Into The Fringe
By Karla Turner
A NOTE TO THE READER
All of the people in this account are real. Because of the nature of the events they experienced, however, several people involved have chosen to be identified by pseudonym or by first name only .Whenever a pseudonym is used, it will be noted at that name's first appearance in the story.CHAPTER 3
July 1988
After returning from Oklahoma, Casey and I both felt compelled to spend a lot of time outside at night. We'd walk up the hill near our house, where Casey had been abducted in December, and watch the skies in vague expectancy. It may sound foolish, but we wanted another contact. We were angry enough and determined enough to want answers, and the aliens were the logical place to find them. We referred to them as aliens because they certainly weren't human, but we didn't know if they were interplanetary beings, entities from a different dimension, or something even stranger than we could imagine.
"Is there any way you might be able to contact them?" I once asked Casey as we stood staring up at the stars. "They've apparently been in your life for years. Don't you think they know your thoughts, then?''
"Maybe," Casey conceded, "but I don't think it works like that. They just do what they want to do. I never called out for them to come get me before, anyway, I know that."
"I wonder what I'd do if one of them actually appeared in the house," I said, visualizing such a scene. "I think it would scare me to death. I've been practicing every time I open a door, pretending there's some alien creature standing there staring back at me. And" every time I do it, I get weak."
Casey squeezed my hand. "Don't worry about it," he told me. "Whatever happened, it's over. They don't show up by invitation."
Still, it was a time of great fear for me, wondering if the alien beings were going to come back. I continued to call out to them mentally, asking them either to leave us alone or to appear to us consciously and give us some explanation of what they're doing to us. Or, if that wasn't possible, I asked that they give us warning of their return so that we wouldn't be so frightened if anything else happened.
And then, less than two weeks after our sighting of the UFO, another strange experience took place. On July 7, after entertaining a visitor in our home, we went to bed, but our sleep was anything but peaceful. All night I felt uneasy, the way I'd been back in May when I'd heard the voice in our bedroom. This time I heard several unusual sounds in the house, including a distinct knocking, and I also remember hearing another voice, saying a single word that began with a "K" sound but which was unfamiliar, when I woke up once in the middle of the night. But again I was too frightened to open my eyes, much less to get up and look around.
In the morning when I went into the kitchen to start breakfast, I was shocked to see that our television was on, with the sound muted. Casey and I were both certain that the television had been off when we went to bed, yet it was playing now, and we couldn't figure out how it could turn on by itself. I asked several people who understood televisions and electricity if there were any way a power surge might have activated the set, but the answers were negative. And the fact that our remote control operated on infrared made the event even more puzzling, unless there had been some other infrared source in the house.
We phoned Barbara, knowing she had much more experience with this strange phenomenon than we did, and told her what had happened. She urged us to check our bodies, to look for any unusual scars or marks, and we did so. That was when I discovered two things: a pair of small puncture, wounds about a quarter of an inch apart on my inner left wrist, and three solid white circles on my lower left abdomen. The circles formed an almost perfect equilateral triangle, with sides of 15 millimeters. The puncture marks looked as if they could have been made by two hypodermic needles, and they were fresh, still scabbed, but there was no sensation of pain associated with them. The circles forming the triangle didn't appear to be a wound of any sort—no broken skin, no itching or pain—just three white areas where the pigment had disappeared.
I had no idea what could have caused either of these sets of marks, until Barbara explained that many of the people she worked with turned up similar scars on their bodies after abduction experiences. Now I was really frightened. Consciously, neither Casey nor I remembered any event which could account for the marks, only the strange sounds in the house and the television being on, but that, too, she explained, wasn't unusual.
My later research into books about UFO experiences confirmed this fact, as I read about several instances in which people had encountered UFOs and their occupants and then began experiencing events that were commonly associated with poltergeists: lights turning themselves on and off, for example, and electrical appliances behaving in unusual ways. Even more frequent were reports of UFOs passing over automobiles and causing them to completely lose power, as well as stopping watches which the passengers wore. And airplane pilots coming into proximity with UFOs often complained that the electrical equipment on their craft malfunctioned.
We already knew from Casey's experiences that abductions can occur without the person consciously being aware of the experience, and Barbara confirmed this. Our feelings of helplessness were overwhelming. If these strange beings could come into our homes undetected, do whatever they wished to us, and then leave us with no memory of their presence, how could we ever defend ourselves or resist their intrusions? To this question, unfortunately, Barbara had no answer.
But we didn't give up. We started reading books on the subject, searching for more understanding and hoping to find an account where someone had been able to stop these things from happening. All through the summer I raided bookstores and ordered other books from the library, yet nowhere in my reading did I discover an answer. Still, we were learning a lot. We found out that this phenomenon had been going on for years, at least since the late 1940s, and that in itself was some sort of relief, knowing that we weren't the only ones who'd been through such things. And we kept in touch with the MUFON group in the city, just in case they could help us in some way.
August 1988
In August we received a flyer announcing an upcoming MUFON meeting with a guest speaker we'd never heard of, a man named John Lear, and we decided to go. By this time we had told our son, David, about our experiences, and he simply didn't believe such events could be real. Still, he decided to go with us to the Lear lecture.
The only other person I had confided in was Bonnie, my best friend. I couldn't just blurt out that Casey had been contacted by aliens, so I started by describing Casey's first hypnosis for relaxation.
"When he was under," I said, "he began exploring his subconscious, looking for causes of stress. And he had some pretty strange memories come to the surface."
"What sort of memories?" Bonnie asked.
"Really strange," I hesitated. Bonnie was my closest, oldest friend, yet I was afraid of her reaction to Casey's story. Who could blame her if she thought we were crazy? But I had to take the chance because I needed her support. Gripping the paper with Casey's drawings, I went on. "What he remembered was so strange that we don't know what to make of it."
Bonnie glanced at the paper in my hand and then back up at me. "Why? Is it something horrible?" she asked.
I shrugged. "We have no idea," I said. "But he drew some pictures of what he remembered. Do you want to see them?"
She nodded, and I handed her the paper. Her response was immediate. When I showed her the face, she literally jumped in her chair and tears came into her eyes.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"Why did you respond so emotionally?"
"I don't know, I don't know," she insisted, shaking her head.
But I knew there had to be a reason, so I pressed her. "Why did that drawing make you cry?"
Finally she replied, "I didn't think anyone else knew," but then immediately denied again that there was any reason for her tears.
It occurred to me that Bonnie might have had experiences of her own, for why else would that drawing have brought tears to her eyes? But she assured me that nothing unusual had ever happened involving UFOs or alien beings. Still, she was very supportive. She'd known me for twenty years and had every faith in my honesty and sanity, and she too wanted to go with us to the meeting. At the last minute, David announced that his best friend, James, in whom he had confided, was also interested in going, so the five of us drove into the city in two cars, ours and James's.
Fortunately, we arrived early and managed to get seats near the front, for by the time Mr. Lear began to speak, a crowd of over three hundred had packed the room, spilling out into the hallway. The room was hot, yet we didn't notice once the lecture began, because the information we were hearing was riveting. Lear told about his research, his countless interviews with people who'd had similar experiences, but the most shocking and unbelievable part concerned an alleged government involvement with these alien beings.
Lear, an expert pilot, had flown missions for the CIA and thus had contacts in the intelligence community, and he insisted his information was true. There were bases, he told us, hidden throughout the country where the aliens carried on a variety of bizarre activities, including crossbreeding experiments with humans. And he said that the "invasion" of these beings was already a fact, that the government had made a secret deal with them, giving permission for the abductions to take place in exchange for promises of advanced technology.
But the government had been duped, he said, and in fact had received very little in the way of useful technology, while the aliens had carried on their abductions and experiments far beyond what was allowed by the agreement with our government. And now, he concluded, the government was in a real quandary. For years they had officially denied the existence of UFOs and aliens, but now with the escalation of ET activities, they didn't know how to go about warning the population, much less how to prevent these things from continuing.
Our little group sat listening in apprehension and disbelief. One part of my mind realized how wild and frightening and unsubstantiated Lear's words were. These things could not be true, I insisted, not in the world that we know. "That's just the point, though," another part of my mind interrupted. "The world you knew didn't accommodate UFOs and aliens, but you have them now anyway, don't you?" This split in my feelings confused me as I watched Lear very calmly, very seriously, deliver his message of doom.
"I'm not here to warn you about an alien invasion," he concluded. "The invasion is over, it's already happened."
I glanced around occasionally, wondering if everyone else in the room was as astounded as I, and I noticed that James seemed rather strange. He appeared almost to be in a trance, staring down at the floor, unblinking, and when the lecture ended he hurried out of the room with only a few words of good-bye. Assuming he must have been in a hurry to get back home, perhaps for a late date, or that he had thought Lear's lecture was a waste of his time, we didn't pay much attention to his odd behavior. So the rest of us rode home together, discussing the things we'd heard.
I had promised to let Barbara know what we learned at the lecture, so I almost decided to go to Oklahoma and deliver a report in person. But at the last minute I changed my mind and stayed home. As it turned out, that was a fortunate change of plans, for things were about to get very strange here at home.
The lecture was on a Wednesday, and two days later something happened which gave a whole new turn to the situation. James called David and asked to meet him for drinks at a local bar. David told us about the events of that meeting the next day. He said that when he got to the bar, James was acting strange, untalkative and generally unresponsive, almost wooden. After a couple of drinks, however, James began to loosen up, suddenly telling David some very disturbing things.
James said that all his life he'd been visited by strange beings in his bedroom. When he was young he also sometimes heard noises in the house, and when he got up to check them out, he'd seen a skinny, unknown man dressed entirely in black, who was picking up various things around the house as if examining them. But whenever James would rush into his parents' bedroom to tell them a prowler was in the house, they would reply that he shouldn't worry about it and to go back to bed. Having known James's parents for years, I couldn't believe they would be so unconcerned, yet James insisted they never once bothered to get up and see if he was telling the truth.
But the visitors to his bedroom were different. At first, as a very young child, he was visited by a small creature he called Mr. Greenjeans, because of the greenish glow the creature emitted. The first time this being appeared, James woke up to see all the toys in his room moving about by themselves, and then Mr. Greenjeans approached his bed and told him not to be afraid. James was always paralyzed when the being appeared, and, petrified with fear, he could never remember what Mr. Greenjeans talked about to him. In later years, another being began showing up, a taller, featureless creature who periodically came into the room and also spoke with him, and during these times, too, James would be unable to move or speak aloud, communicating only telepathically.
But more recently, in the past several months while James and David were living in a farmhouse, yet another type of being had been showing up, and this time the visitor was a woman. He said that she always entered his bedroom from an adjacent interior room rather than through the door that led outside, and he found himself paralyzed until she left through the same door. As soon as the woman disappeared, the paralysis left him, and James had often followed after her, searching through the house and out into the yard, yet he'd never been able to locate her anywhere else.
In her last few visits, he told David, which had been almost weekly, he had been able to remember consciously some of what the woman told him.
"One time she was in my room, but it was just her head and her hands," he said. "She was holding two big, round black orbs, and she told me they wanted to remove my eyes and replace them with those things."
Terrified, James objected, saying he didn't want to be blind, but the woman replied, "You'll still be able to see, but you'll see differently." She had also spoken of replacing various other parts of James's body, leaving him in great fright. And in her last visit, the day before the Lear lecture, she had urged James to go somewhere with her.
"Why don't you just come with us?" she had asked.
"I can't," he said, "I'm too afraid."
"What are you afraid of?" she wanted to know. "Are you afraid of the dark, or of something you think is out there in the dark?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "I'm just too scared."
And the woman departed, leaving him once again to question his own sanity, as he'd secretly done for years, ever since he was old enough to know that other people simply didn't encounter bizarre visitors in the night as he'd been doing all his life.
The only reason that James had decided to tell David about these experiences was that he had actually seen the same woman who'd been coming to his room—or someone who looked identical to her—at the Lear lecture, and this convinced him that he wasn't crazy after all. She was standing in one of the crowded doorways when James spotted her, and she kept staring over the audience to where our group was sitting. After the lecture, James saw her leave and hurried away to follow her, determined to confront her and demand to know what she had been doing to him. He said he trailed after her into the parking lot, and when she turned at the corner of the building he was only a few steps behind. But, turning the same corner, he was stunned to see that she was nowhere in sight.
That was the story David heard as he sat drinking with James. Its impact was strong, following on the heels of our own revelations to him, and David urged James to come talk to us. But James said he couldn't do that yet, he'd kept this explosive material to himself for so long, and he was afraid we might tell his parents, something he desperately didn't want. He did give David permission to discuss it with us, however, providing we promised to keep his secret, and David came to us the next day with the entire account.
Our son had not been able to believe the things we'd told him, but now, trusting the story of his best friend with whom he'd grown up, his disbelief was shaken. In fact, he remembered, as we also did, that James had long ago told us about Mr. Greenjeans, but of course at the time none of us thought it was anything more than the active imagination of a very intelligent child, which James was. He and David, a year apart at the same private school, had both been valedictorians, and we'd never known either of them to make up such preposterous tales before.
We listened that Saturday, however, with serious concern and asked David to urge James to talk to us in person. A few days later, James did come over, and we went through the material with him in greater detail. He had difficulty in talking about it, though, struggling to get out the words, and at times our hearts ached for him as tears ran down his face. But when he had finished, he said that for the first time in years he felt a sense of relief, that sharing his experiences with us somehow helped him feel more whole, and certainly more sane.
He talked about some information that had just recently emerged in his mind, apparently from the conversations he'd been having with the woman in his bedroom. For one thing, he now remembered being told that the woman and her group were "interdimensional," rather than physical extraterrestrials from some other planet, and were benevolent toward humans. But, she had said, there were other beings here who weren't interdimensional and who cared nothing about our human feelings and rights. These are the ones, she told him, who do great harm to humans, who think of us as we think of insects.
He also said that the crystals which so many New Age devotees carry can help the interdimensional ones monitor us more easily, although he had no idea how that worked. And, finally, he said that he now felt compelled to make a trip to St. Louis, where his parents grew up and where many of his relatives still lived. He wouldn't tell us why he wanted to make the trip, only that it had something to do with his current experiences, and that he would be leaving the following week. David and his girlfriend Megan came over with James, and they added more, very disturbing, information to what he was telling us. Megan worked 15 miles away in the afternoons, and when she got off work at 10 P.M., she met David and James at the bar the night James had revealed his story. We were surprised to hear Megan's account of that evening, for she told us not only about what James had said, but also about David's responses and actions.
"When James began talking about the woman he'd seen at the Lear lecture," Megan said,
"David suddenly interrupted and gave a complete description of the woman, including her clothing. But when they left and went back to their house, David claimed he'd never said any of it."
"I don't remember that," David commented, shaking his head.
"You did it twice!" Megan exclaimed. "James told you that you really had just described the woman, and you repeated the description word for word, how the woman looked and what she was wearing! And then a couple of minutes later you denied ever having seen her, much less described her!"
James confirmed what Megan told us, that at three different times that night, both at the bar and back at the house, David described the woman and then acted as if he'd never said anything. We questioned David about it then, and he still insisted he hadn't seen the woman at all.
And that wasn't the only strange thing he had done, apparently. When they all left the bar, James drove his own car and Megan drove David home in her car, since David had had too many drinks to drive safely. When they reached the house, an old farmhouse, Megan said that David had acted very strangely, frightening her with his bizarre behavior.
"David just suddenly changed," she told us, "his voice and his eyes changed. And he was scaring me."
"What was he doing?" Casey asked. "How was he scaring you?"
"At the farm, when we got out of the car, David grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me out into the backyard," Megan replied in bewilderment.
"He kept saying, 'Something out there wants to see you,' but I was fighting him and refusing to go," she told us.
"He was really scaring me, pulling on my arm, trying to get me out into the dark part of the yard. Then when James finally drove up, David changed back to normal," she concluded, "and he didn't remember doing any of that. He didn't even remember when we got to the farm."
David grinned in embarrassment and insisted again that he didn't remember what happened that night, not his description of the woman or his attempts to drag Megan into the yard. And that really worried us. He tried to blame his behavior on the fact that he'd had a lot to drink at the bar, but that wouldn't account for the complete change he exhibited when James drove up the driveway. In my next phone call to Barbara, I told her about that night, and she too seemed worried, even more about David's odd behavior than about James's revelations. But she kept her reasons to herself, saying only that she would like to work with David if the opportunity ever arose, and of course with James.
A few days later, James left for St. Louis, after making us all promise not to tell his parents the real reason for the trip. If he'd been any younger, Casey and I wouldn't have hesitated to talk to his parents, but he was twenty-two years old, and we felt we had to respect his wishes, at least for the present.
And we were still very much preoccupied with our own situation. On August 25, as I was taking my shower, I was thinking hard about these recent events and also about a book I'd just finished reading, Transformation, Strieber's second book about his relationship with alien beings. I felt that I had to do something, find some way to communicate with the beings myself, and I remember thinking, "If you are around me right now, invisible, won't you please just give me some sort of sign?"
And when I stepped out of the shower to dry off, I found a solid red triangle had suddenly appeared on my upper left forearm. At first I thought it must be an insect bite, although I hadn't felt anything bite me, or perhaps it was a hive, but the triangle wasn't itching or swollen. Remembering Barbara's instruction to take photos of any unusual marks, I got out the camera and awkwardly managed to shoot a couple of photos. When I took the roll of film to be developed, the mark was still very visible, and the man at the photo shop looked at it. But by noon, three hours after it first appeared, the triangle was completely gone. Whether it was mere coincidence or a deliberate signal, I don't know, but it has never happened again.
Meanwhile, we all waited anxiously for James to return from St. Louis, hoping he'd finally tell us why he'd felt compelled to make the trip. He came back on the twenty eighth, but we didn't have a chance to talk to him until the thirty-first, and he had an astounding story to tell.
But on the night of his return, I got a phone call from Nancy (pseudonym), a woman James had dated on and off, and Nancy was upset and worried. She said James had just made a very strange call to her, asking her about what she'd been doing while he was gone. I didn't learn any other details except that Nancy felt worried about James's state of mind.
"His voice sounded really strange," she told me. "He wasn't making very much sense." So we waited impatiently to hear from him, and when we did, the things he told us added greatly to the mystery.
On the way up from Texas, where we all lived, the route took him through Oklahoma, the same route he'd traveled for years with his family and with which he was very familiar. At MacAlester he filled the car with gas and reset the trip odometer to zero, at his father's request since he was using the family car. By the time he reached Highway 44 near Tulsa, however, he was aware that something strange was going on. For one thing, that part of the journey had been incredibly short, taking only about 45 minutes, and for another his odometer registered only 37 miles. In actuality, the trip should have taken much longer, since the distance between the two places was at least 100 miles. And, conversely, on another stretch between two small towns only eight miles apart, James insisted that he drove for an hour.
"Later on that day," he said, "I suddenly felt something in my mind telling me to pull over to the side of the road and look to the left. So I did, and there was a very bright light in the sky, making a circular motion in the sky. I watched it come to a dead stop, and then it just sort of hovered, but there were a lot of colors flashing all around it. When it did that, it shot off really fast, out of view."
He told us that the reason for the trip was a command that had been given him by the woman in his bedroom, that he was supposed to go to a certain hill on Saturday night. But the closer it came to the time for him to go, the less he wanted to do it. "The weather was sort of misty, real spooky," he said, "and I thought it would be crazy to go out on a hill somewhere like that. So I tried to turn the car around and go back to my grandparents' house, but I couldn't make myself do it. I had a really strong urge to drive to the hill, and I fought it with all my strength. My arms wouldn't do what I wanted them to. I kept saying 'No, no!' over and over, but finally I just gave up."
Once he reached the hill, he parked and opened the trunk of his car to get out a camera and tape recorder, but again, as if not in control of his will, he couldn't take the equipment with him. "I saw them lying in the trunk," James said, “but I must have lost my mind because I just figured, why bother?"
Night came on as he sat on the hilltop, feeling quite alone and rather silly, he said. For a while, nothing unusual happened, and then three bright lights appeared in the sky. He watched as they went through an intricate series of motions, making a circle in unison and then stopping, as the single light he'd seen earlier had done, emitting colored sparks before departing. After they vanished, he heard a voice in his head saying, "See how easily we made you come to this place? You don't have any control over it. In the future, when you're supposed to go to a certain place, you'll be made to go there. Don't worry about it, there's nothing you can do to stop it."
At that point, thoroughly upset, James left the hilltop and drove to his relatives' home. There he undressed and went to bed, only to suddenly find himself back on the hilltop, completely dressed, in the company of the woman who'd been coming to his bedroom!
Whereas before, at home, the woman had appeared in a variety of ways, sometimes in full form and at other times showing only her head and hands, this time the woman seemed very corporeal.
"She was dressed like a real person," James explained, "in jeans and a T-shirt. And she was nice that time, nicer than she'd ever been before."
In fact, James said he actually felt comfortable with her, talking and listening to the many things she told him. "She wasn't scaring me, talking about replacing parts of my body," he told us.
"What was she saying, then?" I asked.
James shrugged. “I think she was trying to make me feel better about all this stuff. She told me that very long ago I'd made a decision, and that had really decided every other decision since then."
She said he had a specific task—a set of tasks, in fact—to accomplish in the future, within five years. And as she told him all these things, he saw images of David, of us, and other people he knows involved in this future task together. She also told him, without explaining what it meant, that we would be “moved'' into other bodies.
And, as proof that her messages should be trusted, she gave him bits of information about the future which, as they occurred, would show him that she could somehow see across time and know the future events that awaited humanity. One of the things she told him was a conversation taking place far from St. Louis, back in our hometown. James's ex-girlfriend Nancy, the woman said, was conversing with her date at that very moment, and she told him details of that conversation. When he got back home, James called Nancy, questioning her about the date, and Nancy's description of what was said matched that of the woman on the hill. Much more was told to him by the woman, but he hasn't been able to remember it all. The next thing James was aware of was sitting on the front porch of his relatives' home, fully dressed, with no idea of how he'd gotten to the hill or been returned.
A feeling of great apprehension, a real sense of fear, pervaded the room as we all sat listening to James's story. We asked him if he had any idea what was actually going on with these beings, hoping that some of his unremembered information might be nudged to the surface. And, at a later time, James did tell us more about the overall situation, what he understood to be a coming time of battle. But at first he only discussed the personal significance he'd felt about the events of his trip. To him, it seemed that the whole exercise was designed to alleviate his doubts about his sanity.
"The lights in the sky, the odometer, the speeding up and slowing down of time, the woman on the hill—all these things had been very, very real," he concluded. "I think that was why I was sent to St. Louis. They wanted to prove it to me, so I couldn't deny it was real anymore."
Casey and I could only look at each other, bewildered. If his experiences were real, and if he were truly involved in this bizarre reality, then so were we. He had been shown a future time when he would be activated to perform his "task," and he had seen us working with him.
Chapter 4
Sometimes I still tried to pretend that it was all in our imaginations. We overreacted, I told myself, we let paranoia into our thinking, so that now we saw evidence of alien influence everywhere. Afraid to sleep at night, compelled to watch the stars, sometimes disturbed by the books I read about UFOs, yet I couldn't keep from reading more. Conventional logic insisted that such things couldn't be true, and so did the honest desire of my heart. This was not what I wanted reality to be.
I traced the sequence of events back to the very beginning, trying to rationalize the situation. How to account for all the people in my life who now claimed to have had experiences? James must have got it from David, who heard it from us. Casey picked it up from me, I picked it up from Hopkins's book, Missing Time, and the book was motivated by the class project I assigned on unusual phenomena. But where, I wondered, did the motivation for the assignment come from? And why would so many people pick up on the topic and proclaim their own experiences falsely, especially these usually skeptical individuals? Did it make more sense to believe in telepathy, to believe that people I trusted would all suddenly fabricate such stories, than to believe they were telling their own truths?
No matter which way I thought about it, the one thing I couldn't get around were the crafts we had variously seen. I remembered Casey talking about the metallic sphere in December, and I believed James had seen the craft twice on his trip to St. Louis. Most compelling, of course, were the lights and the craft witnessed by three of us in Oklahoma. At the time it seemed like a confirmation of the reality Casey had seen under hypnosis, and that's how it worked now. Every time I'd be just about convinced that there was nothing to fear, I'd remember the dull metallic darkness of the flattened hull reflected in the green and white and red lights, coming directly down toward us, and I knew it was all real.
Still, it was one thing to face such a reality privately with my husband, for we were mature people with plenty of experience in the surprises and crises of life. But it was quite another to see the same bizarre phenomenon descend upon my child. At first, I had thought that only Casey had ever been involved, then I'd begun to have my own experiences, and now there was James. How much longer, I wondered, before David would be waking up hearing things in his bedroom, or seeing strange lights in the sky over the farm? Research showed that the phenomenon often occurs among members of the same family, or among a group of friends, so I sometimes asked people I knew, very discreetly, about their own unusual experiences. We'd asked David early on, of course, at a time when he didn't believe such things actually occurred, and he assured us he'd never gone through anything that didn't have a logical explanation.
Research also indicated, however, that many experiences of alien encounters are only remembered as dreams or as occurring when the person is in a dream state of some sort. And now David was beginning to have UFO dreams—and doubts. The first dream early in August involved the landing of two spacecraft and mental communication between David and an alien occupant of the ship. Later in the dream, another type of UFO craft appeared and also landed, and the odd little alien who emerged delivered a message: the time had come for "the human diaspora." When David told me about the dream, I thought it was something brought on by all the things we'd told him about our own experiences. Still, the alien's message was a total surprise. Nowhere in our conversations had such an idea ever arisen, and David didn't even know what "diaspora" meant.
Then, on August 11, he went through a very real experience that couldn't be dismissed so easily. He went to bed late, about 1:30 A.M., expecting to fall asleep quickly. Instead, he began to feel a strange sensation, building up suddenly and rapidly, in his head.
'It was something I felt,'' he said,”not saw or heard. My immediate thought was that my persona was about to leave my body through my head—up and out."
He was frightened at first, but then he tried to concentrate on the feeling and form some objective description of it. That's when he became aware of a sound, "like a loud electric buzz," yet he knew it wasn't an overtly audible sound. It felt more as if he were hearing it internally, as if, he said, "something was getting on the auditory nerve between my ears and my brain."
The second thing he became aware of then was a great pressure inside his skull, a feeling of inflation that gave him, oddly enough, no sense of pain. "When I thought about it some more," David said, "I could sense that it wasn't just a general pressure, but seemed focused at a certain point behind my forehead, as if there were an incredibly, enormously powerful light there, although," he added, "I could see nothing, as my eyes were closed."
This point source of pressure was hard for him to describe. It seemed like "a cylinder of energy/force/light/ buzz/pressure'' coming in through the top of his skull and reaching about halfway down into his head. After concentrating on this feeling for a couple of minutes, David said, he stopped focusing and just relaxed, and that's when it stopped.
For David, the whole experience had been curious but brief, apparently nothing to really worry about. But I had learned enough from Barbara, as well as from Casey's past experiences, to know that such memorable brief events were often all that was consciously recalled from much more significant, complex situations. I was afraid, with good reason, that my son was no longer exempt, if he ever had been, from alien intrusion.
And I wondered about his girlfriend Megan. Taking Barbara's advice to question our acquaintances, I asked Megan if there'd ever been any strange occurrences in her life.
"Oh, no," she answered, "there's never been anything unusual." I was relieved to hear it and was about to change the subject when she unexpectedly continued.
"Except there was that time," she said, "when I saw the monkey in the window."
Megan had lived all her life in a large city, and I couldn't imagine how a monkey might have turned up in the neighborhood, so I asked her to explain.
"I was ten or eleven," she replied, "and I was taking a nap in the den one afternoon. I woke up and sat up on the couch, and that's when I saw it. There was a gray monkey bobbing up and down outside the kitchen window."
"What did you do?" I asked. "Did you get up to have a closer look?"
"No," she said, "I just sat there watching the monkey."
"Well," I pressed, "didn't you say anything? Did you yell for anyone else to come see it?"
But she shook her head negatively. "And that's all," she continued, "unless you count the time I woke up in my sister's bedroom—I was maybe twelve at the time—and there was a slide show or something going on, up on the wall."
"Slides of what?" I asked.
"Oh, a lot of different things," Megan said. "I can't remember everything, but I do remember seeing the moon. At least I thought it was the moon, and there were two spaceships of some sort flying around. Then they crashed into each other and exploded, and the whole moon blew up. A lot of white stuff started falling onto the earth, and I saw all the people running out to pick it up and eat it."
It was a pretty strange thing to see on the bedroom wall in the middle of the night, we agreed, and I asked if she remembered anything else.
"Well, not really," Megan said, "although there was this thing in the sky. I saw it when I was real young. I was playing outside with some other kids, and I remember looking up and seeing a huge gray shape going over the garage. I thought it was a giant fish."
Of course, I didn't want to frighten Megan by telling her how much these things sounded like screen memories, protective disguises of events too frightening to face. I wondered what she might discover if she ever went through regressive hypnosis. And I also wondered how many other people had strange recollections, strange events in their past, that had been dismissed because they couldn't be understood. Casey and I had done the same thing, relegating those odd scenes and memory gaps to the very back of our thoughts, until events forced them to the forefront once again.
"There must be other people like us out there," I remarked to Casey, "with no idea of the things hidden in their pasts. I wonder if they are also beginning to find out. And I wonder why we haven't heard anything about this before. There are several million people in this part of the state! Surely some of them must have been abducted or have seen UFOs, too."
At the end of August, one of those people came into our lives. I received a phone call from a man in the city named Fred, who had gotten our number from the MUFON group. He had been plagued with nightmares and frightening memories of a strange night in New York the previous October, and when he'd discussed it with a friend, she'd suggested he contact the study group to see if they could help. And they passed him on to us, since we were the only ones they knew who were going through current experiences.
When Fred first came out to meet us, it was apparent that he'd been through a real trauma. He was visibly agitated and excited at the same time, and after we began talking, his story poured out. He had a bizarre UFO sighting back in 1973, with two relatives. They watched a flying craft cavort through the sky, and then it transformed into a giant image of a bearded man dressed in a long, belted robe, with his arms outstretched.
But it was his visit to New York in October that concerned him most. He was staying alone in a friend's apartment, collapsing in bed after hours of walking the streets alone, and when he awoke he was covered with bruises and scratches all over his back. But he had no memory of how they got there, only snatches of memories that made no sense. And now he was suffering from nightmares and fears, all associated with UFOs.
We couldn't do anything more than listen to Fred's story and share our own experiences with him. He left, however, feeling less alone in this strangeness, and we promised he could contact us any time he needed to talk. We also said we'd tell Barbara about him and make arrangements for them to meet. Fred had read Communion and knew enough to want to try hypnosis, to explore the things that had happened to him in New York. He also was worried about a few episodes of missing time he'd experienced recently, working alone on the night shift. We talked about all these things and assured him he could phone us whenever he was frightened or went through some new experience. Sympathetic support was all we could offer, though, having no answers ourselves and not even being sure of the questions.
September 1988
In early September we went back to Oklahoma for another round of regressions, and this time I planned to undergo hypnosis myself. On our first visit there, Casey's experiences were all we really knew about, but since then enough odd things had happened to me to warrant my own exploration through regression. While we were with Barbara, a constant stream of people passed through her house, so we learned in a very short time just how pervasive this phenomenon can be. Several people we met there told us of their UFO sightings and experiences, but the most astounding story came from Ellen (pseudonym), a woman who lived on a northern ranch with her husband. A UFO had once caused a stampede of their herd, Barbara told us, but Ellen's visit to Oklahoma had nothing to do with Barbara's research.
Having tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to have a baby, Ellen was in town visiting a woman who'd agreed to be a surrogate mother for her and her husband. She told us of the many pregnancies she'd been through, only to have them terminate in miscarriage, and her dream of finally having a child now seemed to be within reach.
As we talked, Barbara asked if Ellen had had any unusual dreams lately, a common question to all her visitors. Ellen replied that, yes, she'd had a frightening dream a few nights earlier, in which a woman had threatened to take the baby from the surrogate mother. In the dream, Ellen had to fight very hard to stop the woman from taking the unborn child and had awakened in great fear.
Barbara asked if she'd dreamed of this same woman in the past, and Ellen said no. "But I've seen her when I wasn't sleeping," she added.
Prompted by Barbara to tell us her story, we sat listening as Ellen described her first encounter with the woman. She was in a doctor's examining room, lying on the table alone, when a strange woman suddenly appeared. Ellen didn't tell us all the details of their conversation, which had been several years before, but her impression was that the woman was somehow an ancestor who had previously lost her own children. Ellen thought the woman was resentful of her pregnancies and therefore had been responsible for the miscarriages.
There had been two other such encounters, she said, and that was why she fought so hard in her recent dream to protect the surrogate mother's fetus. Then Barbara asked Ellen to describe the woman, and we listened in astonishment to an almost identical description of the woman who was coming to James's bedroom!
This wasn't the only surprise for us. I had decided to attempt a hypnotic exploration of one of my own unusual memories, but I didn't expect to find anything alien such as turned up in Casey's regressions. Odd things had happened to me during the summer, to be sure, but I still felt that it was Casey, not I, who had been touched by the alien phenomenon earlier in life. I held on to the belief that all the unusual memories from my past would turn out to have mundane explanations if I explored them. Barbara, however, had questioned me about anything strange I remembered, and one puzzling but apparently inconsequential memory caught her attention. So, on the last day of our visit, she put me into a trance and led me through an event which had occurred years before.
I had been driving back alone from my parents' home, a trip of 240 miles, when I saw ahead of me on the interstate a large black cloud descending rapidly. It covered both lanes and the shoulders, so there was no way around it, and it appeared so suddenly that I couldn't apply my brakes in time to avoid it. It was daytime, and the darkness of the cloud stood out in stark contrast, with curling edges and a density that made it almost appear to be solid. I remember driving up to it, and I also remember driving down the interstate past the cloud, seeing it behind me in my rearview mirror, but I never remembered actually driving through it. That, and the cloud's sudden appearance, were all that had made it stand out in my memory.
Barbara began the regression by setting up the scene, having me describe the car, the countryside, and the weather. "This is such a boring drive, mostly," I told her. "But this is the pretty part, so I can look around and enjoy it, the trees and hills. There must not be much traffic now, I'd just be looking around. And I look back to the road. It's like the sun's not so bright anymore. I'm just wondering if it's gonna rain because the sun's overcast now.
"And then there's this crawling, sort of curling black stuff. It's like smoke, coming from the right and just going across the road. And it's making me feel bad, Barbara,"
I stopped, beginning to feel afraid. Barbara expertly reassured me that I was safe and able to look at the experience, so I started up again.
"It's coming, crawling black stuff," I said. "Something dark is coming across the road beside me. At first, I just seem to see these 'finger' tendrils, and then it's all a huge black cloud. It sweeps in front of me, and it's so fast I think it's a storm, but it hasn't been like a storm before now. So I'm wondering what this sudden weather thing is. And I'm going to just drive through it, because I can't slow down in time to stop."
"Are you aware of any other cars passing you or in back of you?'' Barbara asked.
"I was looking off to the left before I looked back to the road," I explained, "and when I looked back there weren't any cars between me and that cloud, I don't remember looking behind me. And I think I'm driving into it. Suddenly I can't see anything, it's dark all around the windows. I'm looking up trying to see if I can see the sky through it. I don't see anything."
"Can you still see inside the car?"
"Yeah," I replied, "I can still see inside the car, I just can't see outside. There's nothing on the windshield. I'm holding the steering wheel real tight, and I'm leaning up close to it, looking up to see why it's all over me. It's like being in a black room, only there's light where I am."
When I seemed unable to get beyond this scene, Barbara deepened my level of concentration and then moved me ahead to the next thing I could recall happening.
"Oh, Barbara," I told her, "I don't know if this is it, really."
Even in the trance, I wanted to reject the images flooding into my mind. "But I'm lying down, and I see that I don't have any shoes on. I'm covered up with something white, but it's not over my feet, about to the middle of my calves. That's what I see. It's like I'm waking up or trying to wake up. I can move my head just this much. I don't know what I'm lying on."
"Can you move your body at all?" she asked.
"I can't even feel it," I replied. "I can move my head. I'm not thinking anything."
"Look around you," she instructed. "What can you see?"
"It's like real soft lighting, sort of peachy or pink. And I can't see above me."
"What is taking place?" she prompted.
"I feel like I just woke up, I don't feel aware of very much. There's more space over here that I can't see, but the white goes all around as far as I can tell. I can't feel my body. I don't see what I'm lying on, it's not showing down there. I must be perfectly comfortable, I can't feel anything. But I feel my ear hurting."
"Which ear?" Barbara asked.
"The right ear, just at the edge of the inside," I tried to explain. "There was just a burning sort of thing, but I can feel it. It's not bad."
"How long did that pain last?"
"I can still feel it a little," I admitted. "It's not bad. But I feel it again a little harder now, down low. I feel my ear being pulled over this way, and that hurts. My ear, the lobe stretches a little."
"Is it stretching by itself?" Barbara asked, hoping to find out exactly what was being done.
"I don't think I'm looking," I answered evasively.
"Can you experience anything at all?" she persisted.
"I know there's some motion," I said after a moment. "I mean, there's just a sense of movement. And I don't know anything at all about what's going on. I feel like there's movement, if I could look, like some people moving. But I can't see anyone, not yet."
"But you're aware of movement to your left," she repeated.
"Uh-huh," I told her, "because you can see that the light changes as things move around in it. That's why I think there's more than one person moving. I think I feel reassured. I don't feel scared."
Barbara questioned me a while longer, but I was unable or reluctant to remember much more. When she asked if I had ever been in that place before, a pain flared up in my side, and I asked her to bring me out of the trance, which she soon did.
This was my first attempt at hypnotic regression, and I found it hard to relax and give myself up to deep trance. Still, the things I saw seemed very real, even if disjointed, yet I tried to explain the whole thing away as the product of my imagination. I had read enough to know that my recollections pointed to some physical intrusion into my ear, perhaps an implant of some sort, or a probe. But since I'd read so much about abduction experiences, it was easier to tell myself that the recollections had been conjured up from the books, not from my own past. Several months passed before I tried regression again, and looking back now I can see that it was my fear which made me wary and resistant to the experiences I had recalled the first time. My heart still rejected the belief that aliens existed or that they had been interfering in our lives, even though my mind knew differently.
I didn't want it to be true, but I feared, increasingly, that it was. Either that, or there were many otherwise normal people in the world who were all having the same sort of mental aberration. As time went on and we heard the same story over and over again from more people, Casey and I finally had to accept the reality of this phenomenon and find a way to understand and cope with it. But it was too early for that now—we were consumed with discovering exactly what was going on, not why.
One other piece of information turned up during our visit with Barbara which shed light on an experience I'd had earlier, back in May. At that time, I was awakened hearing voices in the bedroom during the night, telling me of the "eliomi" or "elianni." At least, that was the closest I could come to transcribing what I heard, and I knew it wasn't an exact reading. Whatever had been said, the word made no sense to me then. But in a book I picked up in Oklahoma in September, The Goblin Universe, by Ted Holiday and Colin Wilson, I came across references to early Gaelic mythology that echoed that nighttime conversation.
"The Ellyllon were pygmy elves or nature spirits," I read, "a name derived from the Welsh el, a spirit, which in turn came from the Hebrew Elohim-God. Such spirits have always been known to objectify materially on occasion, although this is usually in remote country places." Maybe in Wales, I thought, but there was nothing very remote about my bedroom! Going further, I read, "There are many sorts of fairy or nature spirits ranging from the tiny Ellyllon . . . to the wandering Sighes, Elohim, or Trooping Fairies whose illusions and paranormal hoaxes are an intrinsic part of the flying saucer story."
Could that be what the voice in the bedroom was saying? Were the beings who spoke to me calling themselves by the Gaelic term? Later in my research, I did come across other references to alien beings speaking in that ancient language. Most notable was the case of Betty Andreasson, recounted in Raymond Fowler's book, The Andreasson Affair. During one hypnotic regression, Betty Andreasson suddenly began speaking in an unrecognized language, which was duly reported in phonetic terms. One reader of the book later contacted Fowler and said the language matched remarkably well with old Gaelic. When translated, the message read, "Children of the northern peoples, you wander in impenetrable darkness. Your mother mourns." But I could only wonder what message the voice in the bedroom intended for me.
As soon as we returned home, David and James were eager to talk to us. While we were away, James had another episode of missing time, with no memory of what had happened during the two-hour gap.
He and David arrived shortly, and we gathered in the living room, anxious to hear his account. By this point I had begun keeping a journal, first of Casey's experiences and then later adding material about all of us. So, for accuracy, I turned on the tape recorder and got a complete record of James's story.
"It was fifteen till midnight," he told us, "and I decided I'd go to Whataburger and grab a hamburger. So I just got up, got in the car, went and got a Whataburger, and came back."
“Did you eat it in the car?" I asked.
"No," he replied, "I just went to the drive-through and came right back and came into the house and looked at the clock, and it was 2:30."
"Was the hamburger warm?" I wondered.
"No, it was cold," James said. "And I didn't even think about that! There's so many things I don't think about. I reached in there [the sack] and thought, 'Umm, okay, french fries,' and I grabbed a french fry, ate the french fries, and they were cold. And I was mad. I thought, 'Damn,' you know."
That wasn't all that had happened in our absence, James continued. "I was sitting on the couch, and it was late at night. And all of a sudden, the couch started hopping up and down, and then this footstool started hopping, I mean, really hopping. It was shaking me! And then it stopped, just like that, and I got up and looked under the couch, you know, pick up the cushions. I went outside and tried to peek under the house and see if maybe it was something underneath hitting the floor. And I thought, 'Okay, I'm gonna tell David about this,' and then it was two days later before I remembered!"
James paused, still confounded by his forgetfulness of the experience, and David remarked that James had been remembering more of the things the strange woman had told him. We asked James, who nodded in agreement.
"Yeah," he replied, "they said they were nine dimensional. And for them the tenth dimension was like time to us."
The girl had told him this, and he found it odd that more recently she was switching back and forth referring to herself sometimes as "I" and other times as "we."
We wanted to know if he remembered anything about where the woman came from, but he didn't. All he could tell us was that the woman warned him about some other "beings" who have learned how to use the fourth and fifth dimensions, but who weren't spiritually developed.
"She said to be careful of them," James explained. "She said to be very, very careful." And it was his understanding that the woman was warning him about the Grays, the typical being described by so many people who are abducted. The same beings whom Casey had seen during regression, taking him as a young child, later abducting him to perform a nasal implant and to have sex with one of their females, and most recently taking him half a block from our home, cutting his leg and telling him it was time to remember!
It's impossible to describe how we felt then. We had learned a lot about our past experiences through hypnosis, but here we were faced with a current situation in our midst. James was still agitated from the missing time episode and the "hopping" couch incident, and we were frightened for him, as well as for our son and Megan, living in the same house.
A few days later, more strange things occurred, in the onset of what proved to be months of disturbances and encounters. Throughout the fall and winter, we felt literally under siege from forces and entities we couldn't fathom, yet we all tried to keep it secret from the rest of our family and friends. Jobs had to be carried on, houses kept in order, classes taught—the flow of our "normal" lives—but the strain was growing.
One Friday night, I became generally upset, so frightened for David and the others that I begged Casey to take me to the farm to check on them. He drove us over, but since I was so upset he left me in the car and went inside for a few minutes. When he returned, he assured me that they were all three quite all right. The next morning, I simply couldn't wake up. No matter how hard I tried or how much tea I drank, I was in a daze the entire day, yet I had no reason to be so exhausted.
The fear continued, and I became determined to stay up all Saturday night at the farm and watch over the three sleeping young people. My plans were interrupted, however, by the presence of James's younger brother Lucas (pseudonym). Lucas knew nothing about what was going on, nor did James want him to, which meant our conversation was severely limited. By 2:45 A.M. it became clear that he didn't plan to leave before we did. So reluctantly we went home for the night.
The next morning I called to see if anything had happened. At First the only response was that Megan had heard strange noises in the house, waking up three different times. The first sound that disturbed her was James's bedroom door opening and closing, but when she nudged David awake and asked him to check it out, he replied sleepily that she'd only heard the cat.
The second noise she heard was the sound of heavy, crunching footsteps in the front yard, near the picnic table, about twenty feet from her bedroom window, which was open. And the last thing she remembered hearing was a frightfully loud, long train rumbling nearby, which never seemed to pass, followed by the hoot of an owl.
It wasn't until the next day, however, that James told us what had happened to him that same night. He began by saying that two days earlier, when David and Megan were staying at Megan's apartment, James woke up standing in David's bedroom. His arms were outstretched over his head, and he came awake hearing himself say, "I made it! I made it back!" and grinning wildly. But he had no idea where he might have been or why he was in that room instead of his own.
Then on Saturday night, after the others were asleep, James had another visit from the strange woman. She came through the interior door, and this time he was appalled to see that she was angry with him. She scolded him for sitting around and doing nothing. She said he had important things to be doing and that he should get up and start on them.
At that, James exploded. All the anger, frustration, and fear built up inside him came bursting out, and he said he raged at her and at his own inability to understand what was happening to him. He screamed at her, complaining,”Every time I think about all this, I just get more confused, and the more confused I get, the harder it is to think about it! What the hell is going on?"
He was demanding answers, but the woman gave him none. Instead, she suddenly left off her own complaints and began trying to calm him down. She made him lie down on the bed, and then she lay beside him, telling him to rest and find himself again. As they lay there, three balls of light, about the size of basketballs, suddenly whooshed in through the window and whizzed around the room. A voice came from the lights, saying, "Listen to her, believe it, you're not ready," as if in response to his raging demands. The lights whizzed around a little more before disappearing back out the window, and James eventually fell asleep.
Listening to this bizarre story, we could understand how James had doubted his own sanity for so long. If such a thing had happened to us, we would surely have doubted ourselves, too, and yet James had been visited by many stranger events than this, throughout his life.
On Sunday, the next day, the strangeness continued, this time affecting Megan. In the afternoon she went out into the front yard of the farm, beyond which stretched almost five acres of field bounded by a road and a railroad track. She was watching the road where a policeman had stopped a car, but then her attention was drawn to a stand of trees by the track. "I saw this strange, shimmery glow of color formed between the trees," Megan said, "really pretty."
And then she heard a sharp, quick noise and felt a blast of cold air, "sort of like the vents of air that surprise you in a funhouse,'' she explained.
The sudden blast sent a shock of adrenalin racing through her system, but just as suddenly as she'd been exhilarated, she was drained of all her energy and almost fell to the ground in a faint.
James and David noticed her erratic movements as she tried to walk back to the house, so they rushed out and helped her inside. "It was like she was totally dazed out," David said. "Both of us had to hold her up and just drag her to the porch."
Megan collapsed on the couch, unable to speak or even open her eyes for almost half an hour, and then the feeling of exhaustion went away and she recovered. Afterwards, however, she had very little memory of the fainting spell, though she still recalled vividly the glowing color in the trees, the blast of air, and her collapse in the field.
The next night, what little peace of mind I still had was destroyed by an experience I tried to think of as a dream. I was lying down with Casey when I felt the whole bed start to shake, and when I tried to move, I found I was paralyzed. I couldn't even speak, but somehow I finally managed to whisper a prayer, asking the god of truth and love to make this frightening force go away. I repeated the prayer again and again, until the paralysis broke, but the bed shook even more violently as my strength increased.
At last I was able to sit up and pound my fists on the bed, demanding out loud that the force must leave me alone, and then the shaking stopped. I tried to rouse Casey and tell him what had happened, but he rolled over sleepily without responding. At that point, three women came in and approached me. They held me comfortingly and told me, "You did the right thing. You passed the test."
The next thing I recall was actually sitting up in the bed, with Casey asleep beside me. Once again I tried to wake him up, and once again he refused to be roused. I described the dream experience into my tape recorder, feeling the need to remember it in every detail, and then I turned out the light and fell back asleep. But when I woke up the next morning, I was drained and weak. I spent the day completely exhausted, giving in, on and off, to the urge to cry before finally calling my friend Bonnie to come for a visit.
While we were together, I got a phone call from George Andrews, a researcher with whom Barbara was working on a book. He told me about a car wreck his daughter had just been involved in, which had left her seriously injured, a wreck for which there was no logical cause. This news really frightened me, because only three days earlier Barbara's daughter-in-law had been badly hurt in a similar wreck, the cause of which had baffled the investigating police officers. The two young women had received serious injuries to their mouths. I was frightened because Barbara had recently been warned by two different men—one a self-proclaimed psychic to whom she paid little attention, and the other a man whose occasional predictions had proven more reliable—to discontinue her research and not to reveal what she was finding out from the people whose experiences she had explored. That meant, of course, that she shouldn't contribute material to George's book.
They had been warned, and now their children were suffering. What's next, I wondered, scared by the thought that these beings might deliberately be hurting people and afraid of what I might have brought onto my own family by exploring this phenomenon myself. I was filled with the idea that the best thing I could do was to get absolutely out of the entire UFO situation: no more books or journals or notes or tapes or contacts with anyone involved in this thing. At no time, before or since, have I felt such fear, blinding my logic and leaving me to react instinctively and protectively. We were in a nightmare world, helpless.
And then James phoned. He wanted to tell me about a dream he'd had the night before, the same night I'd felt the bed shaking.
In James's dream, he was a little child, perhaps three years old, sitting with a group of other children who were being told a story by an older person. The storyteller looked like James also, but a James twenty-three years old, as he was now, not three. When I heard his dream, I asked him to come over and record it in the journal I was keeping of his experiences. What follows is that account of the dream.
"Once upon a time there was a young prince," James began. "This prince looked around at his world and saw that evil things were happening, and he wanted to stop the evil. So he told his friends, 'There must be someone causing all this evil, so I'm going to go out and search through the world until I find the evil person. Then I'll make him stop.'
"So he roamed all over, meeting and talking to everyone he could, trying to find out who was causing the evil things to happen. But no matter how much he looked, for years and years, he couldn't find an evil person. At last, however, he met a sorcerer, who told him that the cause of the evil was under the ocean. The prince was unable to get down under the ocean, and the sorcerer was unable to help him.
"So the prince returned to his kingdom and stayed there for a year. But he could see that the evil things were still happening and, in fact, increasing throughout the world. Finally, then, he resolved to take up his search again and try to end the evil. Once again, he roamed through the world looking for the evil man, but the man was not found. And once again, the prince met another sorcerer, and this wizard was able to show him how to get under the ocean. '
"The prince did as the wizard told him and made his way under the ocean and began to fight against the cause of evil. Meanwhile, back in his kingdom, the friends of the prince waited anxiously for his return, but the prince remained below the sea. After a long, long time passed, the friends became really worried and decided that they would also go down under the ocean themselves and help the prince in the battle. So they managed to get down under the water, and there they found the prince. They rallied around him and fought in unison, and the evil was finally defeated.
"The moral of the story is that you need your friends in the fight against evil: one man cannot defeat it on his own, but by banding together, our strength can be great enough to win."
The message went straight to my heart. An hour before, I was ready to run away, hopeless, and hide, but here was a message of hope. Could we really fight this awful situation, I wondered, did part of the answer lie in uniting with our friends in some way? And how? What is the battle we face? It was no longer merely a question of what is going on, but of how can we make it stop.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/04/part-3-into-fringeseptember-1988-march.html
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