Communion: A True Story (14 page)

My catechism class was asked to write essays proving the existence of God. Mine, an equation with an intentionally tautological argument, was declared to be a demonic inspiration. When confronted with this by the teacher, my mother said, "To think that children might be inspired by the devil is itself demonic inspiration." Those times were not more innocent than these, but they were less complex.

I do not recall thinking or talking at all about extraterrestrials. However, when I recently asked a friend of those days what was the strangest experience he could remember, I was surprised to find that his answer involved me. At the time I asked him the question, he had not in any way been exposed to this material.

Here is the story he recounted. When we were thirteen I apparently announced to him that

"spacemen" had taught me how to build an antigravity machine, which I was constructing in my bedroom. This was in the summer of 1958. I do not remember the genesis of this machine, but I certainly remember building it. There was no magic to the thing; it was only an assembly of electromagnets taken from old motors. The supposed antigravity effect was based on a principle of counterrotation.

When I plugged my assemblage in, there was a great buzzing, the electromagnet to the core of the thing whirled madly. and the lights in the house began to pulsate. The whole thing whined and fluttered. There were showers of sparks. Parental cries of alarm rose from downstairs. As the machine destroyed itself the pulsation of the house lights became a dimming, until the bulbs glowed orange-red. Then they burst to blazing life, a good number of them blowing out in the process.

Finally I managed to pull the plug. Rather than tell my parents what had happened. I rushed downstairs and pretended ignorance. I did not need to pretend fright. The friend reports that I called him m great anxiety and said that I was afraid that the spacemen were mad because I had disturbed their power field.

I have subsequently discovered that there is a whole mythology of flying saucer technology, and a lot of it revolves around the concept of counterrotating magnets. One among the other people I have met who have remembered being taken tells an interesting story. He knows a man, another victim, who was given detailed instructions about how to build a motor of this sort. The man was given the instructions during an abduction experience during the fifties, and claims that he was told that he wouldn't remember a thing until 1985, when he suddenly found his mind full of richly detailed plans.

The exact sizes of the electromagnets and their distances from one another were explained, and there was much about the materials to used. Not having seen these plans, I cannot evaluate them other than to comment that the idea that counterrotating magnets of any kind would produce any unusual energies at all flies in the face of modern magnetic theory.

But he claims that when he built this device, all the metal objects in his barn were instantly pulled toward it and he was knocked out by a flying automobile engine The next day the barn burned to the ground in an unexplained fire.

It would be easier to believe in the truth of all these effects if superconducting coils were used instead of electromagnets. It is awfully hard to see where a field that powerful would be coming from, given our present understanding of magnetism.

I don't really think that details like the construction of a motor can be part of some shared hallucinatory system. Recall that I did not even remember my antigravity machine myself, but rather was told about it by a friend who remembered. My machine was built in 1958.

More than twenty years later this other man seems to have built a more exact version of the same thing, allegedly based on plans obtained in the same period.

The day after I built my device. I do remember being seized with a fierce urge to get away from the house. I went to my grandmother's country home with her, even though the occasion was one of her afternoon card parties.

About four the telephone at the country house rang. I can remember my grandmother saying, "House burned down? Mary Strieber's house burned down?" The blood just drained from me. Fortunately the entire house had not burned, only the roof over the wing containing my bedroom. The fire was never satisfactorily explained, although I have a feeling that it was related more to the effect a little boy's antigravity machine had on the wiring than to the hostility of annoyed visitors.

Fortunately for me, it never dawned .on my parents that I might have caused a disaster on this scale.

In July 1957 my father took my sister, who was then thirteen, and myself from San Antonio to Madison, Wisconsin, to see his sister and her family. We flew to Chicago and stayed at the Hilton, where I accidentally dropped a large milk shake out of a tenth-floor window. We spent the night at another hotel, and then traveled on to Madison to see the relatives. A week later we returned to San Antonio on the train.

All my life I have had a memory of that train, seen from above, rushing through the night.

Most of the windows are dark, which suggests that it is very late. There are thick pine woods, meaning that it must have been in Arkansas or farther north, for the Texas Eagle did not go through the pine forests of East Texas, but rather across the plains between Texarkana and Dallas and then south over rolling, featureless country.

For some reason I had never thought twice about the strange image of the speeding train.

Why would I have seen it from such a position? Can it be that I really was outside of it at some point?

I remembered absolutely nothing about being taken off the train. There was a sort of confused recollection of my father crouched at the back of an upper berth in our drawing room, his eyes bulging, his lips twisted back from his teeth. But I've always assumed that was a nightmare brought on by the fact that I was so sick on the trip. My illness was violent. I vomited until I thought I would die, and for no apparent reason. Nothing came up but bile, but the spasms simply would not stop.

Now I have added to this recollection a vivid memory of the being pushing a bladder down my throat. This is not the only recollection I have of being made to eat things by the visitors. In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe. This is associated with a perfectly terrible memory of eating what I have always thought was a rotten pomegranate, which was so bitter that it almost split my head apart. A nurse put drops on my tongue to help me keep it down. But what nurse? Where? I was never in a hospital.

Something might have been stuffed in my mouth on the night of December 26. I certainly remember them trying to -get it opened. And afterward I brushed my teeth.

This is about the most disturbing thing that I have yet come across in this whole, vast experience. It is not the eating that disturbs me, because I seem to have lived, but rather the structural coherence of the thing. First I am fed and it comes back up. Then I am fed again and this time drops are used to prevent the material from returning. Years later, the feeding is such a minor part of the experience that the memory of it is covered by other things.

In short, my hallucinatory friends seem to have learned something about how to get me to digest whatever it is they are trying to feed me.

I have not thought of those hours of sickness on that train for a long, long time. I remember, though, how my father labored to help me, and after he grew tired the sleeping-car porter came in and held me over the toilet. A doctor appeared in his bathrobe and tried to get me to drink some water. The illness had begun suddenly in the middle of the night and continued until morning. I was sleeping like the dead when the train finally pulled into the old MoPac station in San Antonio. My father carried me to a cab, and we went home.

By the time I got there I was feeling much better and was eager to see my friends. We had, after all. been away for nearly two weeks in the middle of the summer, and during the last summers of childhood I sensed the increasing rarity of the days. I was fill of excitement as we drove down Elizabeth Road. No sooner had I gone through the motions of helping with the luggage than I was off, my sickness forgotten.

I remember it was then that I told a story, which has remained in the back of my mind for years, of hearing a wolf howling and seeing one on the roadside. Even as I told that story I remember being a little confused. Since then it has lingered, the image of the wolf in the clearing and the sound of its voice echoing through the night. From that image there has flowed an intense lifelong interest in wolves, which has grown into love for this wonderful species.

The image was central to
The Wolfen
and
Wolf of Shadows
, and appears again in
The
Wild
, a novel I have written but have not yet published.

I knew even as I spoke that we hadn't really seen a wolf, or heard one howl. Why then was I saying it? Where had it come from? Was it one of the screen memories which were so common to experiences with the visitors? My memory of the December 26 incident was at first blocked by the recollection of the owl. I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.

I note in passing that if my wise and determined friend from afar is a woman, it could be said that her personal symbol is an owl. Athene's symbol was the owl. The Latin word for owl is
strix
, which also menus witch. It was thought in earliest times to embody the wisdom of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian "Eve-Goddess" with the huge, staring eyes. The owl was also the totem of the Celtic Blodeuwedd, the Triple Goddess of the Moon, and is associated with the notion of the Trinity, which will emerge later in this book as the most common symbolic structure of the visitors, mentioned by many people who have been taken — people who have no idea at all of its ancient importance, which has now declined to the dusty precincts of antiquarians and mythologists.

Perhaps visitors would naturally seek to the center of the soul and enter its reality, being too experienced to be interested in any but the deepest essence of our beings. Then they might well seem to be part of our mythology, part of the basis of being human.

My life is full of peculiar stories like the one about the wolf and the ones about owls.

Oddly enough, my sister also has a strange story about an owl. Sometime in the early sixties she was driving between Kerrville and Comfort, Texas, well after midnight. She was terrified to see a huge light sail down and cross the road ahead of her. A few minutes later an owl flew in front of the car. I have to wonder if that is not a screen memory, but my sister has no sense that it is.

Many of my screen memories concern animals, but not all. I remember being terrified as a little by an appearance of Mr. Peanut, and vet I .know that I never saw Mr. Peanut except on a Planter's can. I said that I was menaced by him at a Battle of Flowers Parade in San Antonio, but I now understand perfectly well that it never happened. For years I have told of being present at the University, of Texas when Charles Whitman went on his shooting spree from the tower in 1966. But I wasn't there.

Then where was I? And what is behind all the other screen memories?

Perhaps on some level I do know. Maybe that's why I spent so much time peeking into closets and under beds. If I really face the truth about this behavior, I must admit that it has been going on for a long time, although in 1985 it became much more intense. Now that I have uncovered these memories, though, it has ended completely.

As a matter of fact, I cannot remember a time in my life when I have felt as well and as happy as I do now. Whatever has happened, one thing is certain: A great pressure has been relieved, and that pressure had been with me always. Was it the pressure involved in keeping my memories of them hidden? I just don't know.

This brief review at least suggests that I ought to continue my exploration of the past.

Before going on, though, it might be wise to examine those last few minutes of the hypnosis session in some detail. It began when. without warning, I found myself in 1957.

Spontaneous regression can happen in hypnosis. the reason it usually takes place is that the subject encounters a memory of something that has also been seen long ago. and drops back to the previous experience.

For, me the trigger seems to have been the "You are our chosen one" speech. After that, I mentioned "others." At that instant there was a flashing image of the lady in the flowered dress being given some sort of elaborate speech, and shouting "Praise the Lord" when she heard it. Then Dr. Klein asked what others, and I found myself in vet another place but with the same being still before me, or somebody who looked very much like her.

I was excited, sitting tip in bed, looking around at the other beds, all of which contained American soldiers lying down asleep. These beds were really more like tables with solid bases and a slight inward cant from bottom to top. I remembered them as being gray in color.

The soldiers were young men in fatigues, and they were sprawled as if totally comatose. It was then that Dr. Klein asked me my age, and I heard myself say, "Twelve."

I changed completely, remarkably. I was my childhood self again. It was quite wondrous.

I felt smaller, I felt verve different. My mind felt different. Gone was the weight of knowledge. For those few moments I was innocent again.

I knew where I was and I was very excited to be there. At first I was sitting up, happy to be awake because even the soldiers were asleep. I was quit. pleased with myself. There was no apparent transition between the time I was sitting up awake and the time I was in a little chair, sitting before a featureless gray surface.

Something terrifically difficult happened while I was sitting in that chair. After hypnosis I recalled seeing a landscape with a great hooked object floating in the air, which on closer inspection proved to be a triangle. Then there followed a glut of .symbolic material, so incense that even as I write I can feel how it hurt my whole brain and body to take it all in. I don't remember what this was — triangles, rushing pyramids, animals leaping through the air.