At that moment, I felt as if I had opened the door onto my familiar yard at the cabin and found no grass, no flowers, no tall hemlocks. All that was there was limitless, empty blue sky through which, if I crossed the threshold, I would fall forever.

On that note I gave up. It was pushing toward three o'clock in the morning and I was finally so exhausted that I could not stay awake. I went to bed. I do not remember any dreams. When morning came, it brought me only one thought: I had to see this through. I had to understand, as far as possible, what was happening to me.

No matter what it actually was, my inner self was reacting to this very much as if it were a real experience with real people. Over the next few days I faced the fact that I had a relationship with them, despite the fact that I could not even be sure they existed.

I wished that I could believe that the experience had never hurt anybody. But I couldn't believe that, not in view of the terrific stress I had been under. Before I underwent hypnosis, the great and agonizing issue was: Did it happen or not? In other words, was I a victim or a madman? This question was literally chewing up my soul. It was intolerable.

The day before I met Budd Hopkins I almost jumped out a window. I am lucky. I found Hopkins, and he found Don Klein. What if I had turned for help to someone irrevocably convinced that I was the victim of hallucination or psychosis and too inflexible even to entertain another possibility? I might have jumped. Don Klein's open-mindedness in the face of the fearful and the fantastic has been instrumental in helping me to learn to live with uncertainty.

Because of the intelligence of the approach, I became stronger. And with my strength there came, beginning in April 1986, a great deal of research. I read thousands of pages of material about the whole phenomenon and all its scientific and cultural implications.

If visitors are really here, one could say that they are orchestrating our awareness of them very carefully. It is almost as if they either carne here for the first time in the late forties, or decided at that time to begin to emerge into our consciousness. People apparently started to be taken by them almost immediately. but few remembered or reported this until the mid-

sixties. Their involvement with us might have been very intimate, though, right from the beginning. Many of those who have been taken report very early childhood experiences.

some dating from considerably before the first disks were reported after World War II.