I first met Cecil Miller and his family in a bar six years after he'd completed his Egg-68 experiments. Miller was one of a handful of graduate students from the University of Chicago enlisted to test the effects of Egg-68 on remote viewing in the early part of the decade as part of the CIA's Lantern 10 project. He seemed normal enough, although his green eyes had a blaze to them that made me feel a bit naked.

We talked for several hours while his wife and two young children played video games and ate pizza on the other side of the room. They left us alone for the most part. Miller ate one piece of mushroom pizza during our conversation and drank three cups of herb tea using little brown bags the size of a thimble and hot water the waitress brought him.

It was a late spring afternoon in Stein's Tavern, a little shack, really, in a village called Fayette in central Missouri. His wife's family farm was a few miles down the road. He'd wanted to meet me at Stein's, Miller told me, because he liked the way the light shifted through the room at that time of day. He was right. The afternoon sunlight showered the room in grimy golden hues. During our conversation he would often pause for minutes at a time, even in mid-sentence, and just look around the place. It was like he was listening to choir music or someone reading a beautiful poem. From my years of interviewing eccentrics, I knew enough to give him time.
The only really odd thing about the meeting was the fact that his daughter, a tiny six-year-old named McKenna, with a freckle-smudged face and large hazel eyes like her mother's, would occasionally pester her father for quarters so that she could play the juke box. Each song she chose was completely foreign to me, but by artists I knew well: Jerry Jeff Walker, Joe Walsh, Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, and Boz Scaggs. It seemed like the child had a sophisticated knowledge of music far beyond my own. After the fourth song I asked her father whether the jukebox was somehow rigged. He gave me a knowing smile and said: "McKenna's been doing this for the last two years. She's playing the B-sides of old favorites. We have no idea how she figured it out. I think she knows something that I don't about music. My wife thinks she likes the letter B."

So, as we listened to B-sides of soul and rock songs, Miller told me about what happened during one strange three-day period in June six years ago. At least he sort of told me about what happened. It's a bit difficult to follow his conversation. The guy spent nearly ten years under the influence of Egg-68, experimenting with the telepathic qualities the drug gave him and, as far as I can tell, because of his telepathic ability, he also figured in heavily with a number of federal operations during much of that time.

Miller claimed we haven't got an inkling of understanding about the relationship between time and music. He hinted at having met the spirits of famous dead people (like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jesse James, and Marilyn Monroe). I don't want to stand in judgement of him — in this world how can any of us judge each other? But I do want to say that I didn't fully understand what he was getting at.

I met with him because of my research into the history of cybernetics and music. My intent was to obtain background information on the relationship between cognits like Egg-68 and music — electric music in particular. Miller is a friend of Lucas Fancher the recording executive who brought psychedelic rock back into the mainstream. When I had asked Fancher why psychedelic music had significance and he directed me to Miller. But I really had no idea what Miller was saying to me. I liked his kids and, although she was quiet, his wife is very attractive, with eyes that burn like her husband's. But as I bid them goodbye I still had no idea what we had been talking about.

I drove back to Kansas City that night and pondered the futility of cognits, psychedelics, and altered consciousness. It wasn't until I was dropping off my rental car at the airport that I noticed the manuscript on the back seat. Miller must have had someone put it in my car while we were talking — his wife maybe. I don't know. How ever it got there I read it on the flight back to San Francisco. It was nothing more than a few journal entries. I would like to say they changed my life. But that might be too extreme. They did, however, alter my research and help shape the direction of my book — if I ever finish it. For that I am thankful.

I offer his notes, then, not so much because they make sense (indeed, what he has written cannot possibly be true), but precisely because they don't. That is what is most disturbing to me. Miller has kept a journal that raises basic questions about life and human thought, questions that we simply must answer. What those answers are, I do not yet know.