I had been assuming that any visitors would be vastly more intelligent than us. What if that was only part of the truth? In terms of earthly evolution, man emerged only very recently. Maybe that also means that man is not the lesser creature, but the more advanced one. If this was so, then older, less quick thinking and flexible forms might view us as quite a danger to them. They might even want to imprison us here in our earth, or do worse than imprison us.

And yet, I did not have the feeling that they were hostile so much as stern. They were also at least somewhat frightened of me . was certain of that

In some sense, their emergence into human consciousness seemed to me to represent life

— or the universe itself — engaged to some deep act of creation.

Sitting there at that moment, I suddenly realized that all my questions about whether or not my experiences were real were meaningless. Of course they were real. I had perceived them. A more accurate question was, what were they? They were not entirely mental, at least not in a conventional sense. Other people had witnessed their side effects. The light seen by Jacques Sandulescu on October 4, the scampering heard Annie Gottlieb, and the explosion perceived by myself, my wife, Annie. and my son suggested that whatever happened that night was more than a psychological experience. And the dozens of similar stories being told by such a cross section of the population suggested as well that if a psychological explanation was to be sustained. it would have to be a most radical one.

In one way, as I sat there at my desk in the middle of the night, I found the notion of all this witness reassuring. But in another way it actually seemed dangerous. It was corrosive to my understanding of myself and of reality.

My mind turned, inevitably, to the part of the hypnosis that had covered the apparent event in my childhood. I had no memory at all of being taken when I was twelve, let alone when we were aboard a moving train. And yet people report this experience beginning at all sorts of improbable times, the most improbable being while they are driving cars. If it is some sort of hypnagogic trance, why don't they go off the road, or at least run a light or so during the couple of hours the experience usually lasts?

My sister and father and I did take a trip in 1957 to Madison, Wisconsin, to see my aunt and uncle and their children. On the way back I was horribly sick. We had a drawing room on the Texas Eagle from Chicago to San Antonio, and much of the trip took place at night.