In early August 2006, Rich Valles is driving into New York City with his family to catch a flight back to the west coast, after visiting his birthplace in New Jersey. At a crossroads offering several routes uptown, the investment representative for a private offshore minerals firm has to make a decision.

Only one sign points “Downtown”. Without knowing why, Rich turns that way. Or the rental car turns itself. He used to drive a truck in the City, so he knows his way around. But driving up Broadway, he doesn't realize where he is until the street takes a sudden jog. Then he sees a crane against a gap in the skyline and knows exactly where he is.

My God, I'm at the Twin Towers site, he thinks. The road straightens and Rich Valles finds himself staring at a ruined stairwell from one of the towers. The burnt-out skeleton of another building is still standing.

“Tower Five,” I tell him after he parks with the cop cars right on the site, gets out of the car with Cathy and India, and calls me on his cell phone.

Rich says that the fences and the barricades surrounding the site remind him strongly of the Pearl Harbor memorial. Years ago in Oahu, on a day just like this, he had remarked to his business partner that he could feel the souls of drowned sailors around them. “They're still here,” Rich had said to his startled companion. “A lot of them haven't left.”

Now he says the same thing to me.

“They're here,” my friend exclaims over the phone.

“Who?” I ask.

“The people who died here. There's a lot of them. It's the same thing here. I have the exact same feeling I had at Pearl Harbor: lies and deception. It's the same message: 'Tell the truth. We were betrayed.' That's all I'm getting. I get the same feeling I got at the Arizona memorial… the same message: 'We were fodder. We were just used.' They were sacrificed. I get the same thing, man!”

On this Saturday afternoon just shy of five years since the towers were toppled, Rich estimates upwards of 2,000 people are at Ground Zero. The crowd is very quiet, he reports. Even the children appear somber. Looking at the people around him, he counts 13 women and three men. Another group includes 10 women and only one man. “Women outnumber the men by 10 to one,” Rich says over the phone.

“Why do you think that is?” I ask him.

After a pause, he says, “The women are being pulled because they're sensitive to the souls. When women give birth to children, they're sensitive to this.” But the women drawn in such numbers don't know why they're here, he adds. “They all have the look of lost children.”

The phone is silent for another moment. When Rich next checks in, he is standing nearly alone on an observation platform overlooking Ground Zero. “They led me here,” he tells me, referring not to helpful onlookers but to the lost souls of the WTC. “I'm 28-feet above the hole,” he says in a voice hushed with are. “There's no fence. No obstructed view.”

In the faces of the few people standing in silence nearby, he observes the same troubled look: Something is wrong with the story they've been told.

There is no laughter among the children, including his own usually happy daughter. His four-year-old is standing apart, quiet and wide-eyed, as if listening to unheard voices. As he watches, India shrinks back from the chain-link observation fence.

“They are very quiet. Very slow to walk. Very silent,” Rich relates. “The children have a different look on their face.”

“What kind of look?” I ask.

“Of feeling the connection,” Rich replies, with the souls whose bodies died here on September 11, 2001. “They're still young enough to connect.”

All the adults around them are connecting, too. “Only most of them don't know it.”

What's the vibe, I want to know? What kind of vibrations is he picking up now?

“It's a heavy feeling, man. I'm getting besieged with energy.”

“What kind of energy?”

“Energy from the people who haven't left. More than half are still here. You've got to remember that these people were pulverized when the buildings came down. There's no opportunity to realize that you've crossed over. Bang! All of a sudden you're…”

My friend falls silent for a moment.

Then he says, “Wow.”

Then he says, “Yeah.”

“'Just keep telling the truth,'” he says into the phone. “That's what the souls from September 11 are saying. 'Nothing can outlast the truth.'”

Apparently, the book I'm writing about this day of deception is going to help “bring down this fraudulent event,” Rich relays.

“Tell them we are on it, and we are honored,” I say. “Everyone who reads my book is going to want to come down here.”

Rich gasps.

“The biggest hit!” he shouts over the phone. “Every hair on my body stood up when you said everyone's going down here after they've read your book. Every time you say something, the energy comes in waves. They are comparing it to the sacrifice at Pearl Harbor. With the same long-term results. It's still going on.”

As he speaks into his cell phone, the sun is setting in the gap where the Twin Towers once stood.

“'You are the outlet for our legacy,'” he says to me. “This isn't me speaking. These are the souls speaking: 'The people who are lying to our nation will be exposed.'”

Rich reads from a plaque commemorating Moira Smith. After helping a broker from Aon named Edward Nicole to safety, the NYPD officer had re-entered the WTC to render further assistance. So did NYPD officer Christopher Amorosi. The list of dead heroes covers six big panels-each with 11 rows of 42 names each.

“'We want our nation back. They will not steal it--that's from the police officers and firemen,” Rich says.

“I wasn't coming for this,” he insists. “I was pulled. The souls pulled me here. I had no intention to come here. This is not an intention. It's not even a thought.”

For both of us, the most fitting memorial to those who perished here would be to leave the site exactly as it is.