Communion: A True Story (21 page)

As I watched, the image moved its nose, revealing that this was obviously a sensitive organ both of touch and smell. The mouth was not straight, but rather one of those rich and complex lines that come to a human mouth with the advance of years. Centered in this mouth was a remarkable expression, the outcome, it seemed to me, of implacable will leavened by what I can only describe as mirth. Ted Jacobs tried especially hard to capture that elusive quality, and succeeded brilliantly — although the final result, on the cover of this book, is a bit more human than was actually the case. Specifically, the mouth was nothing more than a line, albeit a complex one. There were no lips at all. And the cranium was a good bit larger than the cover portrait would suggest.

The chin was strong, very pointed, and there was a general impression that the skin was stretched over a plated bone structure.

By far the most arresting feature in this face was the eyes. They were far larger than our own eyes. In them I once or twice glimpsed a suggestion of black iris and pupil, but it was no more than a suggestion, as if there were optic structures of some kind floating behind those wells of darkness.

It was those eyes that I saw staring down at me on October 4, those eyes that gleamed so furiously in the faint night light. I remember them from December 26, too, and from the summer of 1957, and from the experience with the fogbank.

Ted asked me many questions about the eyes. When he asked me how they looked closed, I got another shock: The image closed its eyes. I saw the huge, glassy structures recede and loosen, becoming wrinkled, and the lids come down and up at the same time, to close just below the middle of the eyeball.

I described this to Ted, but he wanted to know more. How about a profile view? Had I ever seen a profile? As I sat there staring into the darkness of my own mind. I saw the image obediently turn its head.

I could hardly believe what I was observing. Was this a phantom? What was it? My research thus far has not uncovered any specific paradigm of this experience. I will not assert finally that it was a mental phenomenon as yet unidentified, but at the moment this remains a distinct possibility.

While the image stayed with me, it remained exactly the same as it was when I first saw it. I could observe any part of the body from the top of the head to the tip of the foot. I could do this again and a again, and see the same thing each time. On March 1. I made a complete physical description on tape. On March 23 I repeated the description again, then compared the two tapes. There was no difference. The image was unchanged.

Beyond the face, I was able to see the figure's back, the sides of its head, its arms and hands, its feet, torso, abdomen — every part of its body. Under close scrutiny, its surface was smooth but did not seem to have a layer of fat under the skin, which was stretched tight over the bones. The structure of the knee and elbow fonts reminded me of the knees of grasshoppers or crickets. The hands were very long and tapered when in repose, with three fingers and 'in opposable thumb. When pressed down, the hands became flat, suggesting that they were more pliable than our hands. On the fingers were short, dark nails of a more clawlike appearance than ours.

Overall, this did not appear to me to be a highly developed body , but rather a very simple one. There was a general lack of complexity shat suggested few bones and not much flesh.

I do not know how to explain this image. If it was not created by the powerful effect of Don's, asking me to visualize the creature, then perhaps it was some sort of sophisticated holographic projection. It might be possible to maintain an image in the mind if one knew how to stimulate the optic center in the right way.

Is that what happened? Subsequent events suggested that the image was something even more extraordinary than it at first seemed.

The Visitation of March 15, 1986

Late on the night of March 14, after I had come back from the hypnosis session covering events in our apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, I sat down once again to think things through.

The image was with me, of course. I wondered what would happen if' I asked it to come to me.

Humanity has a long history of conjuring and magic. I have no doubt in my mind that most of this arose from the attempts of helpless people to affect an environment before which they were, in fact, powerless.

But what if that was not the whole story. I sat there looking at it. It looked back at me.

Nothing more happened. The thought flashed through my mind almost unbidden that anything I wrote about this experience would be far more intense if I was given some sort of confirmation. It was a true thought: that was exactly how I felt at that moment. The image responded to me with a sharper stare.

On Saturday morning we went to the country. Our son had invited a friend, and we picked this child up on the way. She was one of his school friends, also seven, and the two of them were full of excitement about their weekend together. At no time were the subjects of flying disks, visitors, or any related material discussed at all, and I doubt very much if such things were in the pantheon of either child's awareness. Our son had not been exposed to any of this material and remained totally ignorant of it.

Before dinner I took a walk along our quiet, private road. It was a moderately clear night, with a quarter moon. On the walk I saw a hair-thin streak of light come straight down out of the sky. I thought: I'm disappointed in myself — or in them. Why such a dismal little manifestation?

It was dark when the four of us sat down to the dinner table. We had been eating for only a few minutes when our son's guest suddenly shouted, "A little airplane covered with lights just flew through the front yard!"

There was real shock in this kid's face. The child looked at me, obviously distressed. My impulse was to hide under the table, but I pulled myself together and managed instead to speak in an offhand and reassuring manner. "There's an air base near here." I said. The National Guard base is thirty miles away, but it was all I could think to say. "We don't let those things bother us. Best to just forget about it."

I got up and went outside, but saw nothing. Soon the sock subsided and the children went on eating. Anne and I just sat looking at one another. She had only been hypnotized for the first time the afternoon of the previous day, and knew almost nothing about what was happening with me. From her own hypnosis she had concluded that. some sort of visitor experience might be involved, and thus the little girl's statement scared her.

After dinner the two of us went upstairs and discussed the matter. Frankly, the kid's observation, coming as it did at that moment, had convinced me that on some level what was happening must be real. Why else would the child have made that announcement? Not a word about the visitors had been said within earshot of either of the kids, and the little girl was absolutely without information about this subject.

I told Anne about my attempt at communication. "I had a feeling you'd do something like that." she said. "Too bad I can't drive: I'd take the kids back to the city and leave you here to face the music." She stopped. "No I wouldn't." We sat hand in hand in the dark while downstairs the kids read quietly together.

I wasn't sure I could drive the car-even if I had wanted to. I could barely keep my eves open. I recognized the floating sensation of alight hypnotic trance. Was I hypnotizing myself?

It's possible.

But what had our son's friend seen? The next day I asked her if she knew what a flying saucer was. She replied, "A what?"

"You know, a flying saucer."

The child looked at me like I was crazy. "I don't know what that is. Your son and I are going out to his clubhouse." Her confusion revealed her lack of knowledge.

When we went back to the city I engaged the child's father in conversation. "Do you remember flying saucers?"

"Wha — yeah."

"Ever read any books about them?"

"Can't say that I have.

"Ever discuss them?"

"Whit, what is this about?"

"Ever discuss them?"

"No. Now what? Do I win or lose?"

A child like I was, brought up in the fifties, would have known about flying saucers.

They were big news in those days. But they aren't now, so it's not surprising that the little girl was uninformed, but it is important. It is very important, obviously. The girl saw what she saw, in a simple and real way. When people dismiss such innocent and uninformed testimony, they make a great mistake. Precisely be cause it is so uninformed, it is powerful evidence of the reality of the phenomenon.

But what reality? Maybe the child really saw an object in the physical world. But maybe, also, the mind has powers that we do not understand. Perhaps there is such a thing as mental telepathy, and when I asked the image to help me, what I really did was send my own inner self on a quest. And at the end of its quest it found this innocent, open little mind, entered it, and there created a hallucination, knowing full well that the little guest would be the last person at the house likely to see anything — and thus the first one to be believed.

By nine both children were fast asleep. I was in a surprisingly benign mood, listening to music on WAMC out of Albany and enjoying being with my wife. We sat together in the parlor in our big upstairs bedroom and got sleepier and sleepier. By the time the clock rang ten it was all we could do to crawl into bed. We went to sleep.

Sometime during the night I was awakened abruptly by a jab on my shoulder. I came to full consciousness instantly. There were three small people standing beside the bed, their outlines clearly visible in the glow of the burglar-alarm panel. They were wearing blue coveralls and standing absolutely still.

They were familiar figures, not the fierce, huge eyed feminine being I have described before, but rather the more dwarflike ones, stocky and solidly built, with gray. humanoid faces and glittering, deep-set eyes. They were the ones I felt were "the good army" when they took me tin December 26.

I thought to myself,
My God, I'm completely conscious and they're just standing there
. I thought that I could turn on the light, perhaps even get out of bed. Then I tried to move my hand, thinking to flip the switch on my bedside lamp and see the time.

I can only describe the sensation I felt when tried to move as like pushing my arm through electrified tar. It took every ounce of attention I possessed to get any movement at all. I marshaled my will and brought my attention into the sharpest possible focus. Simply moving my arm did not work. I had to order the movement, to labor at it. All the while they stood there.

I struggled, bit by bit clawing closer and closer to that lamp. I turned my head, fighting a pressure that felt as if a sheath of lead had been draped over me, and saw the light switch in the dark. I watched my hand move slowly closer, and finally felt the switch under my finger.

I clicked it. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing.

The electricity was off. The burglar alarm was still working because it had battery backup

— but apparently it meant little to them, as they had entered the house without tripping it.

When I turned my head back I confronted a sight so weird. I thought afterward that I did not know how to write about it. I still don't, so I am just going to plunge ahead.

Beside my bed, and perhaps two feet from my face, close enough to see it plainly without my glasses. was a version of the thin ones, the type I have called "her." It was not quite right, though. Its eyes were like big, black buttons, round rather than slanted. It appeared to be wearing an inept cardboard imitation of a blue double-breasted suit, complete with a white triangle of handkerchief sucking out of the pocket.

I was overcome at this point by terror so fierce and physical that it seemed more biological than psychological. My blood and bones and muscles were much more afraid than my mind. My skin began tingling, my hair felt like it was getting a static charge. he sense of their presence in the room was so unimaginably powerful, and so
strange
. I tried to wake up Anne but my mouth wouldn't open. The moment I thought of the kids a clear picture flashed in my head of the two of them sleeping peacefully.

The thing before me seemed like a sort of interrogatory. Why the suit? Did it mean that they were showing me a male? If this was a hive species, there might well be more than one sex, and they might be physically very different. Females, males, and stocky little drones?

Now what was I going to do, having called them — lie here and quake? I had wanted to communicate.

They were obviously waiting for me to do something. I saw their faces so clearly, their eyes dark, glittering pits in their dun skin. I could not help noticing that there was a sort of jollity about these beings. I'd thought before that they seemed happy. Perhaps whatever they were trying to do was going well.

They had responded to my summons. What on earth should I say? I wanted them to know that I was still in possession of myself, that despite what I can only describe as a terrific assault against me, physically and mentally, I was still functional and on some level independent. More than this, I wanted them to know how I felt about them, despite all the complex connotations of what they were now doing to me. There may very well be good reasons for their behavior. Have all of their contacts with human beings been peaceful? And how about me: Had I fought in the past?

If they had a hive mind, it might be that the amount of volition I had left was all they could allow me without risking loss of control of the situation. What if I'd been able to do something unexpected very quickly, like reach out and take one of them by the shoulders?

Would the hive then have become confused about where this being was? Would it have been that simple to take a captive?

There was and is no way that I would ever make a provocative gesture in heir presence. In fact, I wouldn't move at all unless bidden, not until I understand more. If one could escape into their world, one could also get lost in it.