I told Anne about it, and as I was talking I experienced a hollow sort of a feeling I knew that she didn't believe me — of course she didn't! And I didn't believe myself. "Wasn't there some problem with the stove?" she asked. I was embarrassed and never mentioned the crystal again. I put it out of my mind permanently.
On February 6, 1986, I came home from Hopkins's house brimming with eagerness. I was sure I would put an end to this by asking careful questions. Jacques and Annie had been disturbed by the bathroom light. Of course. Their door must have been opened, as I had seen Jacques in the hall. And my Anne had cried out not because of the explosion but because I had told her the house was on fire. There had been no explosion. And as for the blue light on the living-room ceiling, put some unanticipated light source together with thick fog and anything can happen.
I first asked my wife to think back to October 4. It wasn't hard to identify the specific night, because it was the last time Jacques and Annie had come to the country and the thickness of the fog was unusual.
I was disturbed that Anne at once remembered being awakened by the bang. She did not see the glow, but my initial warning about the fire apparently didn't penetrate her sleep, because all she did recall was my saying that there was no fire.
I asked my son, "Do you remember the last time Jacques and Annie went to the country with us?"
"Yeah. The night of the bang." So he had also heard it. "A bunch of people told me it was OK; you just threw your shoe at a fly."
"What people?"
"Just a bunch of people. People who were around."
This answer, I must admit, shocked me badly. I left off questioning him and called Budd Hopkins, who suggested that I ask my son not about memories but about dreams.
Taking this advice, I next asked my son if he remembered any unusual dreams. This is his reply, spontaneous and immediate:
"I dreamed that a bunch of little doctors took me out on the porch and put me on a cot. I got scared and they started saying 'We won't hurt you' over and over in my head. That is my strangest dream, because it was just like it was real. It happened in the middle of another dream, when I was dreaming that me and Ezra [a friend of his] were in a boat." He could not say if he had had the dream on the night of October 4. He knew only that it had happened at the cabin.
His words swept away all my hopes of solving this problem in anything remotely resembling a conventional manner. What had happened to my little boy? His innocent report was very upsetting. In the context of my own experiences, his dream suggested either that the two of us have some sort of weird psychological link, or that at some point he has had an experience similar to my own.
Next I spoke to Jacques Sandulescu on the phone. This is a transcript of that conversation.
Me: "Do you remember anything about the last time you and Annie came to the country?"
Jacques: "The light! I was sleeping, all of a sudden something woke me up. I saw the room was full of light. Bright, like daylight. Not like the moon. I thought we overslept. I look at my watch, it says four-thirty. Then I hear you through the door, saying it's OK. The light is gone, so I go back to sleep."
Me: "What kind of light was it?"
Jacques: "Light, it was light. I could see the bushes outside. I could see the tree trunks. I thought it was about ten in the morning."
I have done every conceivable thing to try to duplicate light like that. Our guest room has one small window overlooking a seven-feet-deep covered porch. Beyond that the land slopes up gradually, so that not even car lights from the road can enter that room, much less moonlight or sunlight. With the leaves gone during the winter, we determined that the lights from the neighbor's house are also invisible from that window. The movement-sensitive light doesn't shine directly in, but down the porch. Had it somehow turned on — even absent bulbs — Jacques would have seen not the trees and shrubs but the outline of the porch interior with the yard beyond in darkness. The reason for this is that the fight shines past the window and down the length of .the porch. Had the regular porch light been switched on, the same effect would have resulted.
Even with the neighbor's lights on, the porch light on, and a car in the front yard, we could not duplicate the effect. Nothing I can conceive of can account for the major light phenomena on that night. It may be possible to explain the blue glow I originally saw on the ceiling, but not that massive burst of light from above. I visualized the whole roof being ablaze. Jacques thought it was midmorning. Because of the fog, a helicopter, or indeed any sort of airplane, was out of the question. A pilot told me simply, "Forget aircraft."
At four-thirty the moon was still in the sky, but well below the line of the forest. Could the fog have somehow magnified the moonlight, causing dark-sensitized eyes to mistake its mild glow for bright daylight? Such a thing may have been possible, but the moon was low in the west and the source of the light was clearly directly overhead. And what about the explosion? Maybe it was thunder. But there were no thunderstorms in the area. Perhaps a freak bolt in some sort of unusual ministorm caused it, then. But the period of seeming daylight lasted many seconds, and was not apparent to anybody until after the explosion.
Thunder follows lightning, not the other way around.
Whatever caused the effect, it was a highly unusual phenomenon and it is unlikely that it can be identified.
And so far there is no way at all to account for Annie Gottlieb's testimony. I spoke to her immediately after talking to Jacques. While she must have overheard him on the phone, the two of them had no time between statements to discuss the matter. Also, they are normal, coherent, and reliable people. They had, and have, no reason whatsoever to lie and they are most unlikely to be so radically confused by normal realities that they would derive from them memories such as they report. One only has to look into Annie Gottlieb's writings to see the clarity of her mind.
Like the rest of us, Annie was awakened by a loud explosion. She reports: "It was a bang. Then I heard the scurry of little feet running across your bedroom upstairs. It must have been the cats."
"Annie, the cats were in the city. We don't take them weekends because they don't like the carrier."
"You're kidding! I always just assumed it was the cats. Anyway, I vaguely remember the light. Mostly I remember the noises. A few minutes after the scurrying, I heard you come downstairs. You said through the door not to worry. The next morning you told me that some people had come down from is spaceship to visit."
" What? Annie, I never said any such thing. I would never say anything like that."
"At the time I thought it must have been some kind of dream."
"You remember me saying it?"
"Well, now that I think of it, I don't know where I got the idea that anybody said that."
(Months later she recalled that I had not spoken about a visit. but had described the crystal. In any case, I certainly had a very strange explanation for the night's disturbances.) At that point I almost wished that I had never asked my witnesses anything. I said good-bye and put the phone down. I realized, finally and inescapably, that something very peculiar was going on. I could not deny it. I would have been a fool to deny it.
I went into my office and closed my door. It was evening, and Manhattan's few blind stars were shining in the sky. The world outside looked so normal, and that moment its very normality seemed to me to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I thought back across the months to October The fall had been an awful time for me and my wife. Around the second week of October I had become extremely fearful about living in the New York area and decided to move.
Had my terror stemmed from that night? And what about all my nervousness, my secret searching under beds and in closets, my unreasonable fear of prowlers? It seemed to me that I had been growing increasingly uneasy with the passing months. I had awful dreams that I cannot remember. Again and again I woke up in the small hours of the morning feeling as if something dreadful had just happened.