If I am right about them, it is unlikely that there will ever be the kind of open contact between our two species that seems so logical and useful to us. Even a well-intentioned human being would pose a threat, in that his accidentally taking an action they had not anticipated might cause them literally to lose track of him right in the middle of one of their own craft. Might he not then be able to explore it at will, learn its secrets, and potentially, at least, release all of us into the cosmos?

Can it be that any one of us has the potential to be at once inferior and superior to their entire species?

To contemplate such a notion makes my soul ache with longing to know for certain, and yet also to leap up, as if by some obscure hand it has suddenly been set free.

Hypnosis

FISHING IN THE PAST. PART ONE: THE SHALLOWS

SESSION DATE: March 10, 1 996

SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Vein, MD

[Once we reviewed this apparent past material. Don Klein and I decided to go fishing in it.

This and the next would be the last times that Don would hypnotize me. Despite the fact that many complex experiences took place between April and October of 1986. our interest shifted after March from exploring new material to discovering some physical cause for it.

We will return to hypnosis in the future, but — while it is obviously of great interest — it does not advance any real understanding of the origin of what is happening, only of its content. Why, as I am no longer terrified, the more recent events should still be difficult to remember in their entirety without hypnosis is unclear.

We decided to cover the night at my grandmother's house. the fall of 1980 to New York, and anything else that might be of interest. We both recognized. and I wish to make this clear, that there might well have been a degree of degradation taking place, in the sense that I might have been unintentionally fulfilling expectations of seeing the visitors. While at the time of the hypnosis sessions recorded here and in the next chapter I was still avoiding reading books about anything connected with this sort of material, simply dealing with my own memories must have affected me, altering and changing my perceptions in ways that are probably impossible to detect. Despite this, there was confirmation from another witness that one of my memories was indeed of an extremely strange event.