All hell had broken loose on a night in early October. There had even been an explosion that woke up the whole household. Strange things had happened, but for some unknown reason we had simply put them out of mind. We'd hardly even discussed them. But that time they didn't happen only to me. We'd had houseguests. If anything had really happened, they would certainly remember. Here was a chance to put this to the test. If nobody remembered anything, I would be able to dismiss this embarrassing business of aliens.
I left Hopkins's house a happy man. He'd said that judging from his experience, the October events may have been caused by the same agency that was responsible for the disturbance of December 26.
Wonderful. I'd contact the witnesses. They would of course report that they remembered nothing. Then I would begin the painful but thankfully well understood process of accepting that I had been the victim of some unusual mental phenomenon. would enter therapy and learn to forget the mysterious visitors.
No other outcome seemed possible. Of course not. I had solved my problem.
October 4, 1985
As I walked down Sixth Avenue toward my end of Greenwich Village, what had happened on October 4 became clearer in my mind.
Why had I not thought of or discussed these events before? The answer is straightforward: I had tucked the whole episode into the catalog of open questions and forgotten it. In retrospect the only reason I can advance for having done this is that I did not want to face just how strange the events of that night had really been. But when I thought them over, they began to seem distinctly eerie, even frightening.
We often deal with fear by rejection — and to this case, as will soon be evident, there was more than enough reason to be terrified.
When I wrote the narrative that follows I had not yet been hypnotized and did not know what, if anything, lay unseen in my mind. I wrote it over a two day period after first seeing Hopkins and sometime before I met Dr. Donald Klein, who would become my hypnotist when we began to discover empty places to my memory.
On October 4. 1985, my wife, son, and I drove up to our cabin in the company of two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.
We have known Jacques and Annie for about five years. The thing about them most immediately apparent is that he is as enormous as she is tiny. He weighs nearly 300 pounds, is a black belt in karate, d does a hundred push-ups at a session. She is also a black belt, but weighs perhaps 120 pounds. She is intellectual, he is physical. Both are writers. He came to the United States as a refugee from slave labor in the Soviet Union in the late forties. A Rumanian national, he had been forcibly transferred to the Donbas region to be worked to death in the mines there. His book, Donbas, tells of his long Journey of escape, and paints an accurate picture of him as a profoundly physical man. He would make a good witness, I thought, because of his steadfast sense of reality.
Annie Gottlieb is more an intellectual, the author of the recent Do You Believe fn Magic: The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (Times Books, 1987).
The night of October 4 was foggy in Ulster County. We had dinner at a local restaurant and arrived at the cabin at about nine in the evening. I turned on the pool heater so that the pool would be comfortable for use the next day (Saturday). Then I lit a fire in the wood stove: We were all sleepy, so sleepy that we went off to bed almost immediately.
Anne and I retired to our upstairs bedroom, Jacques and Annie went to the guest room and closed the door, and our son went to his corner bedroom beside theirs. He left his door open. From my bed, with the bedroom doors open, I could see out across the cathedral ceiling of the living room to a hexagonal window set in the peak of the roof.
Over the next hour, the fog grew thicker and thicker. When I turned out my reading fight I was enveloped in absolute blackness and total silence. The harvest moon had been full on September 29, and was now at about half. It rose at approximately ten-thirty, but was entirely invisible because of the cloud cover.
I do not remember what I had been reading that night, but it wasn't frightening, nor was dinner the sort of meal that would give rise to later unrest. We had not drunk more than one glass of wine and a drink each at the restaurant.
I slept dreamlessly for some period of time, perhaps as much as two or three hours. Then I was startled awake and saw, to my horror, that there was a distinct blue light being cast on the living-room ceiling.
I was frightened, because it wasn't possible for there to be any light there. Car lights from the road could not be cast on that ceiling. In early October our neighbor was away in Japan, and his house was not only dark but invisible through the forest between our places, which was still thickly leafed. The automatic porch light that had been persistently troublesome was now without bulbs. It could not have been a flashlight, because it was so uniform and so broad, and so distinctly blue. We have tried duplicating the light with a fluorescent camp lantern both on a clear night and on a similarly foggy one, but even an extremely powerful fluorescent light could not achieve the effect, let alone a small portable unit.
My mind inventoried the possibilities as I watched this blue light slowly creep up the ceiling, as if whatever was causing it were slowly moving down into the front yard from above. Finally I hit on what seemed to me a sensible solution: The chimney must be on fire and dropping sparks into the front yard. I had to do something about it at once.
Then I fell into a deep sleep! The last thought I remember before dropping off with my heart still hammering was that the roof was on fire. This was the first such wildly inappropriate reaction on that night, but it was not to be the last.
I do not know what time this all took place, but it was well after midnight.
Sometime after I fell back to sleep I was again awakened, this time by a loud report, as if a firecracker had popped in my face. My wife cried out and downstairs my son began shouting.
When I opened my eyes I was stunned to see that the entire house was surrounded by a glow that extended into the fog.
I thought to myself: You damned fool, you fell asleep and now the fire's gotten worse. I finally managed to get up. As I did so I said to Anne: "The roofs on fire. I'll get our son and wake up the others." I started downstairs.
I hadn't gotten halfway across the room before the glow suddenly disappeared. I was very confused. There was nothing to do but tell Anne that I had made a mistake, then go downstairs to comfort my son. On the way I met Jacques in the hall. His presence terrified me and I jumped back away from him. Then I apologized for being so startled by a friend, told him to calm down and go to bed, and added that nothing was wrong.
I continued into my son's room and embraced him. In a few minutes I was back in bed and the household was again asleep.
The next morning little was said about the incident. I do remember Annie mentioning that Jacques had been bothered by the light the night before. I didn't understand that because their bedroom door had been dosed, so they couldn't have seen the bathroom light, which is left on for our son. I didn't remember my confusion about fire. As far as I was concerned, Annie and Jacques had been disturbed by the light but I hadn't been.
Later that week I found myself a little agitated, without knowing quite why. I had a persistent memory of light flashing in my eyes that night. And I vaguely recalled some sort of an explosion.
The next weekend I had a very clear and dramatic memory of a huge crystal standing on end above the house, a glorious thing .hundreds of feet tall, glowing with unearthly blue light.