I was aware that I had seen four different types of figures. The first was the small robotlike being that had led the way into my bedroom. He was followed by a large group of short, stocky ones in the dark-blue coveralls. These had wide faces, appearing either dark gray or dark blue in that light, with glittering deep-set eyes, pug noses, and broad, somewhat human mouths. Inside the room, I encountered two types of creature that did not look at all human. The most provocative of these was about five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes. This being had an almost vestigial mouth and nose. The huddled figures in the theater were somewhat smaller, with similarly shaped heads but round, black eyes like large buttons.
Throughout the whole experience, the stocky ones were always present. They were apparently responsible for moving and controlling me, and I had the distinct impression that they were a sort of "good army." Why good I do not know.
I do not remember what, if anything, happened in the operating theater. My memories of movement from place to place are the hardest to recall because it was then that I felt the most helpless. My fear would rise when they touched me. Their hands were soft, even soothing, but there were so many of them that it felt a little as if I were being passed along by rows of insects. It was very distressing.
Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew l was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long narrow. and triangular in structure. They inserted this thin into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.
Only when the thing was withdrawn did I see that it was a mechanical device. The individual holding it pointed to the wire cafe on the tip and seemed to warn . me about something. But what? I never found out.
Events once again started moving very quickly.
One of them took my right hand and made an incision on my forefinger. There was no pain at all. Abruptly, my memories end. There isn't even blackness, just morning.
I had no further recollection of the incident.
I awoke the morning of the twenty-seventh very much as usual, but grappling with a distinct sense of unease and a very improbable but intense memory of seeing a barn owl staring at me through the window sometime during the night.
I remember how I felt in the gathering evening of the twenty-seventh, when I looked out onto the roof and saw that there were no owl tracks in the snow. I knew I had not seen an owl. I shuddered, suddenly cold, and drew back from the window, withdrawing from the night that was falling so swiftly in the woods beyond.
But I wanted desperately to believe in that owl. I told my wife about it. She was polite, but commented about the absence of tracks. I really very much wanted to convince her of it, though. Even more, I wanted to convince myself. So intent was I on this that I telephoned a friend in California for the specific, yet unlikely, purpose of telling her about the barn owl at the window.
Later I discovered that memories of animals in strange places are a common block to this experience. One young woman arrived back at a picnic in the woods in France with a story of seeing a beautiful deer. But she had blood on her blouse, and a strange straight scar that could not be explained. Ten years passed before she remembered anything of the truth of her experience in those woods, and she would have died with that memory had not her memory of another encounter with the visitors caused her to question its real significance. Another man came away from his experience thinking only that he had seen a bunch of rabbits hopping around outside his car.
Like my barn owl, these stories must have seemed no more than whimsies, but they hid real experiences that were so impossible to accept, just keeping them hidden took a large toll-as it has with others, as it might be doing with anybody.
From that first day my wife noticed a dramatic personality change in me, which she thought was similar to a change that had taken place the previous October. We had gone through personal hell then because of my demands and accusatory behavior, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself.
But I was in decline again, and this time the symptoms were not all mental. That first evening I underwent the initial physical symptom of my ordeal. We had come in from an afternoon of light cross-country skiing, not at all strenuous. I was dead tired. Normally I am full of energy. Even a hard afternoon on the ski trails leaves me feeling pleasantly relaxed.
I got chills and went to bed. I lay huddled between the sheets and the quilt, with evening coming down, feeling just awful. I thought that I must have had a high fever. I was exhausted. The sounds of my wife and son downstairs filled me with a sense of foreboding.
Strange recollections of people running, of being pulled and shoved, swirled through my head.
Then our nearest neighbors suddenly arrived. They appeared without warning. We tend to be very private in our sparse community, and this was only their second spontaneous visit in the two years we have been neighbors.
Feeling somewhat better, I went downstairs to see them. No sooner had we started talking than I found myself complaining that I thought I had seen the light of a snowmobile m the woods between our houses at about three in the morning. I was horrified at myself. What was I saying? I couldn't remember any such thing, and I knew it even as I spoke. Our neighbors offered the thought that the woods were too thick for a snowmobile to maneuver, which is true. Then I said that it must have been the lights on his house. He has two floodlights that shine out over his backyard. He explained that these lights had been off, but promised to redirect them so they couldn't be seen from our house. I knew even then that his lights hadn't been bothering me so late at night (although !hey were sometimes bothersome early in the evening, now that winter had stripped the woods of their concealing leaves). My memory of the snowmobile was as hollow as my memory of the owl.
After some small talk, our neighbors went home. I was not pleased with my own behavior, and found it hard to understand because it seemed so nonvolitional, almost as if I had been talking against my will.
My wife reports that my personality deteriorated dramatically over the following weeks. I became hypersensitive, easily confused, and, worst of all, short with my son. We have always been a happy family, and there was no change in our life condition or relationship to account for this personality shift.
The realization that the owl memory was not true created troubling problems for me. I was aware that something had somehow gone wrong with me. The trouble was I could not understand what it was. There simply wasn't anything in my life to explain it. I started to worry about toxins in our food or water, but as nobody else in the family was affected, and we hadn't tried any food that might have caused some bizarre allergy, that seemed unlikely.
I did not know that the owl and the light were screen memories that concealed a traumatic experience. As described by Freud, the screen memory is a method that the mind uses to shield itself from things too upsetting to recall.
I had a feeling of being separated from myself, as if either I was unreal or the world around me was unreal. By December 28 I was so depressed and in such a state of inner conflict that I sat down and wrote a short story in an effort to explore my emotions. It reflected not only my emotional state but probably also some of the realities hidden behind it.