Strangeness About The Oklahoma City Bombing
By James Donahue
We lived thousands of miles away in Michigan but the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in
Oaklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995 struck my family close up and strangely personal.
The bombing happened a few days after Easter. My wife, Doris, and I remember it as a dark and dismal
Easter weekend. We were both struck with a sense of foreboding that something evil was about to befall us. It
was one of those things we could not explain. We just had a subconscious knowledge. But there was more.
I was getting my first taste of retirement that spring, having been persuaded to take an early pension
from my job with a Gannett newspaper. I was trying my hand at self-publishing and promoting my own string of books, which
kept me busy and on the road. But for some reason I was home that morning. I "happened" to turn on CNN just as the first reports
began coming in. We consequently watched the full horror of the bombing unfold before our eyes.
It was as shocking as the Kennedy Assassination some 30 years earlier. Perhaps even as shattering
to us as the 9-11 attacks because by then, it seems that we were getting somewhat immune to visual television reality shock.
These events, the Waco, Texas burning of the Branch Davidians, the Harvey Oswald shooting, the Bobby Kennedy assassination,
and Martin Luther King. We saw it all.
The Oklahoma City bombing had a peculiar personal element attached to it.
Doris and I were getting interested in esoteric things that year. We were reading Wilson, Leary,
Jung, Campbell and Crowley. We were experimenting with palm reading, telepathy, auras, altered states and using the Ouiji
board to communicate with spirits.
Only weeks before the bombing Doris discovered that she had a "gift" at Ouiji. At what was
about her first try she made contact with a spirit that identified itself as Elohim. Elohim, we later learned, is a Hebrew
name for God. We thought, perhaps, he was a demon, or archangel. All I know is that Elohim only made himself known to Doris
that one time. He never came to her again. It was as if he was saying "hello" before fading off into the shadows and letting
other spiritual forces . . . the archangel Michael among them.
I tell this story about Elohim for one reason. Timothy McVeigh, the man charged with the bombing,
was said to have hatched his plans with the White Aryan Resistance, a right-wing extremist group headquartered in a place
called Elohim City, in Oklahoma.
A coincidence you say? Ah but there is more to this odd story.
As the story began to unravel, the coincidences did too. I spoke with my father the following day.
He said that McVeigh allegedly rented his Ryder truck in Kansas, near the very place where my father grew up.
Within a week after the event, strange plain government cars were prowling my neighborhood/
We started getting a creepy feeling that something was very wrong. Was it just our imagination or were we feeling extremely
paranoid? It was like the whole world was suspect.
Then it was announced that government agents raided a home just down the road from ours where brothers
Terry and James Nichols farmed.
We learned that McVeigh knew the Nichols brothers. Not only that, he stayed with them on occasion.
And Terry was charged. James was held in a federal lock-up in Detroit for a while before he was released, under tight surveilance,
to take care of his farm. He was never implicated.
That summer we sold our Michigan home and went on our pilgrimage to Arizona. How odd it felt
when I drove through Oklahoma City in my own rented Ryder truck. We never saw the bombed out rubble though. Traffic was detoured
around the downtown area where it all happened.
It was just as well. The implant of that terrible deed will remain forever fixed in my memory. I
didn't need more visual images to make it worse.
To this day, however, I have had a feeling that the public was never told the full truth about that
bombing. I believe McVeigh went to his death with secrets. And I doubt if even Terry Nichols knows what they are.
