1972, Mining Guano and Huffing Carbogen with an Obscure Spiritual Group in the Arizona Desert
In 1972, brothers David and Ed Smyser received an exceptionally strange job proposition.
The work would take them over a thousand miles away from their Wichita, Kansas, home, and a couple hundred feet beneath the Earth’s surface — and that’s only mentioning physical distances. Their minds would go on a journey several levels of magnitude more dramatic.
David, the younger brother, was 18 years old. He’d just graduated high school and, as he says it, was “fed up with school for the time being.” Ed, the elder brother, had been studying at Wichita State University while working odd jobs between classes. It would have been a perfectly normal, average 1970s middle-class existence if not for their mother, Juanita.
Juanita was a sincere seeker of the spiritual and the strange, the kind of open-road explorer that bounces fearlessly from one paradigm to another, looking for true understanding of this vast, strange mystery that we call “reality.” She was interested in the whole spectrum of weirdness, from esoteric spiritual systems like Rosicrucianism to UFOs and dogmen. Basically, she was my kind of lady.
Juanita subscribed to Fate magazine, which is still existent, and which was then one of the only major publications…
