Alien-ated Youth

At first glance, they look like perfectly ordinary first-graders scribbling feverishly on the blackboard, but there is something striking about the boy's deep blue eyes that suggests a maturity well beyond his years. Jake's in advanced classes and already reading at a third-grade level. Jan is the quiet one, but has a presence that immediately draws attention. Her predilection is toward art, though at the moment she is choosing to write math equations on the board, erasing them as soon as she's completed each of her computations.

Jake's mother is a teacher at this Baytown-area school, and worries that he may be ostracized by his peers if word ever gets out about his special gifts. "He questions everything because he wants to know," she says as her son draws a picture of a lollipop tree. "The questions he asks are not even age-appropriate."

These children tend to know things without ever being taught or told. Jake's companion Jan "can use a compound bow very well," says the girl's grandmother, Jill Spence. "She can shoot a BB gun; she goes fishing." It just came naturally to her, Spence says. She can't explain it.

They go by many names, such as Star Kids, Indigos or Crystalline Children. Whatever they're called, believers say this group of prodigies started appearing about 30 years ago and may now make up as much as 90 percent of the population under ten. They also exhibit strange side effects, like a higher resistance to pollutants but an increased sensitivity to sugar and food additives. These are babies born with an inherent knowledge of art, language and spirituality, possessing an impressive wealth of wisdom. Some will even go so far as to say these kids are not only prime candidates for the gifted and talented program, but the next step in human evolution.

Parents and those who study these children have been asking themselves why here? Why now? Theories about their origins range from spirits entering from other planes and dimensions to chosen ones delivered from heaven. Some even suggest aliens have been abducting and manipulating the DNA of these children and their parents to prepare us for when they make their presence known. The one thing all these groups do agree on is that the kids are out there, and they're coming to teach us a lesson.

The term Indigo Child was coined 17 years ago by Nancy Ann Tappe, a parapsychologist who developed a system for classifying people's personalities according to the hue of their auras, described in her 1982 book, Understanding Your Life Through Colors. According to her, auras have been entering and exiting Earth throughout history. For example, aura colors such as fuchsia and magenta disappeared from the gene pool 100 years ago (though she was recently shocked to find a fuchsia living in Palm Springs). It stood to reason that a new life color was about to make an appearance.

Tappe was unable to find the new color scheme until a baby was born with a heart murmur at a children's hospital in San Diego whom she recognized as being dark blue. The child died six weeks later, but more and more indigo-colored personalities began to appear in the '80s, and their numbers were clearly rising.

But it was the 1999 book The Indigo Children, by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober, that popularized the idea of the next generation. Carroll was an economics major who ran a technical audio business for 30 years until a visit to a psychic prompted a New Age midlife crisis. He found religion and started traveling around the world giving "self-help" seminars. Accompanying him was Tober, a practitioner of metaphysics and hands-on healing as well as a jazz singer who had toured with Benny Goodman and Fred Astaire. The genesis of the book came when they began noticing similar accounts of strange behavior in children from teachers, counselors and psychologists who attended their seminars. As they began to look into these occurrences, they found kids were indeed being born with an "unusual set of psychological attributes" and displaying "a pattern of behavior generally undocumented before." Using a collection of essays and interviews from experts in the field -- mostly counselors working in such New Age areas as Angel Therapy and alternative medicines -- the book focuses on raising an Indigo Child. Some of the main attributes they describe are a sense of "deserving to be here" and "knowing who they are," difficulty with authority, a dislike of activities that don't require creative thought and a feeling of royalty (and acting like it).

The peculiarities of Jake and Jan (their families asked that their real names not be used) were apparent from an early age. As a toddler, Jan sometimes spoke using her own language. Instead of "cookie," she would say "cookah" and refused to call a sandwich anything but a "phonic." Odder still, she didn't begin speaking until she was three years old. For Jake's part, he had trouble grasping the concept that he was not in charge. "He has to be told," Jake's mother says. "He doesn't think he needs permission." Spence noticed a similar idiosyncrasy in her granddaughter. "You have to coax her to do her homework," she says.