Communion: A True Story (15 page)

Are such experiences the source of the performance anxiety that has been detected in psychological tests I have taken, or does that have to do with the many recollections I have always had of sitting in the middle of a little round room and being asked by a surrounding audience of furious interlocutors questions so hard they shatter my soul? Trying to cope with these memories as a child, I wove anguished fantasies around the figures, who became my childhood friends in some round, gray basement, drawing out the secret structures of my mind like surgeons with forceps extracting sparking neurons from my brain. I remember that they would say words, and each word they said would go through me like a hurricane, evoking every memory, drought, and feeling associated with it. This would go on for hours and hours until I begged them to stop, and I would be offered the relief o£ a brief rest at their feet, my soul confessing itself into the stern softness of their love.

Is this just a fantasy, or is it what happens when somebody tries to extract the deepest sense of a language from the mind of a child? If so, who did it? Is this a memory of the visitors at work, as it were?

In my childhood I was known as an extremely persistent questioner, so much that in school I was allowed to ask no more than three per period so that I would not take up all the time. True to form, I started questioning this being. Maybe I knew her even then — certainly I had gotten over any initial shock quickly.

I find the exchange fascinating. I asked who the people around me were, and was told what was obvious even to me. They were all soldiers. Then I wanted to know why they had been brought here. The answer is telling: "Because they were alone." It might suggest a methodology, one that is borne out by some studies of unexplained sightings: The craft seem to favor isolated areas. They do not appear as often over cities, and there are not many stories of their taking people from heavily populated places. Perhaps a limitation of technology is visible here: There are simply too many risks in populated areas.

I asked what was being done to the soldiers. The answer, typically uninformative, was,

"We look then over and send them home." I can recall my perplexity at that moment very well: I relived it during hypnosis. It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go to just to examine people, and I asked, rapid-fire: "What's the point of that?" The creature seemed read to reply, but she was cut off in midsentence as if somebody had flipped a switch. For a moment she sounded like a stuck record. "The point of that is — The point of that is —" Then she stopped, as if surprised that she had been caught off guard, and said, simply, "Well," her voice melodious with amusement.

Soon after, I was watching her moving around. I did not know what she was doing, perhaps something that involved touching the soldiers with a copper-colored thing. I asked her why she looked so awful, and she certainly did look awful. I cannot imagine why I wasn't terrified. It is incredibly upsetting to see something that is clearly not human walking and moving about with intelligence. There is something that is unmistakable about the precision of consciously directed movement that is deeply frightening when seen in such an alien form.

Nothing tike this was going through my mind at the age of twelve, but the vision of that eerie being moving about among the tables remains quite clear. When I asked her why she looked so awful, she replied almost absently, without stopping her work, "I can't help that."

I wonder what Ishtar really looked like, and if the whole Greek pantheon of beautiful gods and goddesses was not something akin to the beautiful "godlike" beings imagined by people who have made flying saucers their religion. These believers seem to be people who cannot face the stark reality of the visitor experience, and so cloak the fierce, limitless eyes, the bad smells, the dreadful food, and the general sense of helplessness in a very human mythology.

I wonder if Homer and Pindar did not do the same. And why was Homer blind? It is known that many different storytellers comprise "Homer." Perhaps hysterical blindness was a commonplace among the prehistoric Greek bards out of whose tales the classical pantheon emerged. I don't blame them. Hysterical blindness and congenial belief systems would both be excellent defenses against things similar to what I have seen.

But if they have really been here so long, why did they have so much trouble getting me to keep down my feeding? Perhaps the substance has not been changed over the years to suit me, perhaps the very act of eating it has changed me. Maybe it is a process of acclimatization.

It was while I was watching the lady with the eyes moving among the soldiers with her copper wand that I noticed my sister. She was below me and to my right, lying sprawled in her nightie. I still remember how much seeing her like that scared me. She and I were very close in those days. I loved her and admired her, and it was dreadful to see her looking as if she were dead. A voice told me that she was all right. This voice was definitely inside my head, I remember that quite distinctly.

Then I saw the sight that has brought me more fear than any other so far: My father was standing near my sister in blue pajamas, his arms dangling at his sides, on his face a look of surprise. Then his eyes moved until they rested on something I could not see very well, because it was invisible beside the doorway. Almost in slow motion his face simply broke up.

He threw his head back and something like an electric shock seemed to go through him.

making hire spread his fingers and shake firs arms. His eyes bulged and his mouth flew open.

Then he was screaming, but I could hear it only faintly, a muffled shrieking, full of terror and despair.

The "awful-looking" creature now came to seem absolutely monstrous. And there was no question in my mind about its being real. It had never even crossed my mind that I might be dreaming. This was as real as any other event in my life, despite the fact that it was far more frightening even than the most frightening horror movie and would soon disappear into amnesia. As a matter of fact, it would be another year or so before I would see my first horror movie.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
, which was shown at my summer camp. I remained at that camp exactly one day. It was later that my interest in horror stories began.

Until I was about thirteen, my taste in comic books ran to
Uncle Scrooge McDuck
and
Little
Lulu
. The scariest things I was exposed to were
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and
The Twilight
Zone
on television.

Under hypnosis the fear went through me like ice water in my veins. It is fortunate for Don Klein and Budd Hopkins that I was under the suggestion not to scream, because they would have hear terrible screaming, I am afraid. As it was, the sensation seemed to explode through me. For a moment I thought I was fainting. I remembered that as a little boy I just shriveled up inside to see my father in such an extremity of terror. In those days he was very much my hero. I tried to talk to him, to reassure him that a was all right. He gasped, "It's not all right, Whiny, it's not all right!" and tried to make a grab for me and my sister. His arms came up and just hung in the air while he writhed and his face worked. When he started screaming again, he became muffled.

They watched this with their steady eyes, like huge black jewels.

The closest thing I have been able to find to an unadorned image of these beings is not from some modern science-fiction movie, it is rather the age-old, glaring face of Ishtar. Paint her eyes entirely black, remove her hair, and there is my image as u hangs before me now in my mind's eye, the ancient and terrible one, the bringer of wisdom, the ruthless questioner.

Do my memories come from my own life, or from other lives lived long ago, in the shadowy temples where the gray goddess reigned?

Perhaps the visitors are the gods. Maybe they created us. Robert Crick, the renowned discoverer of' the double helix, has postulated that the genetic structure of life is so intricate that it seems designed.

According to studies led by Dr. Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, there is genetic evidence that the entire human species arose from a single female in North Africa between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago. In other words, it is conceivable that we all started from the womb of a single woman.

If we could slip back in time and find her dashing across the ancient Mesopotamian savanna, would we also find Ishtar gliding above in an enormous triangular spacecraft like the one that was seen over Westchester County in 1983, as elusive to her struggling little creation as flying disks are to the air force?

Or would we find an even greater mystery, that the whole pantheon of our reality was somehow contained in the wobbling mind of that creature, who fell down to thank her raw new gods after a panther leaped at her throat, and by a miracle missed devouring us all.

The Journey Continued

THE SIXTIES AND THE SEVENTIES

This expedition seemed to have reached the edge of a cliff, one that dropped far into the shadows. I wondered, if I really looked, what might I find there?

What had my life really been, and how many other lives have been lived like mine, skidding the surface of this dark mirror? I wondered, in early 1986, if a couple of recent strange events might have some relevance to this inquiry into the past.

During the third week of March I had a very peculiar thing happen to me. Sometime in the night of March 21 at the cabin I awoke and found myself unable to move or even to open my eyes. I had the distinct impression that there was something in my left nostril, and that it was being slowly moved far up my nose. When I tried to struggle, I heard a pop like an apple crunching between my eyes. The next thing I remembered, it was morning.

I noticed during the day that my nose hurt. There was a little bleeding, but as my wife and son had reported similar injuries (without the memory of something being in their noses) the week before, I assumed that it was the result of a head cold and dry winter air. But I never came down with a cold.

After March 15, they'd both had episodes of nasal bleeding, and little knots in their nostrils. Specifically, Anne had a knot in the top of her right nostril, my son in his left I now developed one in my left nostril. Theirs had gone away without incident, but mine bothered me and I made an appointment with my doctor to get my injury examined. He looked at it on March 26 and diagnosed it as a scratch to the nasal mucosa that had led to the formation of the knot. He correctly predicted that it would subside on its own over a period of days.

I thought no more about this until July 26, 1986, when I received a letter from Donald Klein in which he mentioned that many of my symptoms were consistent with an abnormality in the temporal lobe, and that the method of testing this involved a nasal probe.

The temporal lobe is arguably the most important part of the brain, the seat of "humanity"

itself. It is in the temporal lobe that sense is made of perceptions. Structures there are important to emotion, motivation, and memory. People with temporal-lobe epilepsy report deja vu, unexplained panic states, strong smells, and even a preoccupation with philosophical and cosmic concerns. They also sometimes report vivid hallucinatory journeys.

Initially I seized on this as a way to explain my whole experience. I read some work by Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University that postulated "temporal-lobe transients" to explain psychic and religious experiences. But the more I studied temporal-lobe disorder, the less it seemed an answer. It did not explain the overwhelming sense of the real connected with my experiences. It did not explain the physical consequences. It did not explain the witnesses. Nor did it explain the experiences of others. Temporal-lobe epilepsy was nothing more than another speculation, essentially no different and no more supportable than the visitor hypothesis or any of the other hypotheses that I had put forward. I had to fall back on the truth: I did not know what was happening, but it certainly appeared to be happening in the real world.

As it happened, the week after I received Dr. Klein's letter I met a woman who has had the visitor experience; she began her story by saying that the visitors inserted a probe into her nose, which made a sound "like an apple crunching," between her eyes. She had even drawn pictures of the probe and of the entity that had inserted it. The probe was a businesslike affair, a needle with a small, knifelike handle. The entity was familiar to me because I had seen such beings also.

I then asked Budd Hopkins for information, from his cases, of reports of intrusions into the head. Of his hundred cases, four including me reported intrusions in or behind the ear, three under the eve. and eleven, again including me, up the nose. By far the largest number of intrusions were into the nostril, right into the olfactory nerve with its connection to the deepest core of the brain — and behind that nerve, the temporal lobe.

For what it may be worth, my son and I, who had injuries to the left nostril, are also left-handed. Anne is right-handed.

If the temporal lobe is being entered, then it may not be possible to decide between the temporal-lobe-epilepsy and visitor hypotheses. It could easily be that the visitors are affecting the temporal lobe in such .t way as to induce abnormalities that would later be diagnosed as epileptic conditions. As the reading of temporal-lobe electroencephalograms is such :t subjective business, I decided that I would arrange two separate temporal lobe tests, one by a neurologist recommended by Dr. Klein. and another through a different psychiatrist. This second neurologist carried out the' same preliminary examination done by Dr. Klein's man and came to the same conclusion: There was no evidence of abnormality. He was then given a version of' my December 26 story, but we never discussed hypotheses at all. That way, he felt no need to defend his findings against one hypothesis or another. I went to :t lab, took chloral hydrate, and endured the insertion of electrodes deep into my nasal cavity a few days later the re stilts came back: absolutely normal temporal lobe function, confirmed by both neurologists.