As evening fell last February 16, we were driving across west Texas toward San Antonio, still about four hundred miles out. We were at a point where we could stay on IH-10 or turn off and take the old road, Highway 90, into the city.

At that point, a sequence of events began that would end with a close encounter experience, or rather, a meeting, in the tiny town of Marathon, Texas, some time after midnight on the 17th. I will start out by saying that I still don?t know what the visitors are. In fact, this experience has probably raised more new questions than it has closed old ones. But it was an extraordinary experience that left me in a phenomenal state that, while it lasted, was unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

I know why the event happened. I have begun work on a new book about the grays. The book matters to them. This is clear. When I started Communion, there was a device on my desk, a version of which can be seen in the Rocket Pictures video of one of the grays. I do not know what this device is called, but I know what it does because I have had one in my life. (It is the green flashing light seen hopping up and down camera right in the video during the death throes of the visitor being taped.) It never intruded into my thoughts, but it gave me access to something, at the time, that I could only use in a vague sort of a way: a vast personality with immense experience, not kind, not cruel, but full of knowledge of being. In a way, it was a bridge between souls.

Later, as you may remember, two of the grays showed up in a bookstore with Wm. Morrow & Co. editor Bruce Lee and let him know that Communion was a load of mistakes. Naturally, they were lying. It is not a load of mistakes. It is accurate, and people sensed that, which is why they responded to it.

This time, there is no such device. There is no effort to communicate with me at all. Despite what was said about Communion, this time there is a level of trust.

This has come not because I have somehow become willing to lie about them, but because I have apprehended more of the truth, including the dark parts of it. It?s why I?ve got another book. It will be balanced.

On that night, we reached the point where Highway 90 branches off IH 10. I looked at the map and something seemed to sort of click inside me. I felt that I had to get to Marathon, Texas, and that I was behind schedule. There is a lovely old hotel there. I telephoned them from the car and reserved a room. I knew which one it would be: Room 23. Time was important. I didn’t know why. I wasn?t even thinking in terms of close encounters.

We went racing down the dark, empty highway at speeds sometimes far in excess of my usual sedate pace. I was literally frantic to get to the Gage Hotel. We stopped in Alpine for a quick hamburger. By that time, I had already entered an altered state. I was familiar with it from many other such situations. I was also uneasy. I?ve been writing about the dark side of the grays and talking about it on Dreamland for months. I worried that this was not going to be a pleasant meeting.

As we drove, I looked for telltales in the starry night: the triangle of stars moving across the sky that identifies the approach of a triad of grays, or the black triangle blotting out the stars that would tell me that at least nine of them were coming. I saw nothing.

When we reached the Gage Hotel, I was confused by being given Room 24. I went to Room 23 but couldn?t make the key fit. I couldn?t understand why I was in the wrong room. (I?ve had enough encounters at this point to know that things run on rails. I was expected in Room 23.) I went back to the desk, but Room 23 was taken. So in we went to the adjacent room, number 24.

I had said nothing to Anne to this point, but I did talk a lot about Corina Saebels, wondering how she is faring. Also, we had talked in the car about the Kentucky ?screaming woman? case. I have been doing a lot of research into missing persons records to see if a woman disappeared during the right time frame. So far, I haven?t found anything.

Frankly, I have been living and breathing the dark side for quite a time. It has been much more than merely having a few witnesses with negative experiences and dark side oriented researchers on the show. I have been trying to understand how something that has contributed such immense knowledge and joy to my life could even have a side as dark as I know it to be. But then again, look at us: the same species that accepted the divinity of Christ also tortured him to death; the same nation that birthed Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann, gassed the Jews.

I was not asleep when the encounter started. Indeed, how could I sleep? I knew what was coming. Frankly, I was terribly excited. I was afraid. But I had taken that turn in the road. I had made my choice?or rather, our choice. Anne and I are a partnership in this. It is my lot to guide our little boat, but she also travels in it. I am the eyes and ears of our team. She is its mind and heart. When one of these things is over, I give everything about it to Anne that I can. She interprets, finds the meaning, understands. So, as you read this, you also read her thoughts. Her presence in our life with the grays is much larger than you would imagine. Neither of us asked that it be this way, but it makes a lot of sense. Without her being at a slight distance from them, as she is, there would be no chance of objectivity.

Anne was half asleep. She remembers the sound of somebody entering the room. She remembers me talking. What I was talking about was my book, what form it will take, how it will be constructed, above all, how it will communicate the complex reality of the grays. I was talking to somebody who has been present in my life ever since I can remember. The grays are not really individuals like we are. They are, in this life, more like us when we are already dead and no longer living with the isolating filters we use to enable ourselves to develop freely in this life. In a sense, the grays are dead and are, perhaps, our own dead. But remember, always, that reality?s actual form is not what appears to us.

I remember the sleekness of the person who was there, my desire to hold her, my body?s urging toward her?and my inability to look at her square in the eye.

I am not saying, however, that I think that a physical being came into the room. What I am trying to do is to communicate about this presence in the same indeterminate way that it appeared to me. Think of it as more of a concentration of awareness than a being. Although, if somebody had been in the little courtyard before the room when she came, they probably would have seen a shadowy form, appearing almost as a spindly sort of ghost, slip across the lawn and come into the room.

It would have opened and closed the door. Anne heard this. I heard it. At one point, I was touched by this being. It was a physical touch, the placing of thin, cool, electric hands on my cheeks. It was also soul touch, mind touch, even a physical penetration into my organs, my brain.

It left me in a very intense version of a post-meditative state. I felt much larger, as if my awareness had expanded to any size I wished. The next morning, I could hear people thinking. This has happened to me before and I don?t like it. It?s a side effect and an intrusion on the soul privacy of others. In this state, you not only hear their verbalized thoughts, you see the secret of their essence and in an instant, just at a glance, gain the most intimate knowledge of them. The grays live like this all the time. Their huge eyes are organs unlike ours. They see across the reefs of dimensions, they see the soul as the body and the body as an outgrowth of it, like roots hanging down from a lotus floating on a pond.

It is not knowledge to which I have a right. We hide it from each other for a reason, so that our essences will be free to find their truth, by making their mistakes and having their successes in this life. It?s all about love, that I can tell you. What survives is what loves. The rest dies. When we die, there is often so little left from this life that it is as if it was never lived. There is no memory, nothing. And I don?t mean sex-love, desire. I am speaking of compassion. Where compassion for ourselves and others enters our hearts and becomes part of our hearts, we become eternal. But we have no real understanding of compassion. Compassion rests in wisdom. It is the ability and willingness to guide oneself and others toward what is most needed. That is the central message of the Key, incidentally. It is why the man I met on that night defined sin as ?the denial of the right to thrive.?

We ate quickly and got in the car. When I am like this, I like to be alone. I know Anne and she knows me through and through, so it?s not uncomfortable with just the two of us. Gradually, in any case, the experience faded, but not before a police trooper came close to my car in the town of Bracketville, Texas. This place is a notorious speed trap, the main reason that Highway 90 has been virtually abandoned by Texans, who used to travel it in large numbers. In any case, I really don?t like to be near people like policemen and criminals or people with sexual perversions when I’m like this, and this was a man who could have been, were he not holding himself in frantic check, a sex criminal. Souls have an odor, which is why people report scents in the presence of ghosts. Most of them do not smell very well, and this one reeked like sour flowers.

In any case, the trip continued without further incident. By the time we reached San Antonio, the difficult state had faded away. I could no longer hear the thoughts of others. I was in the second state that follows this: everybody had become incredibly beautiful. In this state, you see the courage of life glowing in their faces, and that is something to see. The preciousness of each person is truly amazing. Also ancient, ancient?many of us are engaged on long, long journeys, and especially in the eyes of children, you can still see the great age.

I was huge, then, able to use my third eye to see anywhere, it seemed. It was the most powerful experience of this I have ever had. When I get this gift, I always want to go to other worlds. Over the years of my life, I have seen many wondrous images of other living planets, although rarely the forms of the beings there. This was different, it was one of the best experiences, because I could not only see the forms but they could be aware of my presence.

What then happened was amazing and hilarious and eye- opening. I found myself attracted to a ritual on a distant world. It was smoky and noisy, with a lot of yelling and pounding going on, but there was an asking about it that seemed so compelling that I could not resist going closer. Incredibly, I was seen, and the reaction was terrific. One of them began bursting with talk and the others went into various postures in concert with his staccato, yelled words. They were dressed in beads and round plates of what looked like copper. Their bodies were not articulated like ours. They wore masks intricately carved of dozens of tiny triangles.

Suddenly, I saw organs, oozing black blood. Sparks flying up into the air shocked me and I was instantly back home. I think that my appearance caused them either to kill something, maybe one of them, or there was an act of self- destruction. In any case, it sent me packing, chagrined that my intrusion had caused this violence.

For the next few days, the ability to see into other worlds continued, although not at this pitch. I would see glimpses of roads, buildings, machines, sometimes creatures. Often, they would be hard to look at because they were so far outside of my mind?s experience of form. But no longer impossible. For years, I saw other worlds but with few exceptions they were empty. This was because it?s so hard to see things you?ve never seen before. It is still almost impossible to describe some of these forms in words.

However, there are worlds where the beings have two arms, two legs and a head, the same general configuration as us, and I have always been able to see these.

This experience or being somebody else?s ghost or god or demon has really gotten me thinking. We have among us also many rituals to call the gods, and sometimes people do see things when enacting these rituals. Perhaps all we are seeing are folks from other worlds like me, no more gods than the man in the moon. But then we sacrifice to them, make religions out of our vision of them, spin tales about their relationships to us, pray to them and get answers, all of it.

But what if all we?re doing is drawing other folks not all that different from us? I mean, I?m nobody?s religious experience, a guy who drives a seven year old car and struggles to stay ahead of the tax man like anybody else. But put me in a situation like that, and I will look like any darned thing you may choose to imagine.

I was led from this experience to some large scale thoughts about the nature of conscious life in the universe. What they saw must have made them think the world of their ritual. It must have made them certain that whatever religious structure they have imagined was true. I mean, they did their magic and it worked. So they?re right. Their faith is justified. Their religion is true.

I would not disagree, despite the fact that I had no idea about their gods, their lives or their prayers and all their sacrifice did, if that?s what it was, was to scare me away. The effect of my presence, though, was to confirm them in their belief. Maybe that means that they went out and slaughtered and pillaged and raped. Maybe it means that they became compassionate and did good. One thing it does mean, is that they were enabled by this fundamental deception to do things that would offer them the chance to find truth inside themselves.

I am not saying that all religious experience is a lie. What I am saying is that the universe is a complex place, full of a number of things, and if you want to find your own truth in it, you?d better sure as hell cut your own cards. Be a be-er, not a believer.

I have a contact experience with the grays. I impute all kinds of wisdom to them. All kinds of terror. Wonder. But, ultimately, all that happened to me that night, or has ever happened to anybody, as far as I know, is exactly the same as what happened to those little creatures lost somewhere in the stars, huddled around their fire. I was led by the hand on that night, but not by the grays. I was led by myself. I went into my ?relationship? with the grays just like the little creatures went into theirs with me, and the whole point of the lesson was, for me, this: what we get from the universe around us does not depend on belief. It depends only on our own vision, and on what is in our hearts.

What did the grays give me on that night? Nothing. But I took a new vision of myself and the world around me, enormous, deeply personal and freeing. The beings chanting around their fire may have been imprisoned by my appearance in their own imaginations. But I was freed from mine.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.

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