Maybe, though, there was another truth here. Perhaps the hypnosis revealed not just the possible presence of visitors but the action of a hidden and tremendously therapeutic potential which, if correctly marshaled, could be of great value.

While there is a long tradition in the fairy literature of the Middle Ages of the use of wands to grant insight, and the angel in the Book of Revelation is said to strike the elect thrice between the eyes and cause them great suffering, modern accounts of visitors contain only one oblique reference to this process. A woman who had an enigmatic visitor encounter in the fifties slowly became insane thereafter. As she did so she would claw at the center of her forehead in the same place where I was struck with the wand, to the point that she gouged herself almost to the bone.

It would be easy to say that the material revealed here is the work of a mind making opportunistic use of some nocturnal disturbances to gain contact with fears that it needed to explore. The glaring difficulty with this supposition is that the whole transaction remained hidden in amnesia until many months later. There is the additional problem of the witnesses, and the "clap of thunder" coming before the "lightning."

The easy route would be to dismiss this material as entirely psychological. That would also be a mistake, at least until the physical effects are explained completely, in detail, and satisfactorily.

A terrifying thing happened to me. Perhaps it involved visitors from somewhere-maybe even from inside the human unconscious. For me, though, the most important thing about it was its essentially human effect. I was a human being, and my part of things involved having a human experience. Even if there was a visitor, it seemed clear that concentration on the human part of the encounter was the key to understanding what meaning it may have for me.

And if the visitor was no more than wind in the eaves or the moon lighting the fog... then it was a key to what I mean to myself.

Events of December 26, 1985

SESSION DATE: March 5. 1986

SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Klein, MD

We met again a few days later. I had occupied myself with other things during the previous four days. but it was hard. It was a great effort not to go to the library and get half a dozen books about close encounters, and another half dozen about possible psychosocial causes for such experiences. But I agreed with Dr. Klein and Budd Hopkins that I must remain as ignorant of this material as possible until after my hypnosis.

Yet I kept remembering that face, darting, the sharp dark eyes glistening, and the silver wand glittering as it rose and fell.

I couldn't believe it could be anything other than an act of mind. While I was prepared to accept that there may be a visitor presence on earth, I was not prepared to find one of them at my bedside practicing psychotherapy with a fairy wand. Surely it wouldn't be that personal.