When two in balance cause a third to emerge and remain in balance, something more happens: The three together become a greater whole. All seeking toward higher consciousness is a search for the sort of balance that will cause the triad to cease to be a collection of parts and become a solid.

Hidden in the Sphinx, one of our most ancient objects, is a great idea, simple and extremely powerful. To understand the riddle of the Sphinx is to know how to begin one's walk along the ancient way, the "pathless path" of old.

The most powerful moment I experienced in my search through the modern literature about the visitors took place when I was reading The Andreasson Affair. Few of the accounts I have read contain as much symbolism. But this one contained a great deal, and it was quite remarkable. What interested me most about it was that Mrs. Andreasson obviously had no idea at all what it meant. But it has great meaning, and is entirely coherent in context with all I have been discussing here.

"I'm standing before a large bird," Mrs. Andreasson reported. "It's very warm …. And that bird looks like an eagle to me. And it's living! It has a white head and there is light in back of it — real, white light …. The light seems so bright in back of it. It's beautiful, bright light...

The light just keeps sending out rays. They keep on getting bigger and bigger. Oh, the heat is so strong!

The great symbol of transformation, the fourth beast of the Sphinx, is the eagle. It is ever associated with heat, the energy of the sun that at once sheds the light of wisdom and the heat that burns the self away.

The riddle of the Sphinx: What has the strength of a bull, the courage of a lion, and the intelligence of a man? The answer is the Sphinx itself, who then takes wind like an eagle and looks down over life from outside of time, with true objectivity.

The flying Sphinx is a triad rendered in yet a fourth dimension of reality: a triangular solid, a pyramid, known in esoteric thought as the living eternal. The pyramids may or may not have been tombs; they were certainly symbols of the immortality of the pharaohs who built them.

Betty Andreasson had no idea what her vision was about. They asked her, "Do you understand?"

"No, I don't understand what this is all about, why I'm even here."

The central effort of my life has been the fulfillment of the triad, the creation of the eagle within me. And now I find the key myth of this transformational effort embedded in the innocent literature of the abductees, in a passage of immense power and force. Later in her transcript, Mrs. Andreasson reports being told like so many of us that she has been "chosen."