Communion: A True Story (8 page)

"Yeah, but when it came close to me I could see its face "

"You said it had a bald head."

"Yeah? Did I?"

"Yes."

"Well, you see, I can sort of see that it had a bald, rather largish head for someone that size. And that its eyes are slanted, more than an Oriental's eyes And they're
quite
— There's a piercing glare, almost.

There's a real fierce look to the whole face. I'm not sure, but at some point I almost thought it looks like a bug. But not-you know, more like a person than a bug . . . but there were buglike qualities to it. Am I getting myself dear at all?"

"Oh, yes. Have you ever seen an image like that before?"

"I don't know. The only thing I ever remember reading about this was in
Look
magazine years and years ago. 'The Incident' . . . the John Fuller article about people who were picked up. That's all I've read about it. And whether or not they had pictures drawn I just don't know."

"Are you sure you haven't seen an image like that before. What about the book you have?"

"No, it has no pictures like that. I don't think so."

Budd Hopkins: "What about the Hynek book? I think there's a drawing in that." (He referred to a famous book on UFOs by Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
The UFO Experience
, which he thought I might have read.)

"I haven't read it. But you know, in our culture, there's so much media around .... It's possible, but I don't think so, because this is so damn real. It just seems impossible that it could be an image I picked up from somewhere —"

"It could still be real, and be an image that you —"

"Maybe the drawings were right. That's possible too."

"That's possible. It's also possible that it's something quite inexplicable that you're trying to hang something on, to give it some shape or form."

"Yeah, that's possible too."

"What I'd like to do is go back to that scene again, and see if we can't get some clarification about these other images."

"OK."

"I understand that this is a wearing business, and if you want to check out at this point —"

"No, I don't want to check out at any point. I'm determined to go through with this. And it seems now that there should be more, because it's obvious that this happened to me. And I would be highly irresponsible to myself not to continue."

"The pacing of it could be too fast. I don't want you to feel you have to be a hero in this thing."

"It's not. a question of being a hero. It's much more a question of not wanting to walk out before the end of the movie." (Hypnosis was undertaken. using the same method as before.

ending with a count up to ten. In about a minute I was rehypnotized.)

"Now I want you to go back to the point where you are having these images. And it's going to be like slow motion now. Everything's going to be going very slow, very slow, very slow. And very dear. Very clear. Tell me what you see."

"The world turns into a whole red ball of fire. It just seems to burst into flames like a little ball of gasoline out in the middle of the sky. And all these . . . smoke . . . things start shooting off it . . . like great horns made of smoke. And we're all there, down there in the red fire, in the middle of it. Then I see that thing on my head and it's gone. Picked it up off my head.

Now I'm scared of him again. Now I see . . a park.... My little boy is sitting there on the grass

. . . he's all wobbly, and he's like he can't move his arms right. He's all wobbly and his eyes look funny." (They appeared entirely black, without any whites at all.) "I have to go over and pick him up and help him. If I don't help him, he's gonna die. [Long pause.]"

(At this point there followed upsetting images of my father's death, images that did not reflect what really happened, but rather my fears about what might have happened.)

"And he puts that thing down on my head again. 'I miss you, Daddy. Oh, God, Daddy, why did you die? [Gasps.] Daddy, why . . . why — I just never got to know you, Dad.' Oh.

God, my poor dad, died a hard death. Oh, she couldn't help him. It's my dad dying and my mother's sitting there staring at him like he was a little animal. Why couldn't she at least give him a good-bye kiss or something? I never knew it was like that." (I saw a clear image of my father lying on the couch in our old den, his head thrown back, gasping and choking. My mother was beside him in a chair, watching, too afraid to move. This was totally different from the scene she described, which was what would have been expected from the gentle and loving relationship that had emerged as his life came to its close. The image, though, was deeply shocking to me, and so real that I felt as if I could step into the scene. I then emerged spontaneously from hypnosis once again. It is very unusual to do this, especially from a deep trance like the one Dr. Klein had induced. It was an indication of the extreme severity of the emotions I was reliving.)

"Did that make sense?"

"Did it make sense to you?"

"Yes, it damn well did. It's a picture of my dad, lying on a couch going like that —gasping — jerking . . . and my mother's sitting in a chair, watching. And he dies."

"Did it actually happen?" '

"I don't know. It's not the story she told. Maybe it's something I fear might have happened."

"Was your mother uncaring about your father?"

"No. They had their ups and downs in their marriage, but they were married for nearly fifty years, and I didn't think she was uncaring about him at the end."

Budd Hopkins: "So you feel these thoughts were maybe your thoughts?"

"They were my thoughts. They were definitely my thoughts. I mean, it sure as hell wasn't
his
father. He's pulling this out of my head is what — he's pulling it out of my mind. He's pulling things like my fear — perhaps there's a suspicion. First of all, when I saw that picture I felt an agony, because I never felt I got close to my father. My dad was distant. He was a loving father, but he always held something back. you know. He was from a very reticent generation. Rural Texans were very inward people. I guess I feel a little bit of guilt about that, or something. You know, I don't know what to make of all this. Do you suppose? I just don't know what to make of it."

"I don't really know what to make of it either, but it certainly sounds as if —"'

"It's just —"

"You were opened —"

"It's so unexpected. This is the last thing I would have thought would have come out of me. And what's weird about it is, why would someone come from a flying saucer and evoke that kind of impression in me? What possible reason would they have?"

Budd Hopkins: "Well, that's not to find out now. That's speculation down the road."

"Like they were trying to find out how I ticked. It really is like that. Unless it's simply that I've come to a time in my life where there's some very difficult and terrifying material that I've got to face and this is how I'm facing it, and there was no little man there. But you know, I say that and I'm telling you right now that it's not true. It's not true. It's incredible, but it's not true. The man was there. He was standing beside my bed as real as life."

"You said, originally, about the December twenty-sixth episode, that it was as if they said to you, when you disappeared, when your ego dissolved, if they had asked you what is your deepest secret, you would have told them right away."

"Right away. Yes."

"So you had an inkling about something. That your deepest secrets were coming out."

"Well, obviously I knew, because the memories were intact and they just came out of my head. Boy, though, if you'd asked me consciously I would have told you I had absolutely no idea what happened during that hour. If it was an hour. I thought I fell asleep after I saw the first glow."

"And the explosion seemed to come right after?"

"He took a little thing like a stick — a needle — and when he moved it even slightly in the air I could see it spark at the end, and he went like that [makes striking motion] and it went
bang
, and spread a tingling all over my face."

Budd Hopkins: "When I asked Annie Gottlieb what she would have to do to make the sound — I said, 'Suppose you were given resources to make the sound. She said, 'If you had a big, heavy door and you pushed it back against the wall,
bang
, like that —'"

"It was a big noise."

Budd Hopkins: "And your Anne said it was like something hitting something. Almost like an explosion."

"Yeah. Well for me it was more like a — I can't say it was like a balloon popping, because that's too innocuous a sound. It had a heavier quality to it than that, like some big energy had been released."

Budd Hopkins: "Annie Gottlieb said it had a slapping sound —"

"Not that crisp. More of a thud. It was a big noise. There was a slap, but there was a deeper resonance to it."

Budd Hopkins: "That's what Annie said. We've got four different people to come up with a description of the sound."

"Thunder?"

"It wasn't like thunder, no. Not like thunder."

"It had a clap in it?"

"Well, no, because it didn't last after it. It would be like a clap that ended immediately. It had a deep undertone to it. But mostly riot.. Actually, a clap would be the best — like a deep clap of thunder that had no echo. Just a single noise. But it had a deep undertone to it. It had a very electrical quality to it. If you could make a tiny bolt of lightning in someone's face, you would create thunder right in their face. That's what was done."

"I think we're about finished."

"Yeah, I don't want to go into the twenty-sixth now!"

"We might not be finished with the fourth."

"Now that the fear is over. The turmoil. I feel I don't have a psychiatric disorder. I feel you're right about that. You know what I've got to do? I've got to figure out how I feel about this, because I don't think I'm intellectually going to be able to deny their existence much longer. And I have to understand how to feel about these beings who would come into my house and do something so strange and yet somehow or another so productive."

"How productive?"

"Well, in two ways. One is, they learned a lot about me, if they are interested in me, for whatever reason. This afternoon I just learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot. Things I didn't have any idea worried me. About my dad and mother."

"The other fears —'

"Well, fear of war, obviously . . . and of the death of my son. There is no such thing as a good father who doesn't worry about harm coming to his kid. But the other material is a great surprise. And that's as vivid as it can be. I loved my mom and dad so much. I love my mom, still, and I want to believe that at the end it was as gentle and loving a moment as Momma has always said."

"That isn't an image of what really happened?"

"No. I have no reason to believe that. Maybe something much more subtle is going on here. Maybe that image was created to see how I react to something that would be ultimately terrifying to me. Or maybe they were just trying to find out what kind of person I am."

The session then ended with a decision to continue later in the week. The next night (Sunday. March 2) I called my mother in San Antonio, as I MY to do every week or two. I told her nothing about this matter. And how could I? I had not thought of a way to explain what was happening to us to my seventy-year-old mother on the telephone.

We talked for a time about a friend who was in the hospital. Then, without warning, she suddenly described my father's death to me. I did not ask her to, nor was I even hoping that she would. In the past ten years I have heard this description only once before, the day after he died. She recounted how she had been sitting near him while he lay on the couch. He had spent a restless afternoon. The doctor believed that his heart would soon fail, and had told my mother this just a few days before. Still, they had been together for so long she could not imagine him dying.

In the last years of their marriage they had become extremely close, often sitting hand in hand together, in the wordless communion that sometimes blesses very old relationships. I can hardly imagine a more gentle or loving end to their long time together than what happened at the last.

Mother told me again how she had suddenly heard Dad call her name, and had gone to him and said, "Karl? Karl, wake up." He was lying still and silent .... It was as easy as that.

How was it that she would suddenly retell this story again, after all these years, at the very moment I needed to hear it? The combination of the memory of that terrifying night and this story, told in my mother's calm, sure voice, led me into the most enriching of insights about my buried fears and quilts. I blamed myself for the lack of intimacy in my relationship with my father. He reached out more than he withdrew. Even though I loved him, I moved away. I grew up and left him to age and die without the comfort of his oldest son.

Also, though, I had to make my own life. Beyond its moral sense, the word
conscience
has always meant to me an active knowledge of one's inner truth, an acceptance of all the sacrifice on the part of others that has been required for one's own development. The prime sacrifice is that of the parents. One can preserve the guilt one feels for it — as I now see that I had done — or one can temper it with acceptance and use it as a building block in the edifice of maturity. In a moment that night, beneath the feather-pounding of the silver wand, I was given a potential that could greatly enrich my life.

If this was a real visitor, giving me a real blessing from some other reality, then why was it hidden in amnesia where I could not gain access to it? Maybe my experiences were only a side effect of some sort of study. Or maybe it was known even then that this rich treasure would eventually be open to me, because the whole experience had been designed in detail by insightful minds engaged in a slow process of acclimatizing humanity to their presence.

Maybe, though, there was another truth here. Perhaps the hypnosis revealed not just the possible presence of visitors but the action of a hidden and tremendously therapeutic potential which, if correctly marshaled, could be of great value.