Communion

EPILOGUE

Where can such a journey as this end? Swaying in the wind with the stars, or along the dark strand of faith? For me it must be in the human dimension, for that is the only place where we can hope to make progress toward a fuller understanding.

I do not have it in me to be a believer. Nor can I be a true skeptic, for I loathe the narrow and love the broad. I cannot say, in all truth, that I am certain the visitors are present as entities entirely independent of their observers. Nor can I say that I do not think they are here at all.

It is not enough for us to ascribe the visitor experience to some unusual manifestation of known phenomena and then ignore it. Science has not explained the visitors; indeed, it has not even begun to explore them. Nor is it sufficient to say that "higher" beings are studying us, and remain passively waiting for what tidbits of knowledge they may toss us.

A striking fact of the colloquy was the general expectation of catastrophe, a possibility that I also fear. Throughout the literature of abduction, there is a frequent message of apocalypse. This is also the message of Fundamentalism — and of some parts of both the peace and environmental movements.

Presently in the Soviet Union there is so much fear regarding the "end of days" that Premier Gorbachev has taken to wearing makeup on Soviet television to obscure a birthmark on his forehead because people have called it "the mark of the 294 beast." And there has been an undertone of fear in relation to the fact that the word chernobyl in Ukranian means "wormwood," the name of the star in the Book of Revelation that is poison to a third of the waters.

As the ninth century closed toward the first millennium, the Western world was also swept by wave after wave of millennial hysteria. The end of days was expected momentarily.

Of course, they did not have nuclear weapons and an expanding hole in the ozone layer.

The Celtic tradition held that the veil between the worlds of man and spirit could grow thin at certain seasons of the year. Maybe there are seasons of ages, and the veil between matter and mind is note growing, thin. It could be that thought is beginning to cross into the concrete world, or even that mind is learning how to manipulate reality to its own secret ends.

Why did an actor report that a UFO was the source of the great New York City blackout, considering that the first "UFO-induced" blackout took place in a play? And the first recorded instance of a UFO killing a car's engine seems to have been in a work of fiction.

Understand, I am not dismissing the phenomenon with yet another version of the "wind making the stars sway" explanation. No, the visitors may very well be real. Quite real. But what are they, and what in their context does the word real actually mean? I do not think that this is a question that will in the end admit itself to a linear and mechanistic answer.

The visitor experience drives us to extremes. Those who have seen the devices or their occupants are often convinced that they are extraterrestrial m origin. And science debunks that, just as the clergy debunked the fairies in centuries past, and for the same reason: These outrageous enigmatics so threaten the established order of belief that they must at all costs be rejected. There was no room in seventeenth-century Christian theology for fairies, and there is scarcely more in twentieth-century scientific theory for visitors as peculiar as these.

But the difference between science and theology is that science can make room .for new things. In 1932 Dr. Albert Einstein stated, "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." Within the decade, he would write President Roosevelt the letter that started the United States on the road to splitting the atom and creating the atomic bomb.

"I know in my heart that they might possibly be here," one skeptic said to me, "but if they are, and they're acting like this, it's just so damned disappointing that I prefer not to believe it."

Why disappointing? Why not leave the question open for now? True, the visitors have not come down from their spaceships and given us a holographic atlas of their "home planet" . . . or the secret of their interstellar drive. They are very strange. But that could be a two-way street. We may also be very strange.

Looking back over my experiences with the visitors, I cannot say that I felt inferior to them. On the contrary, the people I encountered did not seem superior so much as wiser, but also more simple and unformed as individuals. And they not only feared me, they seemed in awe of me. When they asked me what they could do to help me stop screaming, there was an edge of panic among them.

They are not all-powerful superbeings. They are frail, limited individuals far from home — if indeed this world is not their home.

I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening. Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.

The evolution of this increase in perception may have a very definite design. We initially noticed objects from afar, then closer, then we remembered seeing the visitors, and now we are beginning to remember being with them. More than one of those taken were told that he or she would remember nothing "for five years," or "until 1984," or "in a few years." Will the visitors emerge into our world on a hood of memory?

And if so, then why? Why not simply land, open the hatch and come out? It could be that they wish to avoid what Cortez did with such eagerness. It is not difficult to crush the flower of a culture's spontaneity. A friend of mine sat in a Native American medicine circle within hearing distance of a hissing interstate highway — and he heard the emptiness in the old chants, the sadness where conviction once rang. And no new stories are being woven in Papua, New Guinea. The streets are becoming a ramshackle version of Lansing, Michigan.

It's all turning into rock 'n' roll, the scepters of the kings are being broken up for firewood and the old, rich truths of that culture now seem to its inheritors an embarrassment.

Would we not all risk being lost in nonmeaning if an apparently superior visitor culture emerged suddenly into the open? Science, religion, even the arts might be shattered by the appearance of a culture that already knew everything we want to know about the universe.

Unless, of course, it were to emerge not into blinded awe, but into our understanding of its truth, its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Maybe that is why two triangles were inscribed on my arm: to symbolize that we are each a tiny, complete universe, a small but valid version of the whole; that the smaller is not less perfect than the greater, but only less mature.

Beyond the present level, what awaits? What will happen in ten years, in twenty years?

As we begin to admit that the visitor phenomenon has some sort of extrapersonal reality, perhaps it will begin to come into clearer focus.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and of is on. We confuse the language."

There is something of the mirror image in all this, and in the visitors more than a little of the prankster which has so much significance in our own mystical literature. From Till Eulenspiegel to Mullah Nasir Eddin, we have always accepted pranks as one output of true understanding. "God laughs and plays," said Meister Eckhart.

Dr. David M. Jacobs of Temple University recounts a fascinating story of a woman in Philadelphia who once saw a flying disk across the street from her house. As soon as she looked at it, it came closer. She beheld a row of nine windows. In one window stood a man with a cigar in his mouth, staring out. He was as motionless as a statue. The next window revealed a woman in a flowered dress sitting in a chair, also in some sort of trance. Three of the small gray beings then came past the other windows and conducted the entranced woman from the chair and off down a corridor.

The woman who saw this was not a "saucer nut," not a psychotic, but rather an ordinary person. She neither sought nor received fame or money. She simply told what she saw, all innocent to the fascinating combination of absurdity and far-reaching implication in her story.

At the moment of highest absurdity and intensity in my experience, when I was called their chosen one, I had a distinct memory of seeing them getting a woman in a flowered dress very excited with a similar speech.

How can something so profound and even dangerous as the visitor experience also be so ludicrous? It would seem to me to be possible to say that the mind, also, laughs and plays.

In August 1986 a man had a remarkable experience while driving toward Great Neck, Long Island, on the Grand Central Parkway. It was 9:30 P.m., and the sky was overcast, with a three-thousand-foot ceiling. The man suddenly saw an enormous airplane coming toward him so low that it looked like it was about to land on the parkway. It had two bright lights in the nose, lights that seemed to shine beams directly into his eyes. There was a red light at the tip of one wing and a green one at the tip of the other As he passed under the plane he looked up and saw that there were rivets in the undersurface, which was streaked as if it had scraped along the ground. He saw four engine pods with whirling propellers. The nose of the plane was flat and there was no horizontal stabilizer. The man slowed down and leaned his head out the window, looking up at the bizarre Craft. It seemed almost to be standing still, and the propellers made no noise at all. Soon he was past it and taking the Great Neck exit, which makes a horseshoe around a small hill. Above this hill he saw what appeared to be an advertising sign made of many small lightbulbs. It had an angle in it, suggesting that it was attached to two sides of a building. It was flashing, but the symbols were incomprehensible.

As he rounded the horseshoe and saw the sign from another angle, he realized that there was no building there. Then he concluded that it must be a plane. But it suddenly shot off to the southwest, rising into the overcast with blinding speed.

What happened to this man? What did he see? It would be easy to dismiss his experiences as a pair of hallucinations. Easy to debunk this one.

There is, however, a problem. The problem is the man himself, and his extraordinarily apt qualifications. He is a leading perceptual psychologist with encyclopedic knowledge of just exactly how the brain perceives things, and what misperceptions mean. What's more, he has a near-photographic memory and eyes so superb that he can see the moons of Jupiter unaided.

He is also highly intelligent and exceptionally emotionally stable, having had many hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis as part of his clinical training.

Anybody can have a hallucination or a misperception. But this highly qualified man feels certain that what he saw was actually there. Interestingly, other drivers did not react to it at all. I wonder if that might not be because they believed an illusion that this man's mind was too highly trained to mistake. Most people saw a plane and, an advertising sign. But this acute, trained mind saw beyond the camouflage to what was really there — a device of unknown origin and purpose.

How interesting that such an outrageous perceptual joke would be played on a skilled perceptual scientist — who himself has superb perceptual equipment. Or perhaps the visitors were indifferent, and chance played the joke. Then again, maybe it wasn't a joke at all. What about the light shining in his eyes — did they use it to learn something from him, or induce him to act in some drama of importance to their enigmatic designs?

I would not be at all surprised if the visitors are real and are slowly coming into contact with us according to an agenda of their own devising, which proceeds as human understanding increases. If they are not from our universe it could be necessary for us to understand them before they can emerge into our reality. In our universe, their reality may depend on our belief. Thus the corridor into our world could in a very true sense be through our own minds.

The idea of parallel universes is neither proven nor new. It has a distinguished history in physics. Of course, the conditions under which movement between universes might be possible are not known.

We have seen that the visitors are not fairies, and that their ships are not figments of the wind. Now that we know this, what more will we learn?

Humanity could be clutching the frail barque of an outmoded world view while the wind of the mind is swaying the stars into very real craft, and out of them is coming . . . a faint call for help from a lady in a flowered dress.

This is not a "mere" matter, to be explained away by one facile dodge or another. It is an immense human reality, vast in its impact and complexity. It has coherence, strange but undeniable, and thus there is certainly a process of thought that will draw it into our understanding. Presently it is lacking effective definition. To leave it this way when it seems so rich with potential would be a shame. But has science the wit to study such an elusive and multidimensional enigma?

I say yes. Resoundingly so. Even a brilliant but arrogant curmudgeon of my acquaintance, who denounced it all as "Preposterous," is important to an understanding of it. Blind denial is as empty a response as blind acceptance, and operates on the same level of validity. There is no real intellectual difference between the haughty psychiatrist or physicist and his refusal to accept the truth, and the nervous "contactee" eager to see the phenomenon as a dimensionless cartoon of space friends. We must break through both distortions — and we certainly can.

The visitor experience may be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense, definition, and a consciousness of its own. And perhaps, in their world, the visitors are working as hard to create us.

Truly, such an act of mutual insight and courage would be communion . . . two universes spinning each other together . . . the old weaver of reality rethreading creation's loom. Who knows, maybe really skilled observation and genuine insight will cause the visitors to come bursting to the surface shaking like coelacanths in a net.

Something is here, be it a message from the stars or from the booming labyrinth of the mind . . . or from both. It must have left a signature somewhere, a thread in the snow, the scratch of a strange nail upon a wall. And we can certainly find that thread, if we bring humor and honesty and courage — and great care — to the effort. In taking the thread we might find ourselves in possession of a very real key to the universe. In any case accepting that. the visitor experience is not a false unknown will relieve a lot of suffering.

Once the thread is in hand, our own mythology will tell us where it leads. for it will be the same thread that the maiden Ariadne handed to Theseus when he stood before the maze of the Minotaur, voting and strong and mad with courage.

And we will all o down the labyrinth, to meet whatever awaits us here.