Communion: A True Story (31 page)

The most interesting thing about all this material, the most important, haunting thing, is that in the past half-century it has slowly stripped itself of all the illusion, the armies in the sky, the fairies, the incubi, the glorious creatures of old, and come down to what it really is: a difficult experience, terribly enigmatic, the very existence of which implies that we very well may be something different from what we believe ourselves to be, on this earth for reasons that may not yet be known to us, the understanding of which will be an immense challenge.

Even the issue of where science stands in relation to this material has been with us forever. The first debunker was probably the Bishop Adelbard of Lyons, who in the time of Charlemagne saved from an enraged crowd three men and a woman who had been seen climbing down from an airship by half the citizens of the town. They claimed to have been taken for a period of days. The bishop saved them by announcing to the crowd that the whole thing was obviously impossible, and that people
had not seen
what they thought they had seen, nor had the poor victims been in any airship, because there were no airships. Thus the first debunker had the distinction of saving the lives of the first abductees.

People have not climbed down ropes from faire ships since the turn of the century.

Perhaps the parallel world has also had a technological revolution, or the mind of man has created new possibilities in its secret universe, or the dead have discovered wonders about which the living only dream. Maybe there really is another species living upon this earth, the fairies, the gnomes, the sylphs, vampires, goblins. who attach to reality along a different line than we do, but who know and love us as we do the wild things of the woods . . . who, perhaps, are trying to save us from ourselves, or whose lives are inextricably linked to our own. If we die, must the gods, the fairies, the elves then fall into some blue glen of unknowing? Will their secret world go cold without us, or will there only be less excitement?

If intelligence is normally centered in a hive or group context, a species such as mankind with individual independence of will might be a precious thing indeed, an almost inexhaustible reservoir of new thoughts and ways of acting.

Up to a point, there would be a tendency for the hive minds to isolate us, both to protect our freshness and to protect themselves from us. But then, as we matured and came to understand them more clearly, the potential to enter into a relationship with us would emerge.

For such a species, old and with its single enormous mind essentially alone, that potential might eventually overwhelm even the most rigid instinct to self-preservation, especially if we were to learn a way of approaching them that would not threaten them.

This thought leads inescapably to the issue of modern abductions and encounters. They seem qualitatively more "real" than those of the past, although the extended visitations experienced in France, Japan, and other places in earlier times also imply wide contact.

In
An Essay on Man
, Alexander Pope said the following:
So man, who here seems principal alone

Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.

Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal,

'Tis but a part me see, and not a whole.

The Hidden Choir

Budd Hopkins has developed great sensitivity to the problems people face after they encounter the visitors. He has dealt with more than a hundred cases, and knows the pattern of response. When he suggested that I meet the loose support group of others m the New York area, I was at first relieved. Then I became uneasy. "Don't worry," he said, "everybody half believes that they're dreaming all of this up. And that's the healthiest way. Nobody is going to show you an extraterrestrial belt buckle and blow your mind."

Still, I was not eager to meet the other "abductees." Just a few days before, I had interviewed a person who believed that he had been contacted by people who "gosh, just looked like the most beautiful gods and goddesses you ever saw," who explained to him that the world was soon going to end and that the "chosen" would be taken to live on a moon of Jupiter. I hope it isn't lo. This man described a familiar initial visitation, but had altered the terrifying and uncontrollable parts into a structure of belief congenial to him.

I expected to encounter people who hungered for belonging, for publicity, who tended to the imaginative and the grandiose, and who were a bit paranoid. I anticipated that their psychological deficiencies would be obvious to me.

This was all very far off the mark. They wanted nothing to do with publicity. They demanded anonymity. They were a group of average people. I cannot seriously maintain arguments that they are insane, or even particularly unbalanced. They were all anxious, that was obvious. Under the circumstances any other reaction would have been abnormal.

The group was for the most part rather hardheaded and not unusually imaginative. Among them were a business executive, a cosmetologist, a scientist, a hairdresser, a former museum curator, a musician, a dancer — in short a cross section of any big city. They clung firmly to the idea that they might have been dreaming, clung to it, I thought, as to a bit of driftwood in a storm.

I found that my experience had many similarities to those of the support group. We have almost all seen versions of the same creatures. Some of these are small and quick, wearing gray or blue uniforms. Others are taller, graceful, and thin, some with almond eyes and others with round eyes. I have also seen, in my childhood, a very commanding presence in white, which had light blue eyes and skin as white as a sheet. This came back to me in the form of disjointed memories apparently dislodged by all the thinking I had been doing about this subject.

Other relatively common observations are the seemingly ubiquitous dray table with the solid base, the smallness of the visitors, their large, black eyes devoid of iris or pupil, and the fact that there is either more than one type or more than one species appearing in the same context. Many of us also seemed to have relationships with particular beings.

Their skin tone seems to be gray, with other overtones. When they speak aloud, it is sometimes with a high, squeaking sound, other times in a deep bass. They can also create words inside the center of their Beads. One occasionally feels from them powerful emotions.

Other times they are as emotionless as stones. People report various smells, primarily pungent. Light, both as a means of anesthesia and as a medium of transport, is commonly described. "I rose up the shaft of light" and "The light hit me and I was totally paralyzed" are typical statements. Electromagnetic effects are also commonly reported, primarily malfunctioning cars, television sets, and home lights.

A number of us have also been in a small operating theater, but nobody seems to remember what transpires there. One woman was left to walk around in such a place by herself.

Interestingly, one sound that is reported other than the various voices is a very low-pitched noise. There is a small body of research suggesting that low-frequency sound may have biological effects, especially in the area of disorientation.

There is as well a striking symbolic consistency, which lies hidden within many of the accounts I have heard and read. It has almost no reference to modern Western culture, and so is not particularly likely to have been drawn from some general pool of background symbols.

But the symbol is very ancient, as it happens, and through much of human history was tremendously important. I have had a lifelong interest in it — really, an obsession. The others m the colloquy all noted its presence. It is mentioned in many of the tapes people have allowed me to hear, and it appears m the drawings they have made. It is an incidental, though.

Before now, nobody has seen it as a general symbol of the visitors.

This symbol is the triangle Buckminster Fuller. in his autobiography, called it the

"fundamental building block of the universe." It is the central symbol of growth in many ancient traditions. An understanding of it is the key to the riddle of the Sphinx and to the pyramid as the mark of eternal life. G. I. Gurdjieff relates it to the "three holy forces" of creation and it is the main sense of the Holy Trinity.

I had a pair of triangles etched on my arm in February 1986. "Dr. X," a physician in Arles, France, who prefers to remain anonymous, had a triangular rash appear around his navel after his experience.

Sifting through this colloquy will be the symbol of the triangle. While the colloquy was taking place neither I nor any of the participants was aware of the symbol's importance.

When we have contemplated sending a message into space, we have thought to send some core symbol — a prime number, perhaps, or the value of pi. The transmission of an isosceles triangle would not be an invalid choice.

On the night of April 13, 1986, eleven of us met at the home of Budd Hopkins. We were selected simply on the basis of the fact that we live in the New York area and could come.

During the colloquy I persistently asked that specific experiences be recounted, but did not have too much success. To many of these people, the details of what happened are an extremely private matter. And given the shrillness of the debunkers eager to accuse them of everything from charlatanism to insanity, and elements of the press so eager to scoff, I could not really blame them.

The purpose of the colloquy was not primarily to discuss the details of being taken, but rather the experience of coping with it, of trying to live a normal life without knowing for certain what is real, of facing the risk of personal and public ridicule, of finding one's way in a world that has suddenly become very strange indeed.

Needless to say, none of these people would allow his or her name to be used. The only real names in the colloquy are thus my own and that of Budd Hopkins.

This is our hidden choir:

Mary, cosmetologist, age 29

Jenny, dancer, age 22

Mark, museum curator and artist, age 55

Sally, business executive, age 36

Joan, beautician, age 23

Sam, scientist, age 39

Fred, musician, age 34

Pat, housewife, age 35

Amy, Pat's mother, age 56

Betty, executive, age 43

Whitley, writer, age 40

This is our colloquy.

Whitley: "Budd, I'd like it if you could begin. Even though you aren't one, you're still one of us."

Budd: "I'll tell you what I think would be the most interesting thing — rather than tell their experience, why not focus on the idea of how everybody feels about their experience?"

Whitley: "But say what happened to you so that there'll be some perspective in people's minds when they read it."

Budd: "The most valuable thing, really, is for everybody to say how you handle this, how you fit it into the rest of your life if you do, and how seriously you take it, and how important it seems to be to you and so forth. That's very crucial."

Joan: "Sometimes I have a problem feeling the importance of what's going on now, as far as things that take place in the world and jobwise, and the whole attraction of life itself, because I start thinking that this is so mediocre compared to what's out there. What we're doing — people put so much attention and so much pressure on whatever they're doing in their lives, sometimes it gets to seem like we're such jerks, and I say to myself, 'it doesn't mean anything.' There's something that's gonna happen soon, and this doesn't mean anything, what we're doing. And they're trying to tell us something, but nobody's listening."

Whitley: "What happened to you?"

Joan: "I'll tell you one thing. I was shown a picture of another city they are building. What we're doing now to our planet is killing it little by little, and it's going to come to a point where there's not going to be anything left. I think that they're getting ready to start another world. And there will be people who are a part of that. And it scares me, because I have trouble dealing with what's going on in my life now because I start thinking,
This isn't really
what's happening
. It is ending, and they're telling us that, an they've implied that to me. What we are doing is killing ourselves. And that's scary."

Whitley: "Any other thoughts?"

Jenny: "I think what she's saying in terms of the mediocrity of what we're going through is only in the eyes of people around us, but that the important thing is right here, and some of us really understand what is going on, and maybe they are not 'them,' but they are us and we are them, so if you call them 'them,' and say, 'They are looking at us, they are doing this to us,' it's not right. They are us and we are them, and so. . ."

Whitley: "What happened to you?"

Jenny: "I'm not really sure yet because I've only had one hypnosis, but I remembered something from when I was five years old, a very scary experience, and I've always blocked it. From the time I was five I was afraid. And I saw things in my house, I saw people in my house, and I would wake up screaming."

Whitley: "You mean, not human people?"

Jenny: "I don't know, they were shadows. Small things. I saw once this green thing dripping down the wall. It looked like a very bright green triangular light. And I went screaming into my mother's bedroom, and she said, 'Just go to sleep. Obviously a dream.' And so those are the kinds of things I saw from the time I was about five, and I never connected it with anything, until about six months ago my sister said something to me about it, an experience that she had that she remembered me being in, and I remembered it but I'd thought it was a dream."

Whitley: "In February I had a triangular piece taken out of my skin on my arm."

Mary: "The best way for me to live with this is just not to believe it. I mean, there's a part of me that doesn't. The part of me that lives every day doesn't."

Whitley: "How much of this experience have you had?"

Mary: "A lot, since I was about five."

Whitley: "How much, would you say? How many times?"