I was shocked by the unqualified reality of what I had seen. I just could not believe, in that moment, that the forms persisting in my mind were anything but real. And vet they had to be something else, surely they did.

There was a certain way of checking the reality of at least one of these memories, because there was one other person involved whom I knew well: my sister. I had been thinking about calling her. I did so the next afternoon, and asked her our now-familiar question: "What is the strangest thing you remember ever happening?"

"The time we were sleeping out in the back lot and the fireball came across the lot."

I sat there holding the phone and feeling as if I were falling down a deep well, and at the bottom of the well was somebody with huge, shining eyes.

"Can you describe it?"

"It was a big, green fireball. It came catty-corner across the lot. We all got scared and went inside. We slept on the porch instead."

"Did we tell Mother and Dad?"

"Mother said it was nothing to worry about, it was just a fireball."

I still do not remember seeing the fireball. All my life I have had a free-floating memory of a skeleton riding a motorcycle, a frightful effigy. Now I know the source of that image.

Were my sister's words confirmation? Yes — of the fact that something disturbing happened in that vacant lot so long ago. But the issue of what it was remains open.

What is most interesting here is really a pattern. It involves two types of interaction with the visitors. One type seems to involve the approach of a single individual or small group, as happened on the night of the fireball, at my grandmother's, in the apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, and in the country on October 4. The other type of incident is the long visitation, as the ones that occurred when we were on the train in 1957, in Austin the August before the incident at my grandmother's, and on December 26, 1985. These experiences usually include more interaction and often take place on the visitor's own turf.

The short visits seem almost always to concern psychological activity, the long ones to involve more physical testing, almost as if preparations are made or results observed during those times.

By the time December 1985 came around, I may have had these encounters at least a dozen limes. And yet I never learned from them. Each time the experience took place, I was as frightened, as tormented, as astonished as before.

This is one of the most difficult internal problems connected with the experience. One would have thought that the mind, acting alone, would have compartmentalized all this material together, as it does with recurring dreams and nightmares, so that when I entered the state I would have had reference to other experiences of it, even though — as in recurring nightmares — the material would still have been terrifying.