The soldiers were young men in fatigues, and they were sprawled as if totally comatose. It was then that Dr. Klein asked me my age, and I heard myself say, "Twelve."
I changed completely, remarkably. I was my childhood self again. It was quite wondrous.
I felt smaller, I felt verve different. My mind felt different. Gone was the weight of knowledge. For those few moments I was innocent again.
I knew where I was and I was very excited to be there. At first I was sitting up, happy to be awake because even the soldiers were asleep. I was quit. pleased with myself. There was no apparent transition between the time I was sitting up awake and the time I was in a little chair, sitting before a featureless gray surface.
Something terrifically difficult happened while I was sitting in that chair. After hypnosis I recalled seeing a landscape with a great hooked object floating in the air, which on closer inspection proved to be a triangle. Then there followed a glut of .symbolic material, so incense that even as I write I can feel how it hurt my whole brain and body to take it all in. I don't remember what this was — triangles, rushing pyramids, animals leaping through the air.
Are such experiences the source of the performance anxiety that has been detected in psychological tests I have taken, or does that have to do with the many recollections I have always had of sitting in the middle of a little round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul? Trying to cope with these memories as a child, I wove anguished fantasies around the figures, who became my childhood friends in some round, gray basement, drawing out the secret structures of my mind like surgeons with forceps extracting sparking neurons from my brain. I remember that they would say words, and each word they said would go through me like a hurricane, evoking every memory, drought, and feeling associated with it. This would go on for hours and hours until I begged them to stop, and I would be offered the relief o£ a brief rest at their feet, my soul confessing itself into the stern softness of their love.
Is this just a fantasy, or is it what happens when somebody tries to extract the deepest sense of a language from the mind of a child? If so, who did it? Is this a memory of the visitors at work, as it were?
In my childhood I was known as an extremely persistent questioner, so much that in school I was allowed to ask no more than three per period so that I would not take up all the time. True to form, I started questioning this being. Maybe I knew her even then — certainly I had gotten over any initial shock quickly.
I find the exchange fascinating. I asked who the people around me were, and was told what was obvious even to me. They were all soldiers. Then I wanted to know why they had been brought here. The answer is telling: "Because they were alone." It might suggest a methodology, one that is borne out by some studies of unexplained sightings: The craft seem to favor isolated areas. They do not appear as often over cities, and there are not many stories of their taking people from heavily populated places. Perhaps a limitation of technology is visible here: There are simply too many risks in populated areas.
I asked what was being done to the soldiers. The answer, typically uninformative, was,
"We look then over and send them home." I can recall my perplexity at that moment very welclass="underline" I relived it during hypnosis. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go to just to examine people, and I asked, rapid-fire: "What's the point of that?" The creature seemed read to reply, but she was cut off in midsentence as if somebody had flipped a switch. For a moment she sounded like a stuck record. "The point of that is — The point of that is —" Then she stopped, as if surprised that she had been caught off guard, and said, simply, "Well," her voice melodious with amusement.
Soon after, I was watching her moving around. I did not know what she was doing, perhaps something that involved touching the soldiers with a copper-colored thing. I asked her why she looked so awful, and she certainly did look awful. I cannot imagine why I wasn't terrified. It is incredibly upsetting to see something that is clearly not human walking and moving about with intelligence. There is something that is unmistakable about the precision of consciously directed movement that is deeply frightening when seen in such an alien form.
Nothing tike this was going through my mind at the age of twelve, but the vision of that eerie being moving about among the tables remains quite clear. When I asked her why she looked so awful, she replied almost absently, without stopping her work, "I can't help that."
I wonder what Ishtar really looked like, and if the whole Greek pantheon of beautiful gods and goddesses was not something akin to the beautiful "godlike" beings imagined by people who have made flying saucers their religion. These believers seem to be people who cannot face the stark reality of the visitor experience, and so cloak the fierce, limitless eyes, the bad smells, the dreadful food, and the general sense of helplessness in a very human mythology.
I wonder if Homer and Pindar did not do the same. And why was Homer blind? It is known that many different storytellers comprise "Homer." Perhaps hysterical blindness was a commonplace among the prehistoric Greek bards out of whose tales the classical pantheon emerged. I don't blame them. Hysterical blindness and congenial belief systems would both be excellent defenses against things similar to what I have seen.
But if they have really been here so long, why did they have so much trouble getting me to keep down my feeding? Perhaps the substance has not been changed over the years to suit me, perhaps the very act of eating it has changed me. Maybe it is a process of acclimatization.
It was while I was watching the lady with the eyes moving among the soldiers with her copper wand that I noticed my sister. She was below me and to my right, lying sprawled in her nightie. I still remember how much seeing her like that scared me. She and I were very close in those days. I loved her and admired her, and it was dreadful to see her looking as if she were dead. A voice told me that she was all right. This voice was definitely inside my head, I remember that quite distinctly.
Then I saw the sight that has brought me more fear than any other so far: My father was standing near my sister in blue pajamas, his arms dangling at his sides, on his face a look of surprise. Then his eyes moved until they rested on something I could not see very well, because it was invisible beside the doorway. Almost in slow motion his face simply broke up.
He threw his head back and something like an electric shock seemed to go through him, making hire spread his fingers and shake firs arms. His eyes bulged and his mouth flew open.
Then he was screaming, but I could hear it only faintly, a muffled shrieking, full of terror and despair.
The "awful-looking" creature now came to seem absolutely monstrous. And there was no question in my mind about its being real. It had never even crossed my mind that I might be dreaming. This was as real as any other event in my life, despite the fact that it was far more frightening even than the most frightening horror movie and would soon disappear into amnesia. As a matter of fact, it would be another year or so before I would see my first horror movie. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which was shown at my summer camp. I remained at that camp exactly one day. It was later that my interest in horror stories began.
Until I was about thirteen, my taste in comic books ran to Uncle Scrooge McDuck and Little Lulu. The scariest things I was exposed to were Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone on television.
Under hypnosis the fear went through me like ice water in my veins. It is fortunate for Don Klein and Budd Hopkins that I was under the suggestion not to scream, because they would have hear terrible screaming, I am afraid. As it was, the sensation seemed to explode through me. For a moment I thought I was fainting. I remembered that as a little boy I just shriveled up inside to see my father in such an extremity of terror. In those days he was very much my hero. I tried to talk to him, to reassure him that a was all right. He gasped, "It's not all right, Whiny, it's not all right!" and tried to make a grab for me and my sister. His arms came up and just hung in the air while he writhed and his face worked. When he started screaming again, he became muffled.