Elgar Brom



Marguerite Arillotta (March 1, 1920 - August 4, 1997) was an American contactee who wrote under the pen name Elgar Brom. According to her account, beginning in the mid-1960s, Arillotta had regular contacts with a group of extraterrestrials from Etraa, led by a being she called Noel, claims for which she offered as evidence a substance - crystallized space dust - called "Sagasha", and a scroll containing symbols from several ancient alphabets. Arillotta first published her story in 1980 as "SAGASHA - Mysterious Dust from Space".

Background
Born Marguerite Keenan, the daughter of Irish immigrants, and raised in western Pennsylvania, she married Mcclellan Moore in 1946, with whom she had three children; the couple divorced sometime prior to her first contacts. She spent the later years of her life in Pennsylvania, where she passed away in 1997 from lung cancer.

Like many in the saucer community, Arillotta was closely interested in psychicism and mediumship, and a majority of her contacts were made during trance channelling sessions, conducted with her fellow contactees, referred to as John and Pat in her book.

Contact
Arillotta reported that she first encountered a flying saucer while driving through Taylor, Michigan with her friend, Ron, one evening in October 1965. The craft was, she said, a "pulsating orange" colour with a "rim protruding out from around the center, extending around the entire oval-shaped body", enormous and enveloped in cloud cover. The pair later determined the craft had to have been "cylindrical like a cigar", Arillotta describing it as a mothership.

In the weeks following the sighting, according to her 1980 book, Arillotta, along with friend and fellow psychic, John, were party to several strange turns, including the receipt of anonymous instructional messages, the hearing of disembodied mechanical voices, and the accumulation of quantities of blue dust that appeared as if out of thin air. These events continued to escalate as the months passed: John was contacted by enigmatic men who seemed to maintain a powerful, hypnotic control over him; while Arillotta observed phantom lights, noises, and poltergeist-like activities in her home, sometimes accompanied by the manifestation of the blue dust. Both of them, she said, experienced a sharp increase in their psychic ability in connection with these events.

Etraan Contacts
The pair were joined by a third medium in early 1966, a female co-worker of Arillotta's named Pat, upon whom the dust - which they were told was called "Sagasha" - was said to have been used to increase her psychic potential. Arillotta claimed that the three of them were collectively brought into direct mental communications with Etraan intelligences, first as she and John channelled a pair called Thon and Targa, and later as all three channelled a being they designated Noel. During these sessions, she said, the trio asked many questions about Etraa and other matters, but were often only granted vague or cryptic answers, particularly on points that Noel claimed would have to dawn on them in their own time.

The most fantastical claims connected with the Noel contact coincided with the birth of John's son in June 1967. According to Arillotta, the boy was a "star child", whose birth had allegedly been overseen by a strange doctor, "with an odd sounding foreign name", who subsequently disappeared. Seeking more information about the strange circumstances of the birth, Arillotta and John convened to channel Noel for insight.

During the session, she said, Noel told them that the Etraans had allowed them to see the boy in that form in order to reveal to them the truth about themselves, and then related the story of Commander Traybel, the Etraan Mohesteanaas (next-in-line to throne), who had travelled by starship to Earth some decades prior. During his time on our planet, the story went, Traybel had "insinuated" himself into an Earth-family, and from that union Arillotta was born, his daughter by Arillotta's human mother. Traybel would subsequently father John by a Kreen woman who accompanied his ship to Earth; and that John was swapped with an Earth-child, who they had planned to accompany them back to Etraa. However, soon after departing our planet, extensive damage having been caused by prolonged exposure to our atmosphere, the ship exploded, all on board killed.

For her part, Arillotta stated that she did not accept the Traybel story to be true, and argued it held merit as a parable only. Consequently, she said that when asked by Noel in a later session to allow herself to be taken to Etraa aboard a spacecraft, which would land in Atascadara, California to collect her, she refused.

Following the Traybel revelation, John's experiences took centre-stage in the Etraan story. Arillotta's book details his reputed claims to having been physically teleported to Etraa repeatedly over the next several years, relating his tours of the city of Ejii and being taught the history of the planet, and eventual claims to having been made the Mohesteanaan, he-prince leader of Etraa, and witness to the destruction of Ejii in a war.

The group contacts with Noel were ended in 1971. Arillotta shortly after moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania, and would later state she had lost contact with John and Pat, claiming in an October 1980 interview with the Pittsburgh Press that "a unique set of circumstances would bring [them] together and the contacts would begin again."

Adverse Forces & Men in Black
In addition to the contacts with Noel, Arillotta reported an "adverse force" had been at work during some sessions, one which at times mimicked Noel or prevented their channelling of him completely. This force at one point, she said, attempted to reproduce the Sagasha dust phenomena, leaving piles of purple and yellow dust in both her and John's homes, the substance described as provoking revulsion.

Arillotta also alleged that Men in Black on one occasion in 1966 sought to prevent her contacting an Ohio psychic called Wilson in relation to the Noel channellings, referring to an encounter she and John had with two expressionless men, whose "faces seemed unfinished, the color of set, wet, pasty clay."

Sagasha, the Blue Dust
Arillotta claimed in her 1980 book that the blue dust, Sagasha, had been chemically analysed twice at an unnamed laboratory and found to consist of "carbon, sulfur, (copper sulfate), and an organic substance that couldn't be isolated because of its small quantity"; and that it was later retested by Gulf Laboratory, which reported it contained "amino acids, carbon, sulfur, urea, as well as an unknown organic substance", again unidentifiable due to the small quantity. The group, she said, had been told that Sagasha was the remains of a being called Elam, who "had been in our atmosphere a little too long," and disintegrated following his death in Arillotta's Michigan home.

The Scroll
Along with "Sagasha", the other piece of physical evidence presented by Arillotta as proof of her contacts was a parchment scroll (see above-right), which was said to have been brought back from Etraa by John. The symbols are a selection of what appear to be Sanskrit, Norse Runic, Cyrillic, Ancient Hebrew, and Ancient Greek characters; allegedly, in the Etraan language, the text "proclaim[s] the powers and official duties of the Mohana."