Communion

SIX

No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple — or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should. Except that, to wreak a spilt or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone — from what quarry had then come? — of an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children's hands, or rather the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers.

-FRANZ KAFKA,

" The Building of the Temple"

A STRUCTURE IN THE AIR

Science, History, and Secret Knowledge

What Is Going On?

In the past forty years the question of the real nature of the UFO experience has been addressed by psychologists and psychiatrists, most notably Carl lung, by public personages ranging from presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to Senator Barry Goldwater, by a plethora of scientists, by the United States Air Force and various security agencies, and by the general public.

In addition to all this recent interest there are reports of disk sightings, of airships, of little men in silver clothing, dating back over a thousand years.

I began this search by assuming that I was dealing either with a mental aberration or a visit "from another planet." If I had been asked, I would have said that the nature of my experience indicated that the visitors hadn't been here too long, and that I had been studied by a team of biologists and anthropologists.

Judging from the extraordinary range — not to mention the age — of some of the material I have found, thin cannot be the whole answer. Even if partially true, there is much more to it than a recent arrival of more or less comprehensible visitors. Whatever this may be, a correct and final understanding of it certainly poses an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual challenge of unprecedented complexity and subtlety.

There is so little final knowledge of this phenomenon that it is impossible to do more than speculate about its actual nature. But speculation need not be random; it can be careful and directed.

The visitors could be:

• from another planet or planets.

• from earth, but so different from us that we have not hitherto understood that they were even real.

• from another aspect of space-time, in effect another dimension. from this dimension in space but not in time. Some form of time travel may not be impossible, only unlikely and probably very energy-intensive. For example, if we could convert a human being into some sort of energetic medium — say light or radio waves — then place a reconverter 100,000 light years from earth, a person could step through a door here, feel as if he had come out the other side instantaneously, then step back and find that he was 200,000 years in the future. A cumbersome time machine, but it would work. We cannot assume that time travel is out of the question.

• from within us. I keep returning to this hypothesis because I find it so endlessly interesting and at its core so compelling. I suppose the idea that the gods we create would turn out to be real because we created them has a certain ironic appeal to a modern intellectual.

• a side effect of a natural phenomenon. We know so little about how magnetism and extra-low frequencies of all kinds affect the human organism. Perhaps there are natural electromagnetic anomalies that trip a certain hallucinatory wire in the mind, causing many different people to have experiences so similar as to seem to the result of encounters with the same physical phenomena.

• an aspect of the human species. We have a very ancient tradition of afterlife. The respect with which Neanderthals buried their dead in the Middle East more than thirty thousand years ago suggests that this belief may actually predate our own species.

Maybe we do have an afterlife, but not quite in the way tradition suggests. Maybe you and I are larvae, and the "visitors" are human beings in the mature form. Certainly, we are consuming our planet's resources with at least the avidity of caterpillars on a shrub.

Ancient astronomers of India believed that the Siddhas (human beings who have attained perfection) revolved between the clouds and the moon, having been transformed into a lighter, less material state.

Maybe the ancient and revered concept of human spiritual transformation relates to the emergence of the adult from the larva.

In our society transformation has a bad name, having been associated with various meditation fads and instant success groups. But real transformation has nothing to do with gaming a better life in this world; deliverance does not involve trying to use Buddhist chanting techniques to acquire a new Mercedes, nor is salvation a side effect of Fundamentalist healing services. Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehovah's Witness is the same: It is a matter of delivering one's self into the possession of God. Meister Eckhart puts it very well when he says, "We must become as clear glass through which God can shine." But this involves giving up the "self," which feels just like dying.

My historical survey has found that the core experience of seeing flying disks and small figures goes back a long, long time. If we are dealing with extraterrestrials, would they really have been here, say, for a couple of thousand years and remained hidden all that time? Or did they come recently, and find a way to slip themselves into a preexisting human mythology in order to hide there? Or even more extraordinary, it is possible to consider that they might have really, physically arrived sometime in the future, and then spread out across the whole of our history, in effect going back into time to study us. This might mean that they could be here only a short time — say a few weeks or months-but are carrying out a study that would seem to us from our position in sequential time to have extended over our entire recorded history. Of all the theories, this one alone explains why creatures in 1986 would seem so unaware of our languages, nature, and even our clothing, and yet possibly have a history as fairies and gods going back thousands of years. It might also explain why they are so enigmatic and seemingly immaterial. If time travel can exist and is involved, God only knows what the travelers would look like to us as they reached back from the future. From our perception, they might appear in the skies one moment and have full understanding of our entire history, our cultures, and our languages the next. This would be because they would travel back across the whole of our time in the few moments between discovery and understanding, picking up and assimilating all the details at their leisure, while we would be presented with the illusion that they already knew us well even though they had, in effect, just arrived.

All these hypotheses are interesting, but none of them is in the least provable. They' do suggest, though, the rich range of possibilities that are available for further study.

The central question remains, Is there anything real about all this?

I have spent a great deal of time in the past few months searching what could only be described as a morass of literature on the subject of unidentified entities and their craft. I have talked to scientists who think that it's all nonsense and to scientists who are not so sure. I have read dozens of case histories and met many other people who have had visitor experiences.

Something is happening. This is clear. It is not a version of known phenomena.

In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this mattes than it was saying I decided to do some investigation into the truth of this possibility.

I found myself in a minefield. Real documents that seemed to be false. False documents that seemed to be real. A plethora of "unnamed sources." And drifting through it all, the thin smoke of an incredible story.

There is some small reason to speculate that the United States government may have had some sort of communication from visitors as early as the late 1940s, as well as obtained pieces of crashed disks and the bodies of the occupants.

I base this notion on the two best pieces of evidence I could find, both of which I have personally investigated and confirmed as genuine.

These two pieces of evidence are certainly real, in the sense that they are not wilting hoaxes. Of course people can make mistakes. The first document is a letter written by Dr.

Robert I. Sarbacher, dated November 29, 1983, addressed to Mr. William Steinman, a UFO researcher who had inquired about Sarbacher's s government consulting activities during the late forties. The letter has been offered for publication, but to date has not been fully exposed except in the journal of the Mutual UFO Network, a group of people, many of them scientists and academics, interested in serious study of the phenomenon. The letter was also referred to and quoted in Omni. As Dr. Sarbacher died on July 26, 1986, a few days before I became aware of his letter, I was unable to interview him, but I discussed his case with Mr. Barry Greenwood. co-author of Clear Intent, who had had extensive discussion with him. These discussions revealed that Dr. Sarbacher did not appear to know more than he stated in his letter, but he was quite certain that the facts he did relate were as he remembered them.

Dr. Sarbacher was a Department of Defense Research and Development Board consultant during the Eisenhower administration. Educated at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Princeton, he is the author of Hyper and Ultra-High Frequency Engineering, Research Accrediting at Military Establishments, and the Encyclopedia Dictionary of Electronics and Engineering.

This last book is considered a fundamental contribution to science.

He has been dean of the Graduate School of the Georgia Institute of Technology and has participated as a consultant for the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, in Tennessee, and the navy, as well as the Department of Defense. He has held many corporate directorships, among them as director of the General Sciences Corporation and the Union Life Insurance Company.

Dr. Sarbacher writes, in part:

Relating to my own experiences regarding recovered flying saucers, I had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery and have no knowledge regarding the dates of the recoveries ....

About the only thing I remember at this time is that certain materials reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough. I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully.

There were reports that instruments or people operating these machines were also of very light weight, sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration and acceleration associated with their machinery. I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these "aliens" were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth....

I still do not know why the high order of classification has been given and why the denial of the existence of these devices.

All I can say is that I remember very well the eidetic image. I described the joints of the creature I saw as "insectlike." And my hypnotic transcripts continually refer to my impression that I was dealing with creatures that moved like insects. I did not know of Dr. Sarbacher and his letter until August 9, 1986, months after I had my experiences.

The combination of Dr. Sarbacher's recollections and my own memory of how the visitors acted and treated me may provide insight both into why they are so secretive and why they have been so seemingly indifferent to our rights and dignity with their forceful abductions.

If the visitors are indeed insectlike they could be organized as a hive, and not only as small as I saw but also as light as Dr. Sarbacher recalls being told. They may be no physical match for us, not even in fairly large groups. In addition, it could be that there is very little sense of self associated with individual members of their species. Taken together they might be very formidable, but separate individuals may be almost negligible. If their mind is also a hive structure, it could be that their language is more a biological function than something learned. Maybe it is like the language of earth's hive insects: a complex combination of movements, smells, and aural output. There may even be more to it; one of the greatest of biological mysteries is how hives function, and whether or not a hive can have a group mind.

I will briefly illustrate the profundity of this enigma. There has been a study of bees under way at Princeton for some years. A part of this stud was designed to determine how quickly a hive coup find a food source if it was moved. Each day the food source was moved a measured distance. It was soon discovered that the bees would be waiting for the food source at its anticipated location before it was moved.

What a truly intelligent hive mind might have achieved, and how it communicates with itself and others, may be very hard to know.

My second piece of evidence that the government may know more about this than it is saying is a small but telling one, a press release that was issued in July 1947. In that month an incident took place on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, that is the granddaddy of all the "government has a UFO/alien bodies" rumors. Throughout 1947 there were many reports in the New Mexico newspapers of odd lights. But the first modern flying disk sightings, near Mount Rainier, Washington, had been heavily publicized at the time, and some of the New Mexico sightings may have been a result of confused observations of two V-2 launches at White Sands. One took place on June 12 and another on July 3.

However, on the evening of July 2, something was seen by members of the public in the skies over Roswell and reported locally. This object was brightly lit and crossed the skies in a northwesterly direction. On July 8 the Roswell Army Air Base issued a release which was published, among other places, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The release was Issued by public relations officer Lieutenant Walter Haut, on order from the base commander.

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 9th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomber Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

Later a report was issued to the effect that this disk was a crashed weather balloon.

Maybe it was although it is odd that a crashed balloon would have retained enough of its tension to appear to anybody, even briefly, to be anything other than a flaccid plastic bag and some tinfoil.

Under the headline DISC: SOLUTION COLLAPSES the Chronicle reported that General Roger M. Ramey had stated that the wreckage was "a high-altitude weather observation device" that "consisted of a box kite and a balloon." Later in the same story General Ramey is reported to have said that it was a "starshaped tinfoil target designed to reflect radar." Since General Ramey claimed to have the debris in his office, it is strange that he could not seem to settle on an identification for it. Weather balloons, box kites and radar stars were all familiar to air-base personnel in the late forties, and Air Force officers on active duty would have been unlikely to mistake them. Even less likely to be confused on this matter would have been a working base commander such as Colonel William Blanchard, whose order led to the base press officer issuing the original press release claiming that the debris was a crashed disk. The debris was picked up by air intelligence officers Jesse Marcel and "Cav" Cavett — two more men who would have been unlikely to misidentify items like weather balloons and radar targets.

It seems possible that the debris may have been what the officers who originally saw it thought it was — and what they naturally told the press. They were obviously ignorant of General Ramey's cover-up plans.

Much has been made of the fact that the original discoverer of the device, rancher W. W. Brazel, was quoted by the Associated Press as being "sorry he told about it" and describing what he found as tinfoil and other debris. There are three enormous problems with the credibility of the rancher's statements. The first is that he was held incommunicado for days before he made them. The second is that members of his family have asserted that he made them under duress, and his being held incommunicado, which is a matter of record, would certainly support that assertion. The third problem is more telling because it does not rely on the rancher's verisimilitude at all. It is that none of the officers originally involved ever thought that they were dealing with the remains of known objects or they never would have allowed their press release to be issued in the first place.

On looking back through old copies of the Skeptical Inquirer, I discovered an article in the April 1986 issue entitled "Crash of the Crashed Saucer Claim." As it refers to the same incident I have been discussing, I researched it in some detail. Its primary assertion, I am sorry to say, was not supportable at all. The article claimed that the whole busyness began with a story in a book by Frank Scully entitled Behind the Flying Saucers (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1950). I obtained a copy of this book and discovered that there is no relationship whatsoever between its rather dubious tales and the affair in Roswell in 1947. And I also obtained a photostat of the San Francisco Chronicle article from which I have quoted. The photostat is hated July 9, 1947, a year before the "events" covered in t e book. To connect the book and the earlier incident in any way strikes me as an example of poor scholarship and seems not to be supportable. In addition, the Skeptical Inquirer article makes much of rancher Brazel's statements, as quoted by the Associated Press, but does not acknowledge in any way that he made them after a period of being held against his will, and in the presence of the An-Force officers who had been interrogating him. If all he found was a crashed weather balloon, why did they interrogate him? A more logical course would have been to interrogate and severely discipline the officers responsible for the "false" press release. There was no reason to hold an innocent citizen who had made an innocent mistake. Strangely, based on the service information I was able to obtain from the Air Force, I found no evidence of disciplinary action taken against any of the officers involved in the press release.

Was Mr. Brazel interrogated in order to induce him to change his story? There seems to be no other logical conclusion. The inescapable fact of the Roswell affair is that a group of professionally competent Air Force officers caused the publication of a press release claiming that the Air Force had recovered a crashed fling disk, after observing the debris. Only after this' release was published was any ahem pt made to change the story. Even then, neither the release nor the professional competence of its author, his base commander, or the concerned intelligence officers was ever called. into question, publicly or-as far as I was able to discernin internal Air Force procedures. Instead the original witness, who was in no position to know what he had actually seen, was placed under duress and compelled to change his story. Even this process took a substantial period of time, which suggests that the man may have been clinging to the truth despite the frightening situation he was in. The recent attempt to debunk this story in the Skeptical Inquirer was not satisfactory. As a matter of fact, its author, it turns out, takes the unusual position that all unidentified-flying-object sightings can be explained. I have not found many scientists willing to make such a strong assertion about these transitory and poorly understood phenomena, and I wonder if the Inquirer has not stepped beyond the limits of healthy skepticism in its recent article.

That there are deep secrets connected with the area of unidentified flying objects cannot really be denied. In the 1970s Senator Barry Goldwater was denied access to secret documents concerning apparent research into UFOs being conducted at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The National Security agency has gone all the way to the Supreme Court to protect some of its documents about the disks.

The book Clear Intent by Lawrence Fawcett arid Barry J. Greenwood contains legitimate documents obtained under the Freedom of. Information Act that make it essentially impossible to contend that government personnel have not, at the least, had some very strange experiences over the years. It is essential reading because of its coherence and its clarity.

Fawcett and Greenwood prove that some extraordinarily strange things have happened, and that the government has kept these things secret.

In 1966 a "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (the Condon Report) was undertaken at the University of Colorado. When it was issued in 1969. the Condon Report was instrumental in causing me to lose what small interest I had in flying disks and related phenomena. I read the preface, and saw that the project leader apparently thought that there was nothing of interest going on. From that I concluded that flying saucers weren't real and forgot about them.

Recently, I read the Condon Report more carefully and discovered that the internal conclusions are at variance with Condon's preface! His putting his thoughts at the front had the effect of hiding the actual realities of the report. It clearly states that a significant percentage of flying disk cases remain unexplained.

At the inception of the Condon Report, Robert Low, the business administrator of the University of Colorado at the time, wrote to his superiors the following memo: Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by non-believers who, although they couldn't possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally-objective study, but to the scientific community, would present a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.

At the outset of the project. Condon told a public meeting: "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing to it. But I'm not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year." That is an unsound position to take at the inception of a study. Upon saying that, he should have resigned as project director.

Many of the scientists who participated in the study disagreed with London, especially after they saw the data. Some resigned in protest. One of them, Dr. David Saunders, published a book about it called UFOs? Yes! a few weeks before London announced his negative conclusion in November 1964.

The Condon Report ended the public interest of the United States government in the whole subject of unknown flying objects. Subsequent to the government's turning away from study in this area, very quietly the number of cases of people being taken by the visitors seems to have begun to rise.

Scientists nationwide have responded to the government's public position by refusing to take the matter seriously. Many people of the highest reputation have been sucked into this stance.

When the policy of denial was instituted, I doubt if anybody ever dreamed that the visitors would one day start marching into the homes of America in the middle of the night.

But it appears that this may be happening. If so, then the public has ended up on the Front line. And the visitors are not only entering our homes, they are entering our brains. And we do not know what they are doing to us.

It is not possible for there to be a more provocative or intimate intrusion. If, as seems clear, we cannot control the visitors in any way, then we human beings must create among ourselves a community of support. The only lasting damage I can find has not to do with any direct side effects of the visitors' activities, but with people being isolated with their experiences because of the indifference or incomprehension of competent scientific professionals.

The fact that respected public institutions such as the government and the scientific and medical establishments do not. consider this a real problem hurts people, and hurts them badly. The lack of social support irrevocably isolates them when they need help the most.

When they read false debunking stories or see others like themselves made the butts of jokes in the press, they are in effect assaulted a second time by their own society.

Cornell University professor Dr. Carl Sagan has stated many times that there is no evidence that unidentified aerial objects-and presumably visitors exist. To be precise, there is no publicly acknowledged physical artifact. The large body of encounter memories. some heavily freighted with imagination, others more sparse, amount to an artifact of something.

And there is a substantial body of carefully authenticated photographic evidence of the devices themselves that is very hard to refute in any way except on an emotional level. Of course, there are also liars who claim contact, and faked photographs — some of them skillfully faked.

It appears that there is more than a shred of evidence that there are visitors here, and that they are doing something that involves its. It is also obvious from their secrecy that they want very much to hide. Can it be that the government is inadvertently helping them do this, or even that they have somehow compelled it to act as it does? Certainly the combination of visitor and government secrecy has led to profound public confusion. We do not know what is going on There is no publicly available reason to conclude that our earth is the object of visitation, or to support any of the other hypotheses that have been advanced. Indeed, any such assertions would be premature.

Maybe the visitor experience is what happens when the human mind looks into the mirror. . . and discovers that its own reflection is not only real but fearful to see.

Something is here. But what? And from where?

We come at last to the essence of the mystery.

Ancient Future

The first instance of an official attempt to explain flying disks, oddly enough, is not American. In Japan, General Yoritsune observed while on maneuvers that there were mysterious lights swinging and circling in the southern sky. The visitation continued through the night. In the morning the general ordered a group of scientific investigators to determine what had caused the strange disturbance. After consultation they announced that "it was only the wind making the stars sway." They are to be forgiven the profundity of their confusion, for the date of this occurrence was September 24, 1235, 751 years ago.

More recently, the distinguished Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel, in his 1953 book Flying Saucers, explained that a major sighting, carried out by professional observers with good equipment, was "an atmospheric lensing effect." According to navy physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, critical errors were made by Dr. Menzel in comparing his own tensing theory with the data reported observers. Specifically, the angle at which the observation took place was too great to allow Tensing, even under Dr. Menzel's hypothesis. However, in his discussion of the sighting, Dr. Menzel did not mention the angle actually reported but assumed it was one at which it might have been possible to observe lensing.

The observation I refer to occurred at 10:30 A.M. on April 24, 1949, and was made by Mr. Charles B. Moore and a group of U.S. Navy trainees observing a weather balloon with a theodolite. Mr. Moore observed both an unidentified object and the balloon at the same time.

He noted the azimuths and elevations of the object as it moved, and it was noted that the azimuths changed by about 190 degrees during the sixty-second sighting, and that the central angle between the initial and final sightings was 120 degrees. This information was filed with the Navy Special Devices Center.

I found that Dr. Menzel's description of the sighting in Flying Saucers is not the same as in the report. He claimed that what the observers saw was a mirage of the balloon, appearing at first above the balloon and moving straight downward until it was below and to one side of the balloon. But the report clearly states that the object appeared at first so near the balloon that Mr. Moore initially thought it was the balloon. The balloon remained in place while the object moved off to the north.

Dr. Menzel was well aware that a mirage cannot appear at a large angle away from the object that is the source of the mirage. In the appendix to Flying Saucers, Dr. Menzel calculated that the largest angle between the balloon and its mirage would be no greater than one fourth of a degree. But Moore's measurements were far different from that: To make the mirage theory stick, Moore's measurements would have had to have been off by about a hundred degrees. Nowhere in his book did Dr. Menzel mention the actual sighting angles reported by Mr. Moore.

Seven hundred fifty years, and it's still "the wind making the stars sway." That is much of the explanation that has been offered for flying disks and related phenomena by those who are emotionally or intellectually unable to admit the reality of the mystery. It is not because they are bad scientists, not at all. To a degree some of them may be shaking hands with elements of the intelligence community that have hidden information about the phenomena, but this is mere conjecture at this point. A far more compelling reason for this irrational behavior is suggested by a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969 by Dr. Robert L. Hall, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois:

"We might describe the body of scientific knowledge accepted at any given time and the people who bear that knowledge as constituting an unusually strong belief system which resists inconsistent items of knowledge even more powerfully than a layman defending his political beliefs .... The very strength of our resistance to the evidence on UFOs suggests to me that there is clearly a phenomenon of surpassing importance here."

Since that paper was delivered there has been added a new element, which is that of scientifically educated people with Fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs. These "scientists" have joined forces with the debunkers, even founding official-sounding 'skeptics' groups" that have Creationist motives.

The Institute for Creation Research has stated, "To date there is not one iota of real evidence in either science or the Bible that intelligent beings were either evolved or created anywhere in the universe except on earth. In any case, it is the planet earth which is the focal point of God's interest m the universe. There is no need to look, because there couldn't be anyone out there." The banality of this position makes it more pitiful than frightening, but there are competent scientists, such as Drs. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, who recently published a brilliant book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which elegantly states a similarly unsound case, albeit from a much more intellectually substantial viewpoint than that of Creationism. The weakness of even the most sound "man-centered" case is our striking lack of samples from which to extrapolate predictions. We have one sample, and one only: this planet. If we could observe conditions on, say, a few million planets, we might be able to make more viable predictions, as we would then have a sample base comprising at least a small proportion of the probable planetary matter in the universe.

As the emotional charge of the debunkers and Creationists diminishes the impact. of their position. so the paucity of samples reduces the vitality of more coherent man-centered arguments.

The truth is that we do not and cannot know the actual condition of life elsewhere in the universe because we are presently too ignorant of conditions outside our own immediate solar neighborhood. However, judging from the amount of evidence available, it may be possible to expand our knowledge simply by taking the flying disk and abductee phenomena seriously.

We may or may not find visitors, but we would certainly find a body of data so compelling and multidimensional in its complexity that merely stating useful hypotheses about it is going to be a major challenge not only to the physical and behavioral sciences but also to the science and art of language.

This matter is a garden of luminous weed through which only a fool would dash yelling any doctrine at all, whether it be that of the Creationist and debunker or that of the UFO true believer. Even to approach the idea of the visitors, it is necessary to study a whole history of tall stories, bizarre tales, and — just possibly —truths.

It is our American habit to assume that there is something irrelevant-even a little silly-about the past. Our relationship to former times is expressed as nostalgia, not history.

When our government first started studying "flying saucers" in the late forties, it never even occurred to anybody official to consider having a look at the past.

Here are two stories:

In the little town of Merkel, Texas, on April 26, 1897, a group of people going home from church at night allegedly saw a heavy object dragging along the ground. They followed it until it bounce across a railroad track and caught on one of the rails. It was an anchor, tied to a rope. When they looked up, they saw an "airship" with lighted windows and a headlight on the front brighter than the light of a locomotive. Ten minutes passed, and soon a man was seen coming down the rope. He was small, and wearing a blue sailor suit. When he saw the people he cut the rope and the ship sailed off into the night, leaving the anchor behind.

The small beings I first saw were dressed in dark blue coveralls. This is not a unique description of the visitors' garb; perhaps it is a sort of night uniform. But then there are the kobolds, dwarfs who stalked the mines of medieval Germany and gave their name to the mineral cobalt . . . and cobalt blue. Why? They wore dark blue coveralls, too.

One Sunday in the borough of Cloera in Ireland the parishioners of the Church of St. Kinarius heard a noise on the roof. They went outside and saw an anchor embedded in the eaves. The anchor line rose up into the sky where there floated a ship on the air. A man leaped overboard and "swam" down to the anchor. After an altercation with the parishioners, he cut the rope and managed to return to the ship, which sailed away. The anchor remained in the church, but has since been lost, since this incident took place not in 1897, but around A.D. 1211.

What do these stories mean?

When people in the present time find themselves face to face with the visitors, they often think that they are among the first to see them. They do not remember what happened to St. Anthony of Alexandria, the founder of the Monastic movement, in A.D. 300. He was walking through an isolated canyon when he came upon a small figure, "a manikin with hooded snout, horned forehead and extremities like goat's feet." There was a brief exchange of words between this small creature and the saint, who ended the conversation by pounding his cane on the ground and announcing, "Woe to thee Alexandria, who instead of God worshippest monsters! Woe to thee, harlot city, into which have flowed together the demons of the whole world!" Needless to say, the creature fled.

During the reign of Pepin in the early Middle Ages, the French were bothered by apparitions that were seen marching through the sky, camped out in tents on the reaches of heaven, and sometimes in "wonderfully constructed aerial ships" that flew past in veritable squadrons. People were annoyed at the presence of all this unquenchable grandeur and happiness, and both Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Debonair, imposed penalties on the "Tyrants of the Air." As counterpropaganda, the sylphs kidnapped people and took them to their airy abode, showing them their world. But when the people were sent home, they were all burned at the stake without a second's hesitation. Presumably they had just enough time to scream out their stories before being engulfed in the flames.

It is not surprising to me that Marius Dewilde, a resident of Quaroble, a French village near Belgium, was so secretive after he encountered two dark alien figures standing near some railroad tracks in the middle of the night in September 1954. Mr. Dewilde, according to Jacques Vallee in his book Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Refinery, 1969), gave the French Air Police some calcinated rock from the site of the event, and it was handed over to an agency so secret that its name could not be mentioned by the Ministry of Defense.

Perhaps the keepers of these secrets across the world ought to reflect on the ageless nature of this experience. I wonder if St. Anthony's manikin and the medieval French Air Tyrants should join the calcinated rock in deep classification.

Perhaps this would be superfluous, as one "abductee" gave the calcinated earth from her backyard to Budd Hopkins, who has no access to classification procedures. Laboratory analysis of the dirt indicated that it had been subjected to intense heat. Dirt from the same garden had to be burned for eight hours at 800 degrees to achieve a similar effect, and there was no site evidence at all of a lightning strike or even of storm activity on the night the calcination occurred.

As the ages roll along, it could be that what changes is not our visitors but our way of installing them in the culture. Maybe they did not come here in 1946, 1897, 1235, or even A.D. 300. I have reported that the being I have become familiar with looks like Ishtar. Maybe she is: She said she was old.

My point is that there may be far more to this than science or government or even religion can separately address. It would seem that our civilization is not paying attention to what mad be the central archetypal and mythological experience of the ale. If so, then this is the first time that man has simply refused to respond to the ghosts and the gods. Is that why they have become so physical, so real, dragging people out of bed like rapists in the night — because they must have our notice in order to somehow be confirmed in their own truth?

This may be primarily a matter of visions and chimeras battering at the door of physical reality. They are not simply flickering effects of the mind. Something is out there, and it wants in.

There are many instances of the surprising and subtle relationship between the visitor phenomenon and the hidden life of the mind. Understand, I am not presenting a hypothesis that denies that the visitors may be real beings from another planet and/or reality. All I am suggesting is that we do no know what they are, only that they are — and our relationship with them is very strange indeed.

During the great northeastern power blackout of 1965, actor Stuart. Whitman saw an object and heard a strange whistling sound outside his twelfth-story window. He then heard a message to the effect that the disaster was "a warning to the world."

The first instance of an unidentified flying object causing a blackout was seen in a play, Twilight Bar, written by Arthur Koestler in 1933. In the play an enormous meteor flies over a town with a whistling sound and all the lights go out. In the play, the meteor is "a warning to the world." But this does not disprove the reality of the phenomenon: On the contrary, it suggests that something very real may have communicated an actual warning to Stuart Whitman — something that was simultaneously true to his inner life and to the world around us all.

A 1950 novel, The Flying Saucer by Bernard Newman, probably recorded the first instance of a flying disk having an effect on a car ignition. Only after that date did reports of flying disks killing car engines become common. But I cannot assert that the disks don't really kill car engines, and very possibly because of something about the mysterious drives that power the ships.

In December 1985 a man had trouble with his car's electrical system after he had been taken by visitors. The car lost all electrical power and could not be restarted even by jumping the battery. It was towed to a repair shop where nothing was found to be wrong The battery recharged to normal by itself during the night. I know that this story is true because the man it happened to was me, and the problem manifested itself the morning after my December 26 experience.

Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination and reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are — different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic's freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.

There are many stories of visitors giving people secret knowledge. Much of it has proved to be worthless or worse, as was the information I got about electromagnetic motors.

One fascinating case of transmission of knowledge dates from the year 1491, when the Milanese mathematician Jerome Cardan found himself involved in a visitor encounter. When he asked his visitors about the cause of the universe, "The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish. . . "

This is not a fifteenth-century idea. Upon contemplation, it emerges to a degree as a concept from Zen. More than that, though, it is a quantum-physical idea, suggesting that it is the observer who injects reality into the phenomenon observed.

Far from being a fifteenth-century idea, it is an eleventh-century Arabic idea. Did it get to Dr. Cardan via the sylphs, or was it transmitted by more conventional means? There is no other record of it in European scientific and religious literature of the period. If Dr. Cardan obtained the idea in a conventional manner, then what would have been his motive for risking his life to the Inquisition by admitting communion with the sylphs, who were viewed as demons? He was for his period an exceptionally rigorous thinker. He was sane and honest. A modern equivalent of what he did would be for a renowned physicist to announce that he had obtained important information in a UFO experience, but could offer no proof that the experience had happened. Perhaps Dr. Cardan was simply too honest to hide the truth.

In recent years many of the taken have reported having sexual experiences with the visitors. Currently among them this is a source of great disquiet, as will be observed from comments in the colloquy of the taken that follows this section.

It is terrifying, of course. But reflect also that mankind has had a sexual relationship with the fairies, the sylphs, the incubi, the succubi, and the denizens of the night from the very beginning of time. Nowadays men find themselves on examining tables in flying saucers with vacuum devices attached to their privates, while women must endure the very real agony of having their pregnancies disappear, a torment that I, as a man, doubt I can really imagine.

One of the women I know who has experienced this horror seems to me now like an anguished hawk, humiliated by her torment. I must add that no trivial explanation for what happened to her is viable: Her own gynecologist was deeply troubled and confused by the whole affair. To find some glib explanation for it is an insult not only to his skill and her veracity but also to her suffering, and to the worth of human suffering.

The Roman historian Suetonius maintained that Caesar Augustus was the product of relations between his mother and an incubus. Plato was also believed to be the issue of some sort of peculiar coupling, as was Merlin the magician, born of an incubus and one of the daughters of Charlemagne.

In a treatise called On Little Demons, Incubi and Succubi, written by Father Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari de Ameno in the latter part of the seventeenth century, some phenomenal affairs are recounted. One woman found herself awakened by a "fine voice, a high-pitched whistling sound." (I note in passing that when I first read this my blood went cold to remember that the thing that haunted me in Austin in 1967 made such a high-pitched sound. And in the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious treatise against witches, demons are said to speak in reedy voices.)

The shadowy being with the high voice then announced its love for the lady. She was kissed so softly that it felt like cotton touching her cheeks. This went on night after night. The lady tried an exorcist, but to no avail. Eventually the incubus appeared as a boy with golden curls. Still, she retained her honor. He began to take her things, to strike her little poking blows, and to bother her in other ways. One night he built around her bed a wall of stones so high that she and her husband had to use a ladder to get out. I will let the good father recount the climactic assault of the lovelorn visitor:

"On the day of St. Stephen, the lady's husband had invited several military friends to dine with him. To honor his guests he had prepared a respectable dinner. While they were washing their hands according to the custom-hop!-suddenly the table vanished, along with the dishes, the cauldrons, the dates, and all the earthenware in the kitchen, the hugs, the bottles, the glasses, too. You can imagine the surprise, the amazement of the guests."

Indeed.

The teasing continued. In her efforts to rid herself of the incubus, the lady had taken to wearing a monk's robes. She was going to mass in the midst of a large crowd when all her clothes were suddenly whipped off her body and she was left naked in the middle of the throng. What could she do? She hurried home. Her torments continued, the good father relates with relish, "for many years."

Our present relation to the incubi and succubi may very well center on real flesh-and-blood visitors who first appeared here recently. But if so, then it also has a most profound and unexpected human dimension, for they are entering our consciousness where our gods and goblins live.

A famous case of sexual involvement with visitors took place in Brazil in 1957. The victim, Antonio Villas-Boas, had experienced a number of instances of strange lights appearing in his fields on the days prior to his experience. He was running his tractor one night when it died. Mr. Villas-Boas then saw that an object had landed in front of him. He was stripped, washed with a sponge, arid taken inside the device. He was left lying on a table, naked. Sometime later he was astounded to see a naked woman, seemingly human, enter the room. Her hair was blond, parted in the center. Her face was extremely wide, her eyes blue and slanted. The face ended in a pointed chin. Her lips were very thin, nearly invisible . She was shorter than he was. Actually, she sounds very much like a cross between the individual I saw so clearly as the eidetic image and a human being . . . unless she was simply a visitor wearing what they thought would be a disguise. She made love to him, pointed to her belly and then to the sky, and left him. Later he was taken into a room with some males and attempted to steal a clock. As in dozens and dozens of tales in the fairy lore, he failed to get his artifact.

Why? Either because the visitors are good at keeping artifacts from us, or because they exist somewhere between reality and dream, and our inner selves know that we can never take into our hands things from the factory of the mind.

On December 29, 1980, a terrible event of some unknown kind took place near Huffman, Texas. (Oddly enough, this occurred on the same day and at about the same hour that a spectacular and controversial sighting was taking pace halfway across the world in Rendlesam Forest, England.) A group of people observed a diamond-shaped object floating in the sky, glowing with a fierce light. The object was surrounded by helicopters. Some of these people were exposed to heat and apparently radiation. They brought suit in federal court, assuming that they had been the victims of a secret aircraft gone wrong. There was a lot of amused scoffing, of course, and the case drags on to this day. Meanwhile, these poor people have had their health shattered — a double mastectomy has been performed on one victim — and the government stonewalls.

The most interesting thing about all this material, the most important, haunting thing, is that in the past half-century it has slowly stripped itself of all the illusion, the armies in the sky, the fairies, the incubi, the glorious creatures of old, and come down to what it really is: a difficult experience, terribly enigmatic, the very existence of which implies that we very well may be something different from what we believe ourselves to be, on this earth for reasons that may not yet be known to us, the understanding of which will be an immense challenge.

Even the issue of where science stands in relation to this material has been with us forever. The first debunker was probably the Bishop Adelbard of Lyons, who in the time of Charlemagne saved from an enraged crowd three men and a woman who had been seen climbing down from an airship by half the citizens of the town. They claimed to have been taken for a period of days. The bishop saved them by announcing to the crowd that the whole thing was obviously impossible, and that people had not seen what they thought they had seen, nor had the poor victims been in any airship, because there were no airships. Thus the first debunker had the distinction of saving the lives of the first abductees.

People have not climbed down ropes from faire ships since the turn of the century.

Perhaps the parallel world has also had a technological revolution, or the mind of man has created new possibilities in its secret universe, or the dead have discovered wonders about which the living only dream. Maybe there really is another species living upon this earth, the fairies, the gnomes, the sylphs, vampires, goblins. who attach to reality along a different line than we do, but who know and love us as we do the wild things of the woods . . . who, perhaps, are trying to save us from ourselves, or whose lives are inextricably linked to our own. If we die, must the gods, the fairies, the elves then fall into some blue glen of unknowing? Will their secret world go cold without us, or will there only be less excitement?

If intelligence is normally centered in a hive or group context, a species such as mankind with individual independence of will might be a precious thing indeed, an almost inexhaustible reservoir of new thoughts and ways of acting.

Up to a point, there would be a tendency for the hive minds to isolate us, both to protect our freshness and to protect themselves from us. But then, as we matured and came to understand them more clearly, the potential to enter into a relationship with us would emerge.

For such a species, old and with its single enormous mind essentially alone, that potential might eventually overwhelm even the most rigid instinct to self-preservation, especially if we were to learn a way of approaching them that would not threaten them.

This thought leads inescapably to the issue of modern abductions and encounters. They seem qualitatively more "real" than those of the past, although the extended visitations experienced in France, Japan, and other places in earlier times also imply wide contact.

In An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope said the following: So man, who here seems principal alone

Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.

Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal,

'Tis but a part me see, and not a whole.

The Hidden Choir

Budd Hopkins has developed great sensitivity to the problems people face after they encounter the visitors. He has dealt with more than a hundred cases, and knows the pattern of response. When he suggested that I meet the loose support group of others m the New York area, I was at first relieved. Then I became uneasy. "Don't worry," he said, "everybody half believes that they're dreaming all of this up. And that's the healthiest way. Nobody is going to show you an extraterrestrial belt buckle and blow your mind."

Still, I was not eager to meet the other "abductees." Just a few days before, I had interviewed a person who believed that he had been contacted by people who "gosh, just looked like the most beautiful gods and goddesses you ever saw," who explained to him that the world was soon going to end and that the "chosen" would be taken to live on a moon of Jupiter. I hope it isn't lo. This man described a familiar initial visitation, but had altered the terrifying and uncontrollable parts into a structure of belief congenial to him.

I expected to encounter people who hungered for belonging, for publicity, who tended to the imaginative and the grandiose, and who were a bit paranoid. I anticipated that their psychological deficiencies would be obvious to me.

This was all very far off the mark. They wanted nothing to do with publicity. They demanded anonymity. They were a group of average people. I cannot seriously maintain arguments that they are insane, or even particularly unbalanced. They were all anxious, that was obvious. Under the circumstances any other reaction would have been abnormal.

The group was for the most part rather hardheaded and not unusually imaginative. Among them were a business executive, a cosmetologist, a scientist, a hairdresser, a former museum curator, a musician, a dancer — in short a cross section of any big city. They clung firmly to the idea that they might have been dreaming, clung to it, I thought, as to a bit of driftwood in a storm.

I found that my experience had many similarities to those of the support group. We have almost all seen versions of the same creatures. Some of these are small and quick, wearing gray or blue uniforms. Others are taller, graceful, and thin, some with almond eyes and others with round eyes. I have also seen, in my childhood, a very commanding presence in white, which had light blue eyes and skin as white as a sheet. This came back to me in the form of disjointed memories apparently dislodged by all the thinking I had been doing about this subject.

Other relatively common observations are the seemingly ubiquitous dray table with the solid base, the smallness of the visitors, their large, black eyes devoid of iris or pupil, and the fact that there is either more than one type or more than one species appearing in the same context. Many of us also seemed to have relationships with particular beings.

Their skin tone seems to be gray, with other overtones. When they speak aloud, it is sometimes with a high, squeaking sound, other times in a deep bass. They can also create words inside the center of their Beads. One occasionally feels from them powerful emotions.

Other times they are as emotionless as stones. People report various smells, primarily pungent. Light, both as a means of anesthesia and as a medium of transport, is commonly described. "I rose up the shaft of light" and "The light hit me and I was totally paralyzed" are typical statements. Electromagnetic effects are also commonly reported, primarily malfunctioning cars, television sets, and home lights.

A number of us have also been in a small operating theater, but nobody seems to remember what transpires there. One woman was left to walk around in such a place by herself.

Interestingly, one sound that is reported other than the various voices is a very low-pitched noise. There is a small body of research suggesting that low-frequency sound may have biological effects, especially in the area of disorientation.

There is as well a striking symbolic consistency, which lies hidden within many of the accounts I have heard and read. It has almost no reference to modern Western culture, and so is not particularly likely to have been drawn from some general pool of background symbols.

But the symbol is very ancient, as it happens, and through much of human history was tremendously important. I have had a lifelong interest in it — really, an obsession. The others m the colloquy all noted its presence. It is mentioned in many of the tapes people have allowed me to hear, and it appears m the drawings they have made. It is an incidental, though.

Before now, nobody has seen it as a general symbol of the visitors.

This symbol is the triangle Buckminster Fuller. in his autobiography, called it the "fundamental building block of the universe." It is the central symbol of growth in many ancient traditions. An understanding of it is the key to the riddle of the Sphinx and to the pyramid as the mark of eternal life. G. I. Gurdjieff relates it to the "three holy forces" of creation and it is the main sense of the Holy Trinity.

I had a pair of triangles etched on my arm in February 1986. "Dr. X," a physician in Arles, France, who prefers to remain anonymous, had a triangular rash appear around his navel after his experience.

Sifting through this colloquy will be the symbol of the triangle. While the colloquy was taking place neither I nor any of the participants was aware of the symbol's importance.

When we have contemplated sending a message into space, we have thought to send some core symbol — a prime number, perhaps, or the value of pi. The transmission of an isosceles triangle would not be an invalid choice.

On the night of April 13, 1986, eleven of us met at the home of Budd Hopkins. We were selected simply on the basis of the fact that we live in the New York area and could come.

During the colloquy I persistently asked that specific experiences be recounted, but did not have too much success. To many of these people, the details of what happened are an extremely private matter. And given the shrillness of the debunkers eager to accuse them of everything from charlatanism to insanity, and elements of the press so eager to scoff, I could not really blame them.

The purpose of the colloquy was not primarily to discuss the details of being taken, but rather the experience of coping with it, of trying to live a normal life without knowing for certain what is real, of facing the risk of personal and public ridicule, of finding one's way in a world that has suddenly become very strange indeed.

Needless to say, none of these people would allow his or her name to be used. The only real names in the colloquy are thus my own and that of Budd Hopkins.

This is our hidden choir:

Mary, cosmetologist, age 29

Jenny, dancer, age 22

Mark, museum curator and artist, age 55

Sally, business executive, age 36

Joan, beautician, age 23

Sam, scientist, age 39

Fred, musician, age 34

Pat, housewife, age 35

Amy, Pat's mother, age 56

Betty, executive, age 43

Whitley, writer, age 40

This is our colloquy.

Whitley: "Budd, I'd like it if you could begin. Even though you aren't one, you're still one of us."

Budd: "I'll tell you what I think would be the most interesting thing — rather than tell their experience, why not focus on the idea of how everybody feels about their experience?"

Whitley: "But say what happened to you so that there'll be some perspective in people's minds when they read it."

Budd: "The most valuable thing, really, is for everybody to say how you handle this, how you fit it into the rest of your life if you do, and how seriously you take it, and how important it seems to be to you and so forth. That's very crucial."

Joan: "Sometimes I have a problem feeling the importance of what's going on now, as far as things that take place in the world and jobwise, and the whole attraction of life itself, because I start thinking that this is so mediocre compared to what's out there. What we're doing — people put so much attention and so much pressure on whatever they're doing in their lives, sometimes it gets to seem like we're such jerks, and I say to myself, 'it doesn't mean anything.' There's something that's gonna happen soon, and this doesn't mean anything, what we're doing. And they're trying to tell us something, but nobody's listening."

Whitley: "What happened to you?"

Joan: "I'll tell you one thing. I was shown a picture of another city they are building. What we're doing now to our planet is killing it little by little, and it's going to come to a point where there's not going to be anything left. I think that they're getting ready to start another world. And there will be people who are a part of that. And it scares me, because I have trouble dealing with what's going on in my life now because I start thinking, This isn't really what's happening. It is ending, and they're telling us that, an they've implied that to me. What we are doing is killing ourselves. And that's scary."

Whitley: "Any other thoughts?"

Jenny: "I think what she's saying in terms of the mediocrity of what we're going through is only in the eyes of people around us, but that the important thing is right here, and some of us really understand what is going on, and maybe they are not 'them,' but they are us and we are them, so if you call them 'them,' and say, 'They are looking at us, they are doing this to us,' it's not right. They are us and we are them, and so. . ."

Whitley: "What happened to you?"

Jenny: "I'm not really sure yet because I've only had one hypnosis, but I remembered something from when I was five years old, a very scary experience, and I've always blocked it. From the time I was five I was afraid. And I saw things in my house, I saw people in my house, and I would wake up screaming."

Whitley: "You mean, not human people?"

Jenny: "I don't know, they were shadows. Small things. I saw once this green thing dripping down the wall. It looked like a very bright green triangular light. And I went screaming into my mother's bedroom, and she said, 'Just go to sleep. Obviously a dream.' And so those are the kinds of things I saw from the time I was about five, and I never connected it with anything, until about six months ago my sister said something to me about it, an experience that she had that she remembered me being in, and I remembered it but I'd thought it was a dream."

Whitley: "In February I had a triangular piece taken out of my skin on my arm."

Mary: "The best way for me to live with this is just not to believe it. I mean, there's a part of me that doesn't. The part of me that lives every day doesn't."

Whitley: "How much of this experience have you had?"

Mary: "A lot, since I was about five."

Whitley: "How much, would you say? How many times?"

Mary: "Seven. Eight, nine, ten."

Whitley: "Has anything happened to anybody else you know?"

Mary: "My whole family. Neighbors, quite a few friends. From before I ever knew them.

We've all just come together. Several generations."

Budd: "You said that there was one figure, one man —"

Mary: "There's always been one central figure."

Budd: "And he was nice?"

Joan: "Was he tall?"

Mary: "No, they were all little guys. He was my protector. Everybody else who was around was always really very — they were doing a job they needed to do, and that was it. There was no — they weren't angry or mad or happy about it. They were just doing what they had to do. But this one guy, in all instances, this one guy — when I got scared he calmed me down, when I felt bad he made me feel better." (Note: Others have had a very similar experience of a "friend" or a "protector." The perceived sex of the guide is not consistently opposite, but very often is.)

Whitley: "What does he look like?"

Mary: "He looked like all the rest, really."

Whitley: "Which is?"

Mary: "The same small people, you know, four and a half or five feet tall. With the gray skin and the large heads and the big, fluidy, black eyes that went on forever."

Whitley: "In other words, you wouldn't identify him as a human being."

Mary: "No, not in my town, anyway. New York is a different story. Regardless of whether or not any of it was anything more than a dream or what, I know the emotions I've had to deal with through the years have been real all the anxiety that doesn't have any source."

Whitley: "Any of your kids?"

Mary: "Yeah."

Whitley: "How do you feel about that?"

Mary: "That's the only part of it that really upsets me. I guess it's Just the mother instinct in me. I want to know everything that's happening to my children and I want to be there when it's happening. I don't like the idea of someone screwing around with my kids, and me not knowing about it. They're so defenseless, you know, it's not fair. As if we aren't all as defenseless as children, but somehow my mothering instincts are the only thing that turn me on, make me mad. There's only one thing that I'm really angry about, and I don't really understand that. I told Pat, I don't feel like being angry for me, anyway, is going to work. I have enough trouble dealing with everyday life. There are a lot of stresses, and I don't cope with stress really excellently well. I just get by, like everybody else. So I don't see any point in inflicting any more stress on myself by getting all worked up and angry over something I have no control over. Something that no matter how damn mad I get, it ain't gonna do no good. I'm just gonna make myself get worse. So I haven't whipped up a lot of anger over this, other than about my kids."

Whitley: "So basically, you just decided —"

Mary: "Live with it."

Whitley: "Keep it from getting too real?"

Mary: "I believe something is happening to everybody. At least everybody here. I don't know why it is more easy to accept things from all of you than I find it to accept them for myself. Like saying it seems more real when it happens to somebody else."

Fred: "I just want to say that I think we're dealing with so many not-so-obvious things. At least one thing which I think is obvious and important is the fact that we meet. I think that's important. If there's anything we can understand, it's the meeting. The experience — I speak for myself, I don't know how traumatic it was for others — it was fine for me. It was mind opening for me. It's thanks to this little group that I'm getting to, know — love — that's what's important. The rest is up for grabs."

Whitley: "You want to say anything about what happened to you?"

Fred: "Not really."

Budd: "When people first come, they say, 'I feel it's like family."'

Whitley: "That's what I feel. It's very strange." (I was privately contending with the fact that the one called Mary in the colloquy was instantly recognizable to me, and I did not know why.)

Mary: "Strange for me, too."

Pat: "I think the most interesting thing is that I went to a meeting up in Massachusetts and there was a whole bunch of people-and for some reason three people who had been abducted all came together in the middle of the room. It was very strange, and we all knew immediately. And there was nobody else in the room who had any experience —"

Budd: "Don't count on it."

Pat: "I'm not saying that. What's interesting is that they knew. They found each other immediately. We huddled around each other. It was almost like we needed to be together. And it was very strange."

Betty: "I think you get to the point where you almost want to detach yourself from the situation, because you'll really just lose your mind. You have to look at yourself like an outside observer. That's just not happening to you."

Sally: "I think that's the reason it's so difficult to piece it together when it's happening, because while it's happening you're saying this is not happening to me, so part of the mind shuts it off and part of the mind is having to absorb it. So I think that's the reason it's so confusing when it's happening. At least that's what I felt. I felt, really, that my whole mind was just falling apart. It was just crumbling."

Whitley: "What was happening to you? Can you describe anything at all?"

Sally: "Absolute terror. I felt like an animal, totally warped and totally working on the instant."

Whitley: "That's how I felt."

Sally: "I was just clinging to any little piece, little scrap of life. Any kind of shelter, if I could hide in a corner, if I could get away from them somehow. I didn't want to know what they were about, what they were going to do, what they wanted to do with me — I just wanted out. Get me home. That's it. I make no claims to being brave. I was not brave. I said often that I felt like Fay Wray. I was screaming and passing out. I don't care about evolution, I don't care about your spaceships, I don't care about anything. just let me out of here. Of course there were times when I was less frightened and I looked around. But when they were there, no. Most of the time I was angry or terrified. That was it."

Fred: "I still am surprised, despite all the books I've read, I find more out here at this group that makes sense to me personally than I do from any books."

Whitley: "Sam, you're just sitting over there—"

Sam: "My experience happened to me a couple of years ago. I guess it isn't much different than anybody else's." (He had a particularly startling experience, especially for a scientist.) "I find it's easier to sit here and talk to other people about it and listen to other people's experiences than to sit in a quiet corner and get into my mind, and what happened. It's very difficult, almost impossible, for me to close my eyes and go through the experience. I can't do it.

Sally: "It's too scary. It's much too scary alone. I did a self-hypnosis thing actually, I —"

Fred: "My God, you've got guts!"

Sally "Well, I did. I went to sleep. I started to relive the actual abduction. I was in my apartment building going up the stairs. Then I got past a certain point and I said, 'Oh, no, this is too real.' 'Cause I was actually remembering more details than I had under the actual hypnosis. I said, 'Oh, no, this is not going to be able to work.' I stopped."

Sam: "When I get to thinking about it alone, by myself, I get a little angry, and I begin to think, Who the hell do they think they are that they can jest do what they want to us, as though we're nothing. And that really disturbs me, so I turn it off, and I don't want to look at my own experience, and I don't even want to think about what's happened to others, because that disturbs me, too."

Budd: "Mark, if you have anything you'd like to say at this juncture. You've gone up and down about your feelings about it and how real it was. Curious to hear you talk about that."

Mark: "Just trying to et a little understanding. I had an experience when I was ten years old, had no idea what it was, but I know for thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, I was always aware that something had happened, and a general idea of the location. But I could never explain it. I constantly looked for the area where it had taken place. It was in an area I went through often, where there were a lot of people that are witness to the fact that there was something you just couldn't explain. It was after the first hypnosis that all of this comes out, too real, too believable. I was with another person, we were out bike tiding. Then there is a lapse of time and we're walking our bikes home. I remember telling a story that I'd had an accident on my bike because I had a scar, but not believing myself. And not believing it throughout the years."

Whitley: "I'm very curious, just to interrupt for a second. How many of you have stories like that, about things you know didn't happen that you've been telling all your life?"

Jenny: "All my life I used to hear my mother — in my head there was this thing saying, 'You're lying, you're lying,' but my mother never said it. My whole, life from the time I was five years old."

Fred: "Yeah, yes to that question from my point of view also. I know it happened but I can't believe it. And the other thing is, what's nice about the group, to get back on that for a second, we look at each other and we say, 'I can't believe her story, I can't believe his story, I can't believe your story. I can't believe my story.' And vet, there's a comfort which we still sure because behind it all, oh, it's all the same. We don't understand it, but something happened."

Pat: "There's an acceptance."

Sally: "You know, the first time I realized something had happened that wasn't a figment of my imagination, wasn't some subconscious thing or something or a creative element of my mind or something, I was reading Betty Andreasson's story [ The Andreasson Affair by Raymond E. Fowler]; she described a detail of some sort of crystal boots they had put on her. They had clear bottoms, like a platform, and there was some sort of electrical thing, something inside this clear platform. And that's exactly what I had on my feet. Exactly. And I said I cannot believe some other woman could possibly have had the exact same thing on her feet, that her imagination could be exactly like mine. And I just said, 'No way,' and the tears starting coming down my face, and I said, 'That's it.' And I was totally upset. I couldn't sleep, I tossed and turned, I was dust a mess. I wanted to hide somewhere. Horrible."

Joan: "Isn't it a relief when you find it isn't your imagination?"

Sally: "No! Horrible! Except if I was called a liar. But otherwise, no."

Joan: "I figure it's a relief."

Whitley: "I would have gone insane if I thought it was my imagination. At first it was perfectly obvious to me, I was going crazy. I expected to just go around the bend. The realization that it wasn't my imagination, when they, came in such a way that I couldn't deny it, even if I wanted to —"

Joan: "Has everybody had an experience when they were five?"

(General agreement. Some said maybe four, or very young.) Whitley (to Amy): "Any thoughts? Do you know what happened to you?"

Amy: "Yeah, I know. I want to say what Mary talked about. One time it seems real, and the next time it's not real."

Mary: "Every time I look at the pictures of my backyard, then it's real." (It was from her yard that Budd Hopkins obtained the sample of calcinated earth.) Amy: "Sally mentioned Betty Andreasson's book. I looked at a few pages and I couldn't read the book. I knew I would be terrified and I don't know why. I had this trouble feeling like — I have daughters — and I was afraid."

Tom (a college teacher who does UFO research but has not had an experience): "In a way I feel envious of everyone here because you've all had a glimpse into another world, another dimension perhaps. And in a way you've seen the future, if I could even say that, which may or may not be true, if I could even say that. You have seen what might, in fact, be coming eventually down the line. At least, there are people who believe that. And so, you all have a sort of special knowledge that very few other people have."

Sally: "The, question is, what kind of knowledge is it and what if we don't really want it? And if you don't want it, then you refuse to accept it, and if you refuse to accept it, you don't have it, so it's sort of like this whole thing — it's like if you could see something inside of a ship and say 'Is that real?' because you've never seen it before. We're not really food witnesses. I mean, we have just little pieces of things. If we were just allowed to explore one of these ships, imagine the information we could get. But just with little innocent people being abducted, it's not enough. Even though it may be a glimpse. It's a fragment."

Whitley: "I don't think it'll ever come out completely into the public eye. And when it does, it won't be as intimate as these experiences. People will see it, you know, like something in the sky that everybody sees and it's there for four days, that kind of thing."

Sam: "At what level of belief are we? Do we all believe that we had single experiences and they're gone? Or do you believe they come back and forth type of thing Do you believe they're here all the time among us?"

Pat: "How many people have the sense of continuous monitoring?"

Jenny: "Being watched all the time?"

Pat: "Continuous monitoring."

Joan: "I have a very strong feeling."

Whitley: "I do, too."

Pat: "How many people have the sense that there is something involving permanent relocation?"

(Mixed reaction.)

Whitley: "I have persistent images of being in another place. Sometimes it's parklike, sometimes very bright."

Fred: "I do, too. Very bright."

Pat: "What makes us afraid of the change'?'

Joan: "The sense of not being in control."

Pat: "I don't think they have individual DNA. I think they're all pretty much the same. They're interested m us because we are different. And we value the difference, and our individual freedom. And we feel that when we were abducted, that individual freedom has been taken away, and they don't understand that. They don't really understand our sense of freedom and being allowed our own will."

Sam: "They were almost like under military discipline.'

Whitley: "That was my impression."

Sam: "They had instructions and they followed their instructions, and that was it."

Whitley: "Do you suppose we see robots?"

Sam: "I thought of that."

Mark: "Fanatic, or just disciplined?"

Sam: "Disciplined."

Jenny: "That's right, I remember them all walking the same way."

Sally: "Moving in unison, speaking in unison?" (Unified movement is often reported, such as three individuals walking in lockstep.)

Joan: "I can imagine something above them that's speaking through them. They're to do their job."

Jenny: "You don't feel any personality —"

Whitley: "And yet at times I feel incredible personality. She's the strongest personality in my life."

Jenny: "Oh, I feel that way tool I el a personality but I don't know where it comes from. When I try to picture there, they are one sort of thing, going. But there's this sort of force —"

Pat: "One that cares a great deal."

Fred: "There is one, at least in my case, that I can identify that had that force of personality. He was directing the whole operation. Everything. The others were simply not even taking orders. It's not that an order was barked at them or said to them. They just — boom, boom, boom, did it. I felt like I was even superior to them. I felt like slapping one of them. There was always one you felt comfort under, security under."

Jenny: "Like he was part of me. In me."

Mary: "There's a little part of him in me all the time."

Sally: "One did try to comfort me but I refused it. I didn't want to buy any of it. Actually, what my feeling was, I felt that if I looked at him, I was — sort of like looking at the person who robs you. Someone comes up and he has a mask on and if you take down the mask, uh-oh, you're going to be killed now. You've identified him. So I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to believe it and I didn't want to become a part of it. I felt if I removed myself I would be safe. I won't look at you, I won't identify you, I won't tell anyone what you look like. So I dust said, 'I won't look at you.' That was just my feeling. If I could identify him my life would be in danger." (Note: Sally's experience involves seeing not only visitors but seeming humans involved with them. It is these people that she apparently did not wish to recognize.)

Sam: "It felt like one superior intelligence. Very, very powerful sense of intelligence. All the rest were nothing."

Sally: "The others weren't human like that one. The emotions — The one that speaks to me is a mix. He's a crossbreed between them and ourselves."

Whitley: "The one that speaks to me looks like a big bug. Big eyes. Doesn't look anything like a human being.

Sally: "Yeah, I saw those."

Fred: "Just a question. How many feel used?"

Sally: "Yeah."

Sam: "It could be harmless. Harmless use."

Mary: "You know, like for a whole year I was obsessed with taking some little piece of the world with me. I took my children to the park and I collected every little seed and rock and twig I could find. My whole room looked like a nature study. Then half of the stuff turned up missing."

Whitley: "You know, I sometimes have a thought of what will I take with me."

Mary: "I do too. I keep thinking that one day this will all be done. But my thinking is automatic: I want to have this so my children will know how it used to be."

Sam: "I feel the same way. I want to enjoy what's left here, because it won't be here much longer. I want people to understand that."

Mary: "My sister was left with a thought twenty years ago, and she still believes it strongly, that by the year 2000 this world is going to be a totally different place. It won't necessarily be a bad place for a lot of 'em. But for some of 'em who can't adapt, survival will be very difficult. But it will be a good place. The world will be a more stable place or maybe a different place."

Sam: "More artificial."

Mary : "Truly different from this place here. That's for sure. She says that it is for the young and strong. She doesn't quite know whether that means physically young and strong or mentally young and strong. But it will only be for those people."

Sam: "In fifteen years?"

Whitley: "I have a feeling it's right on top of us, too. My feeling is that a cycle sped d up recently, a lot. It's going fast, not slow."

(I wish to add an aside here to expand on why I made that statement. In the form of what can only be described as vivid bursts of information, I have received a great deal of material about the perilous condition of the earth's atmosphere.

Much of this material came in February and March of 1986 and concerned the danger of impending atmospheric deterioration. In March I called a dress conference of environmental reporters in Washington, D.C., to discuss a book I wrote with James Kunetka, Nature's End, and to warn about the serious implications of the hole that had been detected in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. My apparent visitor information suggested this hole would lead to further holes over the Arctic and thereafter a thinning of the ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere, with measurable crop damage from excessive ultraviolet light beginning to occur in the 1990-1993 period. At the time I gave this warning, the only stories about the hole were saying that its significance was not understood. I had also been told that the atmospheric problems will cause a reduction in immune system vitality in all animals, and the consequent resurgence of disease. As yet I have seen no scientific corroboration of this. The damage to the immune system seemed related to excessive ultraviolet light, but the information emerged visually, appearing as complicated images that I may not have understood fully. This information may indicate, by the way, that the ozone holes will open and persist m a single place rather than circulate. Additional information suggested that volcanic activity had exacerbated the ozone problem, and that there would be some reduction of the size of the major holes during the eleven years from 1986 to 1997, but that this would be only a temporary respite.

After the conference I was careful to mention to one reporter that I had had an extremely strange experience that had, in part, led up to my warning. I told this to UPI reporter Ed Lion and explained that it would be the subject of my next book. Lion asked what exactly I was talking about. In his May 16, 1986, review of Nature's End he wrote, "Asked what that subject could possibly be, he shook his head mysteriously. 'You'll have to wait."' I felt embarrassed to have been so cryptic with him, but I wanted a record of some sort of the real motive behind my calling the conference. If I had told the reporters that alleged visitors were in any way involved, it seemed to me that there was a high probability that my credibility would be destroyed. I hate the idea of repeating predictions because I cannot assess the correctness of the "information" that appears to have come to me through the visitor experience. However, in the past year the atmospheric predictions have emerged as being quite accurate, and I thought it best to mention them in view of the obvious seriousness of the problem that they address.)

Sally: "How many people really feel used? Is that a feeling?"

Mary: "I don't feel it's bad."

Amy: "I wouldn't use that adjective. Things happen in certain places to certain people."

Sally: "I felt somehow psychologically violated. There was nothing in my life that would indicate that kind of trauma. There was nothing in my life. Then what happened when this media thing happened and they used my name I felt like it was happening all over again. Horrible, horrible! I couldn't control my crying, couldn't control this horrible feeling inside myself. I felt so powerless! It came back at me and I couldn't look at anything that said UFO. I couldn't stand it. It was just tearing me up inside. I said. 'Something must have happened.' It had to have happened, because this feeling was so intense. It was too intense to — True, you're gonna get angry because they're using your name, but there was this absolute gut-wrenching feeling. It was Just awful. I said, 'It's happening all over again. Somehow or some way, I'm being stabbed in the back again.' And it was really horrible. It was just a horrible feeling. And that's what I mean by used." (Sally's real name was discovered by some journalists who held her up to public ridicule.)

Amy: "There's something, about Betty Andreasson's book that's awakening a terror in me. Something that I've put away, that it was bringing out. That s why I couldn't continue to read it. If continued to read it, it was going to come back to rite and I don't want to know. Whatever that means."

Sam: "Does anybody ever experience light without any source? You see it on the wall or on the ceiling. It could be in a triangular shape or round. Sometimes I see a triangle. Three triangles together on the ceiling. Has anybody else seen that?"

Mary: "My son saw a red light chase him out of his room the other night. He called it a red tarantula. It was a small red ball of -light with things sticking out of it. That was the same night that one of the few things I believe really happened, happened to me."

Whitley: "I saw a light just a couple of weeks ago that went down the hall and into my son's bedroom. I ran in there, but I couldn't see anything wrong Sally: "That's what I saw coming down from the roof. Then the whole area in the hallway was lit. Totally lit. Then what happened. I was starting to go up the stairs and I turned around and saw my shadow cast from the light. Then the light went out, and I decided to go up to see what was going on."

Sam: "Has anybody had their TV go on or off by itself?"

(General reaction. My own television went off at the main switch a few nights earlier, so that it had to be reset before the remote control could be used again. My wife, myself, and a scientist friend have observed that I can sometimes affect electronic devices by simply placing my hand near them. Since the energies that activate such instruments are known, we intend to devise some physical tests to attempt to measure this. The problem, of course, is that there may be other energies we know little or nothing about that could affect electronic equipment.)

Mary: "Before any of the stuff in the yard, either right before or right. after the incident of the three men in my room who gave me the box —"

Whitley: "What was in the box?"

Mary: "I don't know. They just told me to look at it and said I would remember what it was for and how to use it when I saw it again. And I was to hold it and look into it, and I did. But my TV would turn itself up and down all the time. It would turn itself on in the middle of the night. So we finally unplugged it."

Whitley: "I walk into rooms and short out stereos and things to the point where there are people who won't let me get near their sets, and get mad if I touch the equipment because they say it shortens its life."

Jenny: "Ever wake up and the blue thing is going like this?" (Makes pulsating motions with fingers.)

Whitley: "What blue thing?"

Jenny: "The blue TV light."

Whitley: "There is no blue TV light."

Jenny: "What?"

Fred: "I would turn the TV off, go and sit down and start reading, and the TV would go back on."

Sally: "I got the idea that I could stop the roll over on my TV set. I would generate energy out of my hands. This was after the abduction. I don't know where I got the idea I could do it."

Whitley: "Is there anyone here who doesn't do things to electronic stuff?"

Mary: "I put my hand on a TV screen once, and the TV was turned off, and it had been off a while, and when I took my hand away I could see its outline."

Whitley: "I think everyone can do that."

Jenny: "Sometimes I wake up in the night and it's blue but there's no picture."

Sam: "A strong surge of current crosses the switch . . ."

Mark: "I think I've had two happenings, one when I was about ten and one about fourteen years ago when I was teaching. That event I — it was very strange. It happened in a place where I thought it couldn't possibly happen and anyone not see this happen. dust sort of passed it off as a story I sort of made up. But I don't understand why I went and told the story. And then I'd also go back and try to find where this happened. I was driving out one night with the dog, to go and walk the dog — which isn't something I would normally do, to put the dog in the car and drive somewhere to walk the dog and I drove past this area and I saw this light. It pulled the car over. Or I thought it pulled the car over. I don't remember getting out of the car, but I remember somehow getting to the area where this was taking place, and I see this silhouette shape and this light source where these little men, these little creatures, come out. One of the three sort of comes close to me, but nothing is ever said, nothing is done. Next thing I know got back in the car. Now, the area it happened in, it's totally impossible for something like that to happen in, without people around knowing it happened. My question to you is, have you had these things happen m places were it seems totally impossible to happen?"

Sally: "Mine happened in the Bronx. It's in the middle of New York City, but it's a quiet area. We think we had some witnesses, but we don't know if these people still live there. I'm sure somebody has seen it. But nobody told anybody. But there it was on the roof. It was as Whitley once described, a dark shape, you couldn't see the sky through it. But there it was in the middle of the Bronx. There were people down there and there were cars and lights."

Mark: "When I think about it, I just don't know if it was me that stopped the car."

Fred: "They could have taken you somewhere and given you the impression you were in a populated area."

Budd: "Mark said he was walking his dog in this dark. So I naturally made the assumption that he dust went out the front door and walked the dog. So, m other words, it was close. He said, 'No, it was quite a distance.' So I said, 'You really walk your dog a long way?' He said, 'Oh, no, we went by car.' I said, 'You walk your dog by car? Do you often do that?' He said no. I asked if he'd ever done that before. He said no. Then it began to look very odd to him 'What in the world was I doing walking my dog by car?'"

Mark: "I haven't read Budd's book [ Missing Time]. I got a hundred pages in and it began to seem too familiar. I didn't want to read the rest of the book because I didn't want to be influenced by anything I read that wouldn't be of my experience, during the whole hypnosis thing. I've got to keep this as pure as I can."

Budd: "When Mark's lady was present when he described this place he was when he was ten, which turned out under hypnosis not to be a place but a thing, more or less, she said with great relief, 'I've spent seven years with him looking for that place. He's of me believing it was a real place, a tunnel. Than God I don't have to look for it anymore. The mystery's solved.' You were so convinced that it was a tunnel." (Note: Both of Mark's experiences involved extreme disorientation as to place. This is quite common, but appears to have confused him more profoundly than most.)

Mark: "About a year ago I asked my mother if she remembered that incident, and what did I tell her. She remembered it, and repeated what I had told her. When I asked her where it had happened, she said it had happened at the end of the street. She went down and was relieved I wasn't killed. There's a slope. It's a hill. And there's a tunnel there wide enough for four lanes of traffic. But when it happened it was like I was far, far away from home, on the other side of town or something."

(I then asked the group what their jobs were. There was revealed a profile of people on the run, constantly making changes, moving, leaving, escaping. One of them, jenny, had just fulfilled her lifelong dream to move to New York and "live in a big city full of lights and lots of people." She has had this aspiration since she was nine.

I grew up with the same dream, to live in a little apartment m an enormous building in New York with a view of a brick wall.

I did that, though, and it didn't help at all. I now live in an apartment with huge windows and spend a lot of time m a very isolate country cabin.

For most of my life I was running from this, whatever it is. I am unwilling to run anymore.)

Whitley: "We all have trouble saying what we did."

Joan: "Why do you think that is?"

Whitley: "I think we all have something called performance anxiety. That's one of the reasons we all have difficulty pinning ourselves down to do something. I've been extensively psychologically tested twice, and in both cases it came out that there was this deep anxiety in the performance area. I think the reason is that a lot of us have been asked to do some very hard things, that were very frightening, and also I have a feeling that we've been questioned very, very hard. And we can't remember that either."

Jenny: "Do you have trouble taking tests?"

(General agreement.)

Whitley: "That's performance anxiety."

Jenny: "My profession involves auditioning. And every time I go to an audition, I think I'm gonna die."

Sam: "I have tremendous anxiety. Things that I'm very sure of, in the sciences, I don't have a difficult problem. When you start getting out of those areas, I get into real problems."

Whitley: "Fear?"

Sam: "I don't know what it is. Some kind of anxiety there. I really can't pinpoint it."

Sally: "The simplest test — a typing test — I freak out."

Sam: "Being examined. . ."

Budd: "You see, if you imagine that there's a situation of having seen two worlds, of living in this world and then being dumped into this other world at intervals-that has to make you wonder where you belong. And if, in that other world, you are deprived of your ability to act on your own — you can't even move, and you have no choice, nobody asks you anything — you doubt your own powers. In a certain sense you are physically impotent, unable to do anything."

Sam: "And when we're actually being tested, the anxiety is enhanced."

Budd: "One very strange thing that Pat remembered — the thing of the needle going in under the eye — another case of the needle doing up the nose. The neurosurgeon said that is going into the region of the optic nerve, and he said, 'Wouldn't it be wild if you could see through people's eyes?"'

Whitley: "What if I say love? Longing? Does anyone feel anything like that toward them?"

(There was general agreement, except for Sally, who demurred m this way:) Sally: "You know, the funny thing is, before hypnosis I felt an attachment to them, a love. And after hypnosis I was angry. So I can't really say that I feel love."

Pat: "I feel loyalty."

Sally: "I feel like I want to strangle them."

Sam: "I have a lot of mixed emotions. Why are they doing this? That aggravates me. I go back and forth because I don't know. So it's mixed feelings. I feel that they demand loyalty."

Whitley: "I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed."

Sally: "What I really feel hurt about is that I wasn't given more respect. If I ever meet them again, I want to be in control. I want to be able to speak my mind without them telling me what to do. I want to ask them questions. I want some respect for my being And if they don't do that, then I don't want them back, I really don't. I don't want them anywhere near me, if I don't get that response."

Amy: "You want them to share with your intelligence what they're doing, rather than forcing you to be a part of it."

Sally: "Yeah. I don't even want to know what they're doing. I may be curious, but the point is, if they can't trust me, why should I even care about what they're doing? I just don't want to know. The human race has to have some sort of respect from these creatures, and we're not getting that. I don't feel it, and I'm certain — they take children in the middle of the night, they don't care about the anxiety of the parents — they don't understand so many things, and they don't make an effort to understand. Until we can get across to them that we matter and deserve respect, I don't think we should give them respect."

(More than one participant was aware that the visitors were involved with their children.

One man, who saw his child taken in the middle of the night while he was himself entirely conscious, disagreed categorically with Sally. He maintained that-they had shown him respect by allowing him to know what was happening to the child, and not only that, that the child was unharmed in the morning, and seemed filled with anew light of the mind. That day, the child made the following comments: "Reality is God's dream," and "The unconscious is like the universe beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there." He also said, "Dad, I had a dream last night. It was like a dream but it wasn't a dream. I was m the woods and a huge eye was looking down at me.")

Sally: "I'd think you'd feel horrible about it."

(The man added that he did feel horrible about it, but at the same time felt that they took the child because they had to or needed to very badly, and they had been helpful and supportive of him while the child was gone. "Then I woke up in the morning and my child was fine. More than fine. That's the reality.")

Sam: "Do you think they possibly match emotions? If you are hostile, they will be hostile? If you are not forceful in any way, they will be nicer? If you comply, they will, too?"

Whitley: "They won't comply, I don't think. They can be nicer, I've seen that."

Sam: "They're never really hostile with children."

Whitley: "My son remembers them saying in the middle of his head, 'We won't hurt you, we won't hurt you."'

Sam: "They have less to fear from children. As an adult you've learned hatred, fear, violence. They fear an adult."

Whitley: "I've sensed fear."

Sally: "Me too."

Budd: "It's very common that people say that they've felt they're afraid of us."

(The conversation then turned to the issue of sexual experience, disappearing pregnancies, and the sexual intrusions experienced by some of the men, involving extraction of semen with a probe, or having it drawn out with a sort of vacuum device.) Sally: "There was somebody I met — the South American guy — he mentioned a number of dreams he'd had." (An abductee from Brazil.) "In some of the dreams he saw people. He was convinced that the people were half them and half human. They had large heads, but the features were more human And they were children. A little boy, a little girl. I remember thinking, Well, this was a dream. But he had a number of dreams."

Mary: "I still keep it in my mind that it might have been something psychological with this mysterious pregnancy that I had. I did not have a false pregnancy. I was tested positive, blood test, pelvic, my periods had stopped. I was pregnant. But I keep in my mind that maybe this was some kind of psychological reaction to a miscarriage. That keeps me from going crazy, wanting my child."

Budd: "This is very hard."

Mary: "The craziest thing is that I'm not alone."

I have never before encountered such a group of seemingly ordinary people under so much pressure. They were deeply troubled by the question of what their experiences really mean.

Those who have had the experience must learn to ride a sort of psychological razor, to accept and reject at the same time. True agnosticism is a very active mental state, a sort of eager unknowing. In the direction of skepticism, for the taken, lies one form of madness; in that of belief another. One must balance between the two. For scientists there is the additional and very real danger of getting sucked into the study of a false unknown. In the case of a phenomenon as complex and yet as transient as this one, that danger is greatly intensified.

But a large body of observational information now exists about the flying disks, some of it generated by skilled professional observers. And there are thousands of pages of transcript from those who may have been taken. What's more, most of them seem to have endured intrusions into their brains of one sort or another. It would seem that the existing body of data and the large number of individuals available for study might yield some useful conclusions, as long as the subject is not approached with the sort of negative hypothesis that has distorted the efforts of the debunkers.

This need for balance is fundamental to more than the process of reconciling oneself with the apparent meaning of visitation. It is also fundamental to understanding the experience.

For the experience does have its symbolic center in the number three and the triangular shape.

The visitors often appear in threes. They project triangular lights. They have been reported to wear various types of triangular devices and emblems. People see three pyramids or three triangles in connection with them. A huge triangular-shaped object is sometimes sighted. I had triangles etched on my arm. Dr. X and his son developed triangular rashes.

I spent fifteen years involved with the Gurdjieff Foundation, primarily because so much of the thought of G. I. Gurdjieff and his disciple P. D Ouspensky involved the triad as a primary expression of the essential structure of life, and I have always been fascinated with the significance of this figure.

The triangle was the symbol of the ancient Triune goddess, and is, of course, viewed by Christianity as the central form of the Godhead, the Trinity.

The thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said of the Holy Trinity: "God laughed, and begat the Son. Together they laughed, and begat the Holy Spirit. And from the laughter of the three the universe was born."

A current theory suggests that gravity may consist of two components counterbalancing one another, the balance of which causes the third force — which is what we call gravity — to emerge.

In order to approach an initial understanding of the visitor experience, if that is possible, it might be productive to explore the inner meaning of the triangular shape.

Triad

I began this contemplation at noon at the cabin. It was a day in early spring. I was alone. I began to think of triangles, of triads, of the struggle I have had to find a finer balance within myself.

There are many ancient traditions that view man as a being with three parts: body, mind, and heart. It seems possible that the visitors view themselves as an entire species with three parts, judging from the three distinct basic forms that have been seen. (There are variants of these forms, and also more humanlike beings, but given the degree of perceptual error that must be present here, and the fact that the three basic shapes may have many permutations, there is no way to argue with any certainty that more or less than three forms actually exist.) It is not unreasonable to consider that a species with three basic forms would choose the triangle as its most basic symbol of self, as it would express both the nature of the species and a fundamental law of structure.

To begin an exploration of this law, I would like to return to Dr. X and his seemingly enigmatic experience. This man, who was at the time of his observation a prominent physician, experienced something very peculiar. But what happened to him is not without coherence. He was awakened in the night and looked out a window of his house, which had a magnificent view of the Loire Valley and the town of Arles in France. Hanging over the valley were two glowing disk-shaped objects. Electrical discharges were taking place between them. They moved closer to Dr. X, and he observed them to merge together into a single object. Later, he discovered a triangular rash around his navel and around the navel of his son. The rashes persisted for years and, despite extensive study, remained unexplained.

This case was reported and researched by Mr. Aime Michel, a Frenchman at the time eminent in the field of UFO research. The combination of the excellent witness, the strange physical trace, and the seemingly enigmatic nature of the observation caused Mr. Michel to decide that the UFO mystery as a whole was unsolvable.

The fundamental idea of the triad as a creative energy is that two opposite forces coming into balance create a third force. The rather theatrical event that Dr. X perceived was, intentionally or not, an illustration of this principle. Could it have been a communication, even a request for some sort of response?

The imprinting of triangles on myself and Dr. X may also have a similar significance.

The idea of the triad is not static. It is an expression of a series of emanations. The third force emerges when the first and second forces come into balance, and when all three are in harmony they become a fourth thing, an indivisible whole.

I do not wish to imply by this anything beyond a human context. It is possible for man to become more whole, for each of us to make our private journey back to the place of emergence, and find there the simplest and most real of truths: that we are all at heart the same, that every body contains every soul and has room for every act without reference to its quality. There is a deep, objective awareness of self and universe that is available to all of us.

We could be part of a triad that includes the visitors. They might be the aggressive force, entering us, enforcing our passivity, seeking to draw from the relationship some new creation.

But the triad can never come into harmony until there is a firm ground of understanding. We need not be blindly welcoming. What is required is objectivity. We must have a care, for if they are real it can be as persuasively argued that they are aggressive as it can be that they are benevolent. They take us in the night They introduce their instruments and thus their reality into our brains. It is, however, too easy to call them evil, just as it is too easy to say that they are saints, kindly guides from the beyond. They are a very real and immensely complex force, the provocative nature of which demands neither hate nor love, but rather respect in a context of intellectual objectivity and emotional strength.

In ancient Taoist thought the fundamental force in the universe was duality, the yin and the yang, positive and negative, thrusting and opening, seeking and waiting, male and female.

This was also thought by the Aztec and many other cultures to be fundamental to everything.

And the duality, when it was in harmony, formed the triad. Throughout this chapter I will draw primarily on the Aztec imagery, as a reminder of the fragility and seriousness of our situation if we are indeed dancing a real dance with real visitors.

The triad cannot become strong unless it is preceded by a strong duality. Without the friction of bodies there can be no child, and the universe cannot proceed. There must first be two forces, equal opposites, one that pushes and one that resists. Do the visitors perceive themselves as the aggressive force, seeking to open us to their presence. If so, everything depends on our slowly growing understanding, for unless we understand we cannot be their equal. Unless the two forces are equal, the triad will not have a chance to balance itself and the relationship will not be creative.

When the opposition between two is in balance, the third force emerges. Perhaps the French call the moment of sexual climax "the little death" because it suggests the passing of the parents and the turning of the generations. Or maybe because it is like the death of self that is involved in entering pure being, climax being a moment when the self is absorbed m ecstasy.

On the night of December 26 I felt psychologically destroyed, as if my very self had died.

It could be that the basis of the fear we feel for the visitors, and — it seems to me — they for us, comes from a biological, instinctive awareness that our coming together nay mean the creation of a third and greater form which will supplant us as the child dues his parents.

The third force is not a small thing: It is the immense progress of life, the very movement of the universe toward whatever goal it seeks. First and second forces are people struggling in a bed. Third force is at once their frantic union and the whole urgency and implication of creation. It is their mutual attraction, the friction of their bodies--and their child.

When the internal triad of mind, body, and heart becomes fixed in a state of permanent harmony, it is because the seeker has finally died to himself and all the allures of life. Out of this death the fourth state emerges. This is the ecstatic objectivity that the Western seeker cherishes, the nirvana of the Hindu, the blooming lotus of Zen.

The human being in a state of spiritual harmony is looked upon as a sort of cosmic egg out of which hatches the bird of resurrection, which is the phoenix, also characterized as an eagle, the symbol of the yin.

In the old imagery of the tarot, and in the gospel story of the Mama Feast at Cana, the feminine is viewed as a cup, the masculine as what is poured into it. The Aztec poets sang of the creative impact of the God and Goddess of Duality, and called the third force the song of the flower.

Distantly as I sit here on the porch at the cabin, I hear the roaring of one of our brooks, swollen by spring melt. The leaves shimmer on the trees, a swarm of Mayflies hovers in the sun. Suddenly two phoebes battle, a scream, a fluff of feathers, and then silence, both birds gone. At some moment, for a reason that seems to me to be as large and enigmatic as the universe itself, the female ceased to resist the male. The duality joined, the triad emerged, new life is now vibrant in her belly.

And both birds are a little older.

Each independent act of creation vibrates the whole web of the world, when the phoebe mates, when a woman takes the pleasure of a man.

It is hard for me to think that the relationship between two intelligent species would not be dense with creative potential.

When we were first married, Anne and I found a motto for ourselves in the Bible, from Ecclesiastes, "Two are better than one . . . and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped."

Anne cross-stitched it and it has been with us ever since. The third strand is the love, then the child, then the long unraveling of the years. At last it is what is left of a lifetime spent together, the fading remembrance, the generations to come, and also the joy that ripens in souls.

Among the Aztecs, the Lord and Lady of Duality created out of their harmony a truly extraordinary third force:

Man was born,

sent here by our mother, our father

the Lord and Lady of Duality.

The Aztec philosophers asked the question, what is the third force, what is the bond and outcome of harmony? But they did not ask it in these structure-laden words, rather they asked, what is his flower, what is her song? The love and the child both make the marriage true.

And when the flower and the song came together, the Aztecs would say:

The flowers sprout, they are fresh, they grow;

they open their blossoms,

and from within emerge the flowers of song;

among men You scatter them, You send them.

You are the singer!

The flower is the man, the song the woman, the flower of song the third strand winding gaily in the dark.

This must be a very careful business, this communion, for it can easily make such a flame that the flower is burned.

My flowers shall not cease to live;

My songs shall never end:

I, a singer, intone them:

They become scattered, they are spread about.

Cortez emerged from the sea, and the shadow of the creator as destroyer stalked in the land, then the flowers were trodden down and the brutal, beautiful Aztec civilization was destroyed forever.

Destined is my heart to vanish,

like the ever-withering flowers?

What can my heart do?

At least flowers, at least songs!

So a dark triad was completed, the gory Aztec flower cut by the booming Spanish song.

For there to be growth instead of death, much more must be brought to the triad than mere conquest. Or "contact," which, if the visitors are as advanced as they seem, would amount to a form of conquest. Communion is as wide as all the knowledge of both partners, as deep as their whole souls. Marriage requires patience, giving without thought to keep accounts. When one says' I gave this and so I am owed that," the marriage has not yet begun. Real sharing rests in a balanced recognition of sameness and difference. It is a discovery of balances and equalities.

We need to give ourselves to our experience, without knowing what it is, trusting that our understanding will grow as we proceed. To participate truly in this experience, we must marry the unknown. The only belief is the question itself: Love is a matter of leaping out into the sky.

But then again, one cannot be objective in the context of an excess of passion. We must be careful, for the stakes are high: Mankind is in the position of maturing as a species at the same time that our planet could be dying. We have a difficult road ahead. We must resist all temptation to wait for the visitors to save us. If we wait, we can be sure that nothing will save us. We have to learn to live on the edge of the razor.

When two in balance cause a third to emerge and remain in balance, something more happens: The three together become a greater whole. All seeking toward higher consciousness is a search for the sort of balance that will cause the triad to cease to be a collection of parts and become a solid.

Hidden in the Sphinx, one of our most ancient objects, is a great idea, simple and extremely powerful. To understand the riddle of the Sphinx is to know how to begin one's walk along the ancient way, the "pathless path" of old.

The most powerful moment I experienced in my search through the modern literature about the visitors took place when I was reading The Andreasson Affair. Few of the accounts I have read contain as much symbolism. But this one contained a great deal, and it was quite remarkable. What interested me most about it was that Mrs. Andreasson obviously had no idea at all what it meant. But it has great meaning, and is entirely coherent in context with all I have been discussing here.

"I'm standing before a large bird," Mrs. Andreasson reported. "It's very warm .... And that bird looks like an eagle to me. And it's living! It has a white head and there is light in back of it — real, white light .... The light seems so bright in back of it. It's beautiful, bright light . . .

The light just keeps sending out rays. They keep on getting bigger and bigger. Oh, the heat is so strong!

The great symbol of transformation, the fourth beast of the Sphinx, is the eagle. It is ever associated with heat, the energy of the sun that at once sheds the light of wisdom and the heat that burns the self away.

The riddle of the Sphinx: What has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion, and the intelligence of a man? The answer is the Sphinx itself, who then takes wind like an eagle and looks down over life from outside of time, with true objectivity.

The flying Sphinx is a triad rendered in yet a fourth dimension of reality: a triangular solid, a pyramid, known in esoteric thought as the living eternal. The pyramids may or may not have been tombs; they were certainly symbols of the immortality of the pharaohs who built them.

Betty Andreasson had no idea what her vision was about. They asked her, "Do you understand?"

"No, I don't understand what this is all about, why I'm even here."

The central effort of my life has been the fulfillment of the triad, the creation of the eagle within me. And now I find the key myth of this transformational effort embedded in the innocent literature of the abductees, in a passage of immense power and force. Later in her transcript, Mrs. Andreasson reports being told like so many of us that she has been "chosen."

This confused her, because she did not see the significance of what she had been shown.

Since this image was so powerful, and so much at the center of her testimony, it seems logical that whatever it was that chose her did so to convey it.

My day alone at the cabin drew to an end. The dark came slipping out of the woods, and at length I went inside and had a. meal. I did not turn on the lights, but rather chose to let the night in.

Sitting in my silent living room on the couch where the visitors left me on the night of December 26, reading through the late night hours, I reflected on the relationship between the innocent and the sublime, the new and the ancient. How is it that Mrs. Andreasson — a middle-aged American housewife with probably no access to the texts that concern themselves with this deep secret-hit upon the very symbol of the complete triad?

What old beast is shuffling toward the surface of human experience — surely not the very eagle, the Phoenix of transformation whose shadow has made me sweat with longing?

Let us turn now toward the rigorous objectivity that might allow a human spirit to take wing, to soar beyond the attractions of life that the Hindu sages have given the wonderful name maya, which P. D. Ouspensky in his more utilitarian interpretation described simply as "identification" with the illusionary importance of everyday affairs. It seems important to cleave to the things of life, the details of every day, but it is not very important. With care, our obsession with these things can be put aside even while our responsibility for them remains.

We do not even know if there are visitors. We do not know what we are, or why this is happening, or exactly what is happening. The real center of the experience lies not m some facile explanation, it lies in opening. oneself to the question as it really exists, with all its mystery and danger.

To get that particular flower to open a little more, it may be helpful to turn to another enigma: the tarot. First, please set aside any notion of fortune-telling. I suggest that the Major Arcana reveal a hidden symbolic coherence of great purity that has more to do with order than chance. About fifteen years ago I became interested in the tarot when I was studying the rise of monasticism in Europe for a historical novel I never actually wrote. I came to realize that the tarot is much more than a deck of fortune-telling cards; it is a sort philosophical machine that presents its ideas in the form of pictures rather than words.

The story it tells is an interesting one: The face cards of the tarot — the Major Arcana — can be arranged in such a manner that they work as signposts toward spiritual evolution. Card twenty-one, the final card in this arrangement, is called the World. There is in this card as deep a representation of the spirit and force of the triad as exists on earth: It consists of the four beasts of the Sphinx, one at each corner, surrounding an enigmatic and powerful figure who stands within a wreath.

This figure's genitals are hidden by a cloth; it has breasts and also the suggestion of a male form. It is intended, I think, to represent a potential in all human beings. In the hands are carried tools from the table of the card of the Magician, most specifically, his wand. The figure may represent humankind transformed, the beast reborn, man or woman, half human and half god.

Out of communion there emerges transformation. The strong body, the brave heart, and the intelligence of a human being.

What is the true aim of mind? Does it seek knowledge only for the sake of constructing the intricate pleasures and poisons of technology, or just to know, or is there another dancer in the shadows?

The mind can bring understanding to body and heart. It can direct the body toward healthy ways and the heart toward the balm of insight.

Then, when a being comes into harmony, body, mind, and heart reconciled, there is a chance to look up from the plodding and the toil, and there to encounter the whole tremendous ecstasy that made the phoebes scream in the morning light.

It is then that the struggling worm turns from clay into fire and the soul takes wing, sweeping out of time and chance, going higher and higher, daring like the eagle the relentless, revealing fire of the sun.

In all of us there is an unaddressed urgency which we cannot really name, which seems to lie at the heart of our hope for ourselves. It is the flight of the eagle that we seek, the walk of the monk down the nirvana road, the faith of the old priest whose mass in his humble little church last Sunday was really said between the worlds of body and soul.

We go from the endless battle of duality to the harmony of the triad, and then to the mystery of the eagle. Each of us is potentially a transfigure being, the friend of God, the Phoenix gliding free.

Are the visitors asking us to form a triad with them? Is that the purpose of all the triangular and pyramidal imagery? Maybe, but there may be another truth here. Maybe I have located these symbols in the visitor material simply because they are so central to my own life. My whole soul and breath are devoted to the groping toward transformation. Maybe it is inevitable that I would extract relevant material from any enigma that I encounter.

And yet, I cannot think that Betty Andreasson chose to present the fiery drama of the risen eagle with such force in her testimony entirely on her own.

Life is expressed in Christian cosmology as having emerged from the unity of the Trinity.

And this is nothing mystical, it is very simply true: We could not exist without all three of the dimensions that sustain us. Solids depend on breadth, depth, and height, and we cannot construct a perceptual reality sufficiently reflective of all potential with fewer dimensions.

The advantage of three dimensions is that they allow parallel movement through space and time, which is essential to experience.

Everybody is afraid of giving up themselves and just being. The fire behind the eagle felt so hot that it terrified Betty Andreasson, for it was the fire that consumes the self. It was the apocalypse of the soul.

Our agony is to stand before the utter blackness of the unknown with full knowledge that there is something there, and it is alive, and if one is to remain on the path of inner search, one must trust it even though it may very certainly be dangerous. Strength is needed to endure the fire; courage to enter it, intelligence to come out alive.

There has ever been in the life of man this idea of the triad as the primary force of growth.

The Sphinx is a very old construction, and the sacred graphic known as the Kali yantra or Primordial Image in the Indian Tantras may be older still. This ancient symbol, a triangle with the bindu, or spark of life, at the center, is associated with the Trip Goddess who rules past, present, and future (length, breadth, and depth), and the trimesters of pregnancy, and the three seasons of life: childhood, maturity, and age.

Out in my woods the hemlocks are sighing with the long breath of the night.

Three Ways was one name of the Roman goddess Hecate, whose three-faced image at crossroads traditionally received offerings of cake, fruit, and money. Money is still offered at one of her ancient shrines, the Trevi Fountain, and the traditional idea of being blessed by throwing three coins in the fountain has persisted into our era.

The Irish god Trefuilngid is the patron of the trefoil, or three leaf, the shamrock.

Trefuilngid is known as the Triple Bearer of the Triple Key, which is the same appellation given Shiva, Astarte, and Ishtar, three ancient manifestations of the Triune Goddess. Of course, the shamrock is also the symbol of St. Patrick. Among the ancient Arabs the trefoil was called the shamrakh, which was a symbol of the male trident of fertility. Did the Irish once know the Arabs? What dark seas flowed before we learned how to write our history down, and what triumphs have been swallowed by their waters?

In the Greek alphabet the fourth letter, delta, is the symbol of the Holy Door, and among the Egyptians the triangle was the symbol of Men-Nefer, the very ancient goddess of the mother city Memphis, as identified in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The object of the worship of the Yantra is to attain unity with the Mother of the Universe in Her forms as Mind, Life, and Matter ... preparator to Yoga union with Her as She is in herself as Pure Consciousness.

To the Gnostics of the later Roman Empire, the triangle signified creative intellect, the balancing coolness of mind, the persistent reconciliation that proceeds in the souls of the ones who seek Christ within.

Among the ancient Sumerians Ishtar was the Triune Goddess, as among modern Christians the Trinity is the central figure of the creative force, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The Way to Christ is lit by the Star of Bethlehem, as also the word Ishtar means "Star."

Babylonian scriptures call Ishtar the Light of the World, Opener of the Womb, Leader of Armies, Lawgiver, Forgiver of Sins. It is from the legend of Ishtar that the story of the descent into the underworld enters so many of man's traditions: The giver of life overcomes the taker of life, and rebirth emerges.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo traveled the bath of transformation, and were not consumed in its fires. They symbolically sat astride the shoulders of the eagle, as did the medicine men of Native America, the shamans of the Siberian plains, the witches of old Europe when the ice king strode half the continent.

Transformation: Among the Apache, when someone was called in his heart to be a shaman, it meant that he had to go into the world of the dead, he had to dare the fire. The Apache would find a cliff and jump off. If he lived, he became a man of medicine. If he died, he died.

Length and breadth, when they merge, make the solid, which the Pythagoreans thought of as mind emerging into reality. "Know thyself," was ever the refrain of the old Greek mystical philosophers, the admonition of Apollo and of the visitors who took Betty Andreasson.

Could it be that we are about to rediscover the actual, physical truth of the ancient idea that to know the mind is to know the universe? A child reported: "The unconscious mind is like the universe beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there."

What is there? Could there be in the tinkling caves of the soul a door that leads beyond the edge of reality? Is that where the eagle will go when it takes flight? Is that where the visitors came from?

No matter what factual reality attaches to the experience of the visitors, the presence of the triangle as a frequently observed symbol by many people who have no idea at all of its rich heritage suggests that there is much here that is worth exploring, and not only with the tools of science but also with the tools of myth and philosophy, with the heart as well as the intellect.

At the least, we are dealing with a grand flight of our own mind, in some mysterious way collecting itself against thunder from the future, seeking in this time of world danger toward its oldest truth.

It could be that the triangle performs a similar symbolic function wherever the three-dimensional universe prevails. In speaking to us through that particular form — if that is what they are doing — the visitors may be announcing themselves as belonging to the same laws that inscribe our beings, and identifying their presence with the everlasting ideology of transformation. It could be a symbol not only of mutuality of structure but of shared aim, which is the continuation of life and the search for wisdom. The additional presence of the eagle in this symbology confirms its sense and direction and makes it difficult to assert that it is all just an accident, as anchored in chance as a remarkable thing I once saw during a terrible stone at sea.

I was in a small cabin cruiser and a squall had come up out of nowhere on the Gulf of Mexico. The wind was gusting terrifically and twenty-foot waves were threatening to swamp the boat. Should the engine get flooded by water coming in over the transom, we had very little chance of survival..

Slowly, painfully, the boat climbed the wall of a wave. As we teetered over, I saw across the sweep of whitecaps an amazing sight: In the middle of a shaft of bright sunlight stood a tall pyramidal wave. Its sides were glassy smooth, its peak streaming white spray into the wind. For a moment it seemed perfect, solid, and eternal. Then it sank slowly down, the victim of the same random forces that had created it. As we limped back into Port Aransas after the storm the captain commented, "You see some strange things out there."