As Tom French became more involved with Laura, he sat in on a few Cassiopaean channelling sessions at the ouiji board. The Cassiopaeans even had a few things to say to Tom directly.

"On a couple of occasions, the Cs addressed themselves to Cherie or me directly. One night, just as I was putting away my notebook and getting ready to make an exit, they told me to sit myself back down. They were polite about it, but firm.

" "PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE JUST YET, MR. FRENCH," said the stream of letters coming from the board. Laura paused. "Why?" she said. "WE MAY HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY TO HIM."

"I sat back down. When a sixth-density being tells you to do something, you tend to listen. Still, I could not help but laugh. What followed was encouraging, but not especially dramatic. The Cs told me that I had been through some hard times, but that I had finally opened "a doorway to my subconscious" and learned how to examine "the metamorphosis of my being." Good things, they hinted, were just down the road. "THERE ARE MANY CHANGES YET TO COME."

"This did not seem particularly prescient on the part of the Cs."

But the Cs did reveal one curious and checkable fact. Laura’s son Jason, who was 12 at the time, had been having what Laura believed was a "bleed through" from another life since early childhood. The Cs supplied two ambiguous names and the search was on. Laura found an Air Force captain with a first and middle name that matched the Cs’ hint and who died in Viet Nam in April 1969. The captain had relatives close by and a meeting was arranged.

Jason had some details correct from his childhood experiences, but the details added by hypnosis and the Cs proved to be completely inaccurate. Naturally, the relatives, two sisters, wanted nothing to do with such strangeness. "I just don’t believe a word of it," the sister told Tom French.

It was time for that third miracle, if the Cs, and Laura’s self image, were to survive.

In April, 1996, Laura decided it was time for a change and announced that she was divorcing her husband, Lewis Martin. The reason: "Laura said that Lewis did not support her channeling and other paranormal pursuits. She said he seemed to have changed in ways that startled her, to have become more cold and distant. She wondered, aloud, if the Lizzies had somehow replaced him or transformed him into one of the zombie-like creatures, as part of the campaign to keep track of her movements."

Tom of course took this as a metaphor, but to Laura it was a reality. Lewis later commented to Tom: "He (Lewis) acknowledged that he had worried that some of the entities Laura was channeling might not be benevolent. He was not surprised to learn that Laura had wondered if the Lizzies were manipulating him; he had already heard as much. He didn't appreciate that she had suggested such a possibility. It hurt his feelings, he said."

And then Tom continues with some interesting observations: "I was not particularly surprised by Laura's suspicions that Lewis had been changed into some kind of zombie. Those were the terms under which she had come to see the world; that was her prism. In the past, I had heard born-again Christians who were having marital problems talk about how Satan had entered their spouses and was manipulating them. Was this so different? I took this to be simply Laura's way of saying that Lewis had become a stranger to her and that she no longer trusted him."

Indeed, the fundamentalist Christian comparison is very apt. That is also a totalist, black/white, mind set. Laura was acting on the belief that she is correct and those who do not share her views are somehow manipulated by the forces of darkness. This theme would become paramount in the Cassiopaean mythos as the cult developed.

It is also an indication of a much deeper pathology. To give Tom French his due, from very early on in their relationship he realized the depth of the psychological problems, and then decided that they were irrelevant. His interest was not whether Laura was in fact a case of pathology, but how she lived and coped with that mind-set and the world she had created for herself. And, as long as her fantasies remained personal and private, that would have been enough.

Here’s Tom’s point of view on the subject:

"As she once wondered about other people who believe they have been abducted, I thought it conceivable that Laura had suffered some sort of traumatic abuse as a girl and was inventing these alien episodes to cover up her memories of the abuse. Some details from her early history might fit with this theory. A succession of men did move through Laura's childhood. After Laura's parents divorced, her mother had remarried four times; once, Laura says, one of her stepfathers kidnapped her for several days.

"I asked Laura if she had ever been abused by that stepfather or anyone else. She said no, absolutely not. When I asked for details of the kidnapping, she said she did not know. She had almost no memory of it, she said; it was all a blank.

"Other possibilities occurred to me. I wondered if maybe Laura had imagined the face at the window and all the other strange episodes as a way of injecting drama into her life. Was it possible that she was bored, or lonely, or simply so desperate to find something to occupy her mind that she had created this huge fantasy? What if all of it - the exorcisms, the spirit detachments, the channeling with the Cs - was just some massive, unruly play that her subconscious was constantly staging to keep things interesting?
"Then, of course, there was the simplest explanation. What if Laura was a victim of some psychosis?
"This was a possibility Laura repeatedly raised herself. "Sometimes I think I'm losing my mind," she said to me. "Is this what being mad is like? Because, you know, some really crazy people can really seem sane."

"Every time she brought up this possibility, Laura dismissed it. She said that she had occasionally been to counselors and psychologists, as many of us have. But to her knowledge, she told me, she has never been diagnosed with any mental illness.

"Early on, I considered asking Laura to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, at the newspaper's expense. What if a doctor could put a name on whatever was happening with her? What if he or she told us that Laura was manic-depressive, delusional, even schizophrenic?

"Ultimately, though, I never asked Laura to put herself under the microscope. It didn't feel right. The more time I spent with her, the less I wanted to try to force her into another box. Whatever was happening with her, there was something remarkable about the way it was playing itself out. She was raising her children, enjoying her friendships with Freddie and others, reading and learning all the time, exploring the reaches of her imagination.

"The woman was leading a life. It wasn't a perfect life, not even close. But it was hers, and it was extraordinary, and I was not about to interfere."

As Laura went through the months of depression around her decision to divorce Lewis, she apparently sought professional help. "At one point, she went to see a psychiatrist. Afterward, she told me what had happened. She had given the psychiatrist her life history, told him about the face at window and the other disturbing childhood episodes. She said that he had suggested she consider the possibility that she was traumatized as a child. She did not agree; she said her recollections of the incidents were too vivid and real for her to have imagined them. Laura pressed the doctor for help. What should she do? How was she supposed to handle these memories that haunted her? He said she should try to stop thinking about them, learn to cordon off those areas of her mind. Laura didn't think it was possible.

How could she cordon off something so important?

"Laura went to see the psychiatrist only a few times. She said he'd told her she was healthy and did not need to come back."

It boggles the imagination that any competent mental health professional, given that Laura reported anywhere near the truth of her situation and inner mental state, would have declared her healthy and turned her loose. It is much more likely that the psychiatrist told her that her problem was complex and costly to treat and that determined Laura’s own opinion of her mental health. Depression would have been the least of the myriad of diagnoses.