Communion: A True Story (30 page)

One Sunday in the borough of Cloera in Ireland the parishioners of the Church of St.

Kinarius heard a noise on the roof. They went outside and saw an anchor embedded in the eaves. The anchor line rose up into the sky where there floated a ship on the air. A man leaped overboard and "swam" down to the anchor. After an altercation with the parishioners, he cut the rope and managed to return to the ship, which sailed away. The anchor remained in the church, but has since been lost, since this incident took place not in 1897, but around A.D.

1211.

What do these stories mean?

When people in the present time find themselves face to face with the visitors, they often think that they are among the first to see them. They do not remember what happened to St.

Anthony of Alexandria, the founder of the Monastic movement, in A.D. 300. He was walking through an isolated canyon when he came upon a small figure, "a manikin with hooded snout, horned forehead and extremities like goat's feet." There was a brief exchange of words between this small creature and the saint, who ended the conversation by pounding his cane on the ground and announcing, "Woe to thee Alexandria, who instead of God worshippest monsters! Woe to thee, harlot city, into which have flowed together the demons of the whole world!" Needless to say, the creature fled.

During the reign of Pepin in the early Middle Ages, the French were bothered by apparitions that were seen marching through the sky, camped out in tents on the reaches of heaven, and sometimes in "wonderfully constructed aerial ships" that flew past in veritable squadrons. People were annoyed at the presence of all this unquenchable grandeur and happiness, and both Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Debonair, imposed penalties on the "Tyrants of the Air." As counterpropaganda, the sylphs kidnapped people and took them to their airy abode, showing them their world. But when the people were sent home, they were all burned at the stake without a second's hesitation. Presumably they had just enough time to scream out their stories before being engulfed in the flames.

It is not surprising to me that Marius Dewilde, a resident of Quaroble, a French village near Belgium, was so secretive after he encountered two dark alien figures standing near some railroad tracks in the middle of the night in September 1954. Mr. Dewilde, according to Jacques Vallee in his book
Passport to Magonia
(Chicago: Refinery, 1969), gave the French Air Police some calcinated rock from the site of the event, and it was handed over to an agency so secret that its name could not be mentioned by the Ministry of Defense.

Perhaps the keepers of these secrets across the world ought to reflect on the ageless nature of this experience. I wonder if St. Anthony's manikin and the medieval French Air Tyrants should join the calcinated rock in deep classification.

Perhaps this would be superfluous, as one "abductee" gave the calcinated earth from her backyard to Budd Hopkins, who has no access to classification procedures. Laboratory analysis of the dirt indicated that it had been subjected to intense heat. Dirt from the same garden had to be burned for eight hours at 800 degrees to achieve a similar effect, and there was no site evidence at all of a lightning strike or even of storm activity on the night the calcination occurred.

As the ages roll along, it could be that what changes is not our visitors but our way of installing them in the culture. Maybe they did not come here in 1946, 1897, 1235, or even A.D. 300. I have reported that the being I have become familiar with looks like Ishtar. Maybe she is: She said she was old.

My point is that there may be far more to this than science or government or even religion can separately address. It would seem that our civilization is not paying attention to what mad be the central archetypal and mythological experience of the ale. If so, then this is the first time that man has simply refused to respond to the ghosts and the gods. Is that why they have become so physical, so real, dragging people out of bed like rapists in the night — because they must have our notice in order to somehow be confirmed in their own truth?

This may be primarily a matter of visions and chimeras battering at the door of physical reality. They are not simply flickering effects of the mind. Something is out there, and it wants in.

There are many instances of the surprising and subtle relationship between the visitor phenomenon and the hidden life of the mind. Understand, I am not presenting a hypothesis that denies that the visitors may be real beings from another planet and/or reality. All I am suggesting is that we do no know what they are, only that they are — and our relationship with them is very strange indeed.

During the great northeastern power blackout of 1965, actor Stuart. Whitman saw an object and heard a strange whistling sound outside his twelfth-story window. He then heard a message to the effect that the disaster was "a warning to the world."

The first instance of an unidentified flying object causing a blackout was seen in a play,
Twilight Bar
, written by Arthur Koestler in 1933. In the play an enormous meteor flies over a town with a whistling sound and all the lights go out. In the play, the meteor is "a warning to the world." But this does not disprove the reality of the phenomenon: On the contrary, it suggests that something very real may have communicated an actual warning to Stuart Whitman — something that was simultaneously true to his inner life and to the world around us all.

A 1950 novel,
The Flying Saucer
by Bernard Newman, probably recorded the first instance of a flying disk having an effect on a car ignition. Only after that date did reports of flying disks killing car engines become common. But I cannot assert that the disks don't
really
kill car engines, and very possibly because of something about the mysterious drives that power the ships.

In December 1985 a man had trouble with his car's electrical system after he had been taken by visitors. The car lost all electrical power and could not be restarted even by jumping the battery. It was towed to a repair shop where nothing was found to be wrong The battery recharged to normal by itself during the night. I know that this story is true because the man it happened to was me, and the problem manifested itself the morning after my December 26

experience.

Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination and reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are —different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic's freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.

There are many stories of visitors giving people secret knowledge. Much of it has proved to be worthless or worse, as was the information I got about electromagnetic motors.

One fascinating case of transmission of knowledge dates from the year 1491, when the Milanese mathematician Jerome Cardan found himself involved in a visitor encounter. When he asked his visitors about the cause of the universe, "The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish. . . "

This is not a fifteenth-century idea. Upon contemplation, it emerges to a degree as a concept from Zen. More than that, though, it is a quantum-physical idea, suggesting that it is the observer who injects reality into the phenomenon observed.

Far from being a fifteenth-century idea, it is an eleventh-century Arabic idea. Did it get to Dr. Cardan via the sylphs, or was it transmitted by more conventional means? There is no other record of it in European scientific and religious literature of the period. If Dr. Cardan obtained the idea in a conventional manner, then what would have been his motive for risking his life to the Inquisition by admitting communion with the sylphs, who were viewed as demons? He was for his period an exceptionally rigorous thinker. He was sane and honest. A modern equivalent of what he did would be for a renowned physicist to announce that he had obtained important information in a UFO experience, but could offer no proof that the experience had happened. Perhaps Dr. Cardan was simply too honest to hide the truth.

In recent years many of the taken have reported having sexual experiences with the visitors. Currently among them this is a source of great disquiet, as will be observed from comments in the colloquy of the taken that follows this section.

It is terrifying, of course. But reflect also that mankind has had a sexual relationship with the fairies, the sylphs, the incubi, the succubi, and the denizens of the night from the very beginning of time. Nowadays men find themselves on examining tables in flying saucers with vacuum devices attached to their privates, while women must endure the very real agony of having their pregnancies disappear, a torment that I, as a man, doubt I can really imagine.

One of the women I know who has experienced this horror seems to me now like an anguished hawk, humiliated by her torment. I must add that no trivial explanation for what happened to her is viable: Her own gynecologist was deeply troubled and confused by the whole affair. To find some glib explanation for it is an insult not only to his skill and her veracity but also to her suffering, and to the worth of human suffering.

The Roman historian Suetonius maintained that Caesar Augustus was the product of relations between his mother and an incubus. Plato was also believed to be the issue of some sort of peculiar coupling, as was Merlin the magician, born of an incubus and one of the daughters of Charlemagne.

In a treatise called
On Little Demons, Incubi and Succubi
, written by Father Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari de Ameno in the latter part of the seventeenth century, some phenomenal affairs are recounted. One woman found herself awakened by a "fine voice, a high-pitched whistling sound." (I note in passing that when I first read this my blood went cold to remember that the thing that haunted me in Austin in 1967 made such a high-pitched sound.

And in the
Malleus Maleficarum
, the notorious treatise against witches, demons are said to speak in reedy voices.)

The shadowy being with the high voice then announced its love for the lady. She was kissed so softly that it felt like cotton touching her cheeks. This went on night after night. The lady tried an exorcist, but to no avail. Eventually the incubus appeared as a boy with golden curls. Still, she retained her honor. He began to take her things, to strike her little poking blows, and to bother her in other ways. One night he built around her bed a wall of stones so high that she and her husband had to use a ladder to get out. I will let the good father recount the climactic assault of the lovelorn visitor:

"On the day of St. Stephen, the lady's husband had invited several military friends to dine with him. To honor his guests he had prepared a respectable dinner. While they were washing their hands according to the custom-hop!-suddenly the table vanished, along with the dishes, the cauldrons, the dates, and all the earthenware in the kitchen, the hugs, the bottles, the glasses, too. You can imagine the surprise, the amazement of the guests."

Indeed.

The teasing continued. In her efforts to rid herself of the incubus, the lady had taken to wearing a monk's robes. She was going to mass in the midst of a large crowd when all her clothes were suddenly whipped off her body and she was left naked in the middle of the throng. What could she do? She hurried home. Her torments continued, the good father relates with relish, "for many years."

Our present relation to the incubi and succubi may very well center on real flesh-and-blood visitors who first appeared here recently. But if so, then it also has a most profound and unexpected human dimension, for they are entering our consciousness where our gods and goblins live.

A famous case of sexual involvement with visitors took place in Brazil in 1957. The victim, Antonio Villas-Boas, had experienced a number of instances of strange lights appearing in his fields on the days prior to his experience. He was running his tractor one night when it died. Mr. Villas-Boas then saw that an object had landed in front of him. He was stripped, washed with a sponge, arid taken inside the device. He was left lying on a table, naked. Sometime later he was astounded to see a naked woman, seemingly human, enter the room. Her hair was blond, parted in the center. Her face was extremely wide, her eyes blue and slanted. The face ended in a pointed chin. Her lips were very thin, nearly invisible . She was shorter than he was. Actually, she sounds very much like a cross between the individual I saw so clearly as the eidetic image and a human being . . . unless she was simply a visitor wearing what they thought would be a disguise. She made love to him, pointed to her belly and then to the sky, and left him. Later he was taken into a room with some males and attempted to steal a clock. As in dozens and dozens of tales in the fairy lore, he failed to get his artifact.

Why? Either because the visitors are good at keeping artifacts from us, or because they exist somewhere between reality and dream, and our inner selves know that we can never take into our hands things from the factory of the mind.

On December 29, 1980, a terrible event of some unknown kind took place near Huffman, Texas. (Oddly enough, this occurred on the same day and at about the same hour that a spectacular and controversial sighting was taking pace halfway across the world in Rendlesam Forest, England.) A group of people observed a diamond-shaped object floating in the sky, glowing with a fierce light. The object was surrounded by helicopters. Some of these people were exposed to heat and apparently radiation. They brought suit in federal court, assuming that they had been the victims of a secret aircraft gone wrong. There was a lot of amused scoffing, of course, and the case drags on to this day. Meanwhile, these poor people have had their health shattered — a double mastectomy has been performed on one victim — and the government stonewalls.