Communion

Whitley: "What was in the box?"

Mary: "I don't know. They just told me to look at it and said I would remember what it was for and how to use it when I saw it again. And I was to hold it and look into it, and I did. But my TV would turn itself up and down all the time. It would turn itself on in the middle of the night. So we finally unplugged it."

Whitley: "I walk into rooms and short out stereos and things to the point where there are people who won't let me get near their sets, and get mad if I touch the equipment because they say it shortens its life."

Jenny: "Ever wake up and the blue thing is going like this?" (Makes pulsating motions with fingers.)

Whitley: "What blue thing?"

Jenny: "The blue TV light."

Whitley: "There is no blue TV light."

Jenny: "What?"

Fred: "I would turn the TV off, go and sit down and start reading, and the TV would go back on."

Sally: "I got the idea that I could stop the roll over on my TV set. I would generate energy out of my hands. This was after the abduction. I don't know where I got the idea I could do it."

Whitley: "Is there anyone here who doesn't do things to electronic stuff?"

Mary: "I put my hand on a TV screen once, and the TV was turned off, and it had been off a while, and when I took my hand away I could see its outline."

Whitley: "I think everyone can do that."

Jenny: "Sometimes I wake up in the night and it's blue but there's no picture."

Sam: "A strong surge of current crosses the switch . . ."

Mark: "I think I've had two happenings, one when I was about ten and one about fourteen years ago when I was teaching. That event I — it was very strange. It happened in a place where I thought it couldn't possibly happen and anyone not see this happen. dust sort of passed it off as a story I sort of made up. But I don't understand why I went and told the story. And then I'd also go back and try to find where this happened. I was driving out one night with the dog, to go and walk the dog — which isn't something I would normally do, to put the dog in the car and drive somewhere to walk the dog and I drove past this area and I saw this light. It pulled the car over. Or I thought it pulled the car over. I don't remember getting out of the car, but I remember somehow getting to the area where this was taking place, and I see this silhouette shape and this light source where these little men, these little creatures, come out. One of the three sort of comes close to me, but nothing is ever said, nothing is done. Next thing I know got back in the car. Now, the area it happened in, it's totally impossible for something like that to happen in, without people around knowing it happened. My question to you is, have you had these things happen m places were it seems totally impossible to happen?"

Sally: "Mine happened in the Bronx. It's in the middle of New York City, but it's a quiet area. We think we had some witnesses, but we don't know if these people still live there. I'm sure somebody has seen it. But nobody told anybody. But there it was on the roof. It was as Whitley once described, a dark shape, you couldn't see the sky through it. But there it was in the middle of the Bronx. There were people down there and there were cars and lights."

Mark: "When I think about it, I just don't know if it was me that stopped the car."

Fred: "They could have taken you somewhere and given you the impression you were in a populated area."

Budd: "Mark said he was walking his dog in this dark. So I naturally made the assumption that he dust went out the front door and walked the dog. So, m other words, it was close. He said, 'No, it was quite a distance.' So I said, 'You really walk your dog a long way?' He said, 'Oh, no, we went by car.' I said, 'You walk your dog by car? Do you often do that?' He said no. I asked if he'd ever done that before. He said no. Then it began to look very odd to him 'What in the world was I doing walking my dog by car?'"

Mark: "I haven't read Budd's book [ Missing Time]. I got a hundred pages in and it began to seem too familiar. I didn't want to read the rest of the book because I didn't want to be influenced by anything I read that wouldn't be of my experience, during the whole hypnosis thing. I've got to keep this as pure as I can."

Budd: "When Mark's lady was present when he described this place he was when he was ten, which turned out under hypnosis not to be a place but a thing, more or less, she said with great relief, 'I've spent seven years with him looking for that place. He's of me believing it was a real place, a tunnel. Than God I don't have to look for it anymore. The mystery's solved.' You were so convinced that it was a tunnel." (Note: Both of Mark's experiences involved extreme disorientation as to place. This is quite common, but appears to have confused him more profoundly than most.)

Mark: "About a year ago I asked my mother if she remembered that incident, and what did I tell her. She remembered it, and repeated what I had told her. When I asked her where it had happened, she said it had happened at the end of the street. She went down and was relieved I wasn't killed. There's a slope. It's a hill. And there's a tunnel there wide enough for four lanes of traffic. But when it happened it was like I was far, far away from home, on the other side of town or something."

(I then asked the group what their jobs were. There was revealed a profile of people on the run, constantly making changes, moving, leaving, escaping. One of them, jenny, had just fulfilled her lifelong dream to move to New York and "live in a big city full of lights and lots of people." She has had this aspiration since she was nine.

I grew up with the same dream, to live in a little apartment m an enormous building in New York with a view of a brick wall.

I did that, though, and it didn't help at all. I now live in an apartment with huge windows and spend a lot of time m a very isolate country cabin.

For most of my life I was running from this, whatever it is. I am unwilling to run anymore.)

Whitley: "We all have trouble saying what we did."

Joan: "Why do you think that is?"

Whitley: "I think we all have something called performance anxiety. That's one of the reasons we all have difficulty pinning ourselves down to do something. I've been extensively psychologically tested twice, and in both cases it came out that there was this deep anxiety in the performance area. I think the reason is that a lot of us have been asked to do some very hard things, that were very frightening, and also I have a feeling that we've been questioned very, very hard. And we can't remember that either."

Jenny: "Do you have trouble taking tests?"

(General agreement.)

Whitley: "That's performance anxiety."

Jenny: "My profession involves auditioning. And every time I go to an audition, I think I'm gonna die."

Sam: "I have tremendous anxiety. Things that I'm very sure of, in the sciences, I don't have a difficult problem. When you start getting out of those areas, I get into real problems."

Whitley: "Fear?"

Sam: "I don't know what it is. Some kind of anxiety there. I really can't pinpoint it."

Sally: "The simplest test — a typing test — I freak out."

Sam: "Being examined. . ."

Budd: "You see, if you imagine that there's a situation of having seen two worlds, of living in this world and then being dumped into this other world at intervals-that has to make you wonder where you belong. And if, in that other world, you are deprived of your ability to act on your own — you can't even move, and you have no choice, nobody asks you anything — you doubt your own powers. In a certain sense you are physically impotent, unable to do anything."

Sam: "And when we're actually being tested, the anxiety is enhanced."

Budd: "One very strange thing that Pat remembered — the thing of the needle going in under the eye — another case of the needle doing up the nose. The neurosurgeon said that is going into the region of the optic nerve, and he said, 'Wouldn't it be wild if you could see through people's eyes?"'