They watched this with their steady eyes, like huge black jewels.
The closest thing I have been able to find to an unadorned image of these beings is not from some modern science-fiction movie, it is rather the age-old, glaring face of Ishtar. Paint her eyes entirely black, remove her hair, and there is my image as u hangs before me now in my mind's eye, the ancient and terrible one, the bringer of wisdom, the ruthless questioner.
Do my memories come from my own life, or from other lives lived long ago, in the shadowy temples where the gray goddess reigned?
Perhaps the visitors are the gods. Maybe they created us. Robert Crick, the renowned discoverer of' the double helix, has postulated that the genetic structure of life is so intricate that it seems designed.
According to studies led by Dr. Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, there is genetic evidence that the entire human species arose from a single female in North Africa between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago. In other words, it is conceivable that we all started from the womb of a single woman.
If we could slip back in time and find her dashing across the ancient Mesopotamian savanna, would we also find Ishtar gliding above in an enormous triangular spacecraft like the one that was seen over Westchester County in 1983, as elusive to her struggling little creation as flying disks are to the air force?
Or would we find an even greater mystery, that the whole pantheon of our reality was somehow contained in the wobbling mind of that creature, who fell down to thank her raw new gods after a panther leaped at her throat, and by a miracle missed devouring us all.
The Journey Continued
THE SIXTIES AND THE SEVENTIES
This expedition seemed to have reached the edge of a cliff, one that dropped far into the shadows. I wondered, if I really looked, what might I find there?
What had my life really been, and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror? I wondered, in early 1986, if a couple of recent strange events might have some relevance to this inquiry into the past.
During the third week of March I had a very peculiar thing happen to me. Sometime in the night of March 21 at the cabin I awoke and found myself unable to move or even to open my eyes. I had the distinct impression that there was something in my left nostril, and that it was being slowly moved far up my nose. When I tried to struggle, I heard a pop like an apple crunching between my eyes. The next thing I remembered, it was morning.
I noticed during the day that my nose hurt. There was a little bleeding, but as my wife and son had reported similar injuries (without the memory of something being in their noses) the week before, I assumed that it was the result of a head cold and dry winter air. But I never came down with a cold.
After March 15, they'd both had episodes of nasal bleeding, and little knots in their nostrils. Specifically, Anne had a knot in the top of her right nostril, my son in his left I now developed one in my left nostril. Theirs had gone away without incident, but mine bothered me and I made an appointment with my doctor to get my injury examined. He looked at it on March 26 and diagnosed it as a scratch to the nasal mucosa that had led to the formation of the knot. He correctly predicted that it would subside on its own over a period of days.
I thought no more about this until July 26, 1986, when I received a letter from Donald Klein in which he mentioned that many of my symptoms were consistent with an abnormality in the temporal lobe, and that the method of testing this involved a nasal probe.
The temporal lobe is arguably the most important part of the brain, the seat of "humanity" itself. It is in the temporal lobe that sense is made of perceptions. Structures there are important to emotion, motivation, and memory. People with temporal-lobe epilepsy report deja vu, unexplained panic states, strong smells, and even a preoccupation with philosophical and cosmic concerns. They also sometimes report vivid hallucinatory journeys.
Initially I seized on this as a way to explain my whole experience. I read some work by Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University that postulated "temporal-lobe transients" to explain psychic and religious experiences. But the more I studied temporal-lobe disorder, the less it seemed an answer. It did not explain the overwhelming sense of the real connected with my experiences. It did not explain the physical consequences. It did not explain the witnesses. Nor did it explain the experiences of others. Temporal-lobe epilepsy was nothing more than another speculation, essentially no different and no more supportable than the visitor hypothesis or any of the other hypotheses that I had put forward. I had to fall back on the truth: I did not know what was happening, but it certainly appeared to be happening in the real world.
As it happened, the week after I received Dr. Klein's letter I met a woman who has had the visitor experience; she began her story by saying that the visitors inserted a probe into her nose, which made a sound "like an apple crunching," between her eyes. She had even drawn pictures of the probe and of the entity that had inserted it. The probe was a businesslike affair, a needle with a small, knifelike handle. The entity was familiar to me because I had seen such beings also.
I then asked Budd Hopkins for information, from his cases, of reports of intrusions into the head. Of his hundred cases, four including me reported intrusions in or behind the ear, three under the eve. and eleven, again including me, up the nose. By far the largest number of intrusions were into the nostril, right into the olfactory nerve with its connection to the deepest core of the brain — and behind that nerve, the temporal lobe.
For what it may be worth, my son and I, who had injuries to the left nostril, are also left-handed. Anne is right-handed.
If the temporal lobe is being entered, then it may not be possible to decide between the temporal-lobe-epilepsy and visitor hypotheses. It could easily be that the visitors are affecting the temporal lobe in such .t way as to induce abnormalities that would later be diagnosed as epileptic conditions. As the reading of temporal-lobe electroencephalograms is such :t subjective business, I decided that I would arrange two separate temporal lobe tests, one by a neurologist recommended by Dr. Klein. and another through a different psychiatrist. This second neurologist carried out the' same preliminary examination done by Dr. Klein's man and came to the same conclusion: There was no evidence of abnormality. He was then given a version of' my December 26 story, but we never discussed hypotheses at all. That way, he felt no need to defend his findings against one hypothesis or another. I went to :t lab, took chloral hydrate, and endured the insertion of electrodes deep into my nasal cavity a few days later the re stilts came back: absolutely normal temporal lobe function, confirmed by both neurologists.
So whatever the visitors did, they did not damage me in a way detectable to our science.
And I am not a temporal-lobe epileptic. The temporal lobe-disorder hypothesis was now triply weak: The physical consequences of what happened and the witnesses mitigated against it to begin with, and now the temporal-lobe EEG suggested that I was not an epileptic.
Moreover, the beef "transients" postulated by, Dr. Persinger could not account for the elaborate experiences I had undergone. Only a full-scale epilepsy could account for them.