Rainbow Invasion a Peaceful Event : Gathering Marks One Man’s Crusade Against N-Arms

It had been billed as The Rainbow Invasion--a gathering in the spirit of Woodstock in the shadow of the Mission Beach roller coaster, to muster support for a transcontinental peace march and launch peace balloons into outer space.

But it looked more like a novelty act--a man in a Day-Glo helmet operating a helium tank on a Sunday by the sea. Passers-by scratched peace pledges in a cosmic guest book. Steppenwolf music drifted from a suitcase radio. A black peace flag flapped in the wind.

“It’s just a peaceful man fighting for survival the only way a peaceful man can,” Martin Sickler, author of “The Adventures of a Born Again Hippie” and invasion organizer, explained amiably. “I’m trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re in danger! This beautiful day could go pffft.’ ”

The small group gathered Sunday in front of the lifeguard station around a rusting swing. They planted colored banners in the sand, signed the “Starlog,” which Sickler hopes to fill with 50,000 names, and watched balloons carrying “peace messages” rise into the sky.

There was a philosophy student from Vista looking for soul-mates and a bookkeeper from East San Diego with her 2-year-old daughter. Sickler’s brother, Richard, turned out.

Rob Turner, a Navy man from Virginia, stopped in for a little entertainment and sent up a balloon with the message, “I need good sex, love you forever.” He watched his second missive waft beyond the roller coaster: Seven balloons towing a can of beer.

The event was conceived by Sickler, a 25-year-old former beauty-supply store employee from San Diego, who quit the business two years ago because he didn’t believe in the products. He turned to writing novels, selling plasma occasionally for cash.

For a while, he published a “pro-space” newsletter encouraging support for space exploration. Now he has two semiautobiographical novels in search of publishers--”Born Again Hippie” and “The Day-Glo Dream, a Psychedelic Odyssey.”

This fall, Sickler decided it was time for action.

“I’m tired of living under nuclear siege,” explained Sickler, a graduate of Grossmont College, where he studied political science. “What else can I do?” He put on his Day-Glo helmet, bought from an ex-hippie at the El Cajon Swap Meet. Then he got together about $100 from his savings and loans from friends. He left leaflets along the beach and at college campuses, wrote newspapers and put a personal ad in The Reader.

The idea was to rally support for a transcontinental march being organized in Los Angeles by Pro-Peace and scheduled to begin in March. It was also to collect signatures and slogans in Sickler’s Starlog, a cream-colored scrapbook decorated with his favorite symbols.

“I’m going to launch it into space aboard the shuttle. I’m sure it’s just a question of cutting some red tape,” he said. “ . . . I’d like to send a few pages to Moscow. . . . I’d love to get Reagan to sign the book.”

The Invasion is to continue all week with “the assault of airborne peace messages” extending to six college campuses throughout the county. Oddly enough, Sickler said he has found that organizing the invasion made him patriotic.

“I’ve been thinking about the Bill of Rights a lot lately: I’ve got a belief, I want to express it, this system protects that,” he said. “It feels good! America, right on! I’ve got power. It makes me feel stronger.”

That few people seemed to notice Sunday hardly seemed to matter.

“In a way, it’s exciting, a classic story: Will we make it?” Sickler said. “ . . . If we fail, then boom, there’s one less species of nasty creatures in the universe. If we succeed, then we’ve graduated to a higher level of existence.”