Communion: A True Story (4 page)

On the afternoon of January 3 we were skiing when I got a pain behind my right ear. It was a sensation similar to what -happens to one's jaw when Novocain wears off after a session in the dentist's chair. My skull ached and the skin was sensitive. In the middle of this sensitive area my wife could see a tiny pinpoint of a scab.

I believe that the combination of the infected finger, the rectal pain, and the aching head were what finally brought my memories into focus. The confused swirl resolved into a specific series of recollections, and when I saw what they were, I just about exploded with terror and utter disbelief.

One of the memories would come into my head, linger there a moment, then leave me with my heart pounding, gasping, sweat pouring down my face.

I thought that I had lost my mind.

For half of my life I have been engaged in a rigorous and detailed search for a finer state of consciousness. Now I thought my mind was turning against me, that my years of eager study of everything from Zen to quantum physics had led me into some strange and tragic byway of the soul.

As soon as I had them in focus, my memories became perfectly vivid-as vivid, say, as childhood memories become when one chooses to draw them out of the mental file where they are hidden. I sat at my desk, trying to make sense of what could not make sense.

I thought, quietly and calmly,
You may be going mad, or you may have o brain tumor.

You've gut to find um which it is and take whatever steps are necessary
. And then I rested my head on the desk, and, quite frankly, cried.

For a couple of days I lived with it. Maybe the "symptoms" would subside.

Then, quite suddenly one afternoon, I recalled the smell. Their smell. It came back to me as clearly as if I had inhaled it not a moment before. More than anything except discovering that I was not alone with my experience, that totally real memory saved me from going stark raving mad.

In the first week of January, a local newspaper published accounts of an object or objects being sighted in our area. This story appeared m the January 3, 1986, issue of the Middletown. New York
Record
. The headline called the appearance a hoax but according to the story local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. One man, however claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local prison, and in the light he saw planes.

A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the prank hypothesis.

My wife showed me the article and told me. "You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week." I did not remember the conversation, but the article caused me to glance over a hook my brother had sent me for Christmas called
Science and the UFOs
by Jenny Randles and the astronomer Peter Warrington.

Warrington is a respected scientist, and the book seemed well written. As a matter of fact, it does not make any claims about the reality of the phenomenon, but simply calls for more study and appeals to the scientific community to begin to accept it as a legitimate area of inquiry.

I was surprised to find that
Science and the UFOs
frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first fire or six pages read.

Much later. after we had really begun to take this whole matter seriously. Anne and I did more research into UFO sightings in our area. We discovered that it is a hotbed of sightings, and has been for nearly half a century.

As it happens, the eighteen-year-old son of one of our neighbors saw something hovering near a road not five miles from our cabin ac approximately nine-thirty on a night in late December. He described it to me as "huge and covered with lights," a typical description. He watched it for some time. Being the son of a former state trooper and pilot, he did not claim that it was a "UFO," but simply told the truth: He did not know what it was, but it appeared to be a solid structure, and as it hovered for a substantial period, more than fifteen minutes, it could not have been a flight of planes. I telephoned the Goodyear Corporation and found that their blimp was not in the area at the time.

The only thing I thought it could have been was some unknown blimp, but even that appeared hard to believe in view of what snore I discovered about it.

Just by talking with friends in April my wife uncovered a personal experience of an early area sighting, one that took place in the late fifties. One of her best friends is an artist and the wife of a well-known composer. In her childhood this woman used to at summer camp at a location not ten miles from where our log cabin now stands, a fact that we did not know when Anne asked her the question we had determined to put to as many people as we could, as part of our research effort.

To at once gain valid information and prevent bias, we had simply been asking people,

"What was your strangest experience?" None of the people we asked had any idea of what was happening to us.

The woman's answer turned out to be highly revealing. She reported that she had seen a flying saucer in 1953, when she was nine. She proceeded to describe an object similar to the one that had appeared in the same immediate area in December 1985. Like so many reports through the years, she described it as huge, full of lights, and hovering. It moved off slowly If all these objects were the results of pranks, then the pranksters would have been operating for more than thirty years-and even in the early fifties they would have had superb mufflers, considering that the object seen then made no more sound than the ones seen today.

Further research revealed to us that our area of upstate New York, comprising roughly Westchester, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, and Ulster counties, had an absolutely extraordinary series of sightings of boomerang- or triangular-shaped objects of enormous size, starting in 1983. Thousands of people saw these objects, ranging from meteorologists and Federal Aviation Administration employees to a whole cross section of local people. Town police officers, sheriffs, state troopers, even in one case an entire town government en masse viewed the things, which have been described as being "the size of an aircraft carrier."

The official explanation, detailed in
Discover
magazine in November 1984, was that the sightings were created by a group of pilots flying light aircraft. According to
Discover
, the light aircraft sometimes flew in formation with their engines off and their wing tips six inches apart at night. Since these planes never seemed to use their radios, it was subsequently added in local newspapers that radio silence was maintained during these tight nighttime maneuvers.

A pilot told me that this was all highly unlikely, that such formation flying would not be possible e even with much heavier aircraft. Pranksters and even secret aircraft may be part of the answer to the enigma, but they are not the whole answer.

An article appeared in the April 17, 1983, issue of
The New York Times
quoting a professional meteorologist who observed a silent object a thousand yards in diameter hovering a hundred feet above him. He is quoted by the
Times
as saying that he had the sensation of "being scanned and rejected."

I do not think that a professional meteorologist would mistake an object nearly a mile wide for a flight of airplanes, not at an altitude of a hundred feet.

Mr. Philip J. Klass, a noted debunker of unexplained UFO sightings, claimed that people were probably seeing 'an advertising airplane. Mr. Klass was at that time an editor of
Aviation
Week and Space Technology
, a publication noted for its uncanny ability to obtain scoops from the Department of Defense about secret aerospace projects. Mr. Klass also writes for a publication I have admired,
The Skeptical Inquirer
. In view of my own experiences, however.

I am beginning to suspect that, in the case of this particular chimera. skepticism has been taken farther than is reasonable or wise.

Neither the official story nor Mr. Klass's offering explains the hundreds of closeup sighting reports collected by local science teacher Phillip J. Imbrogno whom the
Times
described as "one person working hard to provide a rational explanation." I spoke to Mr.

Imbrogno, who said that he had collected since 1983 snore than two hundred reports from people trained in some way as observers, and that they had seen huge devices that had clear structure to them. He added that on one night when there were extensive and clear sightings of a device hovering above a local parkway, the winds were averaging 23 knots! What people saw on that night was not aircraft, heavy or light flying in close formation.

And nobody has explained who came and took me in the night and injected something into my brain.

When we went to New York City for a stay in January we still knew almost nothing about UFOs, and nothing at all about the sightings discussed above.

Life did not return to normal. Even though there was no further reason for me to delay writing I couldn't seem to get down to work. I felt' a little better, but I was so terribly uneasy.

My difficulty relating to my wife and son continued.

I finally finished
Science and the UFOs
. Toward the end of the book I was astonished to read a description of an experience similar to my own. When I read the author's version of the

"archetypal abduction experience," I was shocked. I was lying in bed at the time, and I just stared and stared at the words. I, also, had been seated in a little depression in the woods. And I had later remembered an animal.

My first reaction was to slam the book closed as if it contained a coiled snake.

They were talking about people who think they're taken aboard spaceships by aliens. And I seemed to be such a person. My blood went cold: Nobody must ever, ever know about this, not even Anne. I decided just to lock the business away in my mind.

A few mornings later at about ten, I was sitting at my desk when things just seemed to cave in on me. Wave after wave of sorrow passed over me. I looked at the window with hunger. I wanted to jump. I wanted to die. I just could not bear this memory, and I could not get rid of it. What on earth were those things? What had they done to me? Were they real, or was I the victim of some unknown mental state?

I remembered that a man named Budd Hopkins had been mentioned in the book as a prominent researcher in the field. The name had been familiar to me: Anne and I are interested in art and Hopkins is a well-known abstract artist, collected by the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

I found his name in the phone book. But how could I call him? What a stupid thing to have to admit. Little men. Flying saucers. How idiotic.

I recognized clearly, though, that if I had another moment of despair that intense, I was going to go out the window. No question. I owed it to the family who loved and depended on me to try to help myself.

I called Budd Hopkins. He answered the phone and listened to my story for a few minutes. I thought I would wither away with embarrassment telling it, but he soon interrupted me. Could I come over — like right now?

It turned out that his place in the city was a ten minute walk from mine.

Hopkins was a large, intense man with one of the kindest faces I have ever seen. I later discovered that he was bright and canny. but at the time he assumed a guileless appearance.

The moment our interview began, Hopkins explained that he was not a therapist but he could put me in touch with one if I wanted that. He then got the facts front me that I have recorded here.

As I sat there in that man's living room, listening to him tell me that I wasn't alone. that others had gone through very much the same thing, the tears rolled down my cheeks, and I went from wanting to hide it all to wanting to understand it.

It was during that first meeting that he asked me if anything else had happened in the past, anything unusual. My initial reaction was to say no. One of these ludicrous and horrible experiences was quite enough. But the question seemed to trigger something in me. After a moment's reflection, I blurted out, " I seem to remember a night the house burned down. But it didn't burn down."

All hell had broken loose on a night in early October. There had even been an explosion that woke up the whole household. Strange things had happened, but for some unknown reason we had simply put them out of mind. We'd hardly even discussed them. But that time they didn't happen only to me. We'd had houseguests. If anything had really happened, they would certainly remember. Here was a chance to put this to the test. If nobody remembered anything, I would be able to dismiss this embarrassing business of aliens.

I left Hopkins's house a happy man. He'd said that judging from his experience, the October events may have been caused by the same agency that was responsible for the disturbance of December 26.

Wonderful. I'd contact the witnesses. They would of course report that they remembered nothing. Then I would begin the painful but thankfully well understood process of accepting that I had been the victim of some unusual mental phenomenon. would enter therapy and learn to forget the mysterious visitors.

No other outcome seemed possible. Of course not. I had solved my problem.

October 4, 1985

As I walked down Sixth Avenue toward my end of Greenwich Village, what had happened on October 4 became clearer in my mind.

Why had I not thought of or discussed these events before? The answer is straightforward: I had tucked the whole episode into the catalog of open questions and forgotten it. In retrospect the only reason I can advance for having done this is that I did not want to face just how strange the events of that night had really been. But when I thought them over, they began to seem distinctly eerie, even frightening.

We often deal with fear by rejection — and to this case, as will soon be evident, there was more than enough reason to be terrified.

When I wrote the narrative that follows I had not yet been hypnotized and did not know what, if anything, lay unseen in my mind. I wrote it over a two day period after first seeing Hopkins and sometime before I met Dr. Donald Klein, who would become my hypnotist when we began to discover empty places to my memory.