Twenty
years ago tonight, at approximately three thirty in the morning on
December 26, 1985, I heard odd noises and felt as if I had fallen
out of bed. I opened my eyes to a scene of such extraordinary
horror that I am still suffering from the effects of that moment,
two decades later.
What I saw before me was a small room like the interior of a
tent, populated by enormous insects. These insects were at once
strange, distant-seeming creatures, totally unlike me and not
communicating any sense of the human at all, and yet at the same
time aware of me in a way that eloquently and terrifyingly signaled
intelligence.
Immediately, I was seized from behind and there was a swooping
rush around me. An odd, machine-like voice commenced repeating
again and again the phrase 'what can we do to help you stop
screaming?'
The terror was beyond words, beyond imagining. They were rough
with me, pressing a needle into my head and raping me with a device
that I now know is called an electrostimulator. In those days, such
devices were used to induce erections in sex clinics, and they are
still used to gather semen in animal husbandry.
I am not a prude, but I am a modest man and quite shy
physically. I was appalled at finding myself naked with these
creatures. I can remember trying and trying to wake up, to somehow
find my bed around me again, to embrace my wife.
But my wife was not there. I was alone in the night with these
things and I had no idea what might happen to me next.
This experience has left me with a disease called post-traumatic
stress disorder. The last time I awakened with my heart practically
slamming out of my chest, my breath coming short and so frightened
that I literally dared not move a muscle was last night.
In fact, for at least five out of seven nights since the event
happened, I have been waking up in terror between three and four in
the morning. I have tried many treatments for this, ranging from
conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy to every sort of esoteric
treatment you can imagine, to no avail.
The disorder that began on that night will, I believe, remain
with me until the day I die. And I wouldn't trade it for anything
in the world. Because, on that night, the woman whose portrait is
on the cover of the book Communion said to me, 'you're the luckiest
of the lucky.'
She was precisely correct. Yes, it has been hard and it has
shattered me on the deepest possible levels. The public reaction
has pained me as much as it has inspired me. But I have had a truly
remarkable opportunity offered to me, and I have taken as full
advantage of it as has been in my ability.
The morning after the experience, I asked my wife if she
remembered anything unusual that night. She said no. My son, also,
seemed entirely untroubled. So I decided that the riotous memories
that were troubling me must have been some sort of a nightmare.
The memories were quite clear. I remembered being carried. I
remembered being roughed up. I remembered being raped. Also,
though, meeting somebody I felt that I had known for quite some
time, somebody, even, who had in some way trained or prepared
me.
During the next few days, I wrote a story called "Pain," about
an angelic being who administers pain in order to free people from
themselves, to use pain, in effect, as a means of transcending the
ego.
I remember how I felt as I wrote that story, the curious sense
of surrender that it brought me, as if I was reliving a very, very
powerful experience with someone who had loved me so hard that it
had broken me heart and soul.
The weekend came, and by the time Monday rolled around I was in
pain. My rectum hurt. The side of my head hurt. And I could not
sleep at all. I was living in a state of terror. By then I was
pretty sure I had been abused in some way. What I could not figure
out was how or by who. I could remember these big, black eyes
staring at me, but could not figure out where they had come
from.
I did not yet know that a friend of mine had also had a very
disturbing experience that night. He was a retired state policeman
and he had been coming home in the wee hours with his wife from a
Christmas party. We lived in a pretty lonely corner of the
world--not entirely isolated, but quite dark and quiet at night,
with lots of woods around, stretching for miles.
He'd been about two miles from our houses traveling along a
lonely stretch of road when he'd observed what looked like a large
gray object in a field. It was a dark night and the object wasn't
very distinct, but it was big enough to make him think that it was
a crashed blimp. He stopped his car and got out, whereupon he heard
somebody screaming. As he walked toward the thing, lights came on
all over it and it began moving toward him. As it was obviously
under power and not in need of help, he got back in his car and
drove home.
I did not know about this for over a year, unfortunately, after
I had written the book Communion and was well into its sequel,
Transformation. It took him that long to tell me, and when he did
tell me we were both just sort of silenced. What were we to
think?
By that time, though, I was already well along what has become
the road of my life.
A few days after the event, I believe, on the Wednesday, I drove
into New York City to see my doctor. He listened to my story and
examined me. There occured during that examination one of the most
agonizing experiences I have ever known. He took one glance at the
condition of my rectum and blurted out, "you've been raped." I was
so terribly, terribly humiliated by this that it has taken me these
twenty long years even to put those words down on paper. Only last
June did I utter them to another person, when I told Anne what he
had said, and told a psychologist I am thinking of working with
this spring. And now I have said it.
I have been the victim of endless jokes for having been raped.
If you are a woman reading this, think of how you would feel if you
had been raped and had been made a laughingstock for it. Your very
soul would be eaten by the acid of that. It has made me despise our
society to the very depths of my being. I loathe the world I live
in, because I was raped and everybody laughed.
But I do not loathe you, because I know that reading this are
many people who have been down this same hard road.
So, why in the world are we lucky? What's lucky about getting
raped and being scorned and rejected after having a devastating,
soul shattering experience that most people think is a lot of hooey
and a big fat joke?
Well, in, I think, early February of 1986, I completed a series
of mental and physical tests that convinced me that I was not
suffering from any known disease. I had an MRI scan, a battery of
psychological tests, a test for temporal lobe epilepsy and a
thorough neurological workup.
The results of these tests were three: one, I was suffering from
severe stress; two, I had some unknown bright objects in my brain
which occur in about 2% of people tested with MRI scans and are
benign; three, my brain was not only not seizure prone, it was
unusually stable.
I then decided that these remarkable beings I had seen must
therefore have been real. I very well remember the moment this
thought first crossed my mind. I had just left the psychologist's
office after getting her evaluation. So all the pieces were in
place. I wasn't psychotic and I had no organic brain disease that
would explain what I remembered happening to me.
I therefore began to attempt to solve the mystery. But where to
turn? I really had no idea. I went out in the woods, revisiting the
place I had been carried. A very odd part of the memory was that I
had seen somebody familiar in the woods just before I ended up in
the little chamber with the insects. This was an old school friend
who had joined the CIA. He had told me about a design flaw in the
containment of some sort of engine that was being tested on a high
performance aircraft.
I have written little about this part of the experience and
mentioned it only a few times in interviews because it has always
disturbed me deeply, but not for the reason that you might think. I
tried to look him up that February, only to discover that he was
dead, and had been dead for more than a year when I saw him in my
woods in the company of what I then regarded as aliens.
I didn't know what in hell to make of this. Only after I
published Communion and began to get hundreds of thousands of
letters from other close encounter witnesses did I realize that
it's routine for the dead to appear with the visitors. The two
things go together--not in every encounter, by any means, but in
enough of them to make it more or less part of the routine.
By that time March had come along, I had read Jenny Randles'
book about UFOs that had a description in it that made me think I
might have encountered aliens. The book led me to Budd Hopkins, who
wanted to hypnotize me. I found Budd to be a very nice fellow and
also quite brilliant, but I declined to be hypnotized by him
because he was not appropriately credentialed. So he introduced me
to Dr. Donald Klein, who was an eminent psychiatrist and one of the
world?s leading forensic hypnotists.
When Dr. Klein first hypnotized me, there was an explosive
reaction. I did not go back to the indicent in December, but rather
to the previous October. I still remember that session vividly: the
absolute terror that I felt when I had awakened one night in our
little country cabin and seen a small hooded figure standing near
the bed?a figure that had proceeded to rush at me and strike my
forehead with a stick that shot out electric sparks.
In the second hypnosis session, I did address the December 26
experience. It became somewhat more vivid in my mind, but nothing
new was added to my memories. However, during the session, I
spontaneously reverted to the age of twelve, and recalled another
incident of meeting this extraordinary woman who is the real
subject of this essay and is, in fact, a great light in my life.
She lives and functions across the divide of what we call life and
death, and beyond the confines of time.
This recollection seemed to the doctor to be similar to the sort
of memories that emerge in people who have experienced repeated
abuse that they have been unwilling or unable to articulate to
themselves. The mechanism by which difficult memories may be
repressed is well explained by Dr. Jennifer Freyd in her book
Betrayal Trauma. Dr. Freyd is the daughter of two of the founders
of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and has accused them of
abusing her.
This memory led me to return to my home town of San Antonio,
Texas, where I explored my own childhood, which I recounted in my
book the Secret School.
Before that, I wrote two additional books about my close
encounter experiences, which continued and expanded after I began
walking in the woods at night in an effort to re-engage with what
it had become obvious to me were some very remarkable beings who
had been with me, in a hidden way, throughout my life.
I remained engaged with them for eleven years after the initial
encounter. It only ended in October of 1997, when I moved out of
the upstate New York cabin and returned to Texas. I did this both
because I wanted to explore my past, and because we no longer could
afford to live in New York. Our son?s education was demanding of
our resources, and the long and terrible depression that had
followed the rejection of my claims of encounter had taken their
toll. I had become unable to write more about my encounters after
the book Breakthrough. I saw that acknowledgement of the existence
of the visitors would bring enormous rewards to our society, and
also the venial reasons for the secrecy. I saw how eagerly the
egocentric media and scientific institutions supported the
government in keeping the secret of their presence. And I watched
as the visitors patiently waited, knowing, as they do, that our
species is in the process of making a deeply spiritual decision
about whether to enter the cosmos or go extinct.
I was having too many thoughts of suicide to stay at the cabin
any longer. I felt that I had failed in one of the most important
missions ever entrusted to a human being, to open the mind of man
to the existence of another intelligent species. In so failing, I
had seen that humanity would most likely give up on the greatness
that is mankind, and choose to turn its back on five billion years
of earthly struggle and the patient, hopeful waiting of those who
long for us to join the stars.
It was a truly fearsome failure. I also had been given, in the
eleven years I had with the visitors, the opportunity to see the
fate of souls, and I suffered the most terrific sorrow over what
was happening to the people who were getting drawn into the trap of
lying about the existence of the visitors in order to support
government policy. I began to see government as a machine for the
killing of souls. The terror of the situation was simply
overwhelming. I will tell you this about the way a soul dies: for
the universe, it winks out of existence the instant the supporting
body?s electrical system fails. But for that soul, the moment of
death remains forever.
What kills souls is quite simple: choice. They choose to die
because they despair of themselves. They die of lack of love. Our
lives must be rich with compassion both for ourselves and others.
This is what enables us to thrive and live in the body of
consciousness that is this universe. The body is a brief passage, a
place of decision. It is here, in this engine of forgetting, that
we can only decide from our essential truth whether we are going to
go on or not.
This is as true for the species as it is for each one of us. I
have chosen life. I believe that this species is worth saving, that
we can ascend into a great journey if we so choose. So when I see
us being captured by the people of the death wish?those who
concentrate on material wealth, who ignore suffering, who fight,
who lie, who ignore the needs of the planet?I feel the touch of
despair.
By 1997, I was in utter despair. I felt that I needed the
support of old friends and family, so, on a night in October of
that year, I sat down for what I knew would be my last meditation
with the visitors. I will not get into why they couldn?t follow me
to Texas. It?s too complex and too far from the subject of this
essay. Suffice to say that the could only come there in a much more
limited way than was possible at the cabin. In part, the reason is
that they are physically much more vulnerable than you might think,
and keep themselves concealed not only through the use of
technology, but primarily by stealth. When you strip away their
ability to affect the mind, their quickness and a couple of other
things, what you will find is a small, delicate person whom a child
could crush between his fists. But also in that vulnerable,
wobbling head a world that reaches across space and time, that
penetrates not only this universe and its secrets, but many others
as well, that is ancient beyond belief and, in a way that I can
hardly even begin to explain, impeccable.
I?m not saying that they?re pleasant. They?re as tough as nails,
as mean as snakes and as dangerous as plutonium.
Now I'm going to return to my life with that woman. Firstly, she
has been with me for longer than life itself. I am one of her many
projects. In the world of the soul, she's rich, on a big journey in
the direction of ecstasy, and seeking to travel there the only way
you can, in a great chorus of free souls. This is what it's about,
it's why we're here. It is the core urgency of life, what you feel
at the moment of birth, of sexual union, and of death.
On that first night, she took semen from me to try to make a
baby out of the two of us. This did not work. She came again to me
many times, and gradually we became gentle enough with each other
so that it did work. I learned a very secret art, which is the art
of touching people who are in a state of higher energy without
trapping them in our level. If you can imagine what it might be
like to embrace a cloud without destroying its form, that's what
it's like to engage with the visitors without turning their
communication into a version of one's own thoughts.
I wonder if that makes any sense to somebody who hasn't done it?
I hope so, because anybody can. The difficulty is, how do you
explain how it feels to ride a bicycle before anybody has ever
ridden one?
Let me tell you about her. She lived both in the country and in
the city, just like I did. Yes, she walked the streets. An editor
from William Morrow & Co., Bruce Lee, saw her and her husband
in a bookstore in Manhattan, a story which I recounted in
Transformation. Another friend of mine saw her on 14th Street on
the day I drove off westward forever. She asked him, 'are you going
west'? He replied, as he was stuck in traffic and trying to go
east, 'no, I'm going east!' She said, 'that's good,; and stepped
off into the crowd. It was her way of expressing her regret at my
departure.
What we did together, in trying to create that living bridge,
was not a disloyalty to her husband or my wife. Think of it as a
scientific experiment in the power of love to transcend. But it
could not transcend the limits of the physical, and there is no
magical child here now to show us the way--at least, not that I
have ever met. Instead, we have the people of the death wish
leading mankind down the road to extinction.
So what happens, then, to the souls that do not enter memory? In
fact, to most of you reading this. You would not be on this
website, or this deep in this message, if you had not made the
opposite choice from the rulers of our world. So what happens to
you when mankind is no more? You will find a sort of magnetic
appeal that will draw you into new companionship. The utterly
unique ecstasy that would accompany mankind's ascension will never
be tasted, but its loss will be part of your beauty. I can't
explain farther than that because of the limitations of language,
but you will certainly find your way, of that be assured.
Where are we now, twenty years after an effort was begun to
bring mankind into real contact with another intelligent species? A
vast number of people have been awakened to the reality of the
visitors. Millions, I believe. Even more, of course, remain as they
always have been, a great, formless ocean of unrealized potential.
At the same time, the general culture has totally failed to address
the reality of the visitors. To an extent, they have pulled up
stakes. They left upstate New York in 1999, two years after I did.
They still come around in various places, but it's only to monitor
those who might be of some interest or other. The fifty years
between 1947 and 1997 were, as far as they were concerned, the time
of decision. And we decided, thanks to those who so effectively
kept their reality secret, to continue as we have been in history,
and to do so despite the risk that will will not be able to manage
the coming failure of the planetary environment properly without
their support, and therefore that it might kill us.
As far as the close encounter experience is concerned, science
is absolutely nowhere. Fantastically, the intellectuals, who so
distrust the government in every other regard, swallow its lies
about this without the least complaint. Perhaps it's because the
visitors completely shatter the secular view of the world. Or maybe
they threaten the fragile ego of the educated human being, whose
soul knows that all his fine knowledge is but an engine of
forgetting. You cannot be with them without also being with your
own truth. Then you see what you really are, a little fragment in a
vastness so great, so various and so shockingly, unimaginably
conscious that it completely swallows you. To enter the universe as
it really is, you've got to leave your self-pride far behind, and
that is a hard, hard thing to do.
Other worlds have faced these same problems. Understand, there
are not all that many worlds with intelligent species on them that
have survived very long. Often, they come to tragic ends, undone by
chance or, more often, by aggression even more excessive than our
own. In some places, though, there have been very remarkable
solutions to the survival problem.
Some intelligent species have been able to see that their
intelligence was a precious asset that could actually intensify
itself. They have learned to increase the quantity of this valuable
commodity by altering themselves, by creating machine intelligence,
and by conferring it on other species on their planets. As if we'd
hit upon the idea of genetically engineering brains to greater
intelligence, and included not only ourselves but the animal world
as well. In such places, life becomes very, very rich.
But mostly it doesn't happen that way. There are people who
worry about the fate of consciousness across the universes. (And
there is more than one, as we will soon discover.) They worry
because so often intelligence--which is the single most important
way station on the road to consciousness--fails. It's incredibly
rare, and it fails. Thus the journey toward ecstasy is
compromised.
The more consciousness, the more ecstasy, and consciousness
cannot come about without intelligence. What is worse, until a
species is conscious, intervention is very, very difficult. That's
the problem that the visitors are having here. If they intervene
openly, our culture totally refocuses itself toward them and all
human innovation stops. We end up locked in a state of profound
disempowerment that will take many generations to recover, and that
will leave a permanent scar.
The visitors cannot reveal themselves to us. We must reveal
ourselves to them.
So, where are we? Certainly, we are avoiding facing the reality
of their presence here. Where we are is on the edge of a new world,
and it's not the best of all possible new worlds, believe me. The
environment has already begun collapsing in irrevocable ways, and
over the next half century many, many lives will be lost.
Personally, I do not think that we will go completely extinct, not
unless we?re helped along in some way. I think that we are going to
defy the odds and live and thrive anyway, no matter that we're led
by people of the death wish, no matter that the visitors have
turned their backs on us. I have this faith in mankind precisely
because I am among the very rarest of human creatures: I have
really and truly been outside of mankind, insofar as I have treated
with nonhuman intelligent beings. I have seen what they are, and
therefore now see my own kind to a degree as an outsider. And what
I see compels me to wonder. You really have no way to know how
marvelous you are. Mankind is like a scattering of jewels in the
blue of the world. You can't even see the dead and dying souls.
They don?t matter and they are surprisingly few. They just make a
lot more noise than the great, sacred majority.
No, I have failed to link us to the visitors. I have failed to
break the bondage of official secrecy, or to save the souls of the
keepers of the secrets. I have failed to raise the eyes of the
average man.
But I have not failed entirely, because I did not fail in my
contacts, and I have not failed with you. In time--and time is what
this is, in the end, all about--my small successes will emerge as
being far more important than my great failures.
I miss my dear and dangerous friends. I miss those days of the
very highest adventure, the sheer thrill that would come over me
when, a mile or so back in the woods in the dead of night, I would
see the quick, darting movement and then the terrible eyes. Then I
would sit down on the ground, and open my swooning, terrified mind
as best I could, and there would be wonder.
I miss my life with her. The various things we tried, in our
effort to tame each to the other. We could not be face to face for
more than a few seconds, so she took to riding on my back. It was
the only way we could embrace without me getting scared and her
suffering grave anguish because of my fear. So we would stay like
that, with her little soft body clasped around me from
behind--soft, but with bones like iron and a grip of steel. We were
sensually repellent to each other, but we made romance in our
hearts, anyway, and if in time they do emerge more into the life of
man, this is how it will be.
It will be so hard. They're bad, never doubt it. They sin and
fail and are weak and venial. They can be murderously indifferent
when they?re concentrating on an important objective. They do not
find us nearly as important as we find ourselves, and they can
therefore be cruel in the pursuit of their goals. But when you
connect with them, the rewards are very, very great. Stupendous,
actually. Beyond measure.
One fifteen. It's quiet here. December 26. A Monday, this year.
I am not so far from death, the unknown country. But I've traveled
it a good deal, actually, so it's not so strange to me now. I
understand how the mystery of the soul works. They showed me by
example; the Master of the Key explained it intellectually. Not the
slightest breeze flows, not a night bird cries. The kitchen clock
hums, my eyes grow heavy, another day comes rolling on. Very
faintly, from where I sit in this moment, I can hear the sea's
sighing night voice. The most ancient sound of the world, the
ocean.
Now I will lie myself down. In a few hours, my heart will start
pounding, my flesh again recoiling from the touch of the unknown.
But not in this moment. In this moment, peace abides. I see rising
as if in the soul's hidden earth, a new sun. This is us, this sun,
mankind rising from our broken world, on the strong two wings of
the good human heart and the good human mind.
