"spacemen" had taught me how to build an antigravity machine, which I was constructing in my bedroom. This was in the summer of 1958. I do not remember the genesis of this machine, but I certainly remember building it. There was no magic to the thing; it was only an assembly of electromagnets taken from old motors. The supposed antigravity effect was based on a principle of counterrotation.

When I plugged my assemblage in, there was a great buzzing, the electromagnet to the core of the thing whirled madly. and the lights in the house began to pulsate. The whole thing whined and fluttered. There were showers of sparks. Parental cries of alarm rose from downstairs. As the machine destroyed itself the pulsation of the house lights became a dimming, until the bulbs glowed orange-red. Then they burst to blazing life, a good number of them blowing out in the process.

Finally I managed to pull the plug. Rather than tell my parents what had happened. I rushed downstairs and pretended ignorance. I did not need to pretend fright. The friend reports that I called him m great anxiety and said that I was afraid that the spacemen were mad because I had disturbed their power field.

I have subsequently discovered that there is a whole mythology of flying saucer technology, and a lot of it revolves around the concept of counterrotating magnets. One among the other people I have met who have remembered being taken tells an interesting story. He knows a man, another victim, who was given detailed instructions about how to build a motor of this sort. The man was given the instructions during an abduction experience during the fifties, and claims that he was told that he wouldn't remember a thing until 1985, when he suddenly found his mind full of richly detailed plans.

The exact sizes of the electromagnets and their distances from one another were explained, and there was much about the materials to used. Not having seen these plans, I cannot evaluate them other than to comment that the idea that counterrotating magnets of any kind would produce any unusual energies at all flies in the face of modern magnetic theory.

But he claims that when he built this device, all the metal objects in his barn were instantly pulled toward it and he was knocked out by a flying automobile engine The next day the barn burned to the ground in an unexplained fire.

It would be easier to believe in the truth of all these effects if superconducting coils were used instead of electromagnets. It is awfully hard to see where a field that powerful would be coming from, given our present understanding of magnetism.

I don't really think that details like the construction of a motor can be part of some shared hallucinatory system. Recall that I did not even remember my antigravity machine myself, but rather was told about it by a friend who remembered. My machine was built in 1958.