The Joshua Tree Controversy

Joe Sanchez was a good friend of mine. He has gone missing. Joe was in his last year at USC, getting a Masters in Biology. Right now, I don’t know where he is. Nor does his family, nor the administrators at the university, nor the police. He went away somewhere, or something bad has happened to him. Nobody can say. (Did I mention that he’s dead?) Besides, when someone has gone missing in the desert, people just assume they got tired of the place and moved away. Happens all the time. Nobody bothers to look for them. There are too many people that ‘move away’ out here.

But it all began when I helped him put together his little Quicktime movie of the Mojave Desert, on my Macintosh. Then, when we watched it, the horror began.

Out here, there is lots of sand, hills, and shallow ravines. The Mojave is the largest desert in the Americas, hundreds of miles long, going from California into Arizona. There is a low desert and a high desert, a full thousand feet above the lower desert. Our part of the Mojave begins at the Sierra mountains in Southern California, bordered by Los Angeles in the South and China Lake in the North. Highway 395 is the main road between Mammoth Lake and Los Angeles. This is where Joe took his little movie, on a hill looking over Kramer Junction, just East of Edwards Air Force Base, fifty miles south of my home.

Joe set up a camera on a very heavy tripod, and set it to take a single picture every day at noon, for a whole year. It was one of his projects for his degree. He wanted to show the development of the plant life in the desert over a year’s time. (He died a horrible death, I think)

I think this little movie is why Joe is missing.

The Mojave is full of Joshua trees. Nobody notices them. They are not really trees, but I will get to that in a moment. Anywhere you look across the high desert, you will see them, sparsely spread out across the desert floor. They only live between three and five thousand foot elevations, so you will not see them elsewhere. But it was the Joshua trees in Joe’s movie that was so controversial, so filled with horror, and what led to his death disappearance.

Because in Joe’s time-lapse movie, the Joshua trees were walking across the desert.

Joshua trees are ‘interesting’ to say the least. You go to the couple of happy little websites that talk about these ‘plants’ and you will see some Joshua trees, and read how they are related to the Yucca plants. But these sites are not a source of details, and they are full of disinformation as well, so you will not really learn anything about Joshua trees from these sites.

If you go out into the Mojave and actually look at these things, you will find that they have no roots at all. Instead, they have feelers or tentacles that spread along the surface of the sand, and they bury these into the sand only an inch or two. (A dead body is three-fourths water, and the rest is nutrients for plants) Thus, it is very easy for the Joshua tree to move across the desert floor. The truck of the tree is hollow. In fact, it is not wood at all, but some sort of white, pithy substance, but rock hard. The outside of this thing is covered with short spikes, facing upwards in rows surrounding the trunk, sharp as razor blades. Joshua trees do not make good firewood for a camp out. You would be in jail for trying to cut one down anyway. These things are protected by the United States Forest Service as a protected species (But they should be protecting us from them!)

More interesting to me are the arms of the Joshua tree. There is a ‘shoulder’ coming from the top of the trunk, and the shoulder has a short ‘arm’ that goes to an ‘elbow’ with a shorter ‘forearm’ that ends in ‘hands,’ in a bowling ball-sized bunch of hard green sharp spikes, each of which are about six inches long. (Imagine being impaled on one of these ‘hands.’) Young Joshua trees have three arms. Older ones can have dozens. People think Joshua trees never die. But there is even more to the horror.

In Joe’s movie, the trees were waving their arms as they were walking.

Is this some sort of communication with sign language between Joshua trees? Because in Joe’s movie, there were plainly talking or gesturing to each other as they walked aimlessly across the ground. (They were talking about their next victims!)

(I want to know about those guys who vanished camping out in the desert next to some Joshua trees, and fragments of their bones were discovered inside the hollow tree trunks!)

Oh, the trees don’t move fast. In the year it took for Joe to make his movie, they only went a couple of yards. At 24 frames per second, Joe’s movie is just 15 seconds long. I got chills when I watched. It. It was like watching aliens marching across our world.

In fact, some think Joshua trees not are of this world. They fit nowhere in the phylum of our trees and plants on earth. What are they? What are they doing when they walk? Are they really communicating with each other, as their arms wave wildly about?

Nobody looks at these things, standing out in the desert. Nobody pays attention, and in our time frame of reference, they appear to be static, and firmly rooted in the ground. (Why can’t you see the danger we are all in???)

Joshua trees have only been recorded as being in the Mojave for the past hundred years. Before that, no one can say that they were here, or anywhere, for that matter. Where did they come from? How did they get here? What further horror is our government hiding?

Why is Joe and his movie suddenly missing? (Joe dying like that, with nothing left and no trace at all, is really bothering me!)

This whole thing is far more alarming that what I have talked about so far. Land is very cheap in the desert. You can buy 200 acres for a couple of thousand dollars. A lot of people find that attractive, and they buy some land out here, and put up a house on it, or move a mobile home onto their newly purchased property.

But most of these lonesome, isolated homes are abandoned, here in the high Mojave desert. Why has no one pointed this out before?

The owners are gone, or missing. The property is falling down. The homes are abandoned, with the roof caving in, with doors and windows empty. But there are dozens of Joshua trees standing around these suddenly empty homes. People abandon their homes in the open desert all the time. Everyone knows that. There is no mystery, no inquiry. But I think the Joshua trees did this. After all, the Mojave has more missing persons than any place on earth. (What horrible thing happened to all these people?)

Joshua trees will not come into a town. They also never cross a highway. When they come to a road, they ‘sit down’ like they cannot figure out how to cross the road and are perplexed.

But it is at the edges of the few towns out here in the desert that is troubling. I live in Ridgecrest, a beautiful place full of nice homes, stores, and lots of grass and trees. Ridgecrest is in the Indian Wells Valley, so there are lots of wells and sweet water here. The Navy base, China Lake, borders Ridgecrest on the North and East. But it is on the South and West, that our town faces the open desert. There you will find a lot of abandoned homes, out there on the sands, even new ones. You will also find Joshua trees out there. The only thing that stops them from coming in, I think, are the asphalt roads on the south and west end of town. It keeps them out, and protects the rest of our homes out here in the lonely, empty desert. So we are relatively safe in town. (HAHAHAHAHA!)

You would think there was no danger here at all. Certainly, there is no controversy. No horror. Just silence from city and federal officials.

This is why I am writing this story here at MyMac, and publishing it for all to read. I don’t want to go away like Joe. (I don’t want to die like he did!) Sure, I am curious, just like anyone would be, concerning trees walking across the desert, and talking to each other with their flailing arms. But the horror. Just thinking about them causes it to rise unbidden within me. I’ve seen their movie. (Can’t forget. . . MUST forget the horror!)

But it was only when I connected all the abandoned homes in the desert to these Joshua things, that I became afraid, and ceased my pleasant walks into the open desert. (I bought a gun, but I know it won’t help me!)

What are they? What is their purpose here? Why is there such an effective and extant cover-up by the government about these things?

Tell me if you know anything about Joe Sanchez and his missing movie. Or about the hundred thousand missing persons out here in the high desert of the Mojave. I want to know.

Because my dreams of late are inhabited by strange trees, walking across the desert.

(I’m not deranged. I’m NOT! I’m NOT!!)

Roger Born
“Happy Halloween”

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