I remembered when my father took me to a slaughterhouse in Fort Worth. and I heard the rumble of panic and saw the bucking backs of the steers and the creamy whites of their eyes.
I smelled the slick of manure and urine and blood, and heard the steady crunching of the blows and the blare of the saws.
And at a research institute in San Antonio I saw monkey cages with rows of doctored capuchins, shaved, their pink heads sewn or laid delicately open, and the trembling brain probes and the gabble of noise when the vocalization center of one of them was stimulated for the information of graduate students.
What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.
Try as I might, I simply did not have the feeling that the visitors were applying the same cold ethic to their relationship with us as we did to ours with the animals. There was something of that in it though, very definitely. I had been captured like a wild animal on December 26, rendered helpless and dragged out of my den into the night.
Nor did I feel that they were simply studying me. Not at all. They had changed me, done something to me. I could sense it clearly that night but I could not articulate it.
Later, I thought to myself that they were taming me. Maybe this gradual increase in the intimacy of contact that has occurred over the years has to do with that: They are taming us all.
After the dialogue about rights, the female called me their chosen one and I proceeded to get mad. I viewed it as a ploy and reacted with scorn. She wagged her head from side to side, singing "Oh. no. Oh, no." There was insistence in her voice, and humor.
I distinctly remembered seeing a woman wearing a flowered dress being told this. But where? When. The memory was free-floating, without reference. There was just this woman in a white floral-pattern dress standing before a group of them shouting "Praise the Lord" as she was told she had been chosen.
Maybe what they meant was that we have all been chosen — and we are all being tamed.
Nobody has ever domesticated mankind. We are thus a wild species, as wild as the day we first went howling across the savanna. Perhaps the self-taming process of becoming a civilized species did not tame us to visitors, but only to ourselves . . . and then not very well, given our violent history.
That first night back at the cabin, I looked at the couch where they had left me on December 26. I wondered if the old earth did not settle in some obscure, internal way just at the moment I came to consciousness there. Perhaps its low-frequency emissions changed and I fell not from that hidden room in the sky but rather from some lurching walkabout in my own night house. I wondered if there was any relationship between my experience and the mystic walk of the shaman, or the night ride of the witch.
I had read far in the works of mystical search and mythology, and in retrospect it surprised me that I would be so amazed when I finally reached down into the darkest part of the soul and found something there. Now that I was back at the scene of my experience, I felt that I always knew what I would find, and that all of my surprise was itself a sort of illusion.
I reflected that the abduction to a round room had a long, long tradition in our culture: There were many such cases in the fairy lore. The story called "Connla and the Fairy Maiden," as collected in Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales (Bodley Head, 1894, 1985). could with some changes be a modern tale of the visitors.
As suggestive as this was of the possibly historical roots of the experience, it was no more definitive of that origin than the whole texture was of the notion of recent visitors.
Maybe the fairy was a real species, for example. Perhaps they now floated around in unidentified flying objects and wielded insight-producing wands because they have enjoyed their own technological revolution.
Every time one decides either that this is psychological or real, one soon finds a theory that forcefully reopens the case in favor of the opposite notion.
The most difficult part of my hypnotic material was the sudden regression to 1957. How could I explain that, even in terms of visitors? To do so, I had to revise my whole understanding of what my life had been. At the beginning of this chapter I described myself as being deeply upset by that unexpected regression. Well, that was true.
But it was no more than a mild state of unease compared to how I felt after I had made a careful inventory of my past.
FOUR
A child said What is the grass?
fetching it to me, with full hands;
How could I answer the child?
I do not know what it is
any more than he
-WALT WHITMAN. "Song of Myself,"
from Leaves of Grass
THE SKY BENEATH MY FEET
A Journey Through My Past
The Journey Back
SUMMER, 1957
The more I thought about it, the less able I was to accept the idea that this had been happening to me most of my life. When Budd Hopkins asked me if I remembered anything in the past, I did mention a few odd incidents. The memory of being taken from the train was not among them.
If I accepted that this happened and that it was buried even more completely than the events of October 4, then what else must I accept? Inevitably, that my conscious life was nothing more than a disguise for another reality. It is easy to speculate about such a thing on an idle evening, but when one considered the terrific intensity of the experience I had remembered, thinking that this might have happened again and again had the potential to shatter me.
Still, I could not simply reject the notion. Why should I? Because it seemed improbable?
All of this seemed improbable. As an experiment I decided to return to my past and see just what I could come-up with. As best I was able I reviewed the years for hints of this material.
I wondered, though, how I could ever tell if the seeking and the finding were the same act.
Maybe nothing happened on that train. Probably nothing did, and there is no way to tell. I would need some sort of corroboration before I could even begin to entertain it as a serious possibility.
It seemed like a trick of the mind. Then I remembered that hypnosis session. and I thought to myself that the real trick of the mind might be happening now. My memories were so spontaneous. and seemed so vividly real. Not the faintest suggestion was made that I regress to age twelve. And vet . . . I now remembered that row of' soldiers sleeping on those tables just as well as I remembered the drawing room of the train we were on.
To protect my sanity. I had to believe that this was a comprehensible thing. If it was contact, then it must be proceeding somewhat along lines I could understand. They've been here for a while. Fine. Lately, because I moved to an isolated area, they found me. That I could at least entertain. But I could not accept the notion that they were so totally involved in my life.
I found a photograph of myself during the spring of my twelfth year, which showed me to the uniform of St. Anthony's School in San Antonio. Here was a child so clean he seemed to have been polished along with the brass crossed rifles on the collars of his uniform. The picture is inscribed: "For my dear father with love. Whitty."
The neatness was a total deception. It couldn't have lasted more than the precise amount of time it took to snap the picture. At twelve I was usually involved in mischief of' one sort or another. I was rarely clean. I was rarely even still.