Communion

ONE

When I had journeyed half of our life's way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear;

so bitter — death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I'll also tell of other things I saw.

- DANTE , Inferno, Canto I

THE INVISIBLE FOREST

First Memories

December 26, 1985

My wife and I own a log cabin in a secluded corner of upstate New York. It is in this cabin that our primary experiences have taken place. I will deal first with what I remember of December 26, 1985, and then with what was subsequently jogged into memory concerning October 4, 1985. Until I sought help, I remembered only that there was a strange disturbance on October 4. An interviewer asked if I could recall any other unusual experiences in my past. The night of October 4 had also been one of turmoil, but it took discussions with the other people who had been in the cabin at the time to help me reconstruct it.

This part of my narrative, covering December 26, is derived from journal material I had written before undergoing any hypnosis or even discussing my situation with anybody.

When I was alone, this is what it was like.

Our cabin is very hidden and quiet, part of a small group of cabins scattered across an area served by a private dirt road, which itself branches off a little-used country road that leads to an old town that isn't even mentioned on many maps. We spend more than half of our time at the cabin, because I do most of my work there. We also have an apartment in New York City.

Ours is a very sedate life. We don't go out much, we rarely drink more than wine, and neither of us has ever used drugs. From 1977 until 1983 I wrote imaginative thrillers, but in recent years I had been concentrating on much more serious fiction about peace and the environment, books that were firmly grounded in fact. Thus, at this time in my life, I wasn't even working on horror stories, and at no time had I ever been in danger of being deluded by them.

We were having a lovely Christmas at the cabin in late December 1985. On Christmas Eve there was snow, which continued for two more days. My son had discovered to his delight that the snow would fall in perfect crystalline flakes on his gloves if he stood still with his hands out.

On December 26 we spent a happy morning breaking in his new sled, then went cross-country skiing in the afternoon. For supper we had leftover Christmas goose, cranberry sauce, and cold sweet potatoes. We drank seltzer with fresh lime in it. After our son went to bed, Anne and I sat quietly together listening to some music and reading.

At about eight-thirty I turned on the burglar alarm, which covers every accessible window and all the doors. For no reason then apparent, I had developed an unusual habit the previous fall. As secretly as ever I made a tour of the house, peering in closets and even looking under the guest-room bed for hidden intruders. I did this immediately after setting the alarm. By ten o'clock we were in bed, and by eleven both of us were asleep.

The night of the twenty-sixth was cold and cloudy. There were perhaps eight inches of snow on the ground, and it was still fang lightly.

I do not recall any dreams or disturbances at all. There was apparently a large unknown object seen in the immediate vicinity at approximately this time of month, but a report of it would not be published for another week. Even when I read that report. though, I did not relate it in any way to my experience. Why should I? The report attributed the sightings to a practical joke. Only much later, when I researched it myself, did I discover how inaccurate that report was.

I have never seen an unidentified flying object. I thought that the whole subject had been explained by science. It took me a couple of months to establish the connection between what had happened to me and possible nonhuman visitors, so unlikely did such a connection seem.

In the middle of the night of December 26-I do not know the exact time-I abruptly found myself awake. And I knew why: I heard a peculiar whooshing, swirling noise coming from the living room downstairs. This was no random creak, no settling of the house, but a sound as if a lame number of people were moving rapidly around to the room.

I listened carefully. The noise just didn't make sense. I sat up in bed, shocked and very curious. There was an edge of fear. The night was dead still, windless. My eyes went straight to the burglar-alarm panel beside the bed. The system was armed and working perfectly. Not a covered window or door was opened, and nobody had entered-at least according to the row of glowing lights.

What I did next may seem peculiar. I settled back in bed. For some reason the extreme strangeness of what I was hearing did not rouse me to action. Over the course of this narrative this sort of inappropriate response will be repeated many times. If something is strange enough, the reaction is very different from what one would think. The mind seems to tune it out as if by some sort of instinct.

No sooner had I settled back than I noticed that one of the double doors leading into our bedroom was moving closed. As they close outward, this meant that the opening was getting smaller, concealing whatever was behind that door. I sat up again. My mind was sharp. I was not asleep, nor in a hypnopompic state between sleep and waking. I wish to be clear that I felt, at that moment, wide awake and in full possession of all my faculties. I could easily have gotten up and read a book or listened to the radio or gone for a midnight walk in the snow.

I could not imagine what could be going on, and I got very uneasy. My heart started beating harder. wasn't settled back anymore; I was sitting up, a question just forming in my mind. What could be moving the door?

Then I saw edging around it a compact figure. It was so distinct and yet so completely, impossibly astonishing that at first I could not understand it at all. I simply sat there staring, too stunned to move.

Months and months later, I discovered that another person who has had the visitor experience first encountered it through the medium of this same peculiar figure rushing toward her in exactly the way that this one now rushed toward me.

Before I narrate those next few seconds, though, I would like to give an exact description of how the figure looked to me. First, I will describe the physical conditions under which I was seeing it. The room was dim but not dark. The burglar-alarm panel alone emitted enough light for me to see. In addition, there was snow on the ground and that added some ambient light. Had it been a person king into the room, I could have trade out his or peek features-clearly.

This figure was too small to be a person, unless a child. I have treasured the approximate distance that the top of the head was from the ground, based on my memory of the figure's position m the doorway, and I believe that it was roughly three and a half feet tall, altogether smaller and lighter than my son.

I could see perhaps a third of the figure, the part that was bending around the door so that it could see me. It had a smooth, rounded hat on, with an odd, sharp rim that jutted out easily four inches on the side I could see. Below this was a vague area. I could not see the face, or perhaps I would not see it. A few moments later, when it was close to the bed, I saw two dark holes for eyes and a black downturning line of a mouth that later became an O.

From shoulder to midriff was the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles. This plate stretched from just below the chin to the waist area. At the time I thought it looked like some sort of breastplate, or even an armored vest. Beneath it was a rectangular appliance of the same type, which covered the lower waist to just above the knees. The angle at which the individual was leaning was such that the lower legs were hidden behind the door.

I was quite shocked, but what I was seeing was so strange I had to assume that it was a dream. Maybe this is why I continued to sit in bed, taking no action. Or perhaps my mind was already under some sort of control.

In any case, I sat there frightened but unable or unwilling to deal with what I was observing My mind explained my vision to me: Despite my full wakefulness, it must be a hypnopompic hallucination. Such phenomena sometimes occur as one drifts between waking and sleep. I assumed that some minor disturbance had awakened me and I was experiencing such an illusion, and never mind the fact that I felt fully awake.

Because of its isolation, the house not only had a burglar alarm but contained a shotgun, which was not far from the bed at the time. Was that why the thing behind the door was wearing a shield, if that was indeed what it was? I have subsequently wondered if an earlier reconnaissance of the house might not have taken place and revealed the presence of the weapon?

The previous July we'd had an experience that should be reported here. I was reading at about half past eleven at night, when I distinctly heard footsteps-normal, human-sounding footsteps move stealthily down our front porch to the area where I had just had a motion-sensitive light installed. The peculiar thing about these footsteps was that they came from the pool area and moved toward the road, the opposite of the direction that they would have come if it was a prowler from the road. At the time, I thought to myself that I would take the gun and go downstairs if the light came on.

No sooner had I thought that than it did. I dashed downstairs but saw nobody even though the light was still on. As it was attached to a fifteen second timer, I found this startling. I had gotten out onto the porch in no more than ten seconds, and there was no place for an intruder to hide between the house and the road, not in that short time.

A careful investigation, shotgun in hand, uncovered nothing. I had been certain that I would see whomever it was running off. At the time I even entertained the notion that they must have jumped onto the roof. but there was nobody there.

Subsequently the light never worked right, although it was in good order earlier that very evening. In September I took the bulbs out. Later in the fall the unit was replaced.

The next thing I knew, the figure came rushing into the room. I recall only blackness after that, for an unknown period of time. I don't remember falling asleep or lying awake. What I do remember is far, far more disturbing. My next conscious recollection is of being in motion. I was naked, with my arms and legs extended. as if I had been frozen iii mid-leap. I was moving out of the room. There was no physical sensation at all, not of being touched. not of being warm or cold. I could feel myself as a shape and a mass. but not in terms of sensation. It was as if' I had become profoundly paralyzed. Although I wanted desperately to move, I could not.

Because of my state of apparent paralysis, I am afraid that I cannot report that I was floating along on some magical pallet or a flying carpet. It could easily be that I was being carried. In any case, I was at this point in a state of panic. (gone was any fleeting thought of dream or hallucination. Something was hideously wrong, so wrong that my mind went blank.

I couldn't think. Even if I had been able to make a sound, which I doubt, I couldn't try.

I must have blacked out again. because I have no further memories of being moved. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a small sort of depression in the woods. It was quite dark, and frozen creeper was pressing tightly around me. I remember being startled that there was no snow on the gray earth.

I sat with my legs partly bent and my hands in my lap. Although I cannot recall this in any detail, I may have been leaning against something. I was still absent sensation. Across the depression to my left there was a small individual whom I could see only out of the corner of my eye. This person was wearing a gray-tan body suit and sitting on the ground with knees drawn up and hands clasped around them. There were two dark eyeholes and a round mouth hole. I had the impression of a face mask.

I felt that I was under the exact and detailed control of whomever had me. I could not move my head, or my hands, or any part of my body save for my eyes. Despite this, I was not tied.

Immediately on my right was another figure, this one completely invisible, except for an occasional flash of movement. This person was working busily at something that seemed to have to do with the right side of my head. It wore dark-blue coveralls and was extremely fast.

The depression appeared to be no more than four feet in diameter, but my eyes were not functioning normally-maybe for no other reason than that I wasn't wearing my glasses. (I am mildly nearsighted.) While the presence of others remains vague in my mind, the individual to my left made a clear impression. I do not know why, but I had the distinct feeling that this was a woman, and so I shall refer to her in the feminine.

She was as small as the others, and appeared almost bored or indifferent. I also felt that she was explaining something to me, but I cannot remember what it was.

I then saw branches moving past my face, then a sweep of treetops. I looked down, and below me the whole tall forest was corkscrewing slowly to the right. There was no chance to question how m the world I had gotten above the trees. I only saw and recorded. Then a gray floor obscured my vision, slipping below my feet like an iris closing.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a messy round room. My impression is that at this point I was actually being cradled by these people, as if they were aware of what was about to transpire. Movement to this totally unfamiliar environment, so suddenly and under these extremely unusual conditions, stripped away whatever reserves of collectedness I still possessed. While I had up until that point been able to retain a degree of control of my attention, this now left me and I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate. This was not a theoretical or even a mental experience. but something profoundly physical.

"Whitley" ceased to exist. What was left was a body in a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death. I do not think that my ordinary humanity survived the transition to this little room. I died, and a wild animal appeared in my place. Not everything was gone, though.

What remained, although small, nevertheless was occupied with an essential task of verification. I was looking around as best I could, recording what I saw.

The small, circular chamber had a domed, Mish-tan ceiling with ribs appearing at intervals of about a foot. I had an impression that it was messy, a living space. Across the room to my right some clothing was thrown on the floor. As a matter of fact, the thought even crossed my mind that the place was actually dirty. It was close and confining for me. The whole scale of it was small, tight, and enclosed. I seem to remember that the room was stuffy and the air quite dry, so it could be that the numbness of panic was wearing off.

Tiny, people were now moving around me at great speed. Their quickness was disturbing, and in a curious way ugly. I had the thought that I was being taken away, and remembered my family. An acute, gnawing feeling of being in a trap overcame me. It was a truly awful sensation, accompanied as it was by the sense that I was absolutely helpless in the hands of these strange creatures.

Despite my extreme terror, I was aware of my surroundings. I know that I was seated on a bench, leaning against a wall. The predominant colors were tan and gray. The bench was the same color as the walls, and was rimmed by a lip of dark brown. From the clarity of my memory of these rather muted colors, I surmise that the room was lit, although I did not see the source of the light.

There was something quite beautiful, I think, having to do with a lens m the ceiling, but I can remember little about it. Perhaps there was a lens at the point of the ceiling, through which some colorful scene could be observed.

There is no way to be certain of how long I remained in this room. It seemed to be a stay of no more than a few minutes or even seconds. It may have been longer, though, because I had time to look around me and note numerous details. While I had before been totally paralyzed, I was now able to move at least my eyes and possibly my head.

I was so scared that my memories are indistinct and covered by amnesia. Even as I write this, I am aware that a great deal more happened. I just can't get to it. This might be terror amnesia, or drugs, or hypnosis, or even doses of all three. There is one drug, tetradotoxin, which could approximate such a state. In small doses it causes external anesthesia. Larger doses bring about the "out of the body" sensation occasionally reported by victims of visitor abduction. Greater quantities can cause the appearance of death-even the brain ceases detectable function.

This rare drug is the core of the zombie poison of Haiti, and little is known about why it works as it does. It is also the notorious "fugu" poison of Japan, found in the tissues of a blowfish, which is an esteemed if deadly aphrodisiac.

My surroundings were so unfamiliar in every detail and my surprise was so great that I simply faded away, in the sense that my ability to direct myself was lost, mentally as well as physically. Not only was I physically anesthetized (although no longer so much paralyzed as totally limp), I was in a mental state that separated me from myself so completely that I had no way to filter my emotions or most immediate reactions, nor could my personality initiate anything. I was reduced to raw biological response. It was as if my forebrain had been separated from the rest of my system, and all that remained was a primitive creature, in effect the ape out of which we evolved long ago.

I was not, however, in the ape. I was in my forebrain, locked away from the rest of myself. My mind had become a prison.

One being was on my right, another on my left. Within my field of vision a great deal of rushing about commenced again. The next thing I knew, was being shown a tiny gray box with a sliding lid. There was a curved lip at one end of this box, to make it easy to push it open. It was being held b a thin, graceful person whose appearance was not distinct. Was this the female again? I'm not sure. It almost seems, as I remember, that something had been done to my eyes to affect my ability to concentrate my vision. Glances around the room were quite detailed in recollection, but any attempts to steady my vision and view a particular being resulted in blurring. It would be interesting to know if this was an induced effect or something caused by my own fear of what I was seeing.

My memory of the one that came before me next is of a tiny, squat person, crouching as if huddled over something. He had been given the box and now slid it open, revealing an extremely shiny, hair-thin needle mounted on a black surface. This needle glittered when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but was practically invisible straight on.

I became aware — I think I was told — that they proposed to insert this into my brain.

If I had been afraid before, I now became quite simply crazed with terror. I argued with them. "This place is filthy," I remember saying. Then, "You'll ruin a beautiful mind." I could imagine my family awakening in the morning and finding me a vegetable. A great sadness overtook me. I do not recall screaming, but evidently I was doing so, because I remember the next exchange quite clearly.

One of them, I think it was the one I had identified earlier as the woman, said, "What can we do to help you stop screaming?" This voice was remarkable. It was definitely aural, that is to say, I heard it rather than sensed it. It had a subtly electronic tone to it, the accents flat and startlingly Midwestern.

My reply was unexpected. I heard myself say, "You could let me smell you." I was embarrassed; that is not a normal request, and it bothered me. But it made a great deal of sense, as I have afterward realized.

The one to my right replied, "Oh, OK, I can do that," in a similar voice, speaking very rapidly, and held his hand against my face, cradling my head with his other hand. The odor was distinct, and gave me exactly what I needed, an anchor in reality. It remained the most convincing aspect of the whole memory, because that odor was completely indistinguishable from a real one. It did not seem in any way a dream experience or a hallucination. I remembered it as an actual smell.

There was a slight scent of cardboard to it, as if the sleeve of the coverall that was partly pressed against my face were made of some substance like paper. The hand itself had a faint but distinctly organic sourness in its odor. It was not a human smell, but it was unmistakably the smell of something alive. There was a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.

The next thing I knew, there was a bang and- a Hash, and I realized that they had performed the proposed operation on my head. I felt like weeping and I recall sinking down into a cradle of tiny arms.

At this point. I had some feeling, and enough muscle tone had returned to enable me to slide my feet along the floor in an effort to avoid falling the way. Then I was lifted up and seemed suddenly to be in another room, or perhaps I simply saw my present surroundings differently. It appeared to be a small operating theater. I was to the center of it on a table, and three tiers of benches were populated with a few huddled figures, some with round, as opposed to slanted, eyes.

I was aware that I had seen four different types of figures. The first was the small robotlike being that had led the way into my bedroom. He was followed by a large group of short, stocky ones in the dark-blue coveralls. These had wide faces, appearing either dark gray or dark blue in that light, with glittering deep-set eyes, pug noses, and broad, somewhat human mouths. Inside the room, I encountered two types of creature that did not look at all human. The most provocative of these was about five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes. This being had an almost vestigial mouth and nose. The huddled figures in the theater were somewhat smaller, with similarly shaped heads but round, black eyes like large buttons.

Throughout the whole experience, the stocky ones were always present. They were apparently responsible for moving and controlling me, and I had the distinct impression that they were a sort of "good army." Why good I do not know.

I do not remember what, if anything, happened in the operating theater. My memories of movement from place to place are the hardest to recall because it was then that I felt the most helpless. My fear would rise when they touched me. Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects. It was very distressing.

Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew l was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long narrow. and triangular in structure. They inserted this thin into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.

Only when the thing was withdrawn did I see that it was a mechanical device. The individual holding it pointed to the wire cafe on the tip and seemed to warn . me about something. But what? I never found out.

Events once again started moving very quickly.

One of them took my right hand and made an incision on my forefinger. There was no pain at all. Abruptly, my memories end. There isn't even blackness, just morning.

I had no further recollection of the incident.

I awoke the morning of the twenty-seventh very much as usual, but grappling with a distinct sense of unease and a very improbable but intense memory of seeing a barn owl staring at me through the window sometime during the night.

I remember how I felt in the gathering evening of the twenty-seventh, when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.

But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.

Later I discovered that memories of animals in strange places are a common block to this experience. One young woman arrived back at a picnic in the woods in France with a story of seeing a beautiful deer. But she had blood on her blouse, and a strange straight scar that could not be explained. Ten years passed before she remembered anything of the truth of her experience in those woods, and she would have died with that memory had not her memory of another encounter with the visitors caused her to question its real significance. Another man came away from his experience thinking only that he had seen a bunch of rabbits hopping around outside his car.

Like my barn owl, these stories must have seemed no more than whimsies, but they hid real experiences that were so impossible to accept, just keeping them hidden took a large toll-as it has with others, as it might be doing with anybody.

From that first day my wife noticed a dramatic personality change in me, which she thought was similar to a change that had taken place the previous October. We had gone through personal hell then because of my demands and accusatory behavior, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself.

But I was in decline again, and this time the symptoms were not all mental. That first evening I underwent the initial physical symptom of my ordeal. We had come in from an afternoon of light cross-country skiing, not at all strenuous. I was dead tired. Normally I am full of energy. Even a hard afternoon on the ski trails leaves me feeling pleasantly relaxed.

I got chills and went to bed. I lay huddled between the sheets and the quilt, with evening coming down, feeling just awful. I thought that I must have had a high fever. I was exhausted. The sounds of my wife and son downstairs filled me with a sense of foreboding.

Strange recollections of people running, of being pulled and shoved, swirled through my head.

Then our nearest neighbors suddenly arrived. They appeared without warning. We tend to be very private in our sparse community, and this was only their second spontaneous visit in the two years we have been neighbors.

Feeling somewhat better, I went downstairs to see them. No sooner had we started talking than I found myself complaining that I thought I had seen the light of a snowmobile m the woods between our houses at about three in the morning. I was horrified at myself. What was I saying? I couldn't remember any such thing, and I knew it even as I spoke. Our neighbors offered the thought that the woods were too thick for a snowmobile to maneuver, which is true. Then I said that it must have been the lights on his house. He has two floodlights that shine out over his backyard. He explained that these lights had been off, but promised to redirect them so they couldn't be seen from our house. I knew even then that his lights hadn't been bothering me so late at night (although !hey were sometimes bothersome early in the evening, now that winter had stripped the woods of their concealing leaves). My memory of the snowmobile was as hollow as my memory of the owl.

After some small talk, our neighbors went home. I was not pleased with my own behavior, and found it hard to understand because it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.

My wife reports that my personality deteriorated dramatically over the following weeks. I became hypersensitive, easily confused, and, worst of all, short with my son. We have always been a happy family, and there was no change in our life condition or relationship to account for this personality shift.

The realization that the owl memory was not true created troubling problems for me. I was aware that something had somehow gone wrong with me. The trouble was I could not understand what it was. There simply wasn't anything in my life to explain it. I started to worry about toxins in our food or water, but as nobody else in the family was affected, and we hadn't tried any food that might have caused some bizarre allergy, that seemed unlikely.

I did not know that the owl and the light were screen memories that concealed a traumatic experience. As described by Freud, the screen memory is a method that the mind uses to shield itself from things too upsetting to recall.

I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal. By December 28 I was so depressed and in such a state of inner conflict that I sat down and wrote a short story in an effort to explore my emotions. It reflected not only my emotional state but probably also some of the realities hidden behind it.

I called it "Pain." It was to be the last sustained writing I would do for seven weeks, and is the last thing I wrote before these enormous hidden truths began emerging from my unconscious.

At the time I had no idea that I was suffering from emotional trauma, or that dozens of other people had been through very similar ordeals after being taken by the visitors.

Previous to the twenty-sixth I had made good progress on a huge two-volume novel based on the relationship between Russia and America at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Now I could hardly read my own work, let alone continue working on this complicated project.

Since I wrote "Pain" as an expression of the emotional state that overlay the memories I was then suppressing, I will recount it briefly. It is about a man who encounters an enigmatic woman named Janet, who proves to be some sort of superhuman being, perhaps an angel or a demon. She draws this man into a strange experience of capture and incarceration in a tiny, magical cabinet. From the agony that ensues, he gains immense insight and new spiritual strength.

What is most interesting to me about this story is that it continues imagery that is present in my early horror novels. The visitors could be seen as the Wolfen, as Miriam Blaylock in The Hunger, and as the fairy queen Leannan and her soldiers in Catmagic. The theme is always the same: Mankind must face a harsh but enigmatically beautiful force that, as Miriam Blaylock describes herself, is "part of the justice of the world." This force is always hidden between the folds of experience.

As I worked on "Pain" my mental and physical states continued to get worse. An infection appeared on my right forefinger. It looked like a splinter injury, but I could not remember getting a splinter, unless it was from some log I carried in for the stove. The injury festered. Neither iodine nor antibiotic ointment seemed to help. I looked for a bit of splinter but could find nothing.

I noticed that I was uncomfortable sitting because of rectal pain, a weird and disturbing symptom. I had a vague feeling that something distressful had happened to me, but no clear memory.

In the ensuing days, I experienced more bouts of fatigue. I would be working and suddenly I would get cold and start to shake. Then I would feel so exhausted that I could not go on, and crawl into bed quivering and miserable, sure that I was coming down with the flu.

I took my temperature during one of these experiences and found that it was 96.6 at the outset and 98.8 at the height of the "fever." Afterward it dropped to 97.0

Nights I would sleep, but wake up in the morning feeling as if I had been tossing and turning the whole time. I ceased to dream, and sometimes had difficulty closing my eyes. I felt watched, and kept hearing noises m the night. Mornings I would wake up with the feeling that I had been somehow on guard.

My disposition got worse. I became mercurial, frantic with excitement about some idea one moment, in despair the next. I was suspicious of friends and family, often openly hostile.

I came to hate telephone calls. I could not concentrate even on light television programs.

After writing "Pain" I found that I could not sustain enough attention to work for more than five or ten minutes at a time. An attempt to read Gerald's Party by Robert Coover left me profoundly confused. I kept reading and rereading the same few pages. I switched to a less challenging novel, but it was also totally incomprehensible. I had been reading some sermons of the thirteenth-century mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart, but this study had to be abandoned. I could no longer follow my own thinking, let alone that of the authors who interested me. It was a fearful, haunting discovery.

On the afternoon of January 3 we were skiing when I got a pain behind my right ear. It was a sensation similar to what happens to one's jaw when Novocain wears off after a session in the dentist's chair. My skull ached and the skin was sensitive. In the middle of this sensitive area my wife could see a tiny pinpoint of a scab.

I believe that the combination of the infected finger, the rectal pain, and the aching head were what finally brought my memories into focus. The confused swirl resolved into a specific series of recollections, and when I saw what they were, I just about exploded with terror and utter disbelief.

One of the memories would come into my head, linger there a moment, then leave me with my heart pounding, gasping, sweat pouring down my face.

I thought that I had lost my mind.

For half of my life I have been engaged in a rigorous and detailed search for a finer state of consciousness. Now I thought my mind was turning against me, that my years of eager study of everything from Zen to quantum physics had led me into some strange and tragic byway of the soul.

As soon as I had them in focus, my memories became perfectly vivid-as vivid, say, as childhood memories become when one chooses to draw them out of the mental file where they are hidden. I sat at my desk, trying to make sense of what could not make sense.

I thought, quietly and calmly, You may be going mad, or you may have o brain tumor.

You've gut to find um which it is and take whatever steps are necessary. And then I rested my head on the desk, and, quite frankly, cried.

For a couple of days I lived with it. Maybe the "symptoms" would subside.

Then, quite suddenly one afternoon, I recalled the smell. Their smell. It came back to me as clearly as if I had inhaled it not a moment before. More than anything except discovering that I was not alone with my experience, that totally real memory saved me from going stark raving mad.

In the first week of January, a local newspaper published accounts of an object or objects being sighted in our area. This story appeared m the January 3, 1986, issue of the Middletown. New York Record. The headline called the appearance a hoax but according to the story local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. One man, however claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local prison, and in the light he saw planes.

A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the prank hypothesis.

My wife showed me the article and told me. "You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week." I did not remember the conversation, but the article caused me to glance over a hook my brother had sent me for Christmas called Science and the UFOs by Jenny Randles and the astronomer Peter Warrington.

Warrington is a respected scientist, and the book seemed well written. As a matter of fact, it does not make any claims about the reality of the phenomenon, but simply calls for more study and appeals to the scientific community to begin to accept it as a legitimate area of inquiry.

I was surprised to find that Science and the UFOs frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first fire or six pages read.

Much later. after we had really begun to take this whole matter seriously. Anne and I did more research into UFO sightings in our area. We discovered that it is a hotbed of sightings, and has been for nearly half a century.

As it happens, the eighteen-year-old son of one of our neighbors saw something hovering near a road not five miles from our cabin ac approximately nine-thirty on a night in late December. He described it to me as "huge and covered with lights," a typical description. He watched it for some time. Being the son of a former state trooper and pilot, he did not claim that it was a "UFO," but simply told the truth: He did not know what it was, but it appeared to be a solid structure, and as it hovered for a substantial period, more than fifteen minutes, it could not have been a flight of planes. I telephoned the Goodyear Corporation and found that their blimp was not in the area at the time.

The only thing I thought it could have been was some unknown blimp, but even that appeared hard to believe in view of what snore I discovered about it.

Just by talking with friends in April my wife uncovered a personal experience of an early area sighting, one that took place in the late fifties. One of her best friends is an artist and the wife of a well-known composer. In her childhood this woman used to at summer camp at a location not ten miles from where our log cabin now stands, a fact that we did not know when Anne asked her the question we had determined to put to as many people as we could, as part of our research effort.

To at once gain valid information and prevent bias, we had simply been asking people,

"What was your strangest experience?" None of the people we asked had any idea of what was happening to us.

The woman's answer turned out to be highly revealing. She reported that she had seen a flying saucer in 1953, when she was nine. She proceeded to describe an object similar to the one that had appeared in the same immediate area in December 1985. Like so many reports through the years, she described it as huge, full of lights, and hovering. It moved off slowly If all these objects were the results of pranks, then the pranksters would have been operating for more than thirty years-and even in the early fifties they would have had superb mufflers, considering that the object seen then made no more sound than the ones seen today.

Further research revealed to us that our area of upstate New York, comprising roughly Westchester, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, and Ulster counties, had an absolutely extraordinary series of sightings of boomerang- or triangular-shaped objects of enormous size, starting in 1983. Thousands of people saw these objects, ranging from meteorologists and Federal Aviation Administration employees to a whole cross section of local people. Town police officers, sheriffs, state troopers, even in one case an entire town government en masse viewed the things, which have been described as being "the size of an aircraft carrier."

The official explanation, detailed in Discover magazine in November 1984, was that the sightings were created by a group of pilots flying light aircraft. According to Discover, the light aircraft sometimes flew in formation with their engines off and their wing tips six inches apart at night. Since these planes never seemed to use their radios, it was subsequently added in local newspapers that radio silence was maintained during these tight nighttime maneuvers.

A pilot told me that this was all highly unlikely, that such formation flying would not be possible e even with much heavier aircraft. Pranksters and even secret aircraft may be part of the answer to the enigma, but they are not the whole answer.

An article appeared in the April 17, 1983, issue of The New York Times quoting a professional meteorologist who observed a silent object a thousand yards in diameter hovering a hundred feet above him. He is quoted by the Times as saying that he had the sensation of "being scanned and rejected."

I do not think that a professional meteorologist would mistake an object nearly a mile wide for a flight of airplanes, not at an altitude of a hundred feet.

Mr. Philip J. Klass, a noted debunker of unexplained UFO sightings, claimed that people were probably seeing 'an advertising airplane. Mr. Klass was at that time an editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, a publication noted for its uncanny ability to obtain scoops from the Department of Defense about secret aerospace projects. Mr. Klass also writes for a publication I have admired, The Skeptical Inquirer. In view of my own experiences, however.

I am beginning to suspect that, in the case of this particular chimera. skepticism has been taken farther than is reasonable or wise.

Neither the official story nor Mr. Klass's offering explains the hundreds of closeup sighting reports collected by local science teacher Phillip J. Imbrogno whom the Times described as "one person working hard to provide a rational explanation." I spoke to Mr.

Imbrogno, who said that he had collected since 1983 snore than two hundred reports from people trained in some way as observers, and that they had seen huge devices that had clear structure to them. He added that on one night when there were extensive and clear sightings of a device hovering above a local parkway, the winds were averaging 23 knots! What people saw on that night was not aircraft, heavy or light flying in close formation.

And nobody has explained who came and took me in the night and injected something into my brain.

When we went to New York City for a stay in January we still knew almost nothing about UFOs, and nothing at all about the sightings discussed above.

Life did not return to normal. Even though there was no further reason for me to delay writing I couldn't seem to get down to work. I felt' a little better, but I was so terribly uneasy.

My difficulty relating to my wife and son continued.

I finally finished Science and the UFOs. Toward the end of the book I was astonished to read a description of an experience similar to my own. When I read the author's version of the "archetypal abduction experience," I was shocked. I was lying in bed at the time, and I just stared and stared at the words. I, also, had been seated in a little depression in the woods. And I had later remembered an animal.

My first reaction was to slam the book closed as if it contained a coiled snake.

They were talking about people who think they're taken aboard spaceships by aliens. And I seemed to be such a person. My blood went cold: Nobody must ever, ever know about this, not even Anne. I decided just to lock the business away in my mind.

A few mornings later at about ten, I was sitting at my desk when things just seemed to cave in on me. Wave after wave of sorrow passed over me. I looked at the window with hunger. I wanted to jump. I wanted to die. I just could not bear this memory, and I could not get rid of it. What on earth were those things? What had they done to me? Were they real, or was I the victim of some unknown mental state?

I remembered that a man named Budd Hopkins had been mentioned in the book as a prominent researcher in the field. The name had been familiar to me: Anne and I are interested in art and Hopkins is a well-known abstract artist, collected by the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

I found his name in the phone book. But how could I call him? What a stupid thing to have to admit. Little men. Flying saucers. How idiotic.

I recognized clearly, though, that if I had another moment of despair that intense, I was going to go out the window. No question. I owed it to the family who loved and depended on me to try to help myself.

I called Budd Hopkins. He answered the phone and listened to my story for a few minutes. I thought I would wither away with embarrassment telling it, but he soon interrupted me. Could I come over — like right now?

It turned out that his place in the city was a ten minute walk from mine.

Hopkins was a large, intense man with one of the kindest faces I have ever seen. I later discovered that he was bright and canny. but at the time he assumed a guileless appearance.

The moment our interview began, Hopkins explained that he was not a therapist but he could put me in touch with one if I wanted that. He then got the facts front me that I have recorded here.

As I sat there in that man's living room, listening to him tell me that I wasn't alone. that others had gone through very much the same thing, the tears rolled down my cheeks, and I went from wanting to hide it all to wanting to understand it.

It was during that first meeting that he asked me if anything else had happened in the past, anything unusual. My initial reaction was to say no. One of these ludicrous and horrible experiences was quite enough. But the question seemed to trigger something in me. After a moment's reflection, I blurted out, " I seem to remember a night the house burned down. But it didn't burn down."

All hell had broken loose on a night in early October. There had even been an explosion that woke up the whole household. Strange things had happened, but for some unknown reason we had simply put them out of mind. We'd hardly even discussed them. But that time they didn't happen only to me. We'd had houseguests. If anything had really happened, they would certainly remember. Here was a chance to put this to the test. If nobody remembered anything, I would be able to dismiss this embarrassing business of aliens.

I left Hopkins's house a happy man. He'd said that judging from his experience, the October events may have been caused by the same agency that was responsible for the disturbance of December 26.

Wonderful. I'd contact the witnesses. They would of course report that they remembered nothing. Then I would begin the painful but thankfully well understood process of accepting that I had been the victim of some unusual mental phenomenon. would enter therapy and learn to forget the mysterious visitors.

No other outcome seemed possible. Of course not. I had solved my problem.

October 4, 1985

As I walked down Sixth Avenue toward my end of Greenwich Village, what had happened on October 4 became clearer in my mind.

Why had I not thought of or discussed these events before? The answer is straightforward: I had tucked the whole episode into the catalog of open questions and forgotten it. In retrospect the only reason I can advance for having done this is that I did not want to face just how strange the events of that night had really been. But when I thought them over, they began to seem distinctly eerie, even frightening.

We often deal with fear by rejection — and to this case, as will soon be evident, there was more than enough reason to be terrified.

When I wrote the narrative that follows I had not yet been hypnotized and did not know what, if anything, lay unseen in my mind. I wrote it over a two day period after first seeing Hopkins and sometime before I met Dr. Donald Klein, who would become my hypnotist when we began to discover empty places to my memory.

On October 4. 1985, my wife, son, and I drove up to our cabin in the company of two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.

We have known Jacques and Annie for about five years. The thing about them most immediately apparent is that he is as enormous as she is tiny. He weighs nearly 300 pounds, is a black belt in karate, d does a hundred push-ups at a session. She is also a black belt, but weighs perhaps 120 pounds. She is intellectual, he is physical. Both are writers. He came to the United States as a refugee from slave labor in the Soviet Union in the late forties. A Rumanian national, he had been forcibly transferred to the Donbas region to be worked to death in the mines there. His book, Donbas, tells of his long Journey of escape, and paints an accurate picture of him as a profoundly physical man. He would make a good witness, I thought, because of his steadfast sense of reality.

Annie Gottlieb is more an intellectual, the author of the recent Do You Believe fn Magic: The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (Times Books, 1987).

The night of October 4 was foggy in Ulster County. We had dinner at a local restaurant and arrived at the cabin at about nine in the evening. I turned on the pool heater so that the pool would be comfortable for use the next day (Saturday). Then I lit a fire in the wood stove: We were all sleepy, so sleepy that we went off to bed almost immediately.

Anne and I retired to our upstairs bedroom, Jacques and Annie went to the guest room and closed the door, and our son went to his corner bedroom beside theirs. He left his door open. From my bed, with the bedroom doors open, I could see out across the cathedral ceiling of the living room to a hexagonal window set in the peak of the roof.

Over the next hour, the fog grew thicker and thicker. When I turned out my reading fight I was enveloped in absolute blackness and total silence. The harvest moon had been full on September 29, and was now at about half. It rose at approximately ten-thirty, but was entirely invisible because of the cloud cover.

I do not remember what I had been reading that night, but it wasn't frightening, nor was dinner the sort of meal that would give rise to later unrest. We had not drunk more than one glass of wine and a drink each at the restaurant.

I slept dreamlessly for some period of time, perhaps as much as two or three hours. Then I was startled awake and saw, to my horror, that there was a distinct blue light being cast on the living-room ceiling.

I was frightened, because it wasn't possible for there to be any light there. Car lights from the road could not be cast on that ceiling. In early October our neighbor was away in Japan, and his house was not only dark but invisible through the forest between our places, which was still thickly leafed. The automatic porch light that had been persistently troublesome was now without bulbs. It could not have been a flashlight, because it was so uniform and so broad, and so distinctly blue. We have tried duplicating the light with a fluorescent camp lantern both on a clear night and on a similarly foggy one, but even an extremely powerful fluorescent light could not achieve the effect, let alone a small portable unit.

My mind inventoried the possibilities as I watched this blue light slowly creep up the ceiling, as if whatever was causing it were slowly moving down into the front yard from above. Finally I hit on what seemed to me a sensible solution: The chimney must be on fire and dropping sparks into the front yard. I had to do something about it at once.

Then I fell into a deep sleep! The last thought I remember before dropping off with my heart still hammering was that the roof was on fire. This was the first such wildly inappropriate reaction on that night, but it was not to be the last.

I do not know what time this all took place, but it was well after midnight.

Sometime after I fell back to sleep I was again awakened, this time by a loud report, as if a firecracker had popped in my face. My wife cried out and downstairs my son began shouting.

When I opened my eyes I was stunned to see that the entire house was surrounded by a glow that extended into the fog.

I thought to myself: You damned fool, you fell asleep and now the fire's gotten worse. I finally managed to get up. As I did so I said to Anne: "The roofs on fire. I'll get our son and wake up the others." I started downstairs.

I hadn't gotten halfway across the room before the glow suddenly disappeared. I was very confused. There was nothing to do but tell Anne that I had made a mistake, then go downstairs to comfort my son. On the way I met Jacques in the hall. His presence terrified me and I jumped back away from him. Then I apologized for being so startled by a friend, told him to calm down and go to bed, and added that nothing was wrong.

I continued into my son's room and embraced him. In a few minutes I was back in bed and the household was again asleep.

The next morning little was said about the incident. I do remember Annie mentioning that Jacques had been bothered by the light the night before. I didn't understand that because their bedroom door had been dosed, so they couldn't have seen the bathroom light, which is left on for our son. I didn't remember my confusion about fire. As far as I was concerned, Annie and Jacques had been disturbed by the light but I hadn't been.

Later that week I found myself a little agitated, without knowing quite why. I had a persistent memory of light flashing in my eyes that night. And I vaguely recalled some sort of an explosion.

The next weekend I had a very clear and dramatic memory of a huge crystal standing on end above the house, a glorious thing .hundreds of feet tall, glowing with unearthly blue light.

I told Anne about it, and as I was talking I experienced a hollow sort of a feeling I knew that she didn't believe me — of course she didn't! And I didn't believe myself. "Wasn't there some problem with the stove?" she asked. I was embarrassed and never mentioned the crystal again. I put it out of my mind permanently.

On February 6, 1986, I came home from Hopkins's house brimming with eagerness. I was sure I would put an end to this by asking careful questions. Jacques and Annie had been disturbed by the bathroom light. Of course. Their door must have been opened, as I had seen Jacques in the hall. And my Anne had cried out not because of the explosion but because I had told her the house was on fire. There had been no explosion. And as for the blue light on the living-room ceiling, put some unanticipated light source together with thick fog and anything can happen.

I first asked my wife to think back to October 4. It wasn't hard to identify the specific night, because it was the last time Jacques and Annie had come to the country and the thickness of the fog was unusual.

I was disturbed that Anne at once remembered being awakened by the bang. She did not see the glow, but my initial warning about the fire apparently didn't penetrate her sleep, because all she did recall was my saying that there was no fire.

I asked my son, "Do you remember the last time Jacques and Annie went to the country with us?"

"Yeah. The night of the bang." So he had also heard it. "A bunch of people told me it was OK; you just threw your shoe at a fly."

"What people?"

"Just a bunch of people. People who were around."

This answer, I must admit, shocked me badly. I left off questioning him and called Budd Hopkins, who suggested that I ask my son not about memories but about dreams.

Taking this advice, I next asked my son if he remembered any unusual dreams. This is his reply, spontaneous and immediate:

"I dreamed that a bunch of little doctors took me out on the porch and put me on a cot. I got scared and they started saying 'We won't hurt you' over and over in my head. That is my strangest dream, because it was just like it was real. It happened in the middle of another dream, when I was dreaming that me and Ezra [a friend of his] were in a boat." He could not say if he had had the dream on the night of October 4. He knew only that it had happened at the cabin.

His words swept away all my hopes of solving this problem in anything remotely resembling a conventional manner. What had happened to my little boy? His innocent report was very upsetting. In the context of my own experiences, his dream suggested either that the two of us have some sort of weird psychological link, or that at some point he has had an experience similar to my own.

Next I spoke to Jacques Sandulescu on the phone. This is a transcript of that conversation.

Me: "Do you remember anything about the last time you and Annie came to the country?"

Jacques: "The light! I was sleeping, all of a sudden something woke me up. I saw the room was full of light. Bright, like daylight. Not like the moon. I thought we overslept. I look at my watch, it says four-thirty. Then I hear you through the door, saying it's OK. The light is gone, so I go back to sleep."

Me: "What kind of light was it?"

Jacques: "Light, it was light. I could see the bushes outside. I could see the tree trunks. I thought it was about ten in the morning."

I have done every conceivable thing to try to duplicate light like that. Our guest room has one small window overlooking a seven-feet-deep covered porch. Beyond that the land slopes up gradually, so that not even car lights from the road can enter that room, much less moonlight or sunlight. With the leaves gone during the winter, we determined that the lights from the neighbor's house are also invisible from that window. The movement-sensitive light doesn't shine directly in, but down the porch. Had it somehow turned on — even absent bulbs — Jacques would have seen not the trees and shrubs but the outline of the porch interior with the yard beyond in darkness. The reason for this is that the fight shines past the window and down the length of .the porch. Had the regular porch light been switched on, the same effect would have resulted.

Even with the neighbor's lights on, the porch light on, and a car in the front yard, we could not duplicate the effect. Nothing I can conceive of can account for the major light phenomena on that night. It may be possible to explain the blue glow I originally saw on the ceiling, but not that massive burst of light from above. I visualized the whole roof being ablaze. Jacques thought it was midmorning. Because of the fog, a helicopter, or indeed any sort of airplane, was out of the question. A pilot told me simply, "Forget aircraft."

At four-thirty the moon was still in the sky, but well below the line of the forest. Could the fog have somehow magnified the moonlight, causing dark-sensitized eyes to mistake its mild glow for bright daylight? Such a thing may have been possible, but the moon was low in the west and the source of the light was clearly directly overhead. And what about the explosion? Maybe it was thunder. But there were no thunderstorms in the area. Perhaps a freak bolt in some sort of unusual ministorm caused it, then. But the period of seeming daylight lasted many seconds, and was not apparent to anybody until after the explosion.

Thunder follows lightning, not the other way around.

Whatever caused the effect, it was a highly unusual phenomenon and it is unlikely that it can be identified.

And so far there is no way at all to account for Annie Gottlieb's testimony. I spoke to her immediately after talking to Jacques. While she must have overheard him on the phone, the two of them had no time between statements to discuss the matter. Also, they are normal, coherent, and reliable people. They had, and have, no reason whatsoever to lie and they are most unlikely to be so radically confused by normal realities that they would derive from them memories such as they report. One only has to look into Annie Gottlieb's writings to see the clarity of her mind.

Like the rest of us, Annie was awakened by a loud explosion. She reports: "It was a bang. Then I heard the scurry of little feet running across your bedroom upstairs. It must have been the cats."

"Annie, the cats were in the city. We don't take them weekends because they don't like the carrier."

"You're kidding! I always just assumed it was the cats. Anyway, I vaguely remember the light. Mostly I remember the noises. A few minutes after the scurrying, I heard you come downstairs. You said through the door not to worry. The next morning you told me that some people had come down from is spaceship to visit."

" What? Annie, I never said any such thing. I would never say anything like that."

"At the time I thought it must have been some kind of dream."

"You remember me saying it?"

"Well, now that I think of it, I don't know where I got the idea that anybody said that."

(Months later she recalled that I had not spoken about a visit. but had described the crystal. In any case, I certainly had a very strange explanation for the night's disturbances.) At that point I almost wished that I had never asked my witnesses anything. I said good-bye and put the phone down. I realized, finally and inescapably, that something very peculiar was going on. I could not deny it. I would have been a fool to deny it.

I went into my office and closed my door. It was evening, and Manhattan's few blind stars were shining in the sky. The world outside looked so normal, and that moment its very normality seemed to me to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I thought back across the months to October The fall had been an awful time for me and my wife. Around the second week of October I had become extremely fearful about living in the New York area and decided to move.

Had my terror stemmed from that night? And what about all my nervousness, my secret searching under beds and in closets, my unreasonable fear of prowlers? It seemed to me that I had been growing increasingly uneasy with the passing months. I had awful dreams that I cannot remember. Again and again I woke up in the small hours of the morning feeling as if something dreadful had just happened.

The last week of October, still with no conscious memory of that night being in any way unusual, I decided that I couldn't live a moment longer in New York. The city streets seemed hideously dangerous. Our cabin was a dark, terrible place, one that I could not bear ever to enter again. I felt out of control, as if anything could happen, and might.

I decided that I wanted to move to Austin. I went to the University of Texas there, and it is a city that both Anne and I love. Some of our best friends, including my collaborator James Kunetka, live there.

I insisted on putting both the cabin and the apartment on the market.

After Halloween we went down to Texas and arranged for our son to attend a local private school and began the process of buying a house.

We got an offer on our cabin, but no interest in the apartment.

One evening in Austin we were looking at the house we had chosen to buy. My wife was inside talking to the realtor and the owners. I walked out onto the deck.

When I looked at the dark canyon that stretched out into the shadows, and the stars in the evening sky, I felt suddenly and absolutely afraid. It was exactly as if the sky were a living thing, and it was watching me.

What was even more frightening was my clear awareness that this was a paranoid fantasy.

I thought then that my mental health was not good, and soon I would either have to calm down or take steps to Improve it.

But I could not live in that house. In fact, I could never enter it again.

When I changed my mind and decided to stay in New York, my wife was understandably furious. Then I accused her of being the one who had wanted to move us to Austin.

There followed a crisis. She really thought that she might have to leave me, because life together was just getting intolerable. But we are a deep marriage, and her despairing threat to separate made me quell my extreme behavior. It was not until Christmas that I really began to feel better.

Sitting in my office that afternoon in February I took stock of all I had found out. I had promised Hopkins that I wouldn't read anything about unidentified flying objects. In the past, as I have said, my interest in the subject was minimal. I have certainly read a book or two about them. Pressing myself I thought maybe I could remember seeing something years ago in Look magazine about somebody named Hill being taken aboard a flying disk. (In July 1986 I got copies of the issues involved — October 4 and 18, 1966-and I do not think that I actually read them at the time. I must have seen something about the story, though, because I remember it. Maybe there was a report in the newspaper.) Judging from what the other witnesses reported, something had happened. But what?

Even after talking to Hopkins, I was by no means willing to ascribe my experiences to the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to be quite clear: I had no idea what had gone on that night.

There did seem to be a lot of confusion, though, and perhaps even an emotional response on my part greatly out of proportion to what seemed a minor disturbance.