Whitley: "What does he look like?"
Mary: "He looked like all the rest, really."
Whitley: "Which is?"
Mary: "The same small people, you know, four and a half or five feet tall. With the gray skin and the large heads and the big, fluidy, black eyes that went on forever."
Whitley: "In other words, you wouldn't identify him as a human being."
Mary: "No, not in my town, anyway. New York is a different story. Regardless of whether or not any of it was anything more than a dream or what, I know the emotions I've had to deal with through the years have been real all the anxiety that doesn't have any source."
Whitley: "Any of your kids?"
Mary: "Yeah."
Whitley: "How do you feel about that?"
Mary: "That's the only part of it that really upsets me. I guess it's Just the mother instinct in me. I want to know everything that's happening to my children and I want to be there when it's happening. I don't like the idea of someone screwing around with my kids, and me not knowing about it. They're so defenseless, you know, it's not fair. As if we aren't all as defenseless as children, but somehow my mothering instincts are the only thing that turn me on, make me mad. There's only one thing that I'm really angry about, and I don't really understand that. I told Pat, I don't feel like being angry for me, anyway, is going to work. I have enough trouble dealing with everyday life. There are a lot of stresses, and I don't cope with stress really excellently well. I just get by, like everybody else. So I don't see any point in inflicting any more stress on myself by getting all worked up and angry over something I have no control over. Something that no matter how damn mad I get, it ain't gonna do no good. I'm just gonna make myself get worse. So I haven't whipped up a lot of anger over this, other than about my kids."
Whitley: "So basically, you just decided —"
Mary: "Live with it."
Whitley: "Keep it from getting too real?"
Mary: "I believe something is happening to everybody. At least everybody here. I don't know why it is more easy to accept things from all of you than I find it to accept them for myself. Like saying it seems more real when it happens to somebody else."
Fred: "I just want to say that I think we're dealing with so many not-so-obvious things. At least one thing which I think is obvious and important is the fact that we meet. I think that's important. If there's anything we can understand, it's the meeting. The experience — I speak for myself, I don't know how traumatic it was for others — it was fine for me. It was mind opening for me. It's thanks to this little group that I'm getting to, know — love — that's what's important. The rest is up for grabs."
Whitley: "You want to say anything about what happened to you?"
Fred: "Not really."
Budd: "When people first come, they say, 'I feel it's like family."'
Whitley: "That's what I feel. It's very strange." (I was privately contending with the fact that the one called Mary in the colloquy was instantly recognizable to me, and I did not know why.)
Mary: "Strange for me, too."
Pat: "I think the most interesting thing is that I went to a meeting up in Massachusetts and there was a whole bunch of people-and for some reason three people who had been abducted all came together in the middle of the room. It was very strange, and we all knew immediately. And there was nobody else in the room who had any experience —"
Budd: "Don't count on it."
Pat: "I'm not saying that. What's interesting is that they knew. They found each other immediately. We huddled around each other. It was almost like we needed to be together. And it was very strange."
Betty: "I think you get to the point where you almost want to detach yourself from the situation, because you'll really just lose your mind. You have to look at yourself like an outside observer. That's just not happening to you."
Sally: "I think that's the reason it's so difficult to piece it together when it's happening, because while it's happening you're saying this is not happening to me, so part of the mind shuts it off and part of the mind is having to absorb it. So I think that's the reason it's so confusing when it's happening. At least that's what I felt. I felt, really, that my whole mind was just falling apart. It was just crumbling."
Whitley: "What was happening to you? Can you describe anything at all?"
Sally: "Absolute terror. I felt like an animal, totally warped and totally working on the instant."
Whitley: "That's how I felt."
Sally: "I was just clinging to any little piece, little scrap of life. Any kind of shelter, if I could hide in a corner, if I could get away from them somehow. I didn't want to know what they were about, what they were going to do, what they wanted to do with me — I just wanted out. Get me home. That's it. I make no claims to being brave. I was not brave. I said often that I felt like Fay Wray. I was screaming and passing out. I don't care about evolution, I don't care about your spaceships, I don't care about anything. just let me out of here. Of course there were times when I was less frightened and I looked around. But when they were there, no. Most of the time I was angry or terrified. That was it."
Fred: "I still am surprised, despite all the books I've read, I find more out here at this group that makes sense to me personally than I do from any books."
Whitley: "Sam, you're just sitting over there—"
Sam: "My experience happened to me a couple of years ago. I guess it isn't much different than anybody else's." (He had a particularly startling experience, especially for a scientist.) "I find it's easier to sit here and talk to other people about it and listen to other people's experiences than to sit in a quiet corner and get into my mind, and what happened. It's very difficult, almost impossible, for me to close my eyes and go through the experience. I can't do it.
Sally: "It's too scary. It's much too scary alone. I did a self-hypnosis thing actually, I —"
Fred: "My God, you've got guts!"
Sally "Well, I did. I went to sleep. I started to relive the actual abduction. I was in my apartment building going up the stairs. Then I got past a certain point and I said, 'Oh, no, this is too real.' 'Cause I was actually remembering more details than I had under the actual hypnosis. I said, 'Oh, no, this is not going to be able to work.' I stopped."
Sam: "When I get to thinking about it alone, by myself, I get a little angry, and I begin to think, Who the hell do they think they are that they can jest do what they want to us, as though we're nothing. And that really disturbs me, so I turn it off, and I don't want to look at my own experience, and I don't even want to think about what's happened to others, because that disturbs me, too."
Budd: "Mark, if you have anything you'd like to say at this juncture. You've gone up and down about your feelings about it and how real it was. Curious to hear you talk about that."
Mark: "Just trying to et a little understanding. I had an experience when I was ten years old, had no idea what it was, but I know for thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, I was always aware that something had happened, and a general idea of the location. But I could never explain it. I constantly looked for the area where it had taken place. It was in an area I went through often, where there were a lot of people that are witness to the fact that there was something you just couldn't explain. It was after the first hypnosis that all of this comes out, too real, too believable. I was with another person, we were out bike tiding. Then there is a lapse of time and we're walking our bikes home. I remember telling a story that I'd had an accident on my bike because I had a scar, but not believing myself. And not believing it throughout the years."