The Heavenly Voyage of the Seven Sisters

By Dana Parsons

Sept. 30, 2006 12 AM PT

This is a story about an unusual-looking 40-foot boat with two outriggers and a legend attached.

As legends go, this one is way out there. Or, if you like, way up there.

The boat’s owner, Tom Kardos of Aliso Viejo, isn’t all that keen about talking about it, although he believes it’s true. “My wife says if I talk about it, make a one-sentence comment and then don’t come back to it,” Kardos says.

So, in deference to Kardos, whose company I enjoyed immensely aboard the Seven Sisters earlier this week, I’ll get to that part of the story a bit later.

Besides, some background always helps.

Kardos is 49 and the father of three children. He’s an engineer with an aptitude for electronics that has put him in touch, he says, with cutting-edge scientific and medical products. He and his wife of 21 years drive hybrid cars and consider themselves “save-the-Earth kind of people,” Kardos says.

And Kardos loves the sea. He spent his boyhood in landlocked Hungary and had never seen an ocean until his family moved to Southern California when he was 12. He has sailed from California to Hawaii and made another trip to the Galapagos Islands.

A few years ago, he was in Hawaii and saw a boat unlike anything he’d ever seen. When he laid eyes on the Seven Sisters, it was love at first sight.

The boat had a standard-looking hull but came with two outrigger hulls attached in a way that gave it a futuristic look. The locals around the yacht club referred to it, Kardos says, “as the ‘Back to the Future’ boat or the James Bond boat or the Enterprise from ‘Star Trek.’ ”

Kardos wanted it but didn’t like the price. However, by 2005, after it had been sold by its designer to a fisherman, Kardos made the deal. To confirm his belief in the craft, he took it out in 35-knot winds off the back side of Kauai and was amazed at how the two outer “wave-piercing” hulls helped the boat knife through the waves at a sustained 10 to 12 knots into the headwinds.

But it’s not just the boat’s look that impressed Kardos. He says it was designed to be environmentally friendly and efficient -- with multiple energy sources and water-catching methods. The boat, he says, weighs 7,000 pounds -- a weight not unusual for a sailboat half its length.

Earlier this week, Kardos piloted the boat into Newport Harbor and, with some cleanup, began his efforts to convince Hollywood to cast the boat. “I think it would be great in a movie like ‘Waterworld II,’ Kardos says, referring to the original 1995 futuristic movie starring Kevin Costner.

I wonder if he knows how Hollywood works. He doesn’t. “I know it’s a long shot,” he says. “You have circulation in Hollywood. I hope they’ll read the story, see the picture and then contact me. I’ll be happy to talk to them and put something together.”

Note to Hollywood: He’s reachable at tomkardos

@yahoo.com.

And now, let’s discuss the legend.

Which means we come to the part of the story where Kardos’ wife, Masako, will turn her head, because her husband doesn’t confine himself to one sentence.

Kardos had assumed the Seven Sisters name was mundane in origin, but learned that it stemmed from the star cluster known as the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus. It is in that vicinity of the universe, Kardos says, that some claim is the home to a friendly alien race that has visited Earth.

The Hawaii story was that the boat’s designer told people he was visited -- Kardos thinks telepathically -- by extraterrestrials who gave him the boat’s basic design specifications.

He knows the territory he’s getting into but is unapologetic. I refuse to mock him, because a good friend of mine years ago -- whom I knew to be rock-solid -- swore he had once seen a spaceship land in a barren Midwestern field.

The Seven Sisters story, Kardos says, was told to him both by the fisherman who sold him the boat and a broker at the yacht club. Although Kardos had phone conversations with the designer a few years ago, Kardos wasn’t aware of the legend at the time and the designer didn’t bring it up. They never talked again.

Kardos could have simply disavowed the story. Instead, he says, “it makes perfect sense to me, because where would a guy get these very specific ideas about such a new design?”

The combination of performance and environmental efficiency, he says, seems to have a point. “They were all meant to allow, perhaps in a post-apocalyptic Earth,” he says, “a family to go out at sea and, if there were a lot of boats like this in the future, like one per family, to live at sea for a prolonged time if land was contaminated.”

Kardos is as even-keeled as I remember my friend being all those years ago. He reminds me that many people have reported extraterrestrial contacts of some sort. And he’s not proselytizing; he’s just telling me what he believes.

Later, I asked Holly Simpson, managing editor of Irvine-based Sea Magazine, what she thought of the Seven Sisters’ design. She’s only seen the boat in photos and says she’d need a fuller inspection for any deep analysis. “It’s definitely a unique-looking vessel and will turn plenty of heads in the harbor wherever it goes,” she says.

She doesn’t consider the two outrigger hulls that unusual but is intrigued by the various on-board specs that Kardos describes. “It could be that the combination of all those features on one boat is a one-of-a-kind,” she says, “but those items individually aren’t particularly revolutionary.”

Before I leave Kardos, he takes me for a spin around the harbor. It’s one of those incredibly placid late afternoons in Orange County, and the living was good.

It isn’t critical to his Hollywood hopes whether anyone shares his views on intergalactic contact. He just wants to rent out the boat when he and his family aren’t using it.

And, yes, he didn’t have to mention the legend. “It’s actually part of the history of the boat,” he says, “so I wanted to say a few words about it. It’s not hype. I’m just a private person. I don’t have any angle.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

[email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.