The short visits seem almost always to concern psychological activity, the long ones to involve more physical testing, almost as if preparations are made or results observed during those times.
By the time December 1985 came around, I may have had these encounters at least a dozen limes. And yet I never learned from them. Each time the experience took place, I was as frightened, as tormented, as astonished as before.
This is one of the most difficult internal problems connected with the experience. One would have thought that the mind, acting alone, would have compartmentalized all this material together, as it does with recurring dreams and nightmares, so that when I entered the state I would have had reference to other experiences of it, even though — as in recurring nightmares — the material would still have been terrifying.
My actual condition almost seems to suggest that there was an attempt to render me as helpless as possible, by placing me in a state where each experience was perceived in and of itself, without reference to past encounters. Thus each time the surprise was total.
Running through my memories there is a consistent flavor of intense terror. But is it only my terror. the terror of the body, biological terror.
There may be things about contact between beings formed in different biospheres that we do not understand at all. Perhaps they feel some instinctive emotion, too. I have the impression that these experiences are very intense for them, if not actually frightening.
If the terror is an unavoidable side effect of our biology, then the amnesia can be seen not only as an act of self-protection but as one of kindness also.
Assuming the correctness of my perceptions, this book then becomes a chronicle not only of my discovery of a visitor's presence in the world but also one of how I have learned to fear them less.
I look out my window. It is a warm afternoon, cloudy and thunderous, an afternoon of early spring. People go back and forth beneath umbrellas, their feet slashing in puddles. A helicopter sails across the sky, a jet angles toward La Guardia.
It's all so normal, so home. But what else was that in the sky — a flash of silver light, or something reflecting on my glasses?
The Image
The morning after the hypnotic session covering my experience with the fogbank (March 11, 1986) I awoke not only feeling as if I had been beaten up during the night, I was aware of something new in my mind.
At first the exact nature of this new manifestation was not clear to me. I was oppressed by it; there was an acute impression of being watched. Then I began to realize why: I was being watched — there was a face staring directly at me, the grave, implacable, subtly humorous face I had come to recognize from hypnosis.
A vivid image of her had emerged in my mind. It was so real I could almost touch it. This was disturbing and I was eager to expel it, assuming it to be a side effect of the hypnotic session, occurring because Dr. Klein had asked for so many details about her appearance.
It was so extraordinarily clear. I was in a panic. I couldn't live with this image perpetually reminding me of the visitors' enigmatic presence in my life.
I went into my office and sat on the floor, going deed into a state of meditation. I drew my concentration to my body, directing my attention to my physical center of gravity just below the navel, and away from my racing mind.
It took only a moment for me to see that the image had not gone away. On the contrary, it had be come far more clear. It wasn't anything like any other imagistic material I had ever had in my mind. I could not calm myself. I was frantic. For the first few hours it was static, simply staring back at me with those large, glistening eyes.
I have never had eidetic, or photographic, memory, so this image was something very new for me. An eidetic image is very much like a photograph inside the mind. This one, though, was far more than a photograph. It had the urgency of life about it.
Despite my attempts to explain it to Budd Hopkins and Don Klein, I could not succeed in communicating to others just how special it seemed to me to be. Nor did I really know this myself until a few days later, when some of the remarkable properties of the image were revealed.
I think that the image was somehow triggered by hypnosis. Maybe the intense state of concentration evoked it from my unconscious . . . or maybe I attracted the visitors' attention and they responded.
After the image appeared I did research into eidetic memory and found that it is very rare in adults, almost to the point of being nonexistent in Western cultures. What's more, the descriptions I found of eidetic images did not even begin to correspond to what I was experiencing. People did not report that their eidetic images had a life of their own.
This one seemed ready to reach out and touch me. I felt a strong sense of relationship.
Looking at it was more like looking at a person behind soundproof glass than looking at a picture.
I found that the image not only moved about of its own accord, it would move on command. It showed me its hands, its face, every detail of its body. Anne asked me to describe its feet and it leaned forward against something that I could not see and raised a foot, which appeared almost like a very simple version of a human foot. Instead of toes there was a solid structure split in only one place. Like all the joints, the ankle appeared simple in structure.
While I might indeed have been viewing the result of some extraordinary connection between myself and a real, conscious being, it may also be that this was an act of the imagination — the act of a mind calling upon itself to provide another argument in favor of this being an experience with an external component.
If what I was really dealing with amounted to some sort of deep and instinctive attempt to create a new deity for myself, to remain agnostic was to put the conscious me in the interesting position of opposing my own unconscious aim.
What if my unconscious got mad at me and started throwing off things that were really scary. even dangerous. We don't know a thing about conjuring and magic. We've dismissed it all, we who love science too much. It could be that very real physical entities can emerge out of the unconscious. That was certainly one of the hypotheses suggested by what had already happened. I worried that I might not be in control of this conjuring ability at all. I'd already conjured something awfully disturbing. What if there were even more disturbing things waiting in the pantheon of the subconscious?
That was on the one hand. On the other hand, maybe I could make this thing become a real, solid being. Frightening, but also fascinating.
Budd Hopkins suggested that I get an artist to render the image. We chose Ted Jacobs, because he is skilled in creating portraits from verbal descriptions.
It was when Ted carne over with his sketch pad that I discovered what was most interesting about the image. I was sitting with my eyes closed, describing this face as carefully as I could. I could see it in amazing detail, moving closer and then farther back, observing fine points such as the faint dusting of white, powdery fuzz that seemed to cover its cheeks and forehead, making it feel, I would imagine, to the touch ,as smooth as the downy head of a baby. The nose was not very prominent, but the end seemed sensitive, almost like the end of a finger.
As I watched, the image moved its nose, revealing that this was obviously a sensitive organ both of touch and smell. The mouth was not straight, but rather one of those rich and complex lines that come to a human mouth with the advance of years. Centered in this mouth was a remarkable expression, the outcome, it seemed to me, of implacable will leavened by what I can only describe as mirth. Ted Jacobs tried especially hard to capture that elusive quality, and succeeded brilliantly — although the final result, on the cover of this book, is a bit more human than was actually the case. Specifically, the mouth was nothing more than a line, albeit a complex one. There were no lips at all. And the cranium was a good bit larger than the cover portrait would suggest.