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A 1950 novel, The Flying Saucer by Bernard Newman, probably recorded the first instance of a flying disk having an effect on a car ignition. Only after that date did reports of flying disks killing car engines become common. But I cannot assert that the disks don't really kill car engines, and very possibly because of something about the mysterious drives that power the ships.

In December 1985 a man had trouble with his car's electrical system after he had been taken by visitors. The car lost all electrical power and could not be restarted even by jumping the battery. It was towed to a repair shop where nothing was found to be wrong The battery recharged to normal by itself during the night. I know that this story is true because the man it happened to was me, and the problem manifested itself the morning after my December 26 experience.

Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination and reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are — different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic's freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.

There are many stories of visitors giving people secret knowledge. Much of it has proved to be worthless or worse, as was the information I got about electromagnetic motors.

One fascinating case of transmission of knowledge dates from the year 1491, when the Milanese mathematician Jerome Cardan found himself involved in a visitor encounter. When he asked his visitors about the cause of the universe, "The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish. . . "

This is not a fifteenth-century idea. Upon contemplation, it emerges to a degree as a concept from Zen. More than that, though, it is a quantum-physical idea, suggesting that it is the observer who injects reality into the phenomenon observed.

Far from being a fifteenth-century idea, it is an eleventh-century Arabic idea. Did it get to Dr. Cardan via the sylphs, or was it transmitted by more conventional means? There is no other record of it in European scientific and religious literature of the period. If Dr. Cardan obtained the idea in a conventional manner, then what would have been his motive for risking his life to the Inquisition by admitting communion with the sylphs, who were viewed as demons? He was for his period an exceptionally rigorous thinker. He was sane and honest. A modern equivalent of what he did would be for a renowned physicist to announce that he had obtained important information in a UFO experience, but could offer no proof that the experience had happened. Perhaps Dr. Cardan was simply too honest to hide the truth.

In recent years many of the taken have reported having sexual experiences with the visitors. Currently among them this is a source of great disquiet, as will be observed from comments in the colloquy of the taken that follows this section.

It is terrifying, of course. But reflect also that mankind has had a sexual relationship with the fairies, the sylphs, the incubi, the succubi, and the denizens of the night from the very beginning of time. Nowadays men find themselves on examining tables in flying saucers with vacuum devices attached to their privates, while women must endure the very real agony of having their pregnancies disappear, a torment that I, as a man, doubt I can really imagine.

One of the women I know who has experienced this horror seems to me now like an anguished hawk, humiliated by her torment. I must add that no trivial explanation for what happened to her is viable: Her own gynecologist was deeply troubled and confused by the whole affair. To find some glib explanation for it is an insult not only to his skill and her veracity but also to her suffering, and to the worth of human suffering.

The Roman historian Suetonius maintained that Caesar Augustus was the product of relations between his mother and an incubus. Plato was also believed to be the issue of some sort of peculiar coupling, as was Merlin the magician, born of an incubus and one of the daughters of Charlemagne.

In a treatise called On Little Demons, Incubi and Succubi, written by Father Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari de Ameno in the latter part of the seventeenth century, some phenomenal affairs are recounted. One woman found herself awakened by a "fine voice, a high-pitched whistling sound." (I note in passing that when I first read this my blood went cold to remember that the thing that haunted me in Austin in 1967 made such a high-pitched sound. And in the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious treatise against witches, demons are said to speak in reedy voices.)

The shadowy being with the high voice then announced its love for the lady. She was kissed so softly that it felt like cotton touching her cheeks. This went on night after night. The lady tried an exorcist, but to no avail. Eventually the incubus appeared as a boy with golden curls. Still, she retained her honor. He began to take her things, to strike her little poking blows, and to bother her in other ways. One night he built around her bed a wall of stones so high that she and her husband had to use a ladder to get out. I will let the good father recount the climactic assault of the lovelorn visitor:

"On the day of St. Stephen, the lady's husband had invited several military friends to dine with him. To honor his guests he had prepared a respectable dinner. While they were washing their hands according to the custom-hop!-suddenly the table vanished, along with the dishes, the cauldrons, the dates, and all the earthenware in the kitchen, the hugs, the bottles, the glasses, too. You can imagine the surprise, the amazement of the guests."

Indeed.

The teasing continued. In her efforts to rid herself of the incubus, the lady had taken to wearing a monk's robes. She was going to mass in the midst of a large crowd when all her clothes were suddenly whipped off her body and she was left naked in the middle of the throng. What could she do? She hurried home. Her torments continued, the good father relates with relish, "for many years."

Our present relation to the incubi and succubi may very well center on real flesh-and-blood visitors who first appeared here recently. But if so, then it also has a most profound and unexpected human dimension, for they are entering our consciousness where our gods and goblins live.

A famous case of sexual involvement with visitors took place in Brazil in 1957. The victim, Antonio Villas-Boas, had experienced a number of instances of strange lights appearing in his fields on the days prior to his experience. He was running his tractor one night when it died. Mr. Villas-Boas then saw that an object had landed in front of him. He was stripped, washed with a sponge, arid taken inside the device. He was left lying on a table, naked. Sometime later he was astounded to see a naked woman, seemingly human, enter the room. Her hair was blond, parted in the center. Her face was extremely wide, her eyes blue and slanted. The face ended in a pointed chin. Her lips were very thin, nearly invisible . She was shorter than he was. Actually, she sounds very much like a cross between the individual I saw so clearly as the eidetic image and a human being . . . unless she was simply a visitor wearing what they thought would be a disguise. She made love to him, pointed to her belly and then to the sky, and left him. Later he was taken into a room with some males and attempted to steal a clock. As in dozens and dozens of tales in the fairy lore, he failed to get his artifact.

Why? Either because the visitors are good at keeping artifacts from us, or because they exist somewhere between reality and dream, and our inner selves know that we can never take into our hands things from the factory of the mind.