Much later I listened to the tapes of other people's memories and hypnosis sessions (with their permission) and read Budd Hopkins's book, Missing Time. I then participated in a colloquy with other people who remember being taken. There I found that multiple-episode memories are quite commonplace. Many people who report being taken report a lifetime pattern much like the one I had discovered.

I wrestled with the notion that something might have been happening in my life — real encounters — that were having a tremendous, hitherto unconscious effect on me. Certainly I had acted as if this were true before any conscious memories had emerged. The conscious memories didn't really come before the first week in January 1986. Yet, as early as the summer of 1985 I had become nervous about "people in the house," even to the point of buying expensive burglar alarms and, in October, a shotgun.

I even tried to move — back to central Texas, where I grew up. It is interesting to note that I was, if anything, even more fearful in Texas than I was in New York. Did this mean that I unconsciously recalled even more frightening things happening there?

When I finally got home to my apartment it was to a bright, warm household with dinner waiting. Ten minutes later I really felt as if I had left the shadows behind.

But then my son went to bed, and soon after Anne turned in. When the lights were low my home seemed no more sheltering than a place of air.

When it was time to be alone in the night, what I now had to take with the was a corpus of staring owllike faces, a shockingly revised personal history, and a great deal of fear.

That night I wished to God that I could somehow shed myself and step out fresh in the world. The visitors persisted in my mind like glowing coals. I could see those limitless, eternal eyes glaring right into the center of me. Visitors seemed to inhabit every shadow, to move in the course of the sky.

I went out again and walked some more, going down through SoHo and into the empty streets of TriBeCa.

When I finally went back to the apartment the cats came up to me and started to twist and turn around my ankles — and then went bounding away. My cats. I shut myself in my office and sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to collect myself.