Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time.
Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors.
I wondered about my description of them as insectlike. Their appearance was actually more humanoid. There were no feelers, no wings, no tangle of legs. It was the way they moved — so stiffly — drat suggested the insect world to me. That, and their enormous, black eyes. What if intelligence was not the culmination of evolution but something that could emerge from the evolutionary matrix at many different points, just as wings and claws and eyes do. Primitive creatures have primitive organs.
If, say, some species of hive insect had become intelligent on some other planet — or even here — it might be very much older than us, and its mind very much more primitive in structure.
What would a more primitive intelligence be? I wondered if such a thing might nut involve less differentiation from creature to creature than we have . . with less individual awareness and independence.
If they were a hive, they might communicate as a hive, using a complex mixture of sounds, motions. scents, and even methods as vet unknown. Our knowledge of earth's hive species is very limited. An intelligent hive might as a whole be very powerful, but as individuals, quite limited both in strength and in understanding.
They might have, in essence, a single, enormous mind. Such a mind might chink very well indeed — but very slowly. That would certainly explain why they were being so careful in dealing with us. A single human being might be far less wise than they but also a lot faster thinking.
I had been assuming that any visitors would be vastly more intelligent than us. What if that was only part of the truth? In terms of earthly evolution, man emerged only very recently. Maybe that also means that man is not the lesser creature, but the more advanced one. If this was so, then older, less quick thinking and flexible forms might view us as quite a danger to them. They might even want to imprison us here in our earth, or do worse than imprison us.
And yet, I did not have the feeling that they were hostile so much as stern. They were also at least somewhat frightened of me . was certain of that In some sense, their emergence into human consciousness seemed to me to represent life — or the universe itself — engaged to some deep act of creation.
Sitting there at that moment, I suddenly realized that all my questions about whether or not my experiences were real were meaningless. Of course they were real. I had perceived them. A more accurate question was, what were they? They were not entirely mental, at least not in a conventional sense. Other people had witnessed their side effects. The light seen by Jacques Sandulescu on October 4, the scampering heard Annie Gottlieb, and the explosion perceived by myself, my wife, Annie. and my son suggested that whatever happened that night was more than a psychological experience. And the dozens of similar stories being told by such a cross section of the population suggested as well that if a psychological explanation was to be sustained. it would have to be a most radical one.
In one way, as I sat there at my desk in the middle of the night, I found the notion of all this witness reassuring. But in another way it actually seemed dangerous. It was corrosive to my understanding of myself and of reality.
My mind turned, inevitably, to the part of the hypnosis that had covered the apparent event in my childhood. I had no memory at all of being taken when I was twelve, let alone when we were aboard a moving train. And yet people report this experience beginning at all sorts of improbable times, the most improbable being while they are driving cars. If it is some sort of hypnagogic trance, why don't they go off the road, or at least run a light or so during the couple of hours the experience usually lasts?
My sister and father and I did take a trip in 1957 to Madison, Wisconsin, to see my aunt and uncle and their children. On the way back I was horribly sick. We had a drawing room on the Texas Eagle from Chicago to San Antonio, and much of the trip took place at night.
At that moment, I felt as if I had opened the door onto my familiar yard at the cabin and found no grass, no flowers, no tall hemlocks. All that was there was limitless, empty blue sky through which, if I crossed the threshold, I would fall forever.
On that note I gave up. It was pushing toward three o'clock in the morning and I was finally so exhausted that I could not stay awake. I went to bed. I do not remember any dreams. When morning came, it brought me only one thought: I had to see this through. I had to understand, as far as possible, what was happening to me.
No matter what it actually was, my inner self was reacting to this very much as if it were a real experience with real people. Over the next few days I faced the fact that I had a relationship with them, despite the fact that I could not even be sure they existed.
I wished that I could believe that the experience had never hurt anybody. But I couldn't believe that, not in view of the terrific stress I had been under. Before I underwent hypnosis, the great and agonizing issue was: Did it happen or not? In other words, was I a victim or a madman? This question was literally chewing up my soul. It was intolerable.
The day before I met Budd Hopkins I almost jumped out a window. I am lucky. I found Hopkins, and he found Don Klein. What if I had turned for help to someone irrevocably convinced that I was the victim of hallucination or psychosis and too inflexible even to entertain another possibility? I might have jumped. Don Klein's open-mindedness in the face of the fearful and the fantastic has been instrumental in helping me to learn to live with uncertainty.
Because of the intelligence of the approach, I became stronger. And with my strength there came, beginning in April 1986, a great deal of research. I read thousands of pages of material about the whole phenomenon and all its scientific and cultural implications.
If visitors are really here, one could say that they are orchestrating our awareness of them very carefully. It is almost as if they either carne here for the first time in the late forties, or decided at that time to begin to emerge into our consciousness. People apparently started to be taken by them almost immediately. but few remembered or reported this until the mid-sixties. Their involvement with us might have been very intimate, though, right from the beginning. Many of those who have been taken report very early childhood experiences, some dating from considerably before the first disks were reported after World War II.
What may have been orchestrated with great care has not been so much the reality of the experience as public perception of it. First the craft were seen from a distance in the forties and fifties. Then they began to be observed at closer and closer range. By the early sixties there were many reports of entities, and a few abduction cases. Now. in the mid-eighties, I and others — for the most part independent of one another — have begun to discover this presence in our lives.
Even though there has been no physical proof of the existence of the visitors, the overall structure of their emergence into our consciousness has had to my mind the distinct appearance of design.
Despite what they had done to me, I did not hate the visitors. Because I knew their strength but not their motives, they frightened me. But I wished to be objective about them, even to the point of saying that they could very definitely be something from inside the mind rather than from elsewhere in the universe. That they represented a real, living force seemed hard to dispute. But that this force might be essentially human in origin remained a definite possibility.