POLARIS: The history of the Outcast Earth project began with a ghost story. In 1998, when my son Ash was only five years old, we lived near the eastern coast of the island of Kaua’i, Hawai’i. For purposes dealing with privacy, I will not be anymore specific than that. The house we lived in was located near the banks of a beautiful river. Although the riverbanks were off limits due to their unsafe nature, they were also an overwhelming temptation for most of the local children. To my chagrin, I would frequently have to wander through this tropical wildness searching for my children who were often hidden away in some new "fort" or "clubhouse" or were building a new fishing shack on the beach nearby. Most of these excursions were the brainchild of Coyote, my older son, whose distaste for rules and accepted levels of conduct was well-known and often expressed. Psychiatrists called this personality trait of his "oppositional-defiant disorder." I just called it annoying. Since Ash was the more sensible and intellectual of the two boys, I tried to reason with him about staying away from the dangerous shores, but to my surprise nothing seemed to sway him.

"Daddy," he said, "if I don’t go I won’t see my friend."

"You can play with the other kids in the neighborhood," I replied. "There’s no need to be near the river. It’s not safe."

"No, daddy, not those friends. My lady friend."

Naturally, I assumed that Ash was telling about some imaginary playmate, or, having taken a page from his older brother’s book, was simply blowing smoke up my ass. I became angry and forbade him from venturing out to the river again. Although Ash followed my instructions, he continued to ply me for permission to return, insisting that he could introduce me to this mysterious forest dweller if given a chance. I ignored his pleas for weeks, but during the interval he began to draw some amazing illustrations. Some were of unknown people, others were of a burning house; and in many cases they were of a young woman in a green dress. Whenever I asked Ash why he was making these drawings, he would just shrug and say that he needed to show me. Eventually, my curiosity got the best of me.

One afternoon in October 1998, I agreed to take the boys for a walk along the riverbanks. I put my digital camera around my neck, turned to Ash and said, "Okay, you win. Show me."

He led Coyote and I southwest through the brush and thick trees. We began to climb into the foothills of the mountains, and I began to worry that we would not be able to find our way back.

"Don’t worry," Ash insisted. "I know the way."

In fact, his knowledge of the area was impressive, especially when Coyote confirmed that neither of them had ever ventured this far into the forest before. Before long, Ash was pointing out the crumbling ruins of old concrete foundations, long abandoned trails and roads, and the shards of ceramic tile mixed with the damp earth. Within a few short minutes, we wandered out of a streambed and into the middle of a disintegrating house. The building was a burned out shell with a flagstone walkway now mostly obscured by moss and weeds. What amazed me most was not that Ash seemed to instinctively know his way to this location, but that such a place existed less than five miles from our home and we had never been aware of it. But then again, the ruins appeared to be at least forty years old.

The boys and I spent about an hour exploring the burned out remains before heading home. Ash kept insisting that this was the home of the lady in the green dress, although he was unable to explain how he had this information. Intrigued, I began to research the home lost in the forest. It was difficult to find information, as records were not well kept prior to Hawai’i’s statehood in 1959, especially in areas inhabited by native Hawai’ians who had little use for being catalogued and tracked by the US government.

The most useful avenue of information actually came from the locals, most of whom had lived on Kaua’i all of their lives. Few of them would venture out to see the ruins, believing that the place was haunted and the forest was filled with spirits. Some of them referred to the area as "kapu," the local term meaning "forbidden" due to great and sometimes harmful spiritual powers. Regardless, several of our older neighbors remembered the house as belonging to an Anglo family. The place had burned during the early 1960s and the family had resettled elsewhere. Although the fire had been a tragedy for the homeowner, there were no reported deaths or any other reason for me to believe that the vicinity would be haunted or "kapu." Our sources were not able to make any connections between the burned out house and the haunting stories, but they did tell me that ghost was said to be a young woman. This was the first time I felt that Ash was truly onto something extraordinary.

(Ash would later call this ability of his "brain-a-psych," This term was Ash’s juvenile attempt to repeat the very complex terms he overheard from the parapsychologists we would consult with. The correct usage of the word would be: "Daddy, my brain-a-psych lets me know everything.")

I decided to encourage Ash’s storytelling to see where it led. Over the next few weeks, he was able to retrieve a variety of details about "his lady." Most pertinent was that her name was Babs Shao and she had apparently died during the late 1930s or early 1940s, apparently at the hands of another. These new details allowed more successful searches through the Kaua’i Historical Society and other local archives. There was nothing I could find regarding the death of a woman named Babs Shao on Kaua’i, but one of the librarians did find a 1940 newspaper story from O’ahu about a missing woman named Barbara Anne Hsiao. Although not explicitly stated in the article, it appeared that Miss Hsiao was a woman of questionable employment working out of Pearl City near Honolulu. Hsiao’s disappearance was discovered on Sunday, May 5th. Two female friends, who had plans with Hsiao for the day, had found the door of her one-room apartment unlocked and partially open. Hsiao was gone, but her purse, wallet and eyeglasses were left behind. The news had caused a sensation in the small community for several days, with a series of consecutive articles supplying a variety of theories, conjecture and reaction about Hsiao’s vanishing act. As time went on, the police seemed to downplay the more sinister aspects of the case. Since there were no signs of forced entry or foul play, the police eventually labeled the disappearance unusual but not criminal. One detective was quoted as describing Hsiao as being behind on her rent and on the verge of being evicted. He surmised that she had probably flown the coop to avoid her landlord. He was unable to explain why the woman would leave behind her purse and other necessary items. An unidentified source was quoted as describing Hsiao as a "bad egg" who frequently moved around, leaving no forwarding address. Her friends and "co-workers" disputed these theories, naturally. There were no additional updates on the disappearance after May 12th, so I can only assume that the authorities never pursued the case any further.

At first, I had little reason to believe that "Babs Shao" and Barbara Anne Hsiao were related in any way other than the similarity of their names. Hsiao’s disappearance took place on a different island three decades before the mysterious house in the forest had burned down. Hsiao was a working girl of mixed Japanese-Hawai’ian descent while the house in the forest reportedly belonged to a wealthy Caucasian family originally from the San Francisco area. Even more perplexing was the fact that no one had died in the house fire. How, then, did the "lady in green" come to be haunting the forest? Logically, there seemed to be no connection. It would take an amazing breakthrough to finally connect these pieces.

In early 1999, Ash, Coyote and I made another trek through the misty forest to the burned out house. This time I came prepared, packing in food, water, cameras, flashlights and protective, waterproof clothing. The boys and I ate0 a picnic lunch near the ruins, then spent the next few hours looking for some kind of clue that might explain Ash’s ghostly visitor. Ash made a breakthrough when he climbed down into the house’s basement and called up to me.

"Come on, Daddy," he called up. "I will show you."

I was furious, certain that the place would collapse in on him at any moment. I gave Coyote instructions to wait above and climbed down to where Ash was squatting. It was late afternoon, with the sun breaking low through the trees, so the basement was dark and treacherous to navigate. The area was small, more like a crawlspace than a true basement. Large areas were impassable because years of rain and rot had caused the floor overhead to fall in. The basement floor was all dirt, vegetated in some areas with thick grass. Ash crawled ahead of me to one corner of the room and informed me that we needed to dig. He began to carve into the wet earth with his bare hands. I helped him dig, using pieces of charred wood as tools. The earth was soft and damp, so we were able to move it quite quickly and easily. When we reached the depth of about two feet, we began to unearth what were clearly bone fragments. They were small at first, no more than an inch in length, but as we progressed we exposed larger and larger sections of skeleton. Due to the small size of the bone pieces, I was convinced that they were from an animal rather than a human being. Still, the thought nagged at me. After all, why would someone bury an animal in their basement? It wasn’t until Ash pulled out a section of what was definitely a section of human scapula that I was convinced otherwise. At this point, we should have stopped digging, hiked out and summoned the county police. But I needed more, so Ash and I continued to carefully pull away dirt as Coyote called down from above, "What it is? What did you find?"

When he were successful in unearthing the top portion of a human skull, Ash sat back on his heels, smiled, and said proudly, "See, I told you she was here."

Amazingly, this five-year old child was not unnerved by the discovery. I think he felt vindicated.

I did not have time to be amazed by my son’s uncanny insight. The only thing I could think of is that we had uncovered a decades’ old crime scene that no one suspected was even here. We needed to halt our excavation and go tell someone. I packed the boys out, their energy renewed by the discovery. It struck me later how little Coyote had questioned his brother’s clairvoyant abilities. Perhaps that was a quality of being a child – they were able to believe in the unbelievable with much greater ease than a thirty-year old man.

As we hiked back to our home, Coyote kept up a barrage of questions for Ash. The younger boy answered each question with confidence, as though the discovery of the skeleton had opened a floodgate of information. We told every detail to the county police officer who arrived at our home later that afternoon. He took copious notes although it was clear from his questions and the circumspect looks he gave us that he did not believe most of it. It doesn’t matter, I thought, the proof is lying there in the forest.

Starting early the following morning, we led four police officers through the woods to the burned out house. The journey this time was faster and easier, as the cops had located an old road leading into the site that was still passable with four-wheel drive vehicles. Forensic and news teams followed. The police were careful, however, to note that human remains had been discovered in the forest, but did not ever speak to the exact location or the circumstances under which they had been detected. Even as time went on, and they connected more and more of the clues Ash had given them, they never credited him with the discovery. The closest we got was a mentioned from their public information officer who stated that the "remains had been accidentally discovered by a family of hikers."

Although I too had been originally pessimistic, Ash’s abilities had convinced me. In a sense, I felt as though my son had been slighted because the authorities were not comfortable in acknowledging his abilities. He was only five, they reminded me, and his stories were nothing more than the fantasy of a young and creative mind. I felt the facts said differently.

Here is the story of Barbara Anne Hsiao as I can best reconstruct it from my own research and that of the local authorities:

Hsiao was born to a prostitute mother working in Iwilei, the Chinatown and red-light district outside of Honolulu. Hsiao’s father was unidentified and probably wasn’t even known to her. Very little information was uncovered about her early life, although I was able to find some primary school records for her. She was a poor student. She seems to have officially entered her mother’s profession at age seventeen, which is when she makes her first appearance in the local police records.

Multiple arrests followed, although only a few were for prostitution. At the time, that profession was overseen by powerful crime bosses and treacherous madams (the most famous of which was Betty Jean O’Hara, who chronicled her life in a self-published tome called The Honolulu Harlot). As a result, most of the elicit vice activities on the island were either overlooked or supported by the local police. Sometime early in her career, Hsiao became the paid mistress of a local businessman who Ash identified by the name "Richard." This is the man who would later abduct Hsiao from her home, probably during the late evening hours of Saturday, May 4th, 1940, and forcibly transport her by boat to his rural home on Kaua’i. Dental studies of the skeleton found in the basement of the burned out house did confirm that these were the remains of Barbara Anne Hsiao. The woman was killed by a blow to the head. But did a man name Richard build and own the house where he bones were discovered? The police said no, as public records showed that the home was built in 1932 by a man named Lloyd J. Weller (not his real name, as Outcast Earth does not wish to be sued by his surviving family.) This fact became the crux of their argument against Ash’s paranormal knowledge of the case.

(My belief was that a reputable businessman probably would NOT tell a local harlot his real name, even if he was visiting her on a regular basis and paying for some of her expenses. Ash insisted that the ghost of Hsiao identified her attacker as "Richard," which may simply have been the name she knew him by. The police seemed to disagree with my theory, and granted, I have no proof one way or the other.)

Weller was originally from San Francisco, but moved to the islands several years before Hsiao's disappearance to invest in the sugar trade. He had a wife and three children, the latter of whom were still alive and living on the mainland. (Mr. and Mrs. Weller died of natural causes in 1975 and 1989 respectively.) Weller was, by all published accounts, a well-respected businessman, a member of the local lodge and a law-abiding citizen… if you happen to overlook the fact that the body of a known prostitute was buried in his basement. In 1963, Weller and kin decided to leave Kaua’i for the big island of Hawai’i, where they resettled in Hilo Bay. Just prior to finishing their move, however, their Kaua’i home caught fire under mysterious circumstances and burned to the ground. Although many of their belongings were destroyed in the conflagration, the Wellers were compensated by a sizable insurance settlement that allowed them to live out the remainder of their lives in luxury. Surprisingly, (or not surprisingly if you are looking at this story with my jaundice eye) the Wellers did not sell their Kaua’i property. The fire rendered the site uninhabitable, but they never rebuilt their home there and allowed the road and other conveniences to degrade. To me, this was Weller’s way of disguising the crime scene and making a little money off of it in the process. The property was finally sold off by his heirs in 1990, and by this time the old homesite was too dilapidated to ever be salvaged.

Only one of the detectives working this case was impressed enough with Ash to consult him on a regular basis. He also privately confirmed that our account of the events was the only one that fit all the facts. Regardless, the official crime report did not list Weller as a suspect or include any of Ash’s insights. The report concluded that "due to the age of this crime and the fact that the remains deteriorated in a damp environment for over a forty-seven years, it is highly unlikely that a suspect will ever be identified." The case officially remains open and unsolved.Although I felt slighted by the authorities overlooking Ash’s contribution to the investigation, I was so impressed by his abilities that I decided to continue to encourage him. As amazing as the Barbara Anne Hsiao case was, it would pale in comparison to what was about to be revealed…

ASH: (Dates active: 2005 to present)

If Polaris was the originator of the Outcast Earth project, then Ash was its inspiration. While still in elementary school, the young man began to tell stories about ghosts. It wasn't long before his father, Polaris, began to suspect that these weren't just stories – they were visions. Although few others took Ash seriously, his father began to look for ways to encourage the boy's abilities... and this ultimately culminated in the creation of Outcast Earth. Ash is considered the most intuitive and psychic of all the team members, with his visions usually coming to him during the dream state. His older brother is Coyote. He is second cousin to former member Cipher. Visit the OUTCASTS page for more information on Ash.

Who runs the Outcast Earth project?
There is no "corporation" overseeing OCE. Each member is an equal partner has the freedom to make cooperative decisions about the course and nature of the journey. Volunteers based in Tucson, Arizona, handle communications between the Outcast Earth members, the public and cyberspace. The duties of these volunteers are limited to transmitting or posting information to and from the participants, but they don't actually participate in the investigations.

How do members join Outcast Earth?
All of the original Outcast Earth members (Polaris, Coyote, Meridian, Anvil, Trespass and Rune) were chosen by Ash, the boy whose psychic visions inspired the formation of the project. As members have left the project, however, others have been added. Most of the time, new members have some kind of personal connection to the other members, whether it be as friends or family. Click here for more about present or past members; or visit the Outcasts page.