The only thing I thought it could have been was some unknown blimp, but even that appeared hard to believe in view of what snore I discovered about it.
Just by talking with friends in April my wife uncovered a personal experience of an early area sighting, one that took place in the late fifties. One of her best friends is an artist and the wife of a well-known composer. In her childhood this woman used to at summer camp at a location not ten miles from where our log cabin now stands, a fact that we did not know when Anne asked her the question we had determined to put to as many people as we could, as part of our research effort.
To at once gain valid information and prevent bias, we had simply been asking people,
"What was your strangest experience?" None of the people we asked had any idea of what was happening to us.
The woman's answer turned out to be highly revealing. She reported that she had seen a flying saucer in 1953, when she was nine. She proceeded to describe an object similar to the one that had appeared in the same immediate area in December 1985. Like so many reports through the years, she described it as huge, full of lights, and hovering. It moved off slowly If all these objects were the results of pranks, then the pranksters would have been operating for more than thirty years-and even in the early fifties they would have had superb mufflers, considering that the object seen then made no more sound than the ones seen today.
Further research revealed to us that our area of upstate New York, comprising roughly Westchester, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, and Ulster counties, had an absolutely extraordinary series of sightings of boomerang- or triangular-shaped objects of enormous size, starting in 1983. Thousands of people saw these objects, ranging from meteorologists and Federal Aviation Administration employees to a whole cross section of local people. Town police officers, sheriffs, state troopers, even in one case an entire town government en masse viewed the things, which have been described as being "the size of an aircraft carrier."
The official explanation, detailed in Discover magazine in November 1984, was that the sightings were created by a group of pilots flying light aircraft. According to Discover, the light aircraft sometimes flew in formation with their engines off and their wing tips six inches apart at night. Since these planes never seemed to use their radios, it was subsequently added in local newspapers that radio silence was maintained during these tight nighttime maneuvers.
A pilot told me that this was all highly unlikely, that such formation flying would not be possible e even with much heavier aircraft. Pranksters and even secret aircraft may be part of the answer to the enigma, but they are not the whole answer.
An article appeared in the April 17, 1983, issue of The New York Times quoting a professional meteorologist who observed a silent object a thousand yards in diameter hovering a hundred feet above him. He is quoted by the Times as saying that he had the sensation of "being scanned and rejected."
I do not think that a professional meteorologist would mistake an object nearly a mile wide for a flight of airplanes, not at an altitude of a hundred feet.
Mr. Philip J. Klass, a noted debunker of unexplained UFO sightings, claimed that people were probably seeing 'an advertising airplane. Mr. Klass was at that time an editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, a publication noted for its uncanny ability to obtain scoops from the Department of Defense about secret aerospace projects. Mr. Klass also writes for a publication I have admired, The Skeptical Inquirer. In view of my own experiences, however.
I am beginning to suspect that, in the case of this particular chimera. skepticism has been taken farther than is reasonable or wise.
Neither the official story nor Mr. Klass's offering explains the hundreds of closeup sighting reports collected by local science teacher Phillip J. Imbrogno whom the Times described as "one person working hard to provide a rational explanation." I spoke to Mr.
Imbrogno, who said that he had collected since 1983 snore than two hundred reports from people trained in some way as observers, and that they had seen huge devices that had clear structure to them. He added that on one night when there were extensive and clear sightings of a device hovering above a local parkway, the winds were averaging 23 knots! What people saw on that night was not aircraft, heavy or light flying in close formation.
And nobody has explained who came and took me in the night and injected something into my brain.
When we went to New York City for a stay in January we still knew almost nothing about UFOs, and nothing at all about the sightings discussed above.
Life did not return to normal. Even though there was no further reason for me to delay writing I couldn't seem to get down to work. I felt' a little better, but I was so terribly uneasy.
My difficulty relating to my wife and son continued.
I finally finished Science and the UFOs. Toward the end of the book I was astonished to read a description of an experience similar to my own. When I read the author's version of the "archetypal abduction experience," I was shocked. I was lying in bed at the time, and I just stared and stared at the words. I, also, had been seated in a little depression in the woods. And I had later remembered an animal.
My first reaction was to slam the book closed as if it contained a coiled snake.
They were talking about people who think they're taken aboard spaceships by aliens. And I seemed to be such a person. My blood went cold: Nobody must ever, ever know about this, not even Anne. I decided just to lock the business away in my mind.
A few mornings later at about ten, I was sitting at my desk when things just seemed to cave in on me. Wave after wave of sorrow passed over me. I looked at the window with hunger. I wanted to jump. I wanted to die. I just could not bear this memory, and I could not get rid of it. What on earth were those things? What had they done to me? Were they real, or was I the victim of some unknown mental state?
I remembered that a man named Budd Hopkins had been mentioned in the book as a prominent researcher in the field. The name had been familiar to me: Anne and I are interested in art and Hopkins is a well-known abstract artist, collected by the Guggenheim and the Whitney.
I found his name in the phone book. But how could I call him? What a stupid thing to have to admit. Little men. Flying saucers. How idiotic.
I recognized clearly, though, that if I had another moment of despair that intense, I was going to go out the window. No question. I owed it to the family who loved and depended on me to try to help myself.
I called Budd Hopkins. He answered the phone and listened to my story for a few minutes. I thought I would wither away with embarrassment telling it, but he soon interrupted me. Could I come over — like right now?
It turned out that his place in the city was a ten minute walk from mine.
Hopkins was a large, intense man with one of the kindest faces I have ever seen. I later discovered that he was bright and canny. but at the time he assumed a guileless appearance.
The moment our interview began, Hopkins explained that he was not a therapist but he could put me in touch with one if I wanted that. He then got the facts front me that I have recorded here.
As I sat there in that man's living room, listening to him tell me that I wasn't alone. that others had gone through very much the same thing, the tears rolled down my cheeks, and I went from wanting to hide it all to wanting to understand it.
It was during that first meeting that he asked me if anything else had happened in the past, anything unusual. My initial reaction was to say no. One of these ludicrous and horrible experiences was quite enough. But the question seemed to trigger something in me. After a moment's reflection, I blurted out, " I seem to remember a night the house burned down. But it didn't burn down."