Alien-ated Youth

"One fucking negative thing appears in the Houston Press, and I will personally track you down and beat the living shit out of you," Wolf says before wandering off toward the back of the store.

"Justin's one of our Indigos," Dee explains.

"What's an Indigo?" English asks, though he seems to like the idea.

Many homeless Indigos do drugs and steal, Dee explains, because they just don't know how to adapt to society's strange, alien ways. Brahm recounts the time she counseled a little Indigo boy who wanted to shoot people because he didn't think anyone could stop him. Brahm explained to him that yes, he could shoot people, but he'd be put in jail. "They don't put little kids in jail," the boy said, but Brahm told him that oh, yes, they do. As long as they understand there's a consequence for everything they do, Brahm explains, they behave. Just be careful to phrase it as an explanation, not an order.

Not all Indigos have such a rough time. Rachel Stegall is 26 years old with a bachelor's degree in marine biology and works in a lab at University of Texas Medical Branch. With Brahm's help, she discovered that she was one of the early Indigos. "I always felt I was different," she says. "I always felt more comfortable in nature than with people." She always had a fascination with things from the past, particularly medieval weapons, and yearned to return to the Middle Ages because she wanted to "remember someplace that was happy." She also loved to collect crystals, stones and fossils, and without anyone having to tell her, she instinctually knew that if she put the stones on her cat while it was purring, the vibrations would heal bones. "I always knew I had knowledge I didn't have," she says. "I'm starting to let it fill in."

Discovering she was an Indigo made everything seem to fall into place. "It makes me believe in myself more," she says. Last summer during a boat trip to the Amazon, she decided her purpose was to teach people about protecting whales and the tropical rain forest.

If there's a message she could pass on to other Indigos, it would be that it's "okay to be who you are and to do what you are here to do. That you have a purpose."

As to whether an alien intelligence is behind these unusual children, everyone involved is much more coy. "Nobody really knows," Batten says. "This is a really interesting question."

"I'm guessing maybe alien," Jake's mother says. Brahm might have mentioned something about her son coming from the planet Pleiades. "I don't know. I don't understand all of that."

"I don't know where souls come from. I don't remember," Brahm says, but she will say there are "six places on my genes that are not technically human." Any chance of getting a look at some of that blood work? "I'm not letting them take blood again. I will not become the object of investigation. I worked at a hospital. I know what they do."

The introduction to Carroll and Tober's book An Indigo Celebration, published last year, proclaims somewhat incredulously that readers of their first book "actually concluded that we were promoting the fact that these new children on Earth were space aliens!" A brief browse through their Indigo Children Web site certainly shows how people might have come to that conclusion.

There's a link to the sister site www.kryon.com that gives a better idea of the kind of self-help seminars Tober and Carroll are conducting. The site contains transcripts of messages channeled through Carroll from a higher being named Kryon. Carroll is credited as one of only nine channels in the world working "in the service of Kryon." Each channeling begins with the greeting "This is Kryon of Magnetic Service," directed to his followers, whom he refers to as Lightworkers. The messages contain instructions for communicating with spirit, healing and reaching the next "level." Carroll is also the author of several Kryon books, including Don't Think Like a Human.

A competing but similar proponent of the idea of highly evolved children is Richard Boylan, a retired social worker and hypnotherapist who works with what he calls Star Kids. He thinks the proponents of Indigos are noticing the same phenomenon but have taken it a bit too far with the New Age stuff. Boylan instead believes parents are being abducted by aliens and having their DNA manipulated to create enhanced offspring capable of telekinesis and ESP. He's seen absolute proof, but as so often happens in these cases, it's been locked away in some secret government lab. He doesn't suggest doing DNA tests on any Star Kids because any irregularities are so subtle that they can be recognized only by an expert. And as so often happens in these cases, the expert is dead of cancer. (Or was that really the cause of death?)