Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 46

Hi 4D ST PFTFBSBKRG TIMFS MONDAY, JUNE 27, 1977 4 i -v 4 Reeves froml-D gave some of the "Moniheya cancer cure" medicine to his 19-year-old Pomeranian pooch "Nelly-Belly" and the dog died two days later, John says this is not true. "She died after 12 days, but not of cancer," he report. "A friend of mine has been taking the medicine for years and she feels fine." talk too much about it because people are gonna laugh at you and make a fool out of you. He says they're liable to put me in the nut house," says John, "1 don't take his advice. For all the bad things that have come out of this, I've brought them out in the open.

1 was the first to bring them into the open, "I had a lady tell me, privately, that she had seen 'em, but wouldn't dare tell anybody, Well, how many of those people do you think are out there like that? I just wish they'd contact somebody else like me who is willing to talk and tell the truth." In John Reeves' backyard is his newest monument a tall obelisk topped by a pear-shaped earth and moon. At the base of the obelisk is a two-perBon tomb, "Someday, all of these woods will be gone and there will be shopping cen- tera everywhere, but this lot of mine will always stay the same. I'll be buried there with my wife and this inscription will be on the stone," He unrolls a sheet of paper with a 700-word epitaph, which he has not yet had inscribed on the obelisk. Wife? His estranged wife died three years ago in New York. "WELL, THAT'S MY major project right now.

I'm looking for a wife to live out my years with. I don't want anybody that smokes or drinks. Just someone who can cook for me and help me keep this place clean. People don't realize how lonely it geta when you get up in age. I've been alone for too many years," sayi the flying saucer man, who put an ad in the Brooksville newspaper and had a 25-, year-old woman answer.

"She wanted three dollars a day and all the beer she could drink and cigarettes she could smoke. I turned her down," Will the spacemen return? John F. Reeves has his own theory about that. For the past year he has collected old tel- evision sets from all over Hernando County and studied their insides, His living and room and backyard are filled with old seta, all of which have the backs off. Tubes and transistors and solid state units fill boxes everywhere.

John picks up a large color TV tube and turns it, mysteriously, in his hand. "You see this? Look at this for a while. Stare at it and see if you can understand this thing. Look at the complicat-, ed worksmanship. No ordinary mortal could have made this.

I've been studying these things for a long time and I can't figure them out," says Reeves, whose voice takes on a very convincing tone at times like thia. "Only a superior being could think of this, could have the skill to make something like this, There's no doubt in my mind." He turns the tube in the light. "They are among us; There's no doubt in my mind. They are here among us. Just" look at this thing! It's the story of the century," JOHN F.

REEVES. The shelve inside hit house are filled with tapes of radio broadcasts and conferences he has participated in. Boxes of magazines containing his accounts litter his living room. JOHN REEVES deeply believes all of this happened and that he is the victim of a U.S. government cover-up.

"There are people all over the place who have made millions of dollars off me, using my story, using my name," he-says, bitterly. "I've never made a penny off it." Which is not to say, John couldn't. He claims to have been approached by Soviet diplomats who offered to take him to Moscow for a price. He turned them down: "I can't leave this place. I've got too much junk here.

It would all be stolen in a week." He says he was also offered $65,000 by a wealthy couple on the condition he would notify them next time the spacemen came. "They just wanted to hitch a ride up to the moon and pick up a few rocks. I don't think the spacemen would appreciate that sort of thing," says John matter-of-factly. Even the spacemen offered him money once. "On Moni-heya they were impressed with my wristwatch and offered me $100 for it, but I refused," smiles John, who neither smokes nor drinks.

"Sentimental value, you know," Oct. 5, 1970 Responding once again to an urge, John Reeves walked back into the Brooksville woods to an area now known as the "landing site. There he says he met two spacemen who escorted him onto a giant spaceship which left for Moniheya or Venus as we call it, After taking a blue smoke shower and drinking water that looked like ink, John was escorted around this planet of buildings and 32-children families. He was given a vial of Moniheya medicine which could cure cancer. He was crowned in a hero's ceremony before thousands of cheer-ing Moniheyans and was stunned to hear the melody of Amazing Grace piped throughout the city, He was returned, safely, five days later, her says, to the relief of friends and neighbors who had discovered his red cane at the "landing site.

John Reeves claims to want no more part of space travel. "I wouldn't mind seeing them again but I don't want to leave on a spaceship. You never know what they are going to do," says Reeves. "I've had too many break-ins at my house and lost too many valuable items (his Hawaiian guitars and banjo, in particular) so I can't leave this place." Three years ago John was beaten and robbed of $36 by three young hoodlums who threatened to set his place on fire. He claims to be constantly harrassed by freeloaders: "You see, me being a big celebrity here in Brooksville, everybody knows me.

I've been in newspapers and magazines all over the world. If I was to turn down these welfare cases people would start saying, 'You know that flying saucer man in Brooksville? He ain't no good. He left those people out in the LAST YEAR, John collapsed near his mailbox near Rt. 50. Perhaps dismissed as drunk by motorists passing by, he remained there for hours until a friend spotted him and called the ambulance.

"I don't smoke nor drink and very few people know that. I think that's the difference between me and all the others who say they've been on UFOs," says John, who dismisses the stories of all other celebrated UFO cases as inconsistent with his experiences. "One of them said they all floated along the ground to the space ship. That doesn't sound realistic to me. We just walked on up there when I went." John's son, who lives in Maryland, took his father home for a few months after the fainting incident, but the old man insisted on returning.

"He (the son) tells me not to 15 mm V4 Mi A FARM rJ I STORES I XJ FOODS I MONTUE WED mdi gQDPriAi SHOP RIGHT FROM YOUR CAR WINDOW 7 AM-11 PM 24 HOUR CONVENIENCE STORE SHOPPING aa? rui k. til i i Aug. 6, 1968 Responding to a strange urge deep within him, John Reeves says he walked deep into a Brooksville wooded area and met a group of spacemen who took him in their spaceship to the planet Checheya, the outer space name for Earth's moon. The trip took six hours under the direction of the ship's captain Josha and his beautiful assistant Dettsi. They toured the dark side of the moon, where John says he picked up dust and a rock to take back.

He noticed the Earth was shaped like an egg when viewed from the moon. He says he was gone 36 hours. The urge. It comes often to John Reeves and usually late at night. He describes it as a feeling deep inside his soul which signals the nearby existence of strange phenomena.

"It's terrible. I can't sleep. I can't do anything but wonder what's going on in the woods. It used to be I couldn't ignore it and I'd go walking out there and, who knows, I might end up on a planet or somewhere. It's like mental telepathy" says Reeves.

"I've been fighting it so long, though, that I can beat it now. But I always know when they are out there. 1 had the urge just a few weeks ago and when morning came I found a whole bunch of spacemen footprints all over my property." John and other Brooksville residents have made plaster casts of the strange inhuman prints and he has also taken pictures of the landing sites holes in the ground, burned out areas, trees knocked down, wind stirred up. He even has a few snapshots of the UFO which returned 29 days later, as promised, but was chased away, John claims, by an Air Force jet. It certainly looks like a UFO, but the print is hazy.

John has made a scale model replica which sits in his living room. HE HAS PASSED at least three lie-detector tests and failed one it was administered by Life magazine, which lost interest in doing his story. "I failed that because I held back information. I didn't tell them the spacemen were coming back in 29 days. I didn't want a stampede out here.

Can you imagine?" says Reeves, who has twice been hypnotized at the University of South Florida, both times repeating the same precise, detailed, long-winded accounts of his outer space experiences. He has approached NASA offering information about the moon, garnered from his own personal experiences but, "They didn't want to listen to me. They say the Earth isn't shaped like an egg. That's as far as we got. They invited me to one of the launches.

That's all. They didn't want to hear about nothing." The aftermath of each John Reeves UFO incident has brought worldwide attention to Brooksville. The Air Force usually arrives to give an official air to the proceedings and even confiscated the outer space writings Reeves found in 1965 for analysis. They couldn't decipher a single character. Publicity about the moon rocks John brought back from Checheya resulted in the theft of his largest stone.

"I put an ad in the paper offering a $25 reward for the stone and the burglars called me up and demanded $75. 1 said no deal," remembers John, who still has a few tiny rocks and a vial of black moon soil The saddest after-effect of John's escapades occurred soon after he says he returned from Moniheya (Venus) in the fall of 1970. According to one newspaper report, John piiiiiiiiriiiiir'iiiiiiiiin iriiniii mm inij mm, I -V TT7 St. Times STEPHANIE JAMES (gffiip warn JUICE AM 4 I fit Above, John Reeves surveys the tornado-damaged interior of the flying saucer model he constructed on his property. Reeves plans to be buried with a future wife in this two-person tomb (at left) dug out of his backyard, flying saucer model is in background.

1 OUR FAMOUS CHOCOLATE OR VANILLA r.Hnr.ni atf Ul IUUULI Ilk OR VANILLA GALLON Readers object, persuade, approve, CARTON correct, clarify, upbraid, advocate, decry, challenge, provoke. Every day in your StPcterSbUrgTimCS Mill 7 fy I i "111 3 '-r-r'---- ml.