Communion: A True Story (32 page)

Mary: "Seven. Eight, nine, ten."

Whitley: "Has anything happened to anybody else you know?"

Mary: "My whole family. Neighbors, quite a few friends. From before I ever knew them.

We've all just come together. Several generations."

Budd: "You said that there was one figure, one man —"

Mary: "There's always been one central figure."

Budd: "And he was nice?"

Joan: "Was he tall?"

Mary: "No, they were all little guys. He was my protector. Everybody else who was around was always really very — they were doing a job they needed to do, and that was it.

There was no — they weren't angry or mad or happy about it. They were just doing what they had to do. But this one guy, in all instances, this one guy — when I got scared he calmed me down, when I felt bad he made me feel better." (Note: Others have had a very similar experience of a "friend" or a "protector." The perceived sex of the guide is not consistently opposite, but very often is.)

Whitley: "What does he look like?"

Mary: "He looked like all the rest, really."

Whitley: "Which is?"

Mary: "The same small people, you know, four and a half or five feet tall. With the gray skin and the large heads and the big, fluidy, black eyes that went on forever."

Whitley: "In other words, you wouldn't identify him as a human being."

Mary: "No, not in my town, anyway. New York is a different story. Regardless of whether or not any of it was anything more than a dream or what, I know the emotions I've had to deal with through the years have been real all the anxiety that doesn't have any source."

Whitley: "Any of your kids?"

Mary: "Yeah."

Whitley: "How do you feel about that?"

Mary: "That's the only part of it that really upsets me. I guess it's Just the mother instinct in me. I want to know everything that's happening to my children and I want to be there when it's happening. I don't like the idea of someone screwing around with my kids, and me not knowing about it. They're so defenseless, you know, it's not fair. As if we aren't all as defenseless as children, but somehow my mothering instincts are the only thing that turn me on, make me mad. There's only one thing that I'm really angry about, and I don't really understand that. I told Pat, I don't feel like being angry for me, anyway, is going to work. I have enough trouble dealing with everyday life. There are a lot of stresses, and I don't cope with stress really excellently well. I just get by, like everybody else. So I don't see any point in inflicting any more stress on myself by getting all worked up and angry over something I have no control over. Something that no matter how damn mad I get, it ain't gonna do no good. I'm just gonna make myself get worse. So I haven't whipped up a lot of anger over this, other than about my kids."

Whitley: "So basically, you just decided —"

Mary: "Live with it."

Whitley: "Keep it from getting too real?"

Mary: "I believe something is happening to everybody. At least everybody here. I don't know why it is more easy to accept things from all of you than I find it to accept them for myself. Like saying it seems more real when it happens to somebody else."

Fred: "I just want to say that I think we're dealing with so many not-so-obvious things. At least one thing which I think is obvious and important is the fact that we meet. I think that's important. If there's anything we can understand, it's the meeting. The experience — I speak for myself, I don't know how traumatic it was for others — it was fine for me. It was mind opening for me. It's thanks to this little group that I'm getting to, know — love — that's what's important. The rest is up for grabs."

Whitley: "You want to say anything about what happened to you?"

Fred: "Not really."

Budd: "When people first come, they say, 'I feel it's like family."'

Whitley: "That's what I feel. It's very strange." (I was privately contending with the fact that the one called Mary in the colloquy was instantly recognizable to me, and I did not know why.)

Mary: "Strange for me, too."

Pat: "I think the most interesting thing is that I went to a meeting up in Massachusetts and there was a whole bunch of people-and for some reason three people who had been abducted all came together in the middle of the room. It was very strange, and we all knew immediately. And there was nobody else in the room who had any experience —"

Budd: "Don't count on it."

Pat: "I'm not saying that. What's interesting is that they knew. They found each other immediately. We huddled around each other. It was almost like we needed to be together.

And it was very strange."

Betty: "I think you get to the point where you almost want to detach yourself from the situation, because you'll really just lose your mind. You have to look at yourself like an outside observer. That's just not happening to you."

Sally: "I think that's the reason it's so difficult to piece it together when it's happening, because while it's happening you're saying this is not happening to me, so part of the mind shuts it off and part of the mind is having to absorb it. So I think that's the reason it's so confusing when it's happening. At least that's what I felt. I felt, really, that my whole mind was just falling apart. It was just crumbling."

Whitley: "What was happening to you? Can you describe anything at all?"

Sally: "Absolute terror. I felt like an animal, totally warped and totally working on the instant."

Whitley: "That's how I felt."

Sally: "I was just clinging to any little piece, little scrap of life. Any kind of shelter, if I could hide in a corner, if I could get away from them somehow. I didn't want to know what they were about, what they were going to do, what they wanted to do with me — I just wanted out. Get me home. That's it. I make no claims to being brave. I was not brave. I said often that I felt like Fay Wray. I was screaming and passing out. I don't care about evolution, I don't care about your spaceships, I don't care about anything. just let me out of here. Of course there were times when I was less frightened and I looked around. But when they were there, no. Most of the time I was angry or terrified. That was it."

Fred: "I still am surprised, despite all the books I've read, I find more out here at this group that makes sense to me personally than I do from any books."

Whitley: "Sam, you're just sitting over there—"

Sam: "My experience happened to me a couple of years ago. I guess it isn't much different than anybody else's." (He had a particularly startling experience, especially for a scientist.) "I find it's easier to sit here and talk to other people about it and listen to other people's experiences than to sit in a quiet corner and get into my mind, and what happened.

It's very difficult, almost impossible, for me to close my eyes and go through the experience.

I can't do it.

Sally: "It's too scary. It's much too scary alone. I did a self-hypnosis thing actually, I —"

Fred: "My God, you've got guts!"

Sally "Well, I did. I went to sleep. I started to relive the actual abduction. I was in my apartment building going up the stairs. Then I got past a certain point and I said, 'Oh, no, this is too real.' 'Cause I was actually remembering more details than I had under the actual hypnosis. I said, 'Oh, no, this is not going to be able to work.' I stopped."

Sam: "When I get to thinking about it alone, by myself, I get a little angry, and I begin to think,
Who the hell do they think they are that they can jest do what they want to us, as
though we're nothing
. And that really disturbs me, so I turn it off, and I don't want to look at my own experience, and I don't even want to think about what's happened to others, because that disturbs me, too."

Budd: "Mark, if you have anything you'd like to say at this juncture. You've gone up and down about your feelings about it and how real it was. Curious to hear you talk about that."

Mark: "Just trying to et a little understanding. I had an experience when I was ten years old, had no idea what it was, but I know for thirty-seven, thirty-eight years, I was always aware that something had happened, and a general idea of the location. But I could never explain it. I constantly looked for the area where it had taken place. It was in an area I went through often, where there were a lot of people that are witness to the fact that there was something you just couldn't explain. It was after the first hypnosis that all of this comes out, too real, too believable. I was with another person, we were out bike tiding. Then there is a lapse of time and we're walking our bikes home. I remember telling a story that I'd had an accident on my bike because I had a scar, but not believing myself. And not believing it throughout the years."

Whitley: "I'm very curious, just to interrupt for a second. How many of you have stories like that, about things you know didn't happen that you've been telling all your life?"

Jenny: "All my life I used to hear my mother — in my head there was this thing saying,

'You're lying, you're lying,' but my mother never said it. My whole, life from the time I was five years old."

Fred: "Yeah, yes to that question from my point of view also. I know it happened but I can't believe it. And the other thing is, what's nice about the group, to get back on that for a second, we look at each other and we say, 'I can't believe her story, I can't believe his story, I can't believe your story. I can't believe my story.' And vet, there's a comfort which we still sure because behind it all, oh, it's all the same. We don't understand it, but something happened."

Pat: "There's an acceptance."

Sally: "You know, the first time I realized something had happened that wasn't a figment of my imagination, wasn't some subconscious thing or something or a creative element of my mind or something, I was reading Betty Andreasson's story [
The Andreasson Affair
by Raymond E. Fowler]; she described a detail of some sort of crystal boots they had put on her.

They had clear bottoms, like a platform, and there was some sort of electrical thing, something inside this clear platform. And that's exactly what I had on my feet. Exactly. And I said I cannot believe some other woman could possibly have had the exact same thing on her feet, that her imagination could be exactly like mine. And I just said, 'No way,' and the tears starting coming down my face, and I said, 'That's it.' And I was totally upset. I couldn't sleep, I tossed and turned, I was dust a mess. I wanted to hide somewhere. Horrible."

Joan: "Isn't it a relief when you find it isn't your imagination?"

Sally: "No! Horrible! Except if I was called a liar. But otherwise, no."

Joan: "I figure it's a relief."

Whitley: "I would have gone insane if I thought it was my imagination. At first it was perfectly obvious to me, I was going crazy. I expected to just go around the bend. The realization that it wasn't my imagination, when they, came in such a way that I couldn't deny it, even if I wanted to —"

Joan: "Has everybody had an experience when they were five?"

(General agreement. Some said maybe four, or very young.)

Whitley (to Amy): "Any thoughts? Do you know what happened to you?"

Amy: "Yeah, I know. I want to say what Mary talked about. One time it seems real, and the next time it's not real."

Mary: "Every time I look at the pictures of my backyard, then it's real." (It was from her yard that Budd Hopkins obtained the sample of calcinated earth.) Amy: "Sally mentioned Betty Andreasson's book. I looked at a few pages and I couldn't read the book. I knew I would be terrified and I don't know why. I had this trouble feeling like — I have daughters — and I was afraid."

Tom (a college teacher who does UFO research but has not had an experience): "In a way I feel envious of everyone here because you've all had a glimpse into another world, another dimension perhaps. And in a way you've seen the future, if I could even say that, which may or may not be true, if I could even say that. You have seen what might, in fact, be coming eventually down the line. At least, there are people who believe that. And so, you all have a sort of special knowledge that very few other people have."

Sally: "The, question is, what kind of knowledge is it and what if we don't really want it?

And if you don't want it, then you refuse to accept it, and if you refuse to accept it, you don't have it, so it's sort of like this whole thing — it's like if you could see something inside of a ship and say 'Is that real?' because you've never seen it before. We're not really food witnesses. I mean, we have just little pieces of things. If we were just allowed to explore one of these ships, imagine the information we could get. But just with little innocent people being abducted, it's not enough. Even though it may be a glimpse. It's a fragment."

Whitley: "I don't think it'll ever come out completely into the public eye. And when it does, it won't be as intimate as these experiences. People will see it, you know, like something in the sky that everybody sees and it's there for four days, that kind of thing."

Sam: "At what level of belief are we? Do we all believe that we had single experiences and they're gone? Or do you believe they come back and forth type of thing Do you believe they're here all the time among us?"

Pat: "How many people have the sense of continuous monitoring?"

Jenny: "Being watched all the time?"

Pat: "Continuous monitoring."

Joan: "I have a very strong feeling."

Whitley: "I do, too."

Pat: "How many people have the sense that there is something involving permanent relocation?"

(Mixed reaction.)

Whitley: "I have persistent images of being in another place. Sometimes it's parklike, sometimes very bright."

Fred: "I do, too. Very bright."

Pat: "What makes us afraid of the change'?'

Joan: "The sense of not being in control."

Pat: "I don't think they have individual DNA. I think they're all pretty much the same.

They're interested m us because we are different. And we value the difference, and our individual freedom. And we feel that when we were abducted, that individual freedom has been taken away, and they don't understand that. They don't really understand our sense of freedom and being allowed our own will."