The team’s visit to the remote and hostile landscape of Iwo Jima also marked several important changes for Outcast Earth. First, Iwo Jima was the last expedition carried out in the South Pacific and marked the completion of that leg of the team’s mission. Second, the spot on the team vacated by Coyote in June 2005 was finally filled by Cipher, Polaris’s cousin. With the addition of Cipher, the team was finally back to its intended complement of seven people.

Because Iwo Jima is a military base jointly operated by Japanese and American forces, the island is not generally open to tourists. The team had to set up base on the island of Saipan while they awaited approval for their request to visit Iwo Jima. The team used the time to explore some of the old battle sites and ruins on Saipan, noting several for further investigation. Then, on October 17, they received notice that they could depart for Iwo Jima for a daylight-only visit on October 19. Polaris described their landing – and the subsequent strange occurances on Iwo Jima – in his journal entry from that same date:

We landed on Iwo Jima this morning at about 6:30 a.m. We were all exhausted after spending so many hours on the boat, ironically twice as much time was spent getting to Iwo Jima than was actually allowed on Iwo Jima. None of us slept real well, as you can imagine, although all of us gave it our best shot. Regardless, we all pulled our asses off the boat and made it ashore where we were met by several members of the Japanese Defense Forces. These guys were very polite and kind, but let us know (quite clearly) what we could and could not do on the island. They shadowed us around the entire time we were there, but otherwise did not interfere in our work.

We landed on the heels of a large thunderstorm and the skies were still very hazy. In addition, the air smelled heavily of fresh rain and rotting eggs, which was a very unusual combination I can tell you. The latter was from the volcano and the surrounding sulfur pits. Visibility was spotty at times and sometimes you couldn’t see any further down the beach than about a hundred feet.

We put ashore on the beach near where the American forces began on their attack on February 19, 1945, just northeast of the volcano called Mount Suribachi. It was on the summit of this mountain that American forces planted their flag, an image that was immortalized in a famous photograph that later became symbolic for the Allied triumph in the South Pacific. We had to do everything on foot and the island seemed suddenly very large. We decided to follow the invasion beaches southwest toward the volcano. We scattered out to cover as much area as possible. Most of us went into the dunes where the greatest fighting took place during the war, while Ash and Cipher stuck to the beach. Rune and Meridian were our big hitters for that part of the survey and were able to pick up a variety of unique impressions off the landscape. Rune even came up with three names she thinks are of U.S. casualties: Peyton, Gifford and Stuch. As is traditional, we [didn't] have any direct knowledge... of the Iwo Jima battles, so we will leave it to our webmasters to see if people with those names were actually killed or wounded on the island.

We had been wandering through the area for about forty minutes when Cipher and Ash came running up from the beach yelling for me. They were both very excited and agitated, but didn’t seem to be afraid or injured. After I got them calmed down, [Ash] told me how he had just seen Tahiki on the beach. [For more about Tahiki, read Tahiti: Land of Volcanoes and Rainbows.] Now under most circumstances, I would have reacted with a hearty guffaw, but it is Ash and strange stuff happens to him all the time. He and Cipher immediately start pulling their digital cameras out of their pockets and are shoving them in my face. By this time, everyone else has wandered over to see what all the excitement is about. Big as life, Tahiki is on one of the photos on Ash’s camera. Then Cipher says he photographed him too and shows me a different shot looking down the beach toward Ash. In that photo, Ash is standing still and turned slightly to his right like he’s in conversation with someone. Cipher points out this smudge on the image which when we blow it up looks like the head and shoulders of a man wearing a black hat and a dark-colored shirt. This is the same type of clothing Tahiki is wearing in the better photo taken by Ash. Click here to see a side-by-side comparison of the photos!

Everyone’s totally confused so we all run back to the place where Ash and Cipher said they took these photos. It’s only been about ten minutes but there’s no Tahiki, of course. In fact, no footprints other than Cipher’s and Ash’s. We continued to look around the whole area but never found anyone. Meridian was brave enough to find our Japanese military “keepers” and ask them if anyone else was on the island but us. They told us that only other military were there, but none in our location. (We didn’t mention why we were asking and they didn’t seem to care.)

After this strange event, we continued on by foot eventually reaching the sulfur pits near the volcano. Although not an ideal place for it considering the smell, we had lunch here and then climbed up Mount Suribachi to see where the famous flag-planting took place. There’s a small white marble memorial there commemorating the act. By this time it was about 4:30 p.m. and we were asked to return to our boat and depart the island...

Tahiki’s appearance appeared to be intentional, as he delivered a warning to Ash, telling him that the team needed to be careful because it had enemies who would “sneak in among you like flies.” Rune took the lead on investigating the “Tahiki sighting” and fully debriefed of both Ash and Cipher. The interviews convinced all the team members that this was a true apparitional experience, especially in light of the bothersome message that he seemed to deliver. What’s more, Tahiki appeared to be delivering an ominous message.

“Tahiki apparently said that OCE has both friends and enemies who are watching what we’re doing,” Rune reported. “That was a damn ominous thing to say, so it struck me that Tahiki was a fairly ominious personality when we met him on Tahiti over a year ago. He was all tales of psychopathic grandmothers and cannibalism! Then he just stops coming around and that’s the last we ever saw of him… until the 19th. So I asked our webmasters if they would do a little research for us on his claim that he was some kind of unusual light-skinned, light-eyed, light-haired Polynesian. Those [were] things he said to us in Tahiti but we never followed up on them. The web gurus have promised to post whatever information they find...”

In fact, the OCE webmasters found a large numbers myths and archaeological work about light-skinned Polynesians that were previously unknown to the team members. You can read more about this by seeing the enewsletter The Puzzle of the Fair-Skinned Polynesians. Suddenly, even bigger questions were being raised... Who was Tahiki? What was his relationship to the mythical character who shared his name? Was he out to help or harm the team?

These questions – and Tahiki himself – would continue to haunt the team in the months ahead.