The evolution of this increase in perception may have a very definite design. We initially noticed objects from afar, then closer, then we remembered seeing the visitors, and now we are beginning to remember being with them. More than one of those taken were told that he or she would remember nothing "for five years," or "until 1984," or "in a few years." Will the visitors emerge into our world on a hood of memory?

And if so, then why? Why not simply land, open the hatch and come out? It could be that they wish to avoid what Cortez did with such eagerness. It is not difficult to crush the flower of a culture's spontaneity. A friend of mine sat in a Native American medicine circle within hearing distance of a hissing interstate highway — and he heard the emptiness in the old chants, the sadness where conviction once rang. And no new stories are being woven in Papua, New Guinea. The streets are becoming a ramshackle version of Lansing, Michigan.

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.