Bunker fever

Nickerson doesn't see it that way. "For me, Y2K was strictly a wake-up call," she says. "'Hey, guys, wake up! Look around! See what's happening.' Most people chose to put their hand on the snooze button. People find evidence to support what they already believe," she adds, in a moment of true self-consciousness and also radical relativism. "Y2K is a fascinating example of 'whatever you believe, you can find your truth in it.'"

And this is the ultimate defense of the Y2K faithful. To them, I seem smug and willfully ignorant in my acceptance of what reality serves up to me. To me, their convictions about Y2K are just the legacy of a fear-everything, trust-no-one culture that runs from the JFK assassination right on up to "The X-Files." Y2K -- you can find your truth in it.

It's a terrible thing to ask someone if they realize that they sound paranoid. It's like banging on the walls of their self-contained version of reality. The question admits that you're not one of them -- you're just another person who refuses to believe the truths that they have so naively imparted to you. Worse, you seem out to get them.

Many of the people whom I talked to about Y2K did not speak to me again after the subject of paranoia came up. But each person was quick to assure me that he or she wasn't one of those alarmist Y2K wack-jobs who'd intoxicated a sensationalistic media around the turn of the century. In fact, the other enemy of truth in the Y2K-faithful universe is the media, which in the absence of planes falling from the sky on New Year's Day is now conspiring to make them look ridiculous.

"I certainly never expected that the legitimate concerns of thousands of people would be so resoundingly scoffed at in public, but solicited so desperately in private by top CEOs and government officials," Beal wrote to me. "I witnessed a very crazy-making treatment of some of the best citizens I've ever had the honor of talking with, as they were dissed by the average Joe (who was taught to dis them by the media machinery) when they had only the best of intentions at heart."

Among Y2K-ers, ridicule from the press confirmed the conviction that they knew a truth that the masses refused to recognize, or that their untrusting government thought the masses couldn't handle. They still feel this way. My conversations with them assumed the dimensions of a confidence game: I wasn't one of those exploitative reporters trying to sensationalize this misunderstood issue, was I?

But after I spent an hour on the phone with Michael Brownlee of Tucson, Ariz., I couldn't help confronting him with a sense of how he might seem to someone outside the Y2K orbit: paranoid.

Brownlee dedicated "the better part of two years" to Y2K. He and his partner, Marie Hanthorn, ran seminars, called "Y2K: The Opportunity of Our Lifetime" in Tucson, Phoenix and Santa Fe, N.M. The classes, which cost $65 and ran for three hours on a Friday night and all day Saturday, aimed to help people cope with the year 2000 rollover. Brownlee sought to move them "from a place of fear to a place of creativity, so they could positively respond instead of being stuck in fear or denial." The couple even published a book, "Just in Case: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Y2K Crisis."

While Brownlee's glad that Y2K didn't cause more problems, he's disappointed that the vast uncertainty of it didn't serve to enlighten more people. "Y2K could have been a wake-up call. Our technologically based society still plunges headlong forward without really carefully considering the consequences of what we're doing to our environment, for instance, what we're doing to our psychospiritual environment, not appreciating the fragility of our life systems, our infrastructure, our technological infrastructure."

Overall, Brownlee comes across like a sincere, if somewhat opportunistic, seeker -- the kind of guy interested in confronting those "big picture" issues, and evangelical about helping others to do the same. That is, until he started talking about aliens. His new cause is coping with the "incursion of an extraterrestrial presence on the planet."

"We have huge evidence that the American government has a great deal of information about this incursion that it has been withholding ostensibly because they don't want people to panic, much like Y2K, but their ability to withhold that information is diminishing," Brownlee says. "There are numerous people who are directly involved in the coverup who are now willing to come forward with their testimony -- the testimony of hundreds of people is now being videotaped and will soon be made available to the public."

He went on to tell me about his own family's encounter with an alien when he was a child, and the encounter of a neighbor in his childhood hometown of Yuma, Colo., who'd received an implant. It was this neighbor's story that galvanized Brownlee's interest in aliens. Now, he and his partner are working on an e-book about "alien incursion" and developing a related seminar.

When I broached the paranoia question over e-mail, Brownlee had a reasoned response: "Since I was clearly drawn to both the Y2K and E.T. issues out of an interest in their transformation potentials rather than out of fear of what might happen, it seems a bit of a stretch to say that I am paranoid. Attentive and alert, yes, but hardly fearful."

But paranoia isn't just about fear; it's the feeling that you have special knowledge that others don't share. Not infrequently, this feeling is accompanied by delusions of grandeur about your role in bringing this essential information to the elite few who can comprehend it.

"When we were involved in Y2K," Brownlee tells me, "we would say to each other, 'This is just training. This is a training exercise to get us ready for something.' And we didn't know what that was. We had that intuitive feeling all along, and now we have a better sense of what that was for." Paranoia is as much about the belief that you are chosen to bring a misunderstood reality to light as a fear of what that reality might mean.

When our conversation ended, Brownlee offered a disclaimer about alien incursion. "It's so easy to make light of this subject and call it fringe and say it's nothing but crazy people," he said. "And God knows there's been a lot of crazy people who have been involved in this field ... but serious investigators are beginning to be involved in this field and look at what's been going on."

Paranoia finds its own support, and renders its critics close-minded skeptics who refuse to see the truth. Even in a case like Y2K, where the threat theoretically evaporated with New Year's Day, the reason to sound the alarm lives on.

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