Budd Hopkins: "Well, that's not to find out now. That's speculation down the road."

"Like they were trying to find out how I ticked. It really is like that. Unless it's simply that I've come to a time in my life where there's some very difficult and terrifying material that I've got to face and this is how I'm facing it, and there was no little man there. But you know, I say that and I'm telling you right now that it's not true. It's not true. It's incredible, but it's not true. The man was there. He was standing beside my bed as real as life."

"You said, originally, about the December twenty-sixth episode, that it was as if they said to you, when you disappeared, when your ego dissolved, if they had asked you what is your deepest secret, you would have told them right away."

"Right away. Yes."

"So you had an inkling about something. That your deepest secrets were coming out."

"Well, obviously I knew, because the memories were intact and they just came out of my head. Boy, though, if you'd asked me consciously I would have told you I had absolutely no idea what happened during that hour. If it was an hour. I thought I fell asleep after I saw the first glow."

"And the explosion seemed to come right after?"

"He took a little thing like a stick — a needle — and when he moved it even slightly in the air I could see it spark at the end, and he went like that [makes striking motion] and it went bang, and spread a tingling all over my face."

Budd Hopkins: "When I asked Annie Gottlieb what she would have to do to make the sound — I said, 'Suppose you were given resources to make the sound. She said, 'If you had a big, heavy door and you pushed it back against the wall, bang, like that —'"

"It was a big noise."

Budd Hopkins: "And your Anne said it was like something hitting something. Almost like an explosion."

"Yeah. Well for me it was more like a — I can't say it was like a balloon popping, because that's too innocuous a sound. It had a heavier quality to it than that, like some big energy had been released."

Budd Hopkins: "Annie Gottlieb said it had a slapping sound —"

"Not that crisp. More of a thud. It was a big noise. There was a slap, but there was a deeper resonance to it."

Budd Hopkins: "That's what Annie said. We've got four different people to come up with a description of the sound."

"Thunder?"

"It wasn't like thunder, no. Not like thunder."

"It had a clap in it?"