(Original headline: Her beliefs are a world away from most )
"Well," I say, standing to leave. "This has certainly been an interesting afternoon."
Mary Sutherland stands. She is trembling, I think. Just a little. I extend my hand and thank her for her graciousness. She has been gracious. Not exactly the huckster I had anticipated.
"We should hug," she says, and she embraces me.
She says: "Don't make me look silly."
And I say, "I'll try."
And then I leave her shop, the Burlington UFO and Paranormal Center, with its inflatable green aliens for sale and "Star Trek" kitsch and troll dolls and monster masks and offers for tours of haunted woods and nearby Atlantean temple sites. I walk to my car and feel conflicted. It seems that, when I sit down to write about Mary Sutherland, I will have but two choices: Make her look silly, or make myself look silly.
I visited Sutherland after hearing that she and her husband, Brad, had just returned from Kentucky, where, according to her Web site, www.burlingtonnews.net, they had spent three weeks "searching for the lost mines of Solomon and the Atlanteans" and where, in a remote area of the Appalachians, they had examined a recently discovered bust of what Sutherland believes was a Atlantean serpent priest.
Sutherland's shop is in downtown Burlington, around the corner from a top museum and around another corner from a chocolate museum.
Sutherland believes there is a stargate located above Burlington, through which UFOs come and go. She believes there is a place near Burlington where Jesus might very well begin the Second Coming. She believes in angels and demons and hyperdimensional realities and vortices of energy and that the vial she wears around her neck may contain material from another world and that it may protect her from negative energy, which she explains is a more modern term for evil spirits.
Sutherland is showing me pictures on her Web site of the Atlantean bust, then shows me photographs she has taken of the paranormal. Fairies. Flying saucers. Temples in the sky. She has, she says, an ability to direct energy into her digital camera so that it photographs multiple dimensions, photographs of what she or anyone else can't see. She can, she says, give others in her proximity the same ability.
She shows me digital pictures of people whose images replicate, or appear to vibrate, or dissolve into light. She shows me pictures of herself taken by her husband. One is a blur of yellow and blue.
"This is me," she says, "when I turned into a ball of light and disappeared. I didn't even know I was gone."
She agrees to take my picture, and she stands me in the middle of her store - a vortex passes through it, she says - and, using a small Samsung 3.2 megapixel point-and-shoot, takes a couple dozen images. She is praying as she takes these pictures. She churns the air around me with her hands to stir up the energy. She urges me to relax and to believe.
I do relax. I don't know what it means to believe.
She removes the camera's memory card and inserts it into her computer. Most of the pictures are unremarkable. In a few, I and the room are out of focus. Sutherland becomes excited. In these blurred pictures, she says, the camera has caught me phasing into another universe.
She appears entirely earnest. Look here, she says. Look there, she says. She is trembling. A little. I am ashamed of myself. I stand to leave.
