Communion: A True Story (34 page)

Mark: "I haven't read Budd's book [
Missing Time
]. I got a hundred pages in and it began to seem too familiar. I didn't want to read the rest of the book because I didn't want to be influenced by anything I read that wouldn't be of my experience, during the whole hypnosis thing. I've got to keep this as pure as I can."

Budd: "When Mark's lady was present when he described this place he was when he was ten, which turned out under hypnosis not to be a place but a thing, more or less, she said with great relief, 'I've spent seven years with him looking for that place. He's of me believing it was a real place, a tunnel. Than God I don't have to look for it anymore. The mystery's solved.' You were so convinced that it was a tunnel." (Note: Both of Mark's experiences involved extreme disorientation as to place. This is quite common, but appears to have confused him more profoundly than most.)

Mark: "About a year ago I asked my mother if she remembered that incident, and what did I tell her. She remembered it, and repeated what I had told her. When I asked her where it had happened, she said it had happened at the end of the street. She went down and was relieved I wasn't killed. There's a slope. It's a hill. And there's a tunnel there wide enough for four lanes of traffic. But when it happened it was like I was far, far away from home, on the other side of town or something."

(I then asked the group what their jobs were. There was revealed a profile of people on the run, constantly making changes, moving, leaving, escaping. One of them, jenny, had just fulfilled her lifelong dream to move to New York and "live in a big city full of lights and lots of people." She has had this aspiration since she was nine.

I grew up with the same dream, to live in a little apartment m an enormous building in New York with a view of a brick wall.

I did that, though, and it didn't help at all. I now live in an apartment with huge windows and spend a lot of time m a very isolate country cabin.

For most of my life I was running from this, whatever it is. I am unwilling to run anymore.)

Whitley: "We all have trouble saying what we did."

Joan: "Why do you think that is?"

Whitley: "I think we all have something called performance anxiety. That's one of the reasons we all have difficulty pinning ourselves down to do something. I've been extensively psychologically tested twice, and in both cases it came out that there was this deep anxiety in the performance area. I think the reason is that a lot of us have been asked to do some very hard things, that were very frightening, and also I have a feeling that we've been questioned very, very hard. And we can't remember that either."

Jenny: "Do you have trouble taking tests?"

(General agreement.)

Whitley: "That's performance anxiety."

Jenny: "My profession involves auditioning. And every time I go to an audition, I think I'm gonna die."

Sam: "I have tremendous anxiety. Things that I'm very sure of, in the sciences, I don't have a difficult problem. When you start getting out of those areas, I get into real problems."

Whitley: "Fear?"

Sam: "I don't know what it is. Some kind of anxiety there. I really can't pinpoint it."

Sally: "The simplest test — a typing test — I freak out."

Sam: "Being examined. . ."

Budd: "You see, if you imagine that there's a situation of having seen two worlds, of living in this world and then being dumped into this other world at intervals-that has to make you wonder where you belong. And if, in that other world, you are deprived of your ability to act on your own — you can't even move, and you have no choice, nobody asks you anything

— you doubt your own powers. In a certain sense you are physically impotent, unable to do anything."

Sam: "And when we're actually being tested, the anxiety is enhanced."

Budd: "One very strange thing that Pat remembered — the thing of the needle going in under the eye — another case of the needle doing up the nose. The neurosurgeon said that is going into the region of the optic nerve, and he said, 'Wouldn't it be wild if you could see through people's eyes?"'

Whitley: "What if I say love? Longing? Does anyone feel anything like that toward them?"

(There was general agreement, except for Sally, who demurred m this way:) Sally: "You know, the funny thing is, before hypnosis I felt an attachment to them, a love.

And after hypnosis I was angry. So I can't really say that I feel love."

Pat: "I feel loyalty."

Sally: "I feel like I want to strangle them."

Sam: "I have a lot of mixed emotions. Why are they doing this? That aggravates me. I go back and forth because I don't know. So it's mixed feelings. I feel that they demand loyalty."

Whitley: "I think we're sisters and brothers not from the fact that we went through something together but from the fact that we noticed."

Sally: "What I really feel hurt about is that I wasn't given more respect. If I ever meet them again, I want to be in control. I want to be able to speak my mind without them telling me what to do. I want to ask them questions. I want some respect for my being And if they don't do that, then I don't want them back, I really don't. I don't want them anywhere near me, if I don't get that response."

Amy: "You want them to share with your intelligence what they're doing, rather than forcing you to be a part of it."

Sally: "Yeah. I don't even want to know what they're doing. I may be curious, but the point is, if they can't trust me, why should I even care about what they're doing? I just don't want to know. The human race has to have some sort of respect from these creatures, and we're not getting that. I don't feel it, and I'm certain — they take children in the middle of the night, they don't care about the anxiety of the parents — they don't understand so many things, and they don't make an effort to understand. Until we can get across to them that we matter and deserve respect, I don't think we should give them respect."

(More than one participant was aware that the visitors were involved with their children.

One man, who saw his child taken in the middle of the night while he was himself entirely conscious, disagreed categorically with Sally. He maintained that-they had shown him respect by allowing him to know what was happening to the child, and not only that, that the child was unharmed in the morning, and seemed filled with anew light of the mind. That day, the child made the following comments: "Reality is God's dream," and "The unconscious is like the universe beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there." He also said, "Dad, I had a dream last night. It was like a dream but it wasn't a dream. I was m the woods and a huge eye was looking down at me.")

Sally: "I'd think you'd feel horrible about it."

(The man added that he did feel horrible about it, but at the same time felt that they took the child because they had to or needed to very badly, and they had been helpful and supportive of him while the child was gone. "Then I woke up in the morning and my child was fine. More than fine. That's the reality.")

Sam: "Do you think they possibly match emotions? If you are hostile, they will be hostile? If you are not forceful in any way, they will be nicer? If you comply, they will, too?"

Whitley: "They won't comply, I don't think. They can be nicer, I've seen that."

Sam: "They're never really hostile with children."

Whitley: "My son remembers them saying in the middle of his head, 'We won't hurt you, we won't hurt you."'

Sam: "They have less to fear from children. As an adult you've learned hatred, fear, violence. They fear an adult."

Whitley: "I've sensed fear."

Sally: "Me too."

Budd: "It's very common that people say that they've felt they're afraid of us."

(The conversation then turned to the issue of sexual experience, disappearing pregnancies, and the sexual intrusions experienced by some of the men, involving extraction of semen with a probe, or having it drawn out with a sort of vacuum device.) Sally: "There was somebody I met — the South American guy — he mentioned a number of dreams he'd had." (An abductee from Brazil.) "In some of the dreams he saw people. He was convinced that the people were half them and half human. They had large heads, but the features were more human And they were children. A little boy, a little girl. I remember thinking, Well,
this was a dream
. But he had a number of dreams."

Mary: "I still keep it in my mind that it might have been something psychological with this mysterious pregnancy that I had. I did not have a false pregnancy. I was tested positive, blood test, pelvic, my periods had stopped. I was pregnant. But I keep in my mind that maybe this was some kind of psychological reaction to a miscarriage. That keeps me from going crazy, wanting my child."

Budd: "This is very hard."

Mary: "The craziest thing is that I'm not alone."

I have never before encountered such a group of seemingly ordinary people under so much pressure. They were deeply troubled by the question of what their experiences really mean.

Those who have had the experience must learn to ride a sort of psychological razor, to accept and reject at the same time. True agnosticism is a very active mental state, a sort of eager unknowing. In the direction of skepticism, for the taken, lies one form of madness; in that of belief another. One must balance between the two. For scientists there is the additional and very real danger of getting sucked into the study of a false unknown. In the case of a phenomenon as complex and yet as transient as this one, that danger is greatly intensified.

But a large body of observational information now exists about the flying disks, some of it generated by skilled professional observers. And there are thousands of pages of transcript from those who may have been taken. What's more, most of them seem to have endured intrusions into their brains of one sort or another. It would seem that the existing body of data and the large number of individuals available for study might yield some useful conclusions, as long as the subject is not approached with the sort of negative hypothesis that has distorted the efforts of the debunkers.

This need for balance is fundamental to more than the process of reconciling oneself with the apparent meaning of visitation. It is also fundamental to understanding the experience.

For the experience does have its symbolic center in the number three and the triangular shape.

The visitors often appear in threes. They project triangular lights. They have been reported to wear various types of triangular devices and emblems. People see three pyramids or three triangles in connection with them. A huge triangular-shaped object is sometimes sighted. I had triangles etched on my arm. Dr. X and his son developed triangular rashes.

I spent fifteen years involved with the Gurdjieff Foundation, primarily because so much of the thought of G. I. Gurdjieff and his disciple P. D Ouspensky involved the triad as a primary expression of the essential structure of life, and I have always been fascinated with the significance of this figure.

The triangle was the symbol of the ancient Triune goddess, and is, of course, viewed by Christianity as the central form of the Godhead, the Trinity.

The thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said of the Holy Trinity: "God laughed, and begat the Son. Together they laughed, and begat the Holy Spirit. And from the laughter of the three the universe was born."

A current theory suggests that gravity may consist of two components counterbalancing one another, the balance of which causes the third force — which is what we call gravity —to emerge.

In order to approach an initial understanding of the visitor experience, if that is possible, it might be productive to explore the inner meaning of the triangular shape.

Triad

I began this contemplation at noon at the cabin. It was a day in early spring. I was alone. I began to think of triangles, of triads, of the struggle I have had to find a finer balance within myself.

There are many ancient traditions that view man as a being with three parts: body, mind, and heart. It seems possible that the visitors view themselves as an entire species with three parts, judging from the three distinct basic forms that have been seen. (There are variants of these forms, and also more humanlike beings, but given the degree of perceptual error that must be present here, and the fact that the three basic shapes may have many permutations, there is no way to argue with any certainty that more or less than three forms actually exist.) It is not unreasonable to consider that a species with three basic forms would choose the triangle as its most basic symbol of self, as it would express both the nature of the species and a fundamental law of structure.

To begin an exploration of this law, I would like to return to Dr. X and his seemingly enigmatic experience. This man, who was at the time of his observation a prominent physician, experienced something very peculiar. But what happened to him is not without coherence. He was awakened in the night and looked out a window of his house, which had a magnificent view of the Loire Valley and the town of Arles in France. Hanging over the valley were two glowing disk-shaped objects. Electrical discharges were taking place between them. They moved closer to Dr. X, and he observed them to merge together into a single object. Later, he discovered a triangular rash around his navel and around the navel of his son. The rashes persisted for years and, despite extensive study, remained unexplained.

This case was reported and researched by Mr. Aime Michel, a Frenchman at the time eminent in the field of UFO research. The combination of the excellent witness, the strange physical trace, and the seemingly enigmatic nature of the observation caused Mr. Michel to decide that the UFO mystery as a whole was unsolvable.

The fundamental idea of the triad as a creative energy is that two opposite forces coming into balance create a third force. The rather theatrical event that Dr. X perceived was, intentionally or not, an illustration of this principle. Could it have been a communication, even a request for some sort of response?