At the age of nine I had been sleeping out with a friend on a lovely Texas summer night when something woke us up in the wee hours, perhaps an owl killing a rat, the stopping of the crickets, or moonset. In any case, we found ourselves awake and deliciously alone in the dark. We went exploring the quiet slips of the night, through our familiar places, the wide lawns and tangled bushes, all transformed by shadows into a new world. The vacant lot behind our house was then an acre of tall sunflowers, taller than either of us boys. We were wandering through these stalks when we heard someone coming toward us. My friend turned and ran. I stood there, then turned and ran as well. When I reached our sleeping bags I was astonished to find him already so completely asleep that I could not wake him up. How could he have gone from running in terror to being dead to the world like that? And why was he still outside at all? Why hadn't he gone running into the house? Again, our behavior was totally at variance with our experience.

He and I also saw a huge object cross the sky one summer night, an event that I have always remembered as particularly strange. I called him after a lapse of twenty five years. We talked for some time, then I asked about those two nights. I told him nothing specific about my other experiences, nor did I discuss visitors. Of the first memory he said, "We were probably just scared by a dog." He had this to say about the second: "Oh, yes, I remember that thing. It was huge. It looked just like a — well, it was strange-looking. And there was a black car." I remembered that, too. Immediately after the object passed overhead an old black car showing no lights went racing down Elizabeth Road in the same direction that the object had gone.

Were these descriptions of events as they had happened, or screen memories? Perhaps, if great care is taken, a method can be devised of finding an answer to such questions, a method more reliable than hypnosis.

I also recalled flying with some people over the roofs of the neighborhood in a thing like a rubber raft, and waking up on more than one morning with bits of grass and twigs in my bed, as if I had been abroad to the night.

There wasn't anything else even that specific, except for a memory of a terrifying round object hanging in some forgotten babyhood sky, and seeing a crowd of big, gray monkeys coming up across the hillside. Apparently this took place at my grandmother's country home when I was about two, which would have been in the summer of 1947.

From the night at age nine to an event in Austin in September 1967, there were few specific recollections except those that emerged under hypnosis, and none was clear. By 1967