Communion

FOUR

A child said What is the grass?

fetching it to me, with full hands;

How could I answer the child?

I do not know what it is

any more than he

-WALT WHITMAN. "Song of Myself,"

from Leaves of Grass

THE SKY BENEATH MY FEET

A Journey Through My Past

The Journey Back

SUMMER, 1957

The more I thought about it, the less able I was to accept the idea that this had been happening to me most of my life. When Budd Hopkins asked me if I remembered anything in the past, I did mention a few odd incidents. The memory of being taken from the train was not among them.

If I accepted that this happened and that it was buried even more completely than the events of October 4, then what else must I accept? Inevitably, that my conscious life was nothing more than a disguise for another reality. It is easy to speculate about such a thing on an idle evening, but when one considered the terrific intensity of the experience I had remembered, thinking that this might have happened again and again had the potential to shatter me.

Still, I could not simply reject the notion. Why should I? Because it seemed improbable?

All of this seemed improbable. As an experiment I decided to return to my past and see just what I could come-up with. As best I was able I reviewed the years for hints of this material.

I wondered, though, how I could ever tell if the seeking and the finding were the same act.

Maybe nothing happened on that train. Probably nothing did, and there is no way to tell. I would need some sort of corroboration before I could even begin to entertain it as a serious possibility.

It seemed like a trick of the mind. Then I remembered that hypnosis session. and I thought to myself that the real trick of the mind might be happening now. My memories were so spontaneous. and seemed so vividly real. Not the faintest suggestion was made that I regress to age twelve. And vet . . . I now remembered that row of' soldiers sleeping on those tables just as well as I remembered the drawing room of the train we were on.

To protect my sanity. I had to believe that this was a comprehensible thing. If it was contact, then it must be proceeding somewhat along lines I could understand. They've been here for a while. Fine. Lately, because I moved to an isolated area, they found me. That I could at least entertain. But I could not accept the notion that they were so totally involved in my life.

I found a photograph of myself during the spring of my twelfth year, which showed me to the uniform of St. Anthony's School in San Antonio. Here was a child so clean he seemed to have been polished along with the brass crossed rifles on the collars of his uniform. The picture is inscribed: "For my dear father with love. Whitty."

The neatness was a total deception. It couldn't have lasted more than the precise amount of time it took to snap the picture. At twelve I was usually involved in mischief of' one sort or another. I was rarely clean. I was rarely even still.

I looked into the child's eves. He did not look haunted to me, that boy just flirting with puberty. In May of that year my younger brother had been born. and the house was consequently in upheaval. only some of it pleasant. I spent much time in my room reading.

That summer I read Life on the Mississippi and it was also the summer of my discover, of'

Kafka. One afternoon I found my mother reading The Metamorphosis. After that I read The Trial. I'd go down to the San Antonio Public Library on the bus and, sit in the big reading room under the fan and read Kafka until the librarian started getting uneasy, then I'd shift to Robert Benchley for the balance of the afternoon.

My smiling face hid a person full of conflicts, trying to cope with the sudden presence of an infant to an established home and discovering under the sheets at night that the sins the older boys whispered about were real, and were they ever sins!

I was deeply conflicted about my Catholicism, wondering whether the tenets of my faith could be fitted to the picture I was forming of the world. I asked why the pope hadn't saved the Jews from Hitler. I asked why the Church had burned people at the stake, and what on earth did abstaining from meat on Friday have to do with getting to heaven? And if the worst punishment in hell was to get a glimpse of heaven and not get to go, then what about the nuns in Limbo who were there caring for the unbaptized babies the angels didn't want to bother with? They'd had more than a glimpse of heaven. They'd been there for a while. So wasn't sending them to Limbo actually sending them to the depths of a personal hell?

The pope closed Limbo before we worked that one out in catechism class, unfortunately.

Still, my faith was a burning fire in me. I loved Christ and Mary especially, and used to pray with great fervor whenever I was trapped into going to church. Then the priest would invariably say, "Go, the mass is ended," when there were still ten minutes left. But why?

At home I got hold of a book by George Gamow about relativity. Suddenly I understood how the nuns could take Limbo. I understood why the mass did and didn't end at the same time. It was all relative. Einstein, in describing the physical universe, had also described the internal logic of the Church, enabling me to preserve my faith.

But when I brought up Einstein with my mother, she said, "We are Catholic. Catholics are absolutist." She and I would spend hours together sitting on the front-porch steps talking. We discussed everything from general relativity to the price of tennis shoes. I used to try to talk her out of her religiosity, but she was a Catholic intellectual in the heady days of the fifties, when the mass was still full of mystery and there were many fascinating and subtle potentials for sin.

My catechism class was asked to write essays proving the existence of God. Mine, an equation with an intentionally tautological argument, was declared to be a demonic inspiration. When confronted with this by the teacher, my mother said, "To think that children might be inspired by the devil is itself demonic inspiration." Those times were not more innocent than these, but they were less complex.

I do not recall thinking or talking at all about extraterrestrials. However, when I recently asked a friend of those days what was the strangest experience he could remember, I was surprised to find that his answer involved me. At the time I asked him the question, he had not in any way been exposed to this material.

Here is the story he recounted. When we were thirteen I apparently announced to him that "spacemen" had taught me how to build an antigravity machine, which I was constructing in my bedroom. This was in the summer of 1958. I do not remember the genesis of this machine, but I certainly remember building it. There was no magic to the thing; it was only an assembly of electromagnets taken from old motors. The supposed antigravity effect was based on a principle of counterrotation.

When I plugged my assemblage in, there was a great buzzing, the electromagnet to the core of the thing whirled madly. and the lights in the house began to pulsate. The whole thing whined and fluttered. There were showers of sparks. Parental cries of alarm rose from downstairs. As the machine destroyed itself the pulsation of the house lights became a dimming, until the bulbs glowed orange-red. Then they burst to blazing life, a good number of them blowing out in the process.

Finally I managed to pull the plug. Rather than tell my parents what had happened. I rushed downstairs and pretended ignorance. I did not need to pretend fright. The friend reports that I called him m great anxiety and said that I was afraid that the spacemen were mad because I had disturbed their power field.

I have subsequently discovered that there is a whole mythology of flying saucer technology, and a lot of it revolves around the concept of counterrotating magnets. One among the other people I have met who have remembered being taken tells an interesting story. He knows a man, another victim, who was given detailed instructions about how to build a motor of this sort. The man was given the instructions during an abduction experience during the fifties, and claims that he was told that he wouldn't remember a thing until 1985, when he suddenly found his mind full of richly detailed plans.

The exact sizes of the electromagnets and their distances from one another were explained, and there was much about the materials to used. Not having seen these plans, I cannot evaluate them other than to comment that the idea that counterrotating magnets of any kind would produce any unusual energies at all flies in the face of modern magnetic theory.

But he claims that when he built this device, all the metal objects in his barn were instantly pulled toward it and he was knocked out by a flying automobile engine The next day the barn burned to the ground in an unexplained fire.

It would be easier to believe in the truth of all these effects if superconducting coils were used instead of electromagnets. It is awfully hard to see where a field that powerful would be coming from, given our present understanding of magnetism.

I don't really think that details like the construction of a motor can be part of some shared hallucinatory system. Recall that I did not even remember my antigravity machine myself, but rather was told about it by a friend who remembered. My machine was built in 1958.

More than twenty years later this other man seems to have built a more exact version of the same thing, allegedly based on plans obtained in the same period.

The day after I built my device. I do remember being seized with a fierce urge to get away from the house. I went to my grandmother's country home with her, even though the occasion was one of her afternoon card parties.

About four the telephone at the country house rang. I can remember my grandmother saying, "House burned down? Mary Strieber's house burned down?" The blood just drained from me. Fortunately the entire house had not burned, only the roof over the wing containing my bedroom. The fire was never satisfactorily explained, although I have a feeling that it was related more to the effect a little boy's antigravity machine had on the wiring than to the hostility of annoyed visitors.

Fortunately for me, it never dawned .on my parents that I might have caused a disaster on this scale.

In July 1957 my father took my sister, who was then thirteen, and myself from San Antonio to Madison, Wisconsin, to see his sister and her family. We flew to Chicago and stayed at the Hilton, where I accidentally dropped a large milk shake out of a tenth-floor window. We spent the night at another hotel, and then traveled on to Madison to see the relatives. A week later we returned to San Antonio on the train.

All my life I have had a memory of that train, seen from above, rushing through the night.

Most of the windows are dark, which suggests that it is very late. There are thick pine woods, meaning that it must have been in Arkansas or farther north, for the Texas Eagle did not go through the pine forests of East Texas, but rather across the plains between Texarkana and Dallas and then south over rolling, featureless country.

For some reason I had never thought twice about the strange image of the speeding train.

Why would I have seen it from such a position? Can it be that I really was outside of it at some point?

I remembered absolutely nothing about being taken off the train. There was a sort of confused recollection of my father crouched at the back of an upper berth in our drawing room, his eyes bulging, his lips twisted back from his teeth. But I've always assumed that was a nightmare brought on by the fact that I was so sick on the trip. My illness was violent. I vomited until I thought I would die, and for no apparent reason. Nothing came up but bile, but the spasms simply would not stop.

Now I have added to this recollection a vivid memory of the being pushing a bladder down my throat. This is not the only recollection I have of being made to eat things by the visitors. In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe. This is associated with a perfectly terrible memory of eating what I have always thought was a rotten pomegranate, which was so bitter that it almost split my head apart. A nurse put drops on my tongue to help me keep it down. But what nurse? Where? I was never in a hospital.

Something might have been stuffed in my mouth on the night of December 26. I certainly remember them trying to -get it opened. And afterward I brushed my teeth.

This is about the most disturbing thing that I have yet come across in this whole, vast experience. It is not the eating that disturbs me, because I seem to have lived, but rather the structural coherence of the thing. First I am fed and it comes back up. Then I am fed again and this time drops are used to prevent the material from returning. Years later, the feeding is such a minor part of the experience that the memory of it is covered by other things.

In short, my hallucinatory friends seem to have learned something about how to get me to digest whatever it is they are trying to feed me.

I have not thought of those hours of sickness on that train for a long, long time. I remember, though, how my father labored to help me, and after he grew tired the sleeping-car porter came in and held me over the toilet. A doctor appeared in his bathrobe and tried to get me to drink some water. The illness had begun suddenly in the middle of the night and continued until morning. I was sleeping like the dead when the train finally pulled into the old MoPac station in San Antonio. My father carried me to a cab, and we went home.

By the time I got there I was feeling much better and was eager to see my friends. We had, after all. been away for nearly two weeks in the middle of the summer, and during the last summers of childhood I sensed the increasing rarity of the days. I was fill of excitement as we drove down Elizabeth Road. No sooner had I gone through the motions of helping with the luggage than I was off, my sickness forgotten.

I remember it was then that I told a story, which has remained in the back of my mind for years, of hearing a wolf howling and seeing one on the roadside. Even as I told that story I remember being a little confused. Since then it has lingered, the image of the wolf in the clearing and the sound of its voice echoing through the night. From that image there has flowed an intense lifelong interest in wolves, which has grown into love for this wonderful species.

The image was central to The Wolfen and Wolf of Shadows, and appears again in The Wild, a novel I have written but have not yet published.

I knew even as I spoke that we hadn't really seen a wolf, or heard one howl. Why then was I saying it? Where had it come from? Was it one of the screen memories which were so common to experiences with the visitors? My memory of the December 26 incident was at first blocked by the recollection of the owl. I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.

I note in passing that if my wise and determined friend from afar is a woman, it could be said that her personal symbol is an owl. Athene's symbol was the owl. The Latin word for owl is strix, which also menus witch. It was thought in earliest times to embody the wisdom of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian "Eve-Goddess" with the huge, staring eyes. The owl was also the totem of the Celtic Blodeuwedd, the Triple Goddess of the Moon, and is associated with the notion of the Trinity, which will emerge later in this book as the most common symbolic structure of the visitors, mentioned by many people who have been taken — people who have no idea at all of its ancient importance, which has now declined to the dusty precincts of antiquarians and mythologists.

Perhaps visitors would naturally seek to the center of the soul and enter its reality, being too experienced to be interested in any but the deepest essence of our beings. Then they might well seem to be part of our mythology, part of the basis of being human.

My life is full of peculiar stories like the one about the wolf and the ones about owls.

Oddly enough, my sister also has a strange story about an owl. Sometime in the early sixties she was driving between Kerrville and Comfort, Texas, well after midnight. She was terrified to see a huge light sail down and cross the road ahead of her. A few minutes later an owl flew in front of the car. I have to wonder if that is not a screen memory, but my sister has no sense that it is.

Many of my screen memories concern animals, but not all. I remember being terrified as a little by an appearance of Mr. Peanut, and vet I .know that I never saw Mr. Peanut except on a Planter's can. I said that I was menaced by him at a Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, but I now understand perfectly well that it never happened. For years I have told of being present at the University, of Texas when Charles Whitman went on his shooting spree from the tower in 1966. But I wasn't there.

Then where was I? And what is behind all the other screen memories?

Perhaps on some level I do know. Maybe that's why I spent so much time peeking into closets and under beds. If I really face the truth about this behavior, I must admit that it has been going on for a long time, although in 1985 it became much more intense. Now that I have uncovered these memories, though, it has ended completely.

As a matter of fact, I cannot remember a time in my life when I have felt as well and as happy as I do now. Whatever has happened, one thing is certain: A great pressure has been relieved, and that pressure had been with me always. Was it the pressure involved in keeping my memories of them hidden? I just don't know.

This brief review at least suggests that I ought to continue my exploration of the past.

Before going on, though, it might be wise to examine those last few minutes of the hypnosis session in some detail. It began when. without warning, I found myself in 1957.

Spontaneous regression can happen in hypnosis. the reason it usually takes place is that the subject encounters a memory of something that has also been seen long ago. and drops back to the previous experience.

For, me the trigger seems to have been the "You are our chosen one" speech. After that, I mentioned "others." At that instant there was a flashing image of the lady in the flowered dress being given some sort of elaborate speech, and shouting "Praise the Lord" when she heard it. Then Dr. Klein asked what others, and I found myself in vet another place but with the same being still before me, or somebody who looked very much like her.

I was excited, sitting tip in bed, looking around at the other beds, all of which contained American soldiers lying down asleep. These beds were really more like tables with solid bases and a slight inward cant from bottom to top. I remembered them as being gray in color.

The soldiers were young men in fatigues, and they were sprawled as if totally comatose. It was then that Dr. Klein asked me my age, and I heard myself say, "Twelve."

I changed completely, remarkably. I was my childhood self again. It was quite wondrous.

I felt smaller, I felt verve different. My mind felt different. Gone was the weight of knowledge. For those few moments I was innocent again.

I knew where I was and I was very excited to be there. At first I was sitting up, happy to be awake because even the soldiers were asleep. I was quit. pleased with myself. There was no apparent transition between the time I was sitting up awake and the time I was in a little chair, sitting before a featureless gray surface.

Something terrifically difficult happened while I was sitting in that chair. After hypnosis I recalled seeing a landscape with a great hooked object floating in the air, which on closer inspection proved to be a triangle. Then there followed a glut of .symbolic material, so incense that even as I write I can feel how it hurt my whole brain and body to take it all in. I don't remember what this was — triangles, rushing pyramids, animals leaping through the air.

Are such experiences the source of the performance anxiety that has been detected in psychological tests I have taken, or does that have to do with the many recollections I have always had of sitting in the middle of a little round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul? Trying to cope with these memories as a child, I wove anguished fantasies around the figures, who became my childhood friends in some round, gray basement, drawing out the secret structures of my mind like surgeons with forceps extracting sparking neurons from my brain. I remember that they would say words, and each word they said would go through me like a hurricane, evoking every memory, drought, and feeling associated with it. This would go on for hours and hours until I begged them to stop, and I would be offered the relief o£ a brief rest at their feet, my soul confessing itself into the stern softness of their love.

Is this just a fantasy, or is it what happens when somebody tries to extract the deepest sense of a language from the mind of a child? If so, who did it? Is this a memory of the visitors at work, as it were?

In my childhood I was known as an extremely persistent questioner, so much that in school I was allowed to ask no more than three per period so that I would not take up all the time. True to form, I started questioning this being. Maybe I knew her even then — certainly I had gotten over any initial shock quickly.

I find the exchange fascinating. I asked who the people around me were, and was told what was obvious even to me. They were all soldiers. Then I wanted to know why they had been brought here. The answer is telling: "Because they were alone." It might suggest a methodology, one that is borne out by some studies of unexplained sightings: The craft seem to favor isolated areas. They do not appear as often over cities, and there are not many stories of their taking people from heavily populated places. Perhaps a limitation of technology is visible here: There are simply too many risks in populated areas.

I asked what was being done to the soldiers. The answer, typically uninformative, was,

"We look then over and send them home." I can recall my perplexity at that moment very well: I relived it during hypnosis. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go to just to examine people, and I asked, rapid-fire: "What's the point of that?" The creature seemed read to reply, but she was cut off in midsentence as if somebody had flipped a switch. For a moment she sounded like a stuck record. "The point of that is — The point of that is —" Then she stopped, as if surprised that she had been caught off guard, and said, simply, "Well," her voice melodious with amusement.

Soon after, I was watching her moving around. I did not know what she was doing, perhaps something that involved touching the soldiers with a copper-colored thing. I asked her why she looked so awful, and she certainly did look awful. I cannot imagine why I wasn't terrified. It is incredibly upsetting to see something that is clearly not human walking and moving about with intelligence. There is something that is unmistakable about the precision of consciously directed movement that is deeply frightening when seen in such an alien form.

Nothing tike this was going through my mind at the age of twelve, but the vision of that eerie being moving about among the tables remains quite clear. When I asked her why she looked so awful, she replied almost absently, without stopping her work, "I can't help that."

I wonder what Ishtar really looked like, and if the whole Greek pantheon of beautiful gods and goddesses was not something akin to the beautiful "godlike" beings imagined by people who have made flying saucers their religion. These believers seem to be people who cannot face the stark reality of the visitor experience, and so cloak the fierce, limitless eyes, the bad smells, the dreadful food, and the general sense of helplessness in a very human mythology.

I wonder if Homer and Pindar did not do the same. And why was Homer blind? It is known that many different storytellers comprise "Homer." Perhaps hysterical blindness was a commonplace among the prehistoric Greek bards out of whose tales the classical pantheon emerged. I don't blame them. Hysterical blindness and congenial belief systems would both be excellent defenses against things similar to what I have seen.

But if they have really been here so long, why did they have so much trouble getting me to keep down my feeding? Perhaps the substance has not been changed over the years to suit me, perhaps the very act of eating it has changed me. Maybe it is a process of acclimatization.

It was while I was watching the lady with the eyes moving among the soldiers with her copper wand that I noticed my sister. She was below me and to my right, lying sprawled in her nightie. I still remember how much seeing her like that scared me. She and I were very close in those days. I loved her and admired her, and it was dreadful to see her looking as if she were dead. A voice told me that she was all right. This voice was definitely inside my head, I remember that quite distinctly.

Then I saw the sight that has brought me more fear than any other so far: My father was standing near my sister in blue pajamas, his arms dangling at his sides, on his face a look of surprise. Then his eyes moved until they rested on something I could not see very well, because it was invisible beside the doorway. Almost in slow motion his face simply broke up.

He threw his head back and something like an electric shock seemed to go through him, making hire spread his fingers and shake firs arms. His eyes bulged and his mouth flew open.

Then he was screaming, but I could hear it only faintly, a muffled shrieking, full of terror and despair.

The "awful-looking" creature now came to seem absolutely monstrous. And there was no question in my mind about its being real. It had never even crossed my mind that I might be dreaming. This was as real as any other event in my life, despite the fact that it was far more frightening even than the most frightening horror movie and would soon disappear into amnesia. As a matter of fact, it would be another year or so before I would see my first horror movie. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which was shown at my summer camp. I remained at that camp exactly one day. It was later that my interest in horror stories began.

Until I was about thirteen, my taste in comic books ran to Uncle Scrooge McDuck and Little Lulu. The scariest things I was exposed to were Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone on television.

Under hypnosis the fear went through me like ice water in my veins. It is fortunate for Don Klein and Budd Hopkins that I was under the suggestion not to scream, because they would have hear terrible screaming, I am afraid. As it was, the sensation seemed to explode through me. For a moment I thought I was fainting. I remembered that as a little boy I just shriveled up inside to see my father in such an extremity of terror. In those days he was very much my hero. I tried to talk to him, to reassure him that a was all right. He gasped, "It's not all right, Whiny, it's not all right!" and tried to make a grab for me and my sister. His arms came up and just hung in the air while he writhed and his face worked. When he started screaming again, he became muffled.

They watched this with their steady eyes, like huge black jewels.

The closest thing I have been able to find to an unadorned image of these beings is not from some modern science-fiction movie, it is rather the age-old, glaring face of Ishtar. Paint her eyes entirely black, remove her hair, and there is my image as u hangs before me now in my mind's eye, the ancient and terrible one, the bringer of wisdom, the ruthless questioner.

Do my memories come from my own life, or from other lives lived long ago, in the shadowy temples where the gray goddess reigned?

Perhaps the visitors are the gods. Maybe they created us. Robert Crick, the renowned discoverer of' the double helix, has postulated that the genetic structure of life is so intricate that it seems designed.

According to studies led by Dr. Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, there is genetic evidence that the entire human species arose from a single female in North Africa between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago. In other words, it is conceivable that we all started from the womb of a single woman.

If we could slip back in time and find her dashing across the ancient Mesopotamian savanna, would we also find Ishtar gliding above in an enormous triangular spacecraft like the one that was seen over Westchester County in 1983, as elusive to her struggling little creation as flying disks are to the air force?

Or would we find an even greater mystery, that the whole pantheon of our reality was somehow contained in the wobbling mind of that creature, who fell down to thank her raw new gods after a panther leaped at her throat, and by a miracle missed devouring us all.

The Journey Continued

THE SIXTIES AND THE SEVENTIES

This expedition seemed to have reached the edge of a cliff, one that dropped far into the shadows. I wondered, if I really looked, what might I find there?

What had my life really been, and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror? I wondered, in early 1986, if a couple of recent strange events might have some relevance to this inquiry into the past.

During the third week of March I had a very peculiar thing happen to me. Sometime in the night of March 21 at the cabin I awoke and found myself unable to move or even to open my eyes. I had the distinct impression that there was something in my left nostril, and that it was being slowly moved far up my nose. When I tried to struggle, I heard a pop like an apple crunching between my eyes. The next thing I remembered, it was morning.

I noticed during the day that my nose hurt. There was a little bleeding, but as my wife and son had reported similar injuries (without the memory of something being in their noses) the week before, I assumed that it was the result of a head cold and dry winter air. But I never came down with a cold.

After March 15, they'd both had episodes of nasal bleeding, and little knots in their nostrils. Specifically, Anne had a knot in the top of her right nostril, my son in his left I now developed one in my left nostril. Theirs had gone away without incident, but mine bothered me and I made an appointment with my doctor to get my injury examined. He looked at it on March 26 and diagnosed it as a scratch to the nasal mucosa that had led to the formation of the knot. He correctly predicted that it would subside on its own over a period of days.

I thought no more about this until July 26, 1986, when I received a letter from Donald Klein in which he mentioned that many of my symptoms were consistent with an abnormality in the temporal lobe, and that the method of testing this involved a nasal probe.

The temporal lobe is arguably the most important part of the brain, the seat of "humanity" itself. It is in the temporal lobe that sense is made of perceptions. Structures there are important to emotion, motivation, and memory. People with temporal-lobe epilepsy report deja vu, unexplained panic states, strong smells, and even a preoccupation with philosophical and cosmic concerns. They also sometimes report vivid hallucinatory journeys.

Initially I seized on this as a way to explain my whole experience. I read some work by Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University that postulated "temporal-lobe transients" to explain psychic and religious experiences. But the more I studied temporal-lobe disorder, the less it seemed an answer. It did not explain the overwhelming sense of the real connected with my experiences. It did not explain the physical consequences. It did not explain the witnesses. Nor did it explain the experiences of others. Temporal-lobe epilepsy was nothing more than another speculation, essentially no different and no more supportable than the visitor hypothesis or any of the other hypotheses that I had put forward. I had to fall back on the truth: I did not know what was happening, but it certainly appeared to be happening in the real world.

As it happened, the week after I received Dr. Klein's letter I met a woman who has had the visitor experience; she began her story by saying that the visitors inserted a probe into her nose, which made a sound "like an apple crunching," between her eyes. She had even drawn pictures of the probe and of the entity that had inserted it. The probe was a businesslike affair, a needle with a small, knifelike handle. The entity was familiar to me because I had seen such beings also.

I then asked Budd Hopkins for information, from his cases, of reports of intrusions into the head. Of his hundred cases, four including me reported intrusions in or behind the ear, three under the eve. and eleven, again including me, up the nose. By far the largest number of intrusions were into the nostril, right into the olfactory nerve with its connection to the deepest core of the brain — and behind that nerve, the temporal lobe.

For what it may be worth, my son and I, who had injuries to the left nostril, are also left-handed. Anne is right-handed.

If the temporal lobe is being entered, then it may not be possible to decide between the temporal-lobe-epilepsy and visitor hypotheses. It could easily be that the visitors are affecting the temporal lobe in such .t way as to induce abnormalities that would later be diagnosed as epileptic conditions. As the reading of temporal-lobe electroencephalograms is such :t subjective business, I decided that I would arrange two separate temporal lobe tests, one by a neurologist recommended by Dr. Klein. and another through a different psychiatrist. This second neurologist carried out the' same preliminary examination done by Dr. Klein's man and came to the same conclusion: There was no evidence of abnormality. He was then given a version of' my December 26 story, but we never discussed hypotheses at all. That way, he felt no need to defend his findings against one hypothesis or another. I went to :t lab, took chloral hydrate, and endured the insertion of electrodes deep into my nasal cavity a few days later the re stilts came back: absolutely normal temporal lobe function, confirmed by both neurologists.

So whatever the visitors did, they did not damage me in a way detectable to our science.

And I am not a temporal-lobe epileptic. The temporal lobe-disorder hypothesis was now triply weak: The physical consequences of what happened and the witnesses mitigated against it to begin with, and now the temporal-lobe EEG suggested that I was not an epileptic.

Moreover, the beef "transients" postulated by, Dr. Persinger could not account for the elaborate experiences I had undergone. Only a full-scale epilepsy could account for them.

So far no hypothesis would explain the motive of the visitors — or the self-confidence they showed by inserting their probe through my germ-filled nasal cavity and into my brain.

No doctor would ever do that, which also means that these are not buried childhood memories of operations. There is no operation that proceeds as the visitors do, jabbing their needles up the nose. What's more, the nasal intrusion is not an epileptic prelude. Mine did not occur until weeks after I had remembered and reported my first experience. Far from suggesting a disorder of some sort, the consistency of the stories and the reported side effects — nosebleeds and nasal damage — were a strong suggestion that something real was happening.

Had the temporal-lobe intrusion initiated my experience, I would be tempted to suggest that perhaps all my perceptions were somehow tied to it. But the intrusion did not initiate the whole experience. It may well have profoundly altered my perception of what happened to me — and all my past memories as well. Perhaps that is what it was meant to do.

I thought back over the previous few weeks. Most of the things that had happened since December were well documented, in the sense that I had immediately told others as soon as I was aware that they had happened.

Besides the visitation of March 15, which I will discuss in detail in a later chapter, there was one earlier incident that is worth recounting, because it was this incident snore than any other that opened the door to the past. And it did this via my sense of smell. Again, it happened before the apparent temporal-lobe intrusion, not after.

The night of Friday, February 7. we spent in out apartment to the city. I was absolutely frantic. I had an awful feeling. I felt their presence. It was palpable. Most upsetting, I could smell them. I could smell a distinct odor as if of smoldering cardboard, and it was familiar from the past. My wife could also smell this odor; it was one we had both smelled man, times. Until now, though. I had not understood its significance. There was also another odor, as if of cheese and cinnamon, that I remembered from December 26.

I remained lying in bed. sweaty and sleepless. But I was shocked to discover that hour hours had passed without my noticing. very suddenly. I was reading at midnight, turned a page. and saw by the clock that it was four A.M. and I was no longer wearing my pajamas.

When I got up the next morning I found two little triangles inscribed on my left forearm. I don't know what happened, and there is no way at all to explain the event in a conventional manner. The larger triangle was quite straight. delicately incised in just the outer few skin layers as if by the work of a skilled master surgeon. The other triangle. very tiny. was pointing at the larger one.

On the morning of February 8, I stood looking down at those triangles with the shower pounding on my back. I also remembered the odors I had smelled the night before. Odor is an excellent trigger of memory, and the odor of smoldering seemed to unlock a lot of doors.

I last smelled it in 1972 or 1973. My wife and I had gone down to San Antonio to see my family, and we were sleeping in my sister's old bedroom on the second floor of the house.

Across the hall was another bedroom, which had been mine when I was a boy. In the middle of the night I suddenly awoke with the impression that I'd just heard a loud noise. I decided to get a glass of water. As I left our bedroom I noticed a strange smell, like smoldering cardboard.

As I went toward the bathroom to get my water, a small, dark figure with a red light in its hand burst out of my old bedroom and dashed downstairs. I was momentarily astonished, but decided that it must have been a family member. The fact that this individual was much smaller than a human being did not bother me in the least, nor even give me pause. Why not?

Maybe for the same reason that none of us remembered the events of the night of October 4.

Maybe I was led to reason thus.

There are reports of visitors carrying small lights, and the fairy lore contains dozens of instances of "fairy stones" that glowed.

There was no sequel to the appearance of the small figure, except perhaps a family member's comment the next morning that he had had a terrible nightmare. Nothing further was said then, and he does not now remember the incident at all, much less the contents of the nightmare.

I am amazed to think how much of a fugitive I have been. Another individual I have met who has had visitor experiences, a young woman whose story of a disappearing pregnancy is medically documented as not being of hysterical origin, also describes a lifetime of running.

"All of my life I wanted to move to New York because of the lights and the people."

So did I. And it turns out that she lives a block from me. We have both been running like mad, and we wound up around the corner from one another. A coincidence? Probably, but the mind seeks for large and subtle designs, images in clouds, hunters marching the stars, always for the hidden sense of the world. The same urgency to understanding that drew early man to imagine the constellations in the random spatter of the night sky might draw me to make false connections. And yet, without a general theory of coincidence, how could I know what was finally true? I searched on, deep into my past.

At the age of nine I had been sleeping out with a friend on a lovely Texas summer night when something woke us up in the wee hours, perhaps an owl killing a rat, the stopping of the crickets, or moonset. In any case, we found ourselves awake and deliciously alone in the dark. We went exploring the quiet slips of the night, through our familiar places, the wide lawns and tangled bushes, all transformed by shadows into a new world. The vacant lot behind our house was then an acre of tall sunflowers, taller than either of us boys. We were wandering through these stalks when we heard someone coming toward us. My friend turned and ran. I stood there, then turned and ran as well. When I reached our sleeping bags I was astonished to find him already so completely asleep that I could not wake him up. How could he have gone from running in terror to being dead to the world like that? And why was he still outside at all? Why hadn't he gone running into the house? Again, our behavior was totally at variance with our experience.

He and I also saw a huge object cross the sky one summer night, an event that I have always remembered as particularly strange. I called him after a lapse of twenty five years. We talked for some time, then I asked about those two nights. I told him nothing specific about my other experiences, nor did I discuss visitors. Of the first memory he said, "We were probably just scared by a dog." He had this to say about the second: "Oh, yes, I remember that thing. It was huge. It looked just like a — well, it was strange-looking. And there was a black car." I remembered that, too. Immediately after the object passed overhead an old black car showing no lights went racing down Elizabeth Road in the same direction that the object had gone.

Were these descriptions of events as they had happened, or screen memories? Perhaps, if great care is taken, a method can be devised of finding an answer to such questions, a method more reliable than hypnosis.

I also recalled flying with some people over the roofs of the neighborhood in a thing like a rubber raft, and waking up on more than one morning with bits of grass and twigs in my bed, as if I had been abroad to the night.

There wasn't anything else even that specific, except for a memory of a terrifying round object hanging in some forgotten babyhood sky, and seeing a crowd of big, gray monkeys coming up across the hillside. Apparently this took place at my grandmother's country home when I was about two, which would have been in the summer of 1947.

From the night at age nine to an event in Austin in September 1967, there were few specific recollections except those that emerged under hypnosis, and none was clear. By 1967

I was attending the University of Texas. In the last week of August I had just rented a new studio apartment and moved back to Austin from San Antonio for the semester when I had an experience I now understand to have been what is known as a "missing time" experience, lasting at least twenty-four hours.

I had moved into the apartment the day before and was sitting on the couch about noon eating a TV dinner when I was confused to discover that the dinner seemed to have hopped from my lap onto the coffee table and gone cold. Now I wonder if there might not have been a period of missing time at that point. I remember getting up to rehear the food and noticing that it was already two P.m. I decided that I had fallen asleep while eating. I put the TV dinner in the oven and turned on the timer to heat it for fifteen minutes. Then I turned back to the oven to check the temperature setting. I was suddenly woozy, my mouth dry, and the sun was going down outside! The dinner was cold again, and I had — and have — no memory of how the intervening hours had passed I got scared, deciding that I had been the victim of blackouts, and tried to make a phone call for help. It was midnight by the oven clock when I put my hand on the phone. There was no discontinuous memory at all, no sense of being unconscious. One moment the timer showed a little after six and the sky outside the kitchen window was glowing, then I moved toward the phone and the timer showed midnight and the sky was black. It was exactly as if six hours had somehow passed in less than a second. I then began trying to make my way out of the dark apartment. I was terrified. I shook with fear, and I was so thirsty I could barely stand it. The next thing I knew, I was in front of the sink.

The water was running and running into a full glass. My watch said four-fifteen. I rushed out the door of the apartment, and found myself in the cool of a Texas predawn. At this point I remembered something of awesome beauty taking place in the sky, which I later told friends must have been a display of the Perseid meteor shower, which was not active then but had been early in August. I drove to an all-night restaurant called the Nighthawk on Guadalupe Street and had a huge breakfast of toast, eggs, bacon, cereal, coffee, and at least six glasses of orange juice. When I described this singular twenty-four hours to Jim Kunetka, who is good at coining words, he invented a name for my state. He called it a "larconic trance." For years we have laughed about the larconic trance, but I am not laughing anymore. There is no evidence that I suffer from any malfunction of the brain. And I was as sane then as I am now.

Some weeks later there was a frightening sequel. I was lying in bed at my grandmother's house to San Antonio, reading Time magazine. It was late at night and I was about to go to seep. In those days I used to stay with my grandmother when I went to San Antonio because my brother, then a teenager, had effectively taken over my old room at home.

Lying in that bed wide awake I had an experience so strange and frightening that I remember it to this day with total clarity. I was suddenly transported back in time and back to Austin a few weeks earlier. I leaped into my car and backed out of the apartment house parking lot. It was night and the windows of the car were closed. I couldn't see out at all. In fact, I could see nothing but the reflection of the inside of the car. I was so blind that I was forced to stop. Something approached the tar. I was frightened to see, peering in the window with its face pressed almost to the glass, what seemed almost to be a demon with a narrow face and dark, slanted eyes. It spoke to me its a high, squeaky voice, and I remember saying that we couldn't leave the car out in the middle of the street.

Then I found myself in an agonizing struggle. I was at once in the car, fighting to keep driving away but unable to overcome an urge to get out and go back into the apartment, while simultaneously fighting, in the real world, an overwhelming urge to -get out of bed and rush outside. I lay on the bed, flopping like a fish. Then it ended. Contrary to my impression, I did not move an inch. The magazine was still propped up in my lap. I could see my grandmother in her bed in the room across the hall, reading quietly. This terrible nightmare had obviously caused not a stir.

Long into the night I lay with the light on. Toward dawn I slept. I believe now that this was a nightmare memory of an attempt I made to escape whatever unearthly thing happened to use in my apartment in Austin. I was reliving an experience which at the time it happened was so unspeakably terrifying that I still don't recall the actual event, only the dream.

There then began a pattern of running that has persisted in my life until the present. A few weeks later I suddenly became obsessed with the notion of getting away from the University of Texas, out of the United States, of going wherever I could, as far away as possible. I fantasized about living in a nice little apartment in some enormous city. I wanted bustle and bright lights, not the sparse Texas landscape and the starry nights.

I didn't have much money, so I contrived various means of getting enough to leave. I obtained a loan from the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation in San Antonio to study film at the London School of Film Technique. I earned some money translating Seneca's Thyestes into English and converting the translation into a film script for the U.T. Department of Radio, Television and Film. I worked as a camera operator. By January 1968 I had saved enough money and I left for London. I have never in my life been so glad to see the back of a place as I was to see the back of Texas. For years I have explained my sudden departure by saying that I couldn't stand the place after the Charles Whitman sniper incident. The truth was, I could have remained after that incident. It was my secret terror that drove me away.

My first few months in London were bliss. I felt as if a burden had been lifted. The school was fun. I spent a great deal of time in film-history classes watching old movies. My nights were occupied at the National Film Theatre watching more old movies. I met interesting friends. Then, in July, there was another incident. I cannot recall what happened with any clarity. It was simply too confusing, too jumbled. I was at a friend's flat in the King's Road, Chelsea. For years I have described it as a "raid" from which I escaped by "crossing the roofs." What I actually remember is a period of complete perceptual chaos, followed by the confusing sensation of looking down into the chimney pots of the buildings. Then there was blackness. I woke up the next morning in my own place with no idea of how I got there.

Whatever may or may not have happened in the flat was never acknowledged or referred to again by anybody who was there, with one exception, which I will recount in a moment.

The next day I decided to leave London for the Continent. I couldn't stand England for another week, not another hour. One of the people who had been present in the flat warned me against going, saying that I would "never come back." I scoffed. It was to be a two-week vacation. He said that he would get a witch to cast a spell to bring me back. I thought, What superstitious nonsense. Recently I looked him up and asked him about this incident. He couldn't think why he had acted as he did, although he remembered a feeling of dread being associated with my journey.

I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 to promote Mondadori's Malian edition of Warday, I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random.

I ended up in Strasbourg, where I saw the cathedral, then suddenly rushed to the station and grabbed another train, a local, that crept across France, ending in Port Bou on the Spanish border. There I took a Spanish train to Barcelona. I was broke, so I holed up in a back room in a hotel on the Ramblas. I can remember nights of terror, being afraid to put out the light, wanting to keep the window and the door locked, living like a fugitive, never wanting to be alone, haunting the Ramblers, grateful for the unceasing crowds. The rest of the memory is a jumbled mess. I am just not certain what happened, except that I lost weeks of time. I remember something about being on a noisy, smelly airplane with someone who called himself a coach, and something about taking a course at an ancient university. I also recall seeing little adobe huts, and expressing surprise to somebody that their houses were so simple I returned to London in an odd way, weeks later than I had planned, with no way to explain those weeks. I cannot say how I got back. What I do know is that I found myself outside a hotel at about six in the morning. I went in and booked a room, then slept until noon. After lunch I went to my lodgings and found that my room had been let and my belongings stored in a trunk in the basement. The management was quite put out. They told me that I had said I would be gone for no more than two weeks and had disappeared for much longer. Since I had not kept a my rent, my room had been given to another student on their long waiting list.

At the time, I simply accepted all this, stayed with a friend for a while, then found a fiat on Westmoreland terrace in Pimlico, where I lived until December 1968. If such incidents were a frequent occurrence in my life, I might suspect some sort of trance or fugue state.

There are certainly many odd incidents, but they are too variable in their nature to suggest the symptomatic consistency of disease.

I recall little more until the spring of 1977. From 1970 until then, my wife and I live in a two-room fiat on the top floor of an old building on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. We were happy there, if cramped. Our marriage grew solid there, and we became confirmed in our life together. One evening in April 1977, something so bizarre happened that I still cannot understand why we didn't make more of it. With both of us sitting together in our living room, somebody suddenly started speaking through the stereo, which had just finished playing a record. We were astonished, naturally, when the voice held a brief conversation with us.

The voice was entirely clear, not like the sort of garbled message sometimes picked up from a passing taxi's radio or a ham operator. Never before had it happened, and it didn't happen again. I do not remember the conversation, except the last words: "I know something else about you." That was the end. I was left dangling. We did not completely ignore the incident. I called the Federal Communications Commission. A man explained to me what I already knew, that ham radios and taxis and police radios sometimes interrupt stereos. But a conversation, he asserted, was impossible. Our stereo had neither a microphone nor a cassette deck. It was a KLH, a good and relatively inexpensive model readily available in the midseventies. At the time, I'd had it for about four or five years.

A few weeks later I became possessed of an overwhelming desire to move. Anne agreed.

There were good reasons: We needed more space, and I'd gotten a nice raise (I was then working in the advertising industry). We could afford a move. By the end of May we .were living on West Seventy-sixth Street on the top two flours of a brownstone. All went well there until the next year. In June 1978 something terrible happened in the middle of the night.

I have variously thought of it as a phone call followed by a menacing visit, and as a series of menacing phone calls. I do know that I called the police, and they came up and checked out the roof, finding nothing. I remember only looking out our, bedroom window onto the roof garden and seeing somebody standing there. Just a prowler, perhaps, but it has always seemed to me that there was more to it than that.

Again without relating the incident to a subsequent sudden desire to move. I almost immediately decided to move to Connecticut. We rented a house in Cos Cob, the term to begin in July 1978. We then left :dew York for Texas, spending most of the intervening weeks there. We slept no more than a few additional nights in that apartment. Again, we felt we had good reason to move. We had forgotten the horrifying incident, whatever it was, and attributed what in retrospect seems the obvious outcome of panic to a rational desire to leave the city. Because Anne was pregnant, we wanted to get out of our walk-up. It never occurred to us that we were making a radical move to another city almost on the spur of the moment.

We were running, but we didn't know it.

We didn't remain in Cos Cob for a full year. In early 1979 I was awakened by the bizarre impression that there were people pouring in through the windows of our rather isolated house. I was terrified. We had a new baby. I remember trying to get to him and that is all I remember. A few nights later we were awakened by the neighborhood filling with terrible screams. Even though we called the police, they never came, and nothing was ever said by neighbors about the shrieking. Within weeks we had left Cos Cob because we were "tired of the country" and wanted to get back to city living.

An interesting further occurrence of screaming took place in August 1986 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. We were staying with friends. In the middle of the night we were awakened by truly bloodcurdling shrieks coming, it seemed, from above the house.

Neither our friends nor anybody we spoke to the next day had any memory of anything unusual happening that night-except for one person. When I asked him if he'd slept well, he said that he'd been awakened by screaming. His house was about a mile from ours. He, also, has had a visitor experience in his past.

In January 1980 we took an apartment on the top floor of a high rise on East Seventy-fifth Street. All went well until September of that year. This episode began when I saw a strange light streak down the night sky. It moved faster than an airplane and left me with the feeling that it had something to do with me. I was deeply and inexplicably moved, and left with an obscure foreboding. In the middle of the night we were awakened by our son's crying. He was desperate, almost wild with terror. I rushed into the living room, heading for his bedroom. I recall the impression of a small, dark figure dashing toward the sliding doors that led to our thirty-third-floor balcony. Then there was a terrific explosion and beads of glass burst out of the pantry. I kept running for my terrified baby. reaching his crib after what seemed an eternity. I cradled him in my arms while Anne rushed through the house turning on lights.

Then she took our son and I went to see what on earth had happened. A siphon of seltzer had exploded, so violently that the glass was reduced to ads, to dust. There wasn't a trace of the water that had been inside. Anne cleaned up the mess while I calmed our son. Then we went back to bed.

In November we closed on a co-op and by January 1981 had moved again, this time to our present apartment in the Village. A dozen times I have told a story of being menaced by an old college acquaintance, whose terrifying appearances and phone calls had driven us from our Seventy-sixth Street walk-up to Cos Cob, then from there to the East Seventy-fifth Street high-rise. and finally to the Village. A part of this myth is the kindly detective who hypnotized me and enabled me to identify this individual by listening to his voice on a tape.

Then we put a stop to his game by simply phoning him back after one of his vicious calls. But it didn't happen: none of it happened. It's just a screen memory, like the story of the six weeks in Florence that never happened. (After I realized that I had not actually been there that long, I began to believe another story, that I had gone to Russia and then to France. and been caught in the French strikes of 1968-without reference to the fact that they ended two months before I crossed France.) But why do I need these absurd stories? They are not lies: when I tell them. I myself believe them. I don't lie. Perhaps I tell them to myself when I tell them to others. so that I can hide from myself whatever has made me a refugee in my own life.

A year passed in the Village. quite pleasantly and uneventfully. Then came what we called the incident. of the "white thing." It took place in the apartment and began with the most down-to-earth member of our family. Anne. One night she woke up screaming and reported that something had poked her in the stomach. She had seen it. too: It was translucent white and about three feet tall. She was greatly agitated. Naturally, we took this to be a nightmare. Nothing more was said about it. Certainly, nothing was said to our son.

The next night at about ten I was sitting up and reading. Anne had just turned over to go to sleep. Suddenly I was struck on the arm. As I turned I saw a small, pale shape withdrawing into the hall. I jumped up and followed it, only to find the hall empty. It hadn't been our son: He was peacefully asleep in bed. Again, Anne and I hardly discussed the incident. When she asked me why I'd gotten up, I muttered something about her nightmare being contagious. The next morning I noticed a distinct bruise on my arm, but assumed that I must have banged into a table or something.

A few nights later our son suddenly began screaming the house down. I leaped up out of bed and went to him. He was terribly frightened. He said that "a little white thing" had come up to his bed "and poked me and poked me."

Neither Anne nor our son showed any physical evidence of injury.

The next Sunday Anne and I were at a wedding reception. I called home and our babysitter's mother answered the phone. She said that there had been some trouble, but everything was all right. Needless to say, we went home, leaving the reception almost before it had begun and incurring the permanent anger of the bride and groom. Something had happened to the sitter. She said that she'd been cooking her dinner when a child in a white sheet had startled her by peering into the kitchen from the fire escape. Only my wife heard this story. I did not. We have tried to find this sitter, but it's been years and we know that she did not remain in the area past that semester. We cannot remember her name. There is thus no way to tell whether my wife remembers the story correctly. We finally realized that there was something weird about the white thing. I have to admit that my thoughts went to Casper the Friendly Ghost. Strangely enough, there are other instances of a similar white figure appearing in the context of the visitors, and even acting very much as this one had acted.

However amused I might outwardly have been about the incidents, within a few weeks I was on the run again. The co-op went on the market, although we once again didn't relate our desire to move to any disturbances. We had decided to move back to the Upper West Side.

But this time thins weren't so easy. We couldn't get enough for our pace to enable us to have as much space in a more expensive neighborhood. We finally quit trying.

In late March 1983 something happened. I walked out to get a breath of air for a few minutes and found myself returning three hours later. Anne hadn't been home and our son was in school, but the experience was so inexplicable to me that I invented an elaborate fantasy of having imagined myself back in old New York for the missing hours. I have told many friends this lovely story. I realized as I thought back that it didn't happen. It was a pleasant cover story, obscuring some other events. The truth is I don't know what happened to me during those three hours. I don't even know if I left the apartment. I was just gone.

We finally gave up trying to sell the co-op and instead bought the cabin, which brings me back to the present.

Emotionally, I have a great deal of trouble with the notions of spaceships and visitors. I simply cannot help it, even though I have a feeling that I might seem to future generations to be obtuse. In view of the evidence, the reason for my reticence is obscure, but it is not so different from the reluctance of most of my friends with scientific or academic backgrounds to entertain the visitor hypothesis comfortably.

This is because the idea of intellectually and technologically advanced visitors who hide their knowledge from us is threatening and infuriating. It suggests that there is something ignoble about mankind, or even that we are prisoners on our planet. Those are ugly notions, and I for one would prefer an empty universe to one that reacts to us with contempt or Olympian indifference.

We human beings have a very natural stake in the value and validity of our species and our minds. And this is doubly true of those whose sense of personal worth stems from intellectual work. If the human mind is second-rate, then so are those who live by it.

On a deeper level, though. I find that I am beginning to become a little more at ease with the idea that the visitors might actually exist. This is for an unexpected reason. I think of those rushing little figures, those haunting eyes, the smells, the little rooms, the uniforms, the sense of hard work being done. I remember how stiff and insectlike the movements of the visitors seemed, and how very careful they were to keep me under control at all times, and I think that I may know the reason for their peculiar manner of dealing with us. If I am right, then the source of their reticence is not contempt but fear, and well-founded fear, too. They are not afraid of man's savagery or his greed, but of his capacity for independent action.

I have seen them from close range, and if I was seeing real beings, then what was most striking about them was that they appeared to be moving to a sort of choreography . . . as if every action on the part of each independent being were decided elsewhere and then transmitted to the individual.

I return to the thought that they may be a sort of hive. If this were true, then they may be, in effect, a single mind with millions of bodies-a brilliant creature, but lacking the speed of independent. quick-witted mankind. If they think slowly enough, it may be that :t human being, fast thinking and autonomous, could be a remarkable threat. It may be that an old, essentially primitive intelligence has encountered a new, advanced form, and is frightened of the potential that our completeness as individuals gives us.

I can picture myself on some night of the future, watching them approach my bed. It will be so dark that I will barely be able to see. But I will see their short selves dressed in their familiar jumpsuits. I will see those big, bobbing heads and those grave, sharp eyes. I will feel their cool, tiny fingers upon me and hear their breathing as they carry me away, perhaps even catch an occasional high whisper, words said and thought like equal sails upon the same ocean. I will know then the reason for both their interest and their shyness: We awe them and frighten them. And I will understand why.

If I am right about them, it is unlikely that there will ever be the kind of open contact between our two species that seems so logical and useful to us. Even a well-intentioned human being would pose a threat, in that his accidentally taking an action they had not anticipated might cause them literally to lose track of him right in the middle of one of their own craft. Might he not then be able to explore it at will, learn its secrets, and potentially, at least, release all of us into the cosmos?

Can it be that any one of us has the potential to be at once inferior and superior to their entire species?

To contemplate such a notion makes my soul ache with longing to know for certain, and yet also to leap up, as if by some obscure hand it has suddenly been set free.

Hypnosis

FISHING IN THE PAST. PART ONE: THE SHALLOWS

SESSION DATE: March 10, 1 996

SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Vein, MD

[Once we reviewed this apparent past material. Don Klein and I decided to go fishing in it.

This and the next would be the last times that Don would hypnotize me. Despite the fact that many complex experiences took place between April and October of 1986. our interest shifted after March from exploring new material to discovering some physical cause for it.

We will return to hypnosis in the future, but — while it is obviously of great interest — it does not advance any real understanding of the origin of what is happening, only of its content. Why, as I am no longer terrified, the more recent events should still be difficult to remember in their entirety without hypnosis is unclear.

We decided to cover the night at my grandmother's house. the fall of 1980 to New York, and anything else that might be of interest. We both recognized. and I wish to make this clear, that there might well have been a degree of degradation taking place, in the sense that I might have been unintentionally fulfilling expectations of seeing the visitors. While at the time of the hypnosis sessions recorded here and in the next chapter I was still avoiding reading books about anything connected with this sort of material, simply dealing with my own memories must have affected me, altering and changing my perceptions in ways that are probably impossible to detect. Despite this, there was confirmation from another witness that one of my memories was indeed of an extremely strange event.

At this session, Don and I examined an incident that took place in the country on an October or November afternoon in 1984. I was driving back to the house from the grocery store when I suddenly saw a fogbank. It was a clear fall day, the air dry. I got curious about the fogbank and drove off the highway onto a dirt road to try and get a better look at it. The next thing I recall, I was in the fog in my car and two people in dark blue uniforms were leaning in the windows. Then I was back on the highway, returning home. I had dismissed this whole thing until just recently, when I thought about it and decided to go back down that dirt road. I went to the exact spot on the highway where I had turned off. I remembered it because it had a lovely view; and I had looked at that view just before making the turn. The dirt road I had seen there didn't exist anymore, and there was no sign of a road ever having been there.

Budd Hopkins had wanted me to cover this incident first, before any further hypnosis, because of its similarity to one of the most common abduction scenarios. the removal of' the subject from a moving car. He did not tell me what I have subsequently discovered, that confusion of place is common among abductees. There are stories of roads that don't exist, beaches that aren't there, structures that later prove never to have been built. There are also cases where clouds came down to the ground or strange fogs proved to contain something more than droplets of water. One might be tempted to ascribe such reports to trance states, but that does not explain what happens to the victims' cars while they are in the trance — and there are often hours of missing time involved. In addition, many experiences take place while moving cars are filled with people. Some period of time passes, and the occupants all wake up to find the car moving in a different direction, or at the wrong place on the highway, or some such thing. They do not find themselves where they ought to be: in a ditch.]

Dr. Klein: "You're in the car, in the car —"

"I went right past the turnoff. I went right past the grocery store and I keep going. I don't know . . . I want to take the car for a little run. Listening to WAMC'

"What do you hear?"

"It's Don Giovanni." (So I said, but it sounded awfully strange.) "Going . . . down the highway toward the interchange. I keep thinking I see something above the car. I'm a little nervous. I turn off the radio. I roll down the window then roll it up again. I don't know why- I missed the turnoff, and I'm going to turn around and go back. But I don't. Isn't a soul around. I calm down, I turn the radio back on again." (I remember flipping the switch to find that a was already turned on. It had stopped working — which was typical of the car I had then.) "I get down past the diner, there's a real nice view off to the left. Looking out the window of the car. A white truck goes past. I — it's like the white truck isn't right. There's a — I don't know what is going on here. Now I want to go home. I feel terribly sick to my stomach. Awful feeling. I don't want to tell you what's happening to me."

"Perfectly all right. Just relax. You don't need to tell us. Only if you can. Relax. Tell us what you can."

"I was driving my car, all of a sudden there was this white pickup coming toward me. Funny white pickup with a black windshield. And the next thing I know, I'm just stupefied. I wasn't thinking about — I just wasn't thinking about them at all, and just die damndest thing. I'm sitting there in a long room. And there's this — being — standing in front of me. A long gray room. Bang. And I jumped down and wanted to get back in my car. I didn't know where the hell I was, what had happened to my car. anything. It was totally immediate. And then there's this-I feel like I'm being stared at. I have the feeling there's a lot going on but I'm just so totally stupefied. I can't describe how I feel right now. It's like I just got turned inside out. And one thing I do feel, which is my stomach feels terrible. I just can't credit — I can't understand it at all."

"Don't try to understand it. Don't try."

"There's this one right in front of me. I'm sitting on the floor with my legs spread apart. I'm dressed in my clothes. Wearing my brown sweater and I can see my shoes. 'Cause I'm sitting with my legs spread out in front of me. And somewhere there's someone watching me with great big eyes. Big black eyes. Just watching me. One second I think they're mean, the second second, I don't know what to make of it. I'm not scared now. I'm just amazed and totally — totally — it's like — just like I —I turned the corner and all of a sudden I was in Arabia or something.

"And I'm thinking, there was this white truck — I'm trying to figure it out. What happened? I was sort of scared because I feel like I've done something wrong or gotten into the wrong end of the tunnel or something. And over here [gestures left], there's somebody who's moved around a lot. No one says a word. I don't say a word."

"Moved around?"

"I could see out of the corner of my eye someone or something is moving around a lot. Just sort of darting around. And there's a whole row of people — little people — standing quietly over there on a little — they're a little higher than I am. And I'm still just — my mind is whirring and whirring and whirring like I'm short-circuited. I mean, it's a — a — on — like I'm on overdrive or something. And I have this feeling that I could kick my way out or dig my way out or something."

"Are they communicating with you?"

"You're just there?"

"I'm just sitting there."

"Are they paying attention to you?"

"Yes. There's one of them now sitting down in front of me staring right at me, and she's completely different from the others. The others are all very small people. This one is tall and thin. And she's sitting down. She's all gangly. I don't know what to ale of that. I don't know what to make of this. Where the hell — how the hell — you know, it's like I can't see. I just don't know what the hell to make of this. It's just impossible. It's totally impossible. It can't be like this."

"Maybe it's not like that."

"How the hell is it, then?"

"Look at it very hard, see if you see any changes. Look at it very hard."

"She's staring right back at me. She looks like a big bug. Just sitting there, staring at me."

"Are you staring back?"

"I don't know what exactly I'm doing. I'm feeling very sad "

"Sad?

"Sad. Yeah, I'm looking at her. She's looking at me."

"Do you know why?"

"No idea. I just don't understand it. It's very hard to understand."

"You say she looks like a bug?"

"Yeah. Great big black eyes. She's sort of brown She has a little, tiny mouth. She's chin."

"She have antennae".

"No."

"She have hair?"

"No, she's bald."

"She have ears?"

"I don't see any."

"Eyebrows?"

"No."

"Does she have a nose?"

"A little bitty tiny sort of two-holed nose."

"A nose, . or just t he holes?"

"I guess it's there."

"What's the mouth like?"

"It's straight and sort of — it's straight and — for some reason it's a little hard to look at."

"Try to make it out. Horizontal lips?"

"Yeah. It's very slight. Just an opening. Very slight lips. Sitting there like that." (I drew my hands around my knees to demonstrate the position. Then I paused, remembering a confusion of images.) "Something happened to me just then. She sat there for a long time, then put a hand out, put it under my shirt and under my sweater and under me and put it right up against my chest, on the side of my chest. And it felt sort of soft, and it's-it doesn't feel bad to be touched like that by that thing. And she takes her hand away.

"Where the hell am I? I'm way out in the country. I thought I was, uh — you know, I'm just scared to death. I'm totally coming out of it. I'm not out of it, either. I'm wrong."

"Try to relax."

"I'm just scared to death, Don."

"Just relax. Sit back, relax. The fear is real but it can't hurt you. Just relax. When did the fear start?"

"When I realized I was driving down this road and I didn't have any idea where I was. I was in the woods on a dirt road — where — what — how'd I get here? So sick of — I was driving down the highway, then I see this weird white pickup. Then I'm all jumbled up and confused. Then I'm sitting in my car on this road scared to death."

"Do you have any recollection of two people to uniforms being there?"

"I'm just sitting in my car alone."

"Anybody tell you to go back?"

"Yeah. He says to me, 'Get out of here.' Then this lady on the other side says, 'We don't want you here.' I say, 'Who are you?' She looks at me with a real mean look on her face. She's a — real mean"

"What are they wearing?"

"I mostly looked at the one over on this side." (Passenger side.) "I thought that was a woman. You know, I just can't tell what's going on here. I don't know what the hell happened. Because the next thing I know, I'm on the road again. I'm going back home."

"I want you to relax. Relax. Let your body go limp. Relax. Deeply asleep again. Deeply asleep. Stay calm. I want you to report. Be a reporter. Tell me what happens. I want you to go back to that long room. You are looking into the eyes of this person. You said this was a woman. Why do you think it's a woman?"

"Because it is."

"Did you hear her talking?"

"No. She told me a long time ago."

"This is somebody you know."

"I don't know."

"Remind you of anybody?"

"I don't know. Don't ask me."

"Try to stay with it."

"Yes — reminds — somebody — I — [Gasping. Evident severe distress.]"

"Try to go on."

"I can't, because I can't make any sense out of it. It's like there are huge, swirling . . . she's got something, she points it at me, it makes tremendous, swirling pictures in my mind, of — I don't know what it's of. It's not of anything. It's like, uh — it's sickening. It's very — they're pictures of abstractions. Things fitted together. [Pause.] I feel much calmer, much better."

"Why do you feel that?"

"I don't know. Just do."

"What did she do?"

"Because of these pictures."

"'They made you feel better?"

"Better. They're abstractions, like triangles and circles and things. And they're fitted together in order. The triangle with the circle in it and the square comes around it and it moves all very smoothly, and it makes me feel better." (Note: When people are asked at random to draw the first figure that enters their minds, 30 percent will draw a triangle. Nobody knows why this is the case.)

"Did she want you to feel better?"

"I don't know. Nobody said anything about it to me."

"This person — you saw somebody when you were twelve years old. Was that the same sort of person?"

"Yeah."

"Exactly?"

"I don't know. Looks about the same."

"You said she was very tall and thin."

"She's always sitting down. She's got a lotta legs and arms."

" A lot?"

"I mean four." (Two legs and two arms.) "But she's so thin, and her arms are especially thin. She has sort of hands that look like they might have gloves on. You know, I've seen her before."

"Go back to when you saw her before. Try to go back to another time."

"When?"

"Whenever you saw her before."

"I've seen her lots of times."

"Lots of times?"

"Sure. I've seen her lots of times. I hate to think about that. Christ. I really do. Really do. It's very hard to think about that. It's like I'm being horsewhipped. I'm just not going to think about that. I don't want to think about it."

At this point Dr. Klein no longer wished to continue the hypnosis because of my evident distress and awakened me. My first words on waking up were, "It was like my head was in a vise right at the end. Like I was being beaten, whipped. Horrible Why would it be that intense?"

"It seems like there's a lot of bad feeling here."

"It was like a stone. A stone blocking me."

The night after that hypnosis session I became aware of an almost palpable presence before me. It was the image of her. After my careful scrutiny it had lingered past hypnosis into my conscious life. As I walked home that night I could see it before me just as it had been in the long room, staring at me with its great, dark eyes.

I had the impression during hypnosis that I had been going somewhere that afternoon, someplace I wasn't supposed to go, almost as if, having been drawn to buy a house in that particular area in the first place, I was overreacting to the impetus and was on my way right into their laps. Can it be that there is some sort of lodgement or projection into physical reality where these manifestations congregate? Or is it simply that visitors have established a base in the general neighborhood . . . or, perhaps, have been there since time immemorial.

After this hypnosis session I suffered the same sort of debilitation I had felt for so long following the December 26 experience-lowered body temperature, weakness, an unpleasant sense of being somehow separated from the world around me. And the next afternoon I felt terribly tired.

Either I was overloaded by a demand for more material than I could comprehend at one time, or there was a limit to the amount of information I would be able to remember.

Or perhaps I could not comply because my unconscious mind had not anticipated the question, and had not yet had time to construct more stories.

I wonder.

Hypnosis

FISHING IN THE PAST, PART TWO: THE DEEPS

SESSION DATE: March 14, 1986

SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Fein, MD

[This time we tried for a very, very deep trance. I was concerned about complying not so much with Don's wishes, since he remains neutral, but rather with a hidden desire of mine that my memories would somehow confirm their own reality. I was hoping that a more profound trance would direct me totally toward Don and thus all my compliance would be concentrated on him, and I knew I could trust his neutrality.

The trance, which was deepened by the added suggestion that I descend two flights of stairs of twenty steps each, was profound. When I awakened it was as if I had come up out of a well. I was reasonably satisfied that I had been too directed toward the hypnotist to interfere with myself, but it is not possible to be certain of this. I noticed afterward that he seemed to have kept his questions to an absolute minimum perhaps in an effort to further reduce suggestion.

We went first to the incident at my grandmother's house in 1967. The images were startlingly real, almost as vivid as if I were there again, twenty years ago.]

"Granny's in the other room. She's reading too. I see her light is still on. Gigi's sleeping beside her bed. The rest of the house is dark. I turn the page There's an ad for a car. Just scaring at that ad. Goddamn. Something buzzing around in here. I'm fighting it. All of a sudden it puts something on my head like a railroad spike. A silver nail. A big, flat-Beaded silver nail and it hits me right in the side of the head with it. And I turn into something — else. I have — I'm heavy and big. I get up out of the bed, I feel totally different. I feel like I'm moving like I'm walking through the house, like I'm a ghost in the house. I'm in the basement.

"No I'm not. I — I'm still in bed. It's so peculiar. Because t never moved at alt. The ad's still there. I never went anywhere, I staved right there. I get up and I get a glass of water. I'm scared to death. I don't know why this happened to me."

"You said something about something happening right at the beginning of the thing?"

"Yeah. There's like this very fierce face up beside the bed. A very fierce strange face like a giant fly. It hits me with like a bright silver nail. This huge change comes over me. It's terrifying. Like I turn into another kind of a person. I'm big, I'm heavy, I'm dark. I'm bony. And I start walking out of the room. And it just — it's terrible. And the next thing I know I'm back in bed again, my stomach's all knotted up, I'm scared to death, and the magazine's still on my lap. And then —"

"Could it have been a dream?"

"I don't know. I don't know what to think of it. Yeah, of course it's a dream: It's gotta be a dream. Yet — I don't want to look up there where that thing was. So scared I feel like I'm just totally — it's just totally unaccountable. I don't know what came over me. It's like it came out of nowhere. And there's this face — real mean, fierce face."

"A person?"

"Nah. It's like a big bug. Only it looks at you and you just want to look away. And it has a silver nail in its hand and it hit me with the flat end of the nail and the next thing I knew I was moving. Only I was — there I was back in the bed reading the magazine, still on the same page. An ad for a Mustang very much like my Mustang, only it's blue."

"You had the experience before with that object?" (He probably referred to the October 4 incident, but that was not one that came into my mind.)

"Yeah, it happened to me before. We were out in the lot. Someone came across the lot. My sister thought it was a fireball. I thought it was a motorcycle. We had — they put up the tent, I came out late. I was just gonna go in the tent. It had been raining. All of a sudden this thing came catty-corner across the lot. And they're all stopped. It had a skeleton on it. Scared the hell out of me. I turned around to run in the house, I didn't go anywhere. That skeleton's in the bushes. It knocked down the tent and they didn't do anything, they just stayed inside it.

"Patricia and Roxy and Angie and that was all. And it had a silver thing, and it had real long arms. I was yelling for Daddy, and I couldn't-there was just nothing happening. I was yelling for Daddy and it comes — I can feel its hand on my shoulder. I don't want it to have its hand on my shoulder, it's really terrible. [Making running movements.] I can't run away. I can't run away. And it has its hand on my shoulder and I can't run away from it. It just — it's stuck to me kind of. Horrible! It pulls itself around me so I can see it and God, whoo! Jesus! [Gasping.] Just looks at me. And then there — she's trying to get this thing on me.

" Oh. I feel much better. It feels — I know it's there but I'm not scared. I'm not trying to run away anymore. This is really something. Boy. I'm lying down on the grass. On the lot. I'm not on the grass, I'm on the lot and it's all stickery underneath. I just had my T-shirt on and it's got something that's gonna — I just know it's there, I can see it clear as day. It looks just exactly like a bug. A praying mantis is what it looks like. Only it's so big. How can it be so big? And I don't feel so bad but jeez. it's just doing that. It's got this thing and it's like working it down into my hair or something. I can't feel a thing Now it's up in the air. And it's gone. And I know that the stars was coming out and it'd been all cloudy before."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve. And now they're all yellin' at me because I collapsed the tent. My sister's real triad ant she's gonna get !Momma to spank me because I collapsed the tent. And they get scared. And we take our stuff and we go on inside. Patricia tells Momma she saw a fireball. Mom and Dad are inside watching TV They're watching — Ed Sullivan Show. And Momma says we'll be able to see Senor Wences if we stay inside. And it's cool anyway, cool in the house. It was hot and muggy outside. I feel — Patricia tells Momma there was a fireball in the lot is why we came in. And I wonder why she doesn't say I collapsed the tent. And there was no fireball in the lot. Momma says not to worry about it. it was just a fireball.

"And that night we slept out on the screened-in porch. Daddy came out and sang us a song. It embarrassed Patricia but I loved it. So did Roxy and Angie."

"This vision you had of this praying mantis thing — is that the same as the others you've seen?"

"They all look like that. Yeah. I thought at first it was like a skeleton on a motorcycle or something. It was flying-no, it wasn't flying. I could just see it, and I see it almost does, really does, look like a praying mantis, only bigger. It's got great big eyes that just scare the hell out of you. Scare you real bad. Big, big eyes. Doesn't really look like a praying mantis. They've got white eyes. This has got dark, black eyes. I thought it was a motorcycle because at first it looked like a guy on a motorcycle wearing dark glasses. Then I saw, God, it wasn't that!

"It came right up past the tent and just up to the honeysuckle hedge. And I just wanted to get across that hedge and into the yard so bad. Oh, God."

"So you've had this experience of something being done to your head before?"

"Yeah."

"The same sort of thing?"

"No, it calmed me down. It felt . . . good. It tapped one with something in the head and it calmed me down. Felt good. And I knew that it was still there but I just laid right down in the-was I in the backyard? No, I was in the lot. But it didn't feel like a bad place to lie down. There's lots of stickerburs in the lot. It was a little stickery but it wasn't too bad. I lay down and looked up at it and it worked something into my hair. I didn't feel anything. It had something long that it worked into my hair. It was like, working in my hair. Doing something. Then it went away. I wasn't scared while it was working that thing up in my hair. I don't know what it was. I didn't ever see it. It was working a thing up in my hair. I didn't feel a thing."

"Try and relax, now, relax. Muscles are loose. Deeply asleep, relaxed. We talked before about another time, where you thought you saw a meteorite."

"Yeah."

"How old are you now?"

"I'm thirty-six."

"Tell me what happened."

"Well, I've started working with the young people at the Foundation." (This was the Gurdjieff Foundation, an organization devoted to the development of consciousness based on the ideas of the philosophers G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. It is not related to groups that make public claim to be the "Gurdjieff Foundation." The real Foundation is not a public organization.) "I've been in a very intensive period. A lot of meditation and effort. I'm working very hard on my new book." ( The Hunger.) "Jim Landis is on sabbatical, so I'm just working pretty much alone. I feel pretty good about it. We worked together a lot on it. And now he's gone on sabbatical. I think they like it a lot down at Morrow.

"I saw this thing — I had been feeling very good about my Foundation work. I thought I was really connecting with the young people. Maybe I was reaching a new state of consciousness, too. And, looking out over the city one night, the sun had just set and it was beautiful, orange glow; you could see the streetlights everywhere. I loved that den I had then. Love the den. It's so beautiful a view. When it's clear I can see all the way up to Bear Mountain. When it's clear.

"And then I saw this meteor. Like you couldn't quite really see it. It came down out of the sky, very tiny, like a spark. And I thought, Oh, that's not a plane. It's not anything. And I felt awed. Like it was someone coming to see me. I told Anne about it. She said, 'Who would it be?' I said I didn't have any idea. And I went to bed.

"I love her so much. You know, I can't believe I'm seeing this. One two three four five six. I look up from my book and there are six figures standing at the end of the bed looking right at both of us. She's turned over and she's asleep. I say, 'Anne, Anne, look at this.'

"They're menacing-looking. Strange. I don't understand where they even could have come from. They made no sound. They came out of the living room. The door is so dark. Nelson's sleeping under the bed." (Nelson was the family dog.) "'Nelson! Nelson!' Nelson's just sleeping under the bed. I feel like I've just gotten some kind of weight on me. I want to get tip. I'm thinking about my son. I want badly to get up. I'm thinking about my son. I do not know what's going on here. Is it because we're so high? Why did I ever get this apartment?

"Why didn't I get an apartment downstairs? I feel like crying. because I can't get tip and the door is so dark. They're just standing there. They don't say anything, they don't even look like they're alive. Five. six. tar babies. Six tar babies standing there. Am I seeing things? 'Anne, Anne!' No one sees this. It must be that I'm seeing thins. I close my eves. I open my eyes. And it's changed. Now they're around both sides of the bed. about halfway tip. like when you stop looking at them they start moving.

"I've lost my mind. I have lost my mind. This cannot be real. 'Anne.'- Anne!' I shake Anne. I don't stop looking at them but I shake Anne. They're wearing uniforms. This just is incredible. It can't be real. It cannot be true, it just can't be. 'Anne?' Why in the world won't she wake up, she's never been this damned asleep. 'Anne, will you wake up! Anne, Anne! Oh, Christ.' It's like I'm in another world. I can't make her wake up, and every time I glance at her they get a little closer to the front of the bed. This is really a bad nightmare, boy. This is a real foul nightmare, man! Oh, God, I wish I could wake her up!"

"Voice 1 [Basso profundo]: 'You're not trying to wake her up.'

"'I'm not trying to wake her up.' I feel calmer. better.

"Voice 2 [Light]: 'They're all right.'

"'They're all right.'

"Voice 2: 'They have to do that.'

"'They have to do that. Who's that standing out there?' I get the feeling this place is full of people. Someone keeps telling me it's all right, it's all right, all right. 'I know it's all right, but I still want to get up and uh — ah —'

"They moved again. When I tried to get out of bed they moved again. And they're standing one two three four five." (Total eight.) "Three up right beside my bed, four five at the foot of the bed. One two three on the other side of the bed. And goddamn Nelson is snoring away under the bed. Why doesn't the dog wake up, at least? What's the use of buying a dog? They aren't people, therefore it's a dream.

"Our boy says, 'Oh!' He says, 'Oh!' And he screams out loud, real loud l Screams again! Ah! They pull — all — right down to the foot of the bed and I get up and I'm running like hell and he's screaming like hell, and that praying mantis is standing right in the middle of the living room. Right near the windows. And I run on in to my boy and he's put his arms out and he's got his face all screwed up and he's screaming. Screaming. I never saw that little boy scream like that before. Something happened — something happened to Anne. 'Anne? What the hell was that?' I pick him up. She comes in. He's like he's hard and cold. He's very cold. He's got his diaper pulled down around his knees. It falls off. We're holding him, both of us are holding him. He finally calms down. 'What happened, Anne?'

"'I don't know.'

"'My God, something blew up in the kitchen.'

"'You keep him, hold on now. I'll go. It's a bottle.'

"He's falling asleep in my arms. 'What kind of a horde, honey?'

"'A bottle of seltzer blew up.'

"'You're kidding.' I've still got my son, I walk out there.

" 'Don't get in the glass. There's glass all over the floor.'

"I take him and I rock him. She's out there working on the glass and I'm rocking him. We've got all the lights on. I'm rocking him.'

(Don then suggested that I was back in my bed, and that I would be able to see the ones around it very clearly.)

"They look like they're staring at me with their mouths opened. Only their faces do not move. I don't know exactly what they are."

"They're like the other one?"

"No, no, the other one is thin and bigger. They're stocky and little."

"What color are they?"

"Color? They're wearing blue uniforms. Dark blue uniforms. They're sort of gray. They look like they haven't been out in the sun in ten years. Sort of mushroomy-gray. Smell funny, too. Like a burned match head. Just totally expressionless faces. Two big round eyes and a round mouth — and I don't think they even have noses. I really didn't look at them too hard. I don't know if they had noses. I was scared pretty bad there. This has to be a dream, because the dog is sleeping like the dead. Why do you feed a dog?"

Don then brought me out of the trance.

I was shocked by the unqualified reality of what I had seen. I just could not believe, in that moment, that the forms persisting in my mind were anything but real. And vet they had to be something else, surely they did.

There was a certain way of checking the reality of at least one of these memories, because there was one other person involved whom I knew well: my sister. I had been thinking about calling her. I did so the next afternoon, and asked her our now-familiar question: "What is the strangest thing you remember ever happening?"

"The time we were sleeping out in the back lot and the fireball came across the lot."

I sat there holding the phone and feeling as if I were falling down a deep well, and at the bottom of the well was somebody with huge, shining eyes.

"Can you describe it?"

"It was a big, green fireball. It came catty-corner across the lot. We all got scared and went inside. We slept on the porch instead."

"Did we tell Mother and Dad?"

"Mother said it was nothing to worry about, it was just a fireball."

I still do not remember seeing the fireball. All my life I have had a free-floating memory of a skeleton riding a motorcycle, a frightful effigy. Now I know the source of that image.

Were my sister's words confirmation? Yes — of the fact that something disturbing happened in that vacant lot so long ago. But the issue of what it was remains open.

What is most interesting here is really a pattern. It involves two types of interaction with the visitors. One type seems to involve the approach of a single individual or small group, as happened on the night of the fireball, at my grandmother's, in the apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, and in the country on October 4. The other type of incident is the long visitation, as the ones that occurred when we were on the train in 1957, in Austin the August before the incident at my grandmother's, and on December 26, 1985. These experiences usually include more interaction and often take place on the visitor's own turf.

The short visits seem almost always to concern psychological activity, the long ones to involve more physical testing, almost as if preparations are made or results observed during those times.

By the time December 1985 came around, I may have had these encounters at least a dozen limes. And yet I never learned from them. Each time the experience took place, I was as frightened, as tormented, as astonished as before.

This is one of the most difficult internal problems connected with the experience. One would have thought that the mind, acting alone, would have compartmentalized all this material together, as it does with recurring dreams and nightmares, so that when I entered the state I would have had reference to other experiences of it, even though — as in recurring nightmares — the material would still have been terrifying.

My actual condition almost seems to suggest that there was an attempt to render me as helpless as possible, by placing me in a state where each experience was perceived in and of itself, without reference to past encounters. Thus each time the surprise was total.

Running through my memories there is a consistent flavor of intense terror. But is it only my terror. the terror of the body, biological terror.

There may be things about contact between beings formed in different biospheres that we do not understand at all. Perhaps they feel some instinctive emotion, too. I have the impression that these experiences are very intense for them, if not actually frightening.

If the terror is an unavoidable side effect of our biology, then the amnesia can be seen not only as an act of self-protection but as one of kindness also.

Assuming the correctness of my perceptions, this book then becomes a chronicle not only of my discovery of a visitor's presence in the world but also one of how I have learned to fear them less.

I look out my window. It is a warm afternoon, cloudy and thunderous, an afternoon of early spring. People go back and forth beneath umbrellas, their feet slashing in puddles. A helicopter sails across the sky, a jet angles toward La Guardia.

It's all so normal, so home. But what else was that in the sky — a flash of silver light, or something reflecting on my glasses?

The Image

The morning after the hypnotic session covering my experience with the fogbank (March 11, 1986) I awoke not only feeling as if I had been beaten up during the night, I was aware of something new in my mind.

At first the exact nature of this new manifestation was not clear to me. I was oppressed by it; there was an acute impression of being watched. Then I began to realize why: I was being watched — there was a face staring directly at me, the grave, implacable, subtly humorous face I had come to recognize from hypnosis.

A vivid image of her had emerged in my mind. It was so real I could almost touch it. This was disturbing and I was eager to expel it, assuming it to be a side effect of the hypnotic session, occurring because Dr. Klein had asked for so many details about her appearance.

It was so extraordinarily clear. I was in a panic. I couldn't live with this image perpetually reminding me of the visitors' enigmatic presence in my life.

I went into my office and sat on the floor, going deed into a state of meditation. I drew my concentration to my body, directing my attention to my physical center of gravity just below the navel, and away from my racing mind.

It took only a moment for me to see that the image had not gone away. On the contrary, it had be come far more clear. It wasn't anything like any other imagistic material I had ever had in my mind. I could not calm myself. I was frantic. For the first few hours it was static, simply staring back at me with those large, glistening eyes.

I have never had eidetic, or photographic, memory, so this image was something very new for me. An eidetic image is very much like a photograph inside the mind. This one, though, was far more than a photograph. It had the urgency of life about it.

Despite my attempts to explain it to Budd Hopkins and Don Klein, I could not succeed in communicating to others just how special it seemed to me to be. Nor did I really know this myself until a few days later, when some of the remarkable properties of the image were revealed.

I think that the image was somehow triggered by hypnosis. Maybe the intense state of concentration evoked it from my unconscious . . . or maybe I attracted the visitors' attention and they responded.

After the image appeared I did research into eidetic memory and found that it is very rare in adults, almost to the point of being nonexistent in Western cultures. What's more, the descriptions I found of eidetic images did not even begin to correspond to what I was experiencing. People did not report that their eidetic images had a life of their own.

This one seemed ready to reach out and touch me. I felt a strong sense of relationship.

Looking at it was more like looking at a person behind soundproof glass than looking at a picture.

I found that the image not only moved about of its own accord, it would move on command. It showed me its hands, its face, every detail of its body. Anne asked me to describe its feet and it leaned forward against something that I could not see and raised a foot, which appeared almost like a very simple version of a human foot. Instead of toes there was a solid structure split in only one place. Like all the joints, the ankle appeared simple in structure.

While I might indeed have been viewing the result of some extraordinary connection between myself and a real, conscious being, it may also be that this was an act of the imagination — the act of a mind calling upon itself to provide another argument in favor of this being an experience with an external component.

If what I was really dealing with amounted to some sort of deep and instinctive attempt to create a new deity for myself, to remain agnostic was to put the conscious me in the interesting position of opposing my own unconscious aim.

What if my unconscious got mad at me and started throwing off things that were really scary. even dangerous. We don't know a thing about conjuring and magic. We've dismissed it all, we who love science too much. It could be that very real physical entities can emerge out of the unconscious. That was certainly one of the hypotheses suggested by what had already happened. I worried that I might not be in control of this conjuring ability at all. I'd already conjured something awfully disturbing. What if there were even more disturbing things waiting in the pantheon of the subconscious?

That was on the one hand. On the other hand, maybe I could make this thing become a real, solid being. Frightening, but also fascinating.

Budd Hopkins suggested that I get an artist to render the image. We chose Ted Jacobs, because he is skilled in creating portraits from verbal descriptions.

It was when Ted carne over with his sketch pad that I discovered what was most interesting about the image. I was sitting with my eyes closed, describing this face as carefully as I could. I could see it in amazing detail, moving closer and then farther back, observing fine points such as the faint dusting of white, powdery fuzz that seemed to cover its cheeks and forehead, making it feel, I would imagine, to the touch ,as smooth as the downy head of a baby. The nose was not very prominent, but the end seemed sensitive, almost like the end of a finger.

As I watched, the image moved its nose, revealing that this was obviously a sensitive organ both of touch and smell. The mouth was not straight, but rather one of those rich and complex lines that come to a human mouth with the advance of years. Centered in this mouth was a remarkable expression, the outcome, it seemed to me, of implacable will leavened by what I can only describe as mirth. Ted Jacobs tried especially hard to capture that elusive quality, and succeeded brilliantly — although the final result, on the cover of this book, is a bit more human than was actually the case. Specifically, the mouth was nothing more than a line, albeit a complex one. There were no lips at all. And the cranium was a good bit larger than the cover portrait would suggest.

The chin was strong, very pointed, and there was a general impression that the skin was stretched over a plated bone structure.

By far the most arresting feature in this face was the eyes. They were far larger than our own eyes. In them I once or twice glimpsed a suggestion of black iris and pupil, but it was no more than a suggestion, as if there were optic structures of some kind floating behind those wells of darkness.

It was those eyes that I saw staring down at me on October 4, those eyes that gleamed so furiously in the faint night light. I remember them from December 26, too, and from the summer of 1957, and from the experience with the fogbank.

Ted asked me many questions about the eyes. When he asked me how they looked closed, I got another shock: The image closed its eyes. I saw the huge, glassy structures recede and loosen, becoming wrinkled, and the lids come down and up at the same time, to close just below the middle of the eyeball.

I described this to Ted, but he wanted to know more. How about a profile view? Had I ever seen a profile? As I sat there staring into the darkness of my own mind. I saw the image obediently turn its head.

I could hardly believe what I was observing. Was this a phantom? What was it? My research thus far has not uncovered any specific paradigm of this experience. I will not assert finally that it was a mental phenomenon as yet unidentified, but at the moment this remains a distinct possibility.

While the image stayed with me, it remained exactly the same as it was when I first saw it. I could observe any part of the body from the top of the head to the tip of the foot. I could do this again and a again, and see the same thing each time. On March 1. I made a complete physical description on tape. On March 23 I repeated the description again, then compared the two tapes. There was no difference. The image was unchanged.

Beyond the face, I was able to see the figure's back, the sides of its head, its arms and hands, its feet, torso, abdomen — every part of its body. Under close scrutiny, its surface was smooth but did not seem to have a layer of fat under the skin, which was stretched tight over the bones. The structure of the knee and elbow fonts reminded me of the knees of grasshoppers or crickets. The hands were very long and tapered when in repose, with three fingers and 'in opposable thumb. When pressed down, the hands became flat, suggesting that they were more pliable than our hands. On the fingers were short, dark nails of a more clawlike appearance than ours.

Overall, this did not appear to me to be a highly developed body , but rather a very simple one. There was a general lack of complexity shat suggested few bones and not much flesh.

I do not know how to explain this image. If it was not created by the powerful effect of Don's, asking me to visualize the creature, then perhaps it was some sort of sophisticated holographic projection. It might be possible to maintain an image in the mind if one knew how to stimulate the optic center in the right way.

Is that what happened? Subsequent events suggested that the image was something even more extraordinary than it at first seemed.

The Visitation of March 15, 1986

Late on the night of March 14, after I had come back from the hypnosis session covering events in our apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, I sat down once again to think things through.

The image was with me, of course. I wondered what would happen if' I asked it to come to me.

Humanity has a long history of conjuring and magic. I have no doubt in my mind that most of this arose from the attempts of helpless people to affect an environment before which they were, in fact, powerless.

But what if that was not the whole story. I sat there looking at it. It looked back at me.

Nothing more happened. The thought flashed through my mind almost unbidden that anything I wrote about this experience would be far more intense if I was given some sort of confirmation. It was a true thought: that was exactly how I felt at that moment. The image responded to me with a sharper stare.

On Saturday morning we went to the country. Our son had invited a friend, and we picked this child up on the way. She was one of his school friends, also seven, and the two of them were full of excitement about their weekend together. At no time were the subjects of flying disks, visitors, or any related material discussed at all, and I doubt very much if such things were in the pantheon of either child's awareness. Our son had not been exposed to any of this material and remained totally ignorant of it.

Before dinner I took a walk along our quiet, private road. It was a moderately clear night, with a quarter moon. On the walk I saw a hair-thin streak of light come straight down out of the sky. I thought: I'm disappointed in myself — or in them. Why such a dismal little manifestation?

It was dark when the four of us sat down to the dinner table. We had been eating for only a few minutes when our son's guest suddenly shouted, "A little airplane covered with lights just flew through the front yard!"

There was real shock in this kid's face. The child looked at me, obviously distressed. My impulse was to hide under the table, but I pulled myself together and managed instead to speak in an offhand and reassuring manner. "There's an air base near here." I said. The National Guard base is thirty miles away, but it was all I could think to say. "We don't let those things bother us. Best to just forget about it."

I got up and went outside, but saw nothing. Soon the sock subsided and the children went on eating. Anne and I just sat looking at one another. She had only been hypnotized for the first time the afternoon of the previous day, and knew almost nothing about what was happening with me. From her own hypnosis she had concluded that. some sort of visitor experience might be involved, and thus the little girl's statement scared her.

After dinner the two of us went upstairs and discussed the matter. Frankly, the kid's observation, coming as it did at that moment, had convinced me that on some level what was happening must be real. Why else would the child have made that announcement? Not a word about the visitors had been said within earshot of either of the kids, and the little girl was absolutely without information about this subject.

I told Anne about my attempt at communication. "I had a feeling you'd do something like that." she said. "Too bad I can't drive: I'd take the kids back to the city and leave you here to face the music." She stopped. "No I wouldn't." We sat hand in hand in the dark while downstairs the kids read quietly together.

I wasn't sure I could drive the car-even if I had wanted to. I could barely keep my eves open. I recognized the floating sensation of alight hypnotic trance. Was I hypnotizing myself?

It's possible.

But what had our son's friend seen? The next day I asked her if she knew what a flying saucer was. She replied, "A what?"

"You know, a flying saucer."

The child looked at me like I was crazy. "I don't know what that is. Your son and I are going out to his clubhouse." Her confusion revealed her lack of knowledge.

When we went back to the city I engaged the child's father in conversation. "Do you remember flying saucers?"

"Wha — yeah."

"Ever read any books about them?"

"Can't say that I have.

"Ever discuss them?"

"Whit, what is this about?"

"Ever discuss them?"

"No. Now what? Do I win or lose?"

A child like I was, brought up in the fifties, would have known about flying saucers.

They were big news in those days. But they aren't now, so it's not surprising that the little girl was uninformed, but it is important. It is very important, obviously. The girl saw what she saw, in a simple and real way. When people dismiss such innocent and uninformed testimony, they make a great mistake. Precisely be cause it is so uninformed, it is powerful evidence of the reality of the phenomenon.

But what reality? Maybe the child really saw an object in the physical world. But maybe, also, the mind has powers that we do not understand. Perhaps there is such a thing as mental telepathy, and when I asked the image to help me, what I really did was send my own inner self on a quest. And at the end of its quest it found this innocent, open little mind, entered it, and there created a hallucination, knowing full well that the little guest would be the last person at the house likely to see anything — and thus the first one to be believed.

By nine both children were fast asleep. I was in a surprisingly benign mood, listening to music on WAMC out of Albany and enjoying being with my wife. We sat together in the parlor in our big upstairs bedroom and got sleepier and sleepier. By the time the clock rang ten it was all we could do to crawl into bed. We went to sleep.

Sometime during the night I was awakened abruptly by a jab on my shoulder. I came to full consciousness instantly. There were three small people standing beside the bed, their outlines clearly visible in the glow of the burglar-alarm panel. They were wearing blue coveralls and standing absolutely still.

They were familiar figures, not the fierce, huge eyed feminine being I have described before, but rather the more dwarflike ones, stocky and solidly built, with gray. humanoid faces and glittering, deep-set eyes. They were the ones I felt were "the good army" when they took me tin December 26.

I thought to myself, My God, I'm completely conscious and they're just standing there. I thought that I could turn on the light, perhaps even get out of bed. Then I tried to move my hand, thinking to flip the switch on my bedside lamp and see the time.

I can only describe the sensation I felt when tried to move as like pushing my arm through electrified tar. It took every ounce of attention I possessed to get any movement at all. I marshaled my will and brought my attention into the sharpest possible focus. Simply moving my arm did not work. I had to order the movement, to labor at it. All the while they stood there.

I struggled, bit by bit clawing closer and closer to that lamp. I turned my head, fighting a pressure that felt as if a sheath of lead had been draped over me, and saw the light switch in the dark. I watched my hand move slowly closer, and finally felt the switch under my finger.

I clicked it. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing.

The electricity was off. The burglar alarm was still working because it had battery backup — but apparently it meant little to them, as they had entered the house without tripping it.

When I turned my head back I confronted a sight so weird. I thought afterward that I did not know how to write about it. I still don't, so I am just going to plunge ahead.

Beside my bed, and perhaps two feet from my face, close enough to see it plainly without my glasses. was a version of the thin ones, the type I have called "her." It was not quite right, though. Its eyes were like big, black buttons, round rather than slanted. It appeared to be wearing an inept cardboard imitation of a blue double-breasted suit, complete with a white triangle of handkerchief sucking out of the pocket.

I was overcome at this point by terror so fierce and physical that it seemed more biological than psychological. My blood and bones and muscles were much more afraid than my mind. My skin began tingling, my hair felt like it was getting a static charge. he sense of their presence in the room was so unimaginably powerful, and so strange. I tried to wake up Anne but my mouth wouldn't open. The moment I thought of the kids a clear picture flashed in my head of the two of them sleeping peacefully.

The thing before me seemed like a sort of interrogatory. Why the suit? Did it mean that they were showing me a male? If this was a hive species, there might well be more than one sex, and they might be physically very different. Females, males, and stocky little drones?

Now what was I going to do, having called them — lie here and quake? I had wanted to communicate.

They were obviously waiting for me to do something. I saw their faces so clearly, their eyes dark, glittering pits in their dun skin. I could not help noticing that there was a sort of jollity about these beings. I'd thought before that they seemed happy. Perhaps whatever they were trying to do was going well.

They had responded to my summons. What on earth should I say? I wanted them to know that I was still in possession of myself, that despite what I can only describe as a terrific assault against me, physically and mentally, I was still functional and on some level independent. More than this, I wanted them to know how I felt about them, despite all the complex connotations of what they were now doing to me. There may very well be good reasons for their behavior. Have all of their contacts with human beings been peaceful? And how about me: Had I fought in the past?

If they had a hive mind, it might be that the amount of volition I had left was all they could allow me without risking loss of control of the situation. What if I'd been able to do something unexpected very quickly, like reach out and take one of them by the shoulders?

Would the hive then have become confused about where this being was? Would it have been that simple to take a captive?

There was and is no way that I would ever make a provocative gesture in heir presence. In fact, I wouldn't move at all unless bidden, not until I understand more. If one could escape into their world, one could also get lost in it.

Lying in that bed, I felt a very strong sense of responsibility. I had to communicate in some nonthreatening manner. I was an emissary of sorts — although perhaps only to the court of nightmare. If so it was a strange sort of bad dream, in that the terror began to pass even though the dream hadn't ended.

Again it took an absolute concentration of will, a centering of my attention and the application of the most careful effort to the muscles of my face, but I did manage to smile.

Instantly everything changed. They dashed away with a whoosh and I was plunged almost at once back into sleep. Now I did dream — qualitatively a very different experience from what had just transpired. Frankly, I'm quite certain that the beings I saw were not a dream, and probably not a hallucination. What they were was an enigma.

Interestingly, my dream was an unfrightening repeat of one of the few really terrifying nightmares I have ever had. This was of being chased through a stark stone palace by a robot with beady pop eyes. This time, however, I didn't run and the robot finally sat down and contented itself with staring at me.

The next thing I knew, morning came. I opened my eves, feeling absolutely drained.

Anne said, "Well, it was a quiet night," and proceeded to make a beautiful breakfast while I sat and stared.

Everybody was happy and well around the breakfast table. The Times was as thick as ever and the coffee and waffles were delicious. I was back in my world again, with my own familiar family. When I told Anne about what had happened, she laughed merrily at the idea of the painted suit of aged design. and reset the clock on the stove. which had lost five minutes during the night.

I found that one of the other people I have met has also had an experience involving visitors in archaic quits. This suggests that the visitors are not too interested in our clothing, or confused about its significance . . . or perhaps that their thought processes have not gotten very far vet in regard to clothing. It may be that, if we ever meet them openly, they will not be quite as naked as the creature who emerged in Close Encounters. Perhaps they will be wearing double-breasted suits circa 195Y, complete with pocket handkerchiefs.

What happened the night of March 15 was fundamentally different, and more open, than any other contact I have had. The visitors almost irrefutably announced themselves to toe.

They allowed the m see them while in full possession of all my other memories of them — albeit in a more or less completely restrained physical condition. And they preceded their appearance to me by the witness of the uninvolved child, the one person there that night who had absolutely no relationship to this at all.

Who had come to see me during the night? Did they really drop down from the sky, or have then come from some other cosmos, a place where dreams are real and reality a dream, where shadows and those who cast them are one and the same?

Weeks after writing the material preceding in this chapter I met a woman who said she thought of her visitor as a man, and proceeded to describe a small being, very geode, with round eves like shiny black buttons arid a tiny, almost nonexistent mouth.

This was what I had seen, or a model of it. The suit must have been a form of communication.

Why not simply speak? They have a voice of sorts. I have heard it, others have heard it.

And they can also speak in the center of the head. I wondered if it all had something to do with my request for confirmation. Were the three real ones holding a scarecrow near me because they wanted to see what I would do with my limited physical mobility and did not want to expose a living being to the danger of my touch?

In retrospect, I am glad that I did not reach out. My impression is that these people, if they exist, are more than a little afraid of us: They are deeply afraid. I suppose it was best to smile rather than move my hands toward them, but I wish that there had been touch. Could there have been, or would my fingers have crossed only air? I suppose that I will always wonder.

I asked for confirmation, not proof. It seems that they took me at the exact meaning of the word.