It's all turning into rock 'n' roll, the scepters of the kings are being broken up for firewood and the old, rich truths of that culture now seem to its inheritors an embarrassment.

Would we not all risk being lost in nonmeaning if an apparently superior visitor culture emerged suddenly into the open? Science, religion, even the arts might be shattered by the appearance of a culture that already knew everything we want to know about the universe.

Unless, of course, it were to emerge not into blinded awe, but into our understanding of its truth, its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

Maybe that is why two triangles were inscribed on my arm: to symbolize that we are each a tiny, complete universe, a small but valid version of the whole; that the smaller is not less perfect than the greater, but only less mature.

Beyond the present level, what awaits? What will happen in ten years, in twenty years?

As we begin to admit that the visitor phenomenon has some sort of extrapersonal reality, perhaps it will begin to come into clearer focus.

A visitor once said to an abductee, "On is off and of is on. We confuse the language."

There is something of the mirror image in all this, and in the visitors more than a little of the prankster which has so much significance in our own mystical literature. From Till Eulenspiegel to Mullah Nasir Eddin, we have always accepted pranks as one output of true understanding. "God laughs and plays," said Meister Eckhart.

Dr. David M. Jacobs of Temple University recounts a fascinating story of a woman in Philadelphia who once saw a flying disk across the street from her house. As soon as she looked at it, it came closer. She beheld a row of nine windows. In one window stood a man with a cigar in his mouth, staring out. He was as motionless as a statue. The next window revealed a woman in a flowered dress sitting in a chair, also in some sort of trance. Three of the small gray beings then came past the other windows and conducted the entranced woman from the chair and off down a corridor.

The woman who saw this was not a "saucer nut," not a psychotic, but rather an ordinary person. She neither sought nor received fame or money. She simply told what she saw, all innocent to the fascinating combination of absurdity and far-reaching implication in her story.

At the moment of highest absurdity and intensity in my experience, when I was called their chosen one, I had a distinct memory of seeing them getting a woman in a flowered dress very excited with a similar speech.

How can something so profound and even dangerous as the visitor experience also be so ludicrous? It would seem to me to be possible to say that the mind, also, laughs and plays.