Later I discovered that memories of animals in strange places are a common block to this experience. One young woman arrived back at a picnic in the woods in France with a story of seeing a beautiful deer. But she had blood on her blouse, and a strange straight scar that could not be explained. Ten years passed before she remembered anything of the truth of her experience in those woods, and she would have died with that memory had not her memory of another encounter with the visitors caused her to question its real significance. Another man came away from his experience thinking only that he had seen a bunch of rabbits hopping around outside his car.

Like my barn owl, these stories must have seemed no more than whimsies, but they hid real experiences that were so impossible to accept, just keeping them hidden took a large toll-as it has with others, as it might be doing with anybody.

From that first day my wife noticed a dramatic personality change in me, which she thought was similar to a change that had taken place the previous October. We had gone through personal hell then because of my demands and accusatory behavior, and she did not want that pattern to repeat itself.

But I was in decline again, and this time the symptoms were not all mental. That first evening I underwent the initial physical symptom of my ordeal. We had come in from an afternoon of light cross-country skiing, not at all strenuous. I was dead tired. Normally I am full of energy. Even a hard afternoon on the ski trails leaves me feeling pleasantly relaxed.

I got chills and went to bed. I lay huddled between the sheets and the quilt, with evening coming down, feeling just awful. I thought that I must have had a high fever. I was exhausted. The sounds of my wife and son downstairs filled me with a sense of foreboding.

Strange recollections of people running, of being pulled and shoved, swirled through my head.

Then our nearest neighbors suddenly arrived. They appeared without warning. We tend to be very private in our sparse community, and this was only their second spontaneous visit in the two years we have been neighbors.

Feeling somewhat better, I went downstairs to see them. No sooner had we started talking than I found myself complaining that I thought I had seen the light of a snowmobile m the woods between our houses at about three in the morning. I was horrified at myself. What was I saying? I couldn't remember any such thing, and I knew it even as I spoke. Our neighbors offered the thought that the woods were too thick for a snowmobile to maneuver, which is true. Then I said that it must have been the lights on his house. He has two floodlights that shine out over his backyard. He explained that these lights had been off, but promised to redirect them so they couldn't be seen from our house. I knew even then that his lights hadn't been bothering me so late at night (although !hey were sometimes bothersome early in the evening, now that winter had stripped the woods of their concealing leaves). My memory of the snowmobile was as hollow as my memory of the owl.