
"Lisa! We don't have time for this," Janna said.
"Relax!" Hastily she touched up her lipstick. "I'm only going to ask
them how to get back to the highway."
As Janna slowed down, she noticed a good deal of consternation among the
men. As if they'd been startled by some
unknown animal. Sticking her head out the window, Lisa said, "Hi!
We're--" And she let out a terrified scream.
"Lisa! What--!?" Janna turned in her seat.
"Get out of here!" the girl screamed, frantically rolling up the window.
"Punch it, Jana!"
Bethany shrieked, "Step on it!"
Tires sitting sand, the Chevy zoomed away from the building. Janna
stepped down hard on the gas pedal. The lake flew by
on her left.
"Oh, my God! They're coming after us!" Bethany shouted. "Janna, faster!"
Janna glanced in her rear-view mirror, and what she saw turned her blood
to ice. They were being chased, but not by any
vehicle that had ever been built in Detroit.
Four queer-looking automobiles followed in their wake. Egg-shaped
vehicles mounted on tricycle wheels. That is, with
two large wheels in the front and a smaller wheel in the rear. A single
bright white headlight shone from the front of each
pursuing "car." They made a strange whirring or buzzing sound as they
rolled along.
"Janna, go faster! They're gaining on us!"
Ahead the road led back into a red-rock canyon. Janna's Chevy plunged
into it at 80 miles per hour. The road was so
narrow, it seemed to hem them in. The Chevy's tires kicked up a
billowing cloud of dust. They could no longer see their
pursuers.
Minutes later, they roared out of the canyon, back into the familiar
desert. All at once, the road vanished. The headlights
showed nothing but sagebrush and ocotillo. The Chevy bucked and jostled
like a wild bronc. Janna hit the brakes. Too late!
The car sideskidded down an arroyo and came to rest at the bottom.
Shaking uncontrollably, the girls emerged from the car. Miraculously
they were unhurt. The Chevy took the worst of it,
with three flat tires, numerous dings in the front bumper and a missing
hubcap. Jenna took one look and clapped both
hands to her forehead. "Oh, no-no-no! My dad's going to kill me!"
Lisa, however, was near-hysterical. She sat on the ground, hugging the
knees of her bell- bottom blue jeans, weeping and
moaning, She kept mumbling, "They-they weren't human..."
The girls stayed with the car until sunrise. Then they walked a couple
of miles due south. Boy, were they glad when they
found the familiar blacktop of Highway 56. An hour later, they flagged
down a cruiser of the Utah Highway Patrol and told
their story.
Trooper Vic Lundquist, who investigated the case, noted several
circumstances that were never adequately explained.
(1) There were no tire tracks showing where the Chevy had left Highway
56 in Modena.
(2) Tire tracks from the wrecked Chevy extended only 200 yards back into
the desert and ended abruptly.
(3) No one could explain how the Chevy had gotten nearly two miles north
of Highway 56 without leaving any physical
trace of its passage through the rough desert terrain.
(4) Although volunteers searched diligently, no trace of the Chevy's
right front hubcap was ever found.
If Utah's Gadianton Canyon is, as some people claim, a gateway to
another dimension, then perhaps Janna's missing
hubcap is a prime exhibit--an "alien artifact"--on display in a museum
on that parallel Earth. (See the book Utah: A Guide to
the State by Hastings House Publishers, New York, N.Y., 1945, page 298.)
--
Lance Schneider
Software Developer
StorageTek