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."