I decided that I wanted to move to Austin. I went to the University of Texas there, and it is a city that both Anne and I love. Some of our best friends, including my collaborator James Kunetka, live there.

I insisted on putting both the cabin and the apartment on the market.

After Halloween we went down to Texas and arranged for our son to attend a local private school and began the process of buying a house.

We got an offer on our cabin, but no interest in the apartment.

One evening in Austin we were looking at the house we had chosen to buy. My wife was inside talking to the realtor and the owners. I walked out onto the deck.

When I looked at the dark canyon that stretched out into the shadows, and the stars in the evening sky, I felt suddenly and absolutely afraid. It was exactly as if the sky were a living thing, and it was watching me.

What was even more frightening was my clear awareness that this was a paranoid fantasy.

I thought then that my mental health was not good, and soon I would either have to calm down or take steps to Improve it.

But I could not live in that house. In fact, I could never enter it again.

When I changed my mind and decided to stay in New York, my wife was understandably furious. Then I accused her of being the one who had wanted to move us to Austin.

There followed a crisis. She really thought that she might have to leave me, because life together was just getting intolerable. But we are a deep marriage, and her despairing threat to separate made me quell my extreme behavior. It was not until Christmas that I really began to feel better.

Sitting in my office that afternoon in February I took stock of all I had found out. I had promised Hopkins that I wouldn't read anything about unidentified flying objects. In the past, as I have said, my interest in the subject was minimal. I have certainly read a book or two about them. Pressing myself I thought maybe I could remember seeing something years ago in Look magazine about somebody named Hill being taken aboard a flying disk. (In July 1986 I got copies of the issues involved — October 4 and 18, 1966-and I do not think that I actually read them at the time. I must have seen something about the story, though, because I remember it. Maybe there was a report in the newspaper.)

Judging from what the other witnesses reported, something had happened. But what?

Even after talking to Hopkins, I was by no means willing to ascribe my experiences to the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to be quite clear: I had no idea what had gone on that night.