Communion: A True Story (12 page)

The day before I met Budd Hopkins I almost jumped out a window. I am lucky. I found Hopkins, and he found Don Klein. What if I had turned for help to someone irrevocably convinced that I was the victim of hallucination or psychosis and too inflexible even to entertain another possibility? I might have jumped. Don Klein's open-mindedness in the face of the fearful and the fantastic has been instrumental in helping me to learn to live with uncertainty.

Because of the intelligence of the approach, I became stronger. And with my strength there came, beginning in April 1986, a great deal of research. I read thousands of pages of material about the whole phenomenon and all its scientific and cultural implications.

If visitors are really here, one could say that they are orchestrating our awareness of them very carefully. It is almost as if they either carne here for the first time in the late forties, or decided at that time to begin to emerge into our consciousness. People apparently started to be taken by them almost immediately. but few remembered or reported this until the mid-

sixties. Their involvement with us might have been very intimate, though, right from the beginning. Many of those who have been taken report very early childhood experiences.

some dating from considerably before the first disks were reported after World War II.

What may have been orchestrated with great care has not been so much the reality of the experience as public perception of it. First the craft were seen from a distance in the forties and fifties. Then they began to be observed at closer and closer range. By the early sixties there were many reports of entities, and a few abduction cases. Now. in the mid-eighties, I and others — for the most part independent of one another — have begun to discover this presence in our lives.

Even though there has been no physical proof of the existence of the visitors, the overall structure of their emergence into our consciousness has had to my mind the distinct appearance of design.

Despite what they had done to me, I did not hate the visitors. Because I knew their strength but not their motives, they frightened me. But I wished to be objective about them, even to the point of saying that they could very definitely be something from inside the mind rather than from elsewhere in the universe. That they represented a real, living force seemed hard to dispute. But that this force might be essentially human in origin remained a definite possibility.

Certainly, they did not seem human at all. Under hypnosis I described the approach of the small figure wearing the strange cards and helmet. He stood all tiny and bursting with firmness at my bedside and made a semaphore gesture with his closed fists. I leaped out of bed, threw off my pajamas, and presented myself naked to him and his soldiers, thoughts of

"the good army" filling my head. There was nothing human about him, except that he had two arms, two legs, and a head.

Given their general reluctance to expose themselves to us in an open and obvious manner, it may be hypothesized that they are trying for a degree of influence or even control over us, but one that at least presents an appearance of compliance on our part.

About two weeks after my last hypnosis session, the three of us returned to the cabin for the first time since Christmas. Anne still knew little, our son, nothing.

I did not realize until I arrived there that I had entrusted these two other people to this experience without letting them know what might be happening. But what could I say? That it could be dangerous? Was that true? Or should I have told them to decide for themselves?

Probably, but I didn't. Later, after Anne had herself undergone hypnosis and knew the whole story, she said that she would never, ever have turned away from the cabin. And our son — if he was involved there was little we could do except agonize. To hear my own mind tell the story. I had been involved most of my life.

As soon as we returned. I realized how precious our cabin had become to me. One would think that the discovery of something like this in one's life would create absolute panic, and special fear concerning the place where it had happened. At first the thought of the cabin filled me with dread, but by the time we went back I felt more reconciled to my situation. It was as if ignoring what had been happening to me required a very substantial effort. Screen memories and amnesia have to be maintained, and there is an emotional cost.

If mine was not an uncommon experience, it might be that we live in a society that bears a secret bruise from it. But as more of us allow ourselves to see what we have fought so hard to ignore, maybe the bruise will begin to heal.

Standing in our living room, I recalled my own distressed state in, really, the past year or so. How many times I had gone through that house or my apartment in the midnight, opening closets and looking under beds. I was always perplexed at myself, because I did not understated my urgency to investigate — especially the corners and crannies. I always looked down low in the closets, seeking something small. Under hypnosis I remembered that I felt as if something very strange was about to put its hand on me and take me away. It was a most curious feeling, not unlike the mood created by the sound of wind in night trees, or the cast of moonlight upon an uneasy stream.

On the surface I was quite normal, but there was this persistent undertone of fear. I felt watched. even though I knew that I was not actually being observed. I bought my dun. I had the burglar alarm installed. I got the motion-sensitive lights.

What was all this supposed to be for in that peaceful, crime-free corner of the world?

Even at the time I'd had trouble rationalizing my fears. Now it was clear that they referred not to conventional burglars and such, but to this furtive presence in my life. And this presence was coming to seem. to me to be quite real.

The moment I walked into the bedroom I was struck by what I can only describe as a sense of the true. Being in the place where the events had happened made it essentially impossible for me to separate them from other reality. The whole experience of the twenty-sixth, especially the first few moments, rested in the part of my mind that recalled reality, and was as completely distinguished from dream as any other real memory. Those first moments, when the person wearing the shieldlike cards entered the room, were a memory. I was not in any sort of trance when that happened. I was not asleep. I had been conscious and m a state that seemed m every way to be normal.

Now I stood in that bedroom looking at the door , at the floor, at the bed.

Then I saw, behind the door, an indentation in the wall that had been made by the door being slammed open with substantial force.

Did we do that, or did they do it?

Being in the room again, my memories of December 26 grew quite distinct. I could see the visitors coming, could recall my terror, my paradoxical loyalty to their commands. I remembered how it had felt to be touched by them. They were quick and precise in their movements. I remembered the smell of them, the look of their places, and above all I remembered how it was to be with them. There was fear, awe, even a sort of love.

It was cold in the cabin, and I soon went back downstairs and built a fire. We had supper and put our boy to bed with a story, then I sat in a favorite chair with a glass of wine and stared at the flames, thinking.

I wanted to approach this from the most productive viewpoint possible. Rather than trying to decide who the visitors may be and what they may want for themselves here, I thought to concentrate on my. own feelings and thoughts about them. Absent even a scintilla of certain knowledge about them, there really was no other meaningful choice.

I looked at the black picture window across the room, seeing only my own faint reflection. How clearly I recalled sweeping off the porch beyond on the night of the twenty-

sixth, going into the air with the little people swirling around me. Remaining in my mind's eye is an image that I remembered under hypnosis of my cabin, of my dark bedroom window and my son's window below it with the night light shining faintly behind the curtains. As I left I felt a sorrow as if I had died, and that is why the moment was buried in amnesia.

Then there was an impression as if all the trees below me were suddenly swept up together in a great mass of flashing trunks and limbs. When they straightened themselves out again I was sitting in the small depression with some guards around me. I still had the thought that somebody was talking to me then, but I did not remember what was said. The voice I remembered was one that had appeared to be inside my head. This may seem like some sort of thought transference, but may also be something more understandable.

The brain is an electrical device. As such it has a faint electromagnetic field and even emits very, very weakly in the radio part of the spectrum. Specifically, it contains a portion of an extra-low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic field wave at frequency between 1 and 30

hertz. The heart and musculature also develop electromagnetic fields in the extra-low-frequency range.

A more acute technology than our own might be able to mediate mental and physical functioning to a great degree by the use of sensitive ELF transmitters and receivers. It is more prosaic, perhaps, than the magic of extrasensory perception. but it has just enough plausibility to suggest that external control of the mind, and even the implantation of perceptions (hearing voices inside the head), is not beyond the realm of possibility.

I should add here that the earth itself generates a good deal of ELF in the 1 to 30 hertz range. Perhaps there are natural conditions that trigger a response in the brain which brings about what is essentially a psychological experience of a rare and powerful kind. Maybe we have a relationship with our own planet that we do not understand at all, and the old gods, the fairy, and the modern visitors are side effects of it. Admittedly, this idea is farfetched. But what of it? So are all the others.

Sitting in front of my fire, though, I found that I could not concentrate on hypotheses. My mind kept returning to memory. Intellectually, I was unsure about what the visitors were. But my emotional self did not share that indecision. My emotional response was to real people, albeit nonhuman ones.

Hypnosis had made the memories very vivid. When I rose out of the woods under hypnosis, I actually felt the sensation of rushing upward, just as if I were in an extremely fast elevator. I saw the trees below me, standing in the night, glowing faintly with a covering of snow. I can remember seeing them between my knees, getting rapidly smaller.

The space I entered smelled like warm Cheddar cheese with a hint of sulfur. This sulfur odor has been reported by others. There was a discarded coverall lying partly on the bench, partly on the floor. I had the strong impression that I was in a living room of some sort. For the most part, people feel that they are in an examination room.

Sitting before me was the most astonishing being I have ever seen in my life, made the more astonishing by the fact that I knew her. I say
her
, but I don't know why. To me this is a woman, perhaps because her movements are so graceful, perhaps because she has created states of sexual arousal in me, or maybe it is simply the memory of her hand touching the side of my chest one time, so lightly and yet with such firmness.

In subsequent months I found that people who have had the experience often felt that they were familiar with one of the visitors, and usually perceived this person to be of the opposite sex. People generally appeared for help with a single memory, maybe two. When they discovered a continuity of experience they were usually as stunned as I was. I also noticed that the fact that people report multiple-visitor experiences over the course of their lives had been published very minimally, even in the UFO literature. I was virtually certain that my own hypnosis was the first time I had encountered what seemed to me to be a fantastically improbable notion.

It was interesting to me that the idea of multiple experiences would be shared by so many people, given that there has been so little cultural reinforcement of it. Published accounts generally avoided this aspect, because a single experience with the visitors stretches credibility so much that an assertion like this seems impossible to maintain.

That night at the cabin, I found myself thinking about the one I knew, turning her presence over and over in my mind. She had those amazing, electrifying eyes . . . the huge, staring eyes of the old gods .... They were featureless, in the sense that I could see neither pupil nor iris. She was seated across from me, her legs drawn up, her hands on her knees. Her hands were wide when placed flat, narrow and long when dangling at her sides. There was a structure, perhaps of bones, faintly visible under the skin. And yet other parts of her body seemed almost like a sort of exoskeleton, like an insect would have.

She was undeniably appealing to me. In some sense I thought I might love this being —almost as much as I might my own anima. I bore toward her the same feelings of terror and fascination that I might toward someone I saw staring back at me from the depths of my unconscious.

There was in her gaze an element that is so absolutely implacable that I had other feelings about her, too. In her presence I had no personal freedom at all. I could not speak, could not move as I wished.

I wondered, before the fire, if that wasn't a sort of relief. I had reported that I had been terrified in her presence. Certainly I remember fear. But was that an accurate portrayal of my actual state? If I could give up my autonomy to another. I might experience not only fear but also a deep sense of rest. It would be a little like dying to really give oneself up in that way, and being with her was also a little like dying.

When they held me in their arms, I had been as helpless as a baby, crying like a baby, as frightened as a baby.

I realized that the extraordinarily powerful states I was examining could lead me in two undesirable directions. First, the sheer helplessness that they evoked created awe, which could lead to a desire to comply . . . and then to love. Second, the fear caused such confusion that one could not be sure how to feel.