Budd: "This is very hard."

Mary: "The craziest thing is that I'm not alone."

I have never before encountered such a group of seemingly ordinary people under so much pressure. They were deeply troubled by the question of what their experiences really mean.

Those who have had the experience must learn to ride a sort of psychological razor, to accept and reject at the same time. True agnosticism is a very active mental state, a sort of eager unknowing. In the direction of skepticism, for the taken, lies one form of madness; in that of belief another. One must balance between the two. For scientists there is the additional and very real danger of getting sucked into the study of a false unknown. In the case of a phenomenon as complex and yet as transient as this one, that danger is greatly intensified.

But a large body of observational information now exists about the flying disks, some of it generated by skilled professional observers. And there are thousands of pages of transcript from those who may have been taken. What's more, most of them seem to have endured intrusions into their brains of one sort or another. It would seem that the existing body of data and the large number of individuals available for study might yield some useful conclusions, as long as the subject is not approached with the sort of negative hypothesis that has distorted the efforts of the debunkers.

This need for balance is fundamental to more than the process of reconciling oneself with the apparent meaning of visitation. It is also fundamental to understanding the experience.

For the experience does have its symbolic center in the number three and the triangular shape.

The visitors often appear in threes. They project triangular lights. They have been reported to wear various types of triangular devices and emblems. People see three pyramids or three triangles in connection with them. A huge triangular-shaped object is sometimes sighted. I had triangles etched on my arm. Dr. X and his son developed triangular rashes.

I spent fifteen years involved with the Gurdjieff Foundation, primarily because so much of the thought of G. I. Gurdjieff and his disciple P. D Ouspensky involved the triad as a primary expression of the essential structure of life, and I have always been fascinated with the significance of this figure.

The triangle was the symbol of the ancient Triune goddess, and is, of course, viewed by Christianity as the central form of the Godhead, the Trinity.

The thirteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said of the Holy Trinity: "God laughed, and begat the Son. Together they laughed, and begat the Holy Spirit. And from the laughter of the three the universe was born."

A current theory suggests that gravity may consist of two components counterbalancing one another, the balance of which causes the third force — which is what we call gravity —to emerge.

In order to approach an initial understanding of the visitor experience, if that is possible, it might be productive to explore the inner meaning of the triangular shape.