Today is my birthday, and when I opened my email folder this
morning, I discovered the first witness statement I have
received in the twenty plus years since my close encounters
that corroborates my testimony about my 1985 experiences.
The witness was working at the Mohonk Mountain House during
the fall of 1985. This establishment, a lovely old lodge on
a small glacial lake in the Shawangunk Mountains north of
New York City, is about two miles, as the crow flies, from
our old cabin.
One evening, she received a call from the resort's gatehouse
to check the lights that were moving above the lake. She
checked but saw nothing. When she returned to her desk, she
found people calling from the local area to report seeing
the lights moving above the mountain the resort is on, and
to report, as well, that the light on its tower, known as
Skytop, had gone out.
A police report was filed, and the police dismissed the
phenomenon as ultralight planes. In later years, when I was
investigating UFO sightings in the area, I came upon a
phenomenal story that was being documented by a researcher
called Phillip J. Imbrogno. It seems that the Hudson Valley,
lying about forty miles southeast of our cabin, had been
experiencing extensive UFO sightings.
These were dismissed in the early eighties by Aviation Week
and Space Technology editor and Air Force analyist Phillip
J. Klass as "ultralight" aircraft being flown at night, and
thus the dismissive police report in 1985. (This is still a
popular
shibboleth, in fact.)
Had there been a news report in late 1985 of UFOs in my
area, I don't think that I would have suffered the agony of
terror and confusion that I actually experienced. My
experiences started in October, around the same time the
lights were observed over Mohonk. I don't know if it was the
same night, but the mere fact that there were unknowns in
the area might have saved me a great deal of agony.
I saw no lights. I heard nothing about UFOs, ultralights or
anything else. What I did experience during the fall of 1985
was a horrific descent into terror that ended with an
apparent psychotic break on December 26 of that year.
My anguish is terrible to remember. I bought an alarm system
at Radio Shack and took all one night installing it at our
cabin. I bought a Benelli Riot Gun and began patrolling the
house, sometimes sitting for hours outside my son's bedroom,
rushing upstairs from time to time to be sure my wife was
still okay, suffering horrendous fear that I could not explain.
I thought that I might end up in an insane asylum, and that
my wife would be unable to divorce me if I was declared
incompetent. So I fought with her, I screamed at her, I
tried and tried to get her to divorce me.
At the same time, I kept having horrific terror visions of
the end of the world. I felt watched, I heard things
creeping about in the house, I woke up in the morning
feeling greasy and filthy and bathed and bathed but still
felt dirty. Sometimes, in the late night, I would find
myself lying on the living room floor naked, or the bedroom
floor, with my stomach twisted in knots and my mind racing
down red mad roads of fear. I would go in the bathroom and
vomit white froth, then double over in the tub in agony.
And nobody else was bothered. In fact, Anne and Andrew were
fine. No problems, except with me.
And why? Because I had no idea what was happening to me. And
why didn't I? Because of the arrogance of the local police,
in part, but it is larger than that. The arrogant stupidity
of people who are willing to believe that we are NOT being
visited despite the vast, overwhelming evidence that we
are--the millions of UFO reports, the hundreds of thousands
of detailed close encounter reports, the physical evidence
of implants found in my body and the bodies of others, the
fact that I passed rigorous lie detector tests, and, in the
years that followed, gathered witnesses at my cabin who also
had experiences there that they reported under their own
names in my books.
All of this, and still the arrogance continues, and the
stupidity, as the culture at large throws out the
magnificent chance we have been given to gather knowledge
from whoever the visitors are, be they from another planet,
from another dimension, from the land of the dead or our own
souls--whatever they are, they are the most valuable thing
that has happened to humankind since we harnessed fire, and
if ever there was any act that signaled our coming ruin, it
is our denial of them, our foolish, prideful and
extraordinarily stupid turning away from the treasure house of
new knowledge that they have on offer.
I look back to those blood-sweating months of October,
November and December of 1985, and I think to myself: if
only this world had been different, I would not have been so
confused and afraid. It took me years of blood, sweat and
holy terror to get my relationship with the visitors to come
into focus. Communicating with them was the highest, most
astonishing act of mind I have ever accomplished. And it was
an accomplishment, a signal accomplishment, almost as
improbable as squaring a circle or levitating.
However, neither I nor the rest of the world have gained
from my experience a tenth of what would have been gained if
there had been a proper response, with scientific
participation, philosophic inquiry and the support of the
intellectual community. If only I had been able to talk to
linguists and even philologists about the communications
problems I was having. Or scientists?real ones?about the
remarkable physical phenomena I was observing, and the
questions they raise both about potential technologies and
the relationship between the visitors and reality.
I did have the help of a courageous scientific pioneer in
studying implants, Dr. William Mallow at the Southwest
Research Institute. The director of the institute was
willing to let him use the facilities openly, as long as he
did not publish any of his reports on official SwRI
stationary. Later, a new director came along, who told Bill
that ?our CIA client takes a dim view of UFO research,? and
demanded that he stop altogether. That slowed him down, but
death from two different forms of leukemia was what really
did it.
I have discussed our implant findings in Confirmation. But
we could do, really, very little. We could not afford the
extensive physical histories and physical-psychological
workups that the implant hosts should be given. We could not
afford the really deep testing that the objects themselves
required.
But that isn?t the problem. The problem is that Bill was a
rare, rare bird. Look at the Mutual UFO Network:
scientifically and theoretically, they?re still back right
where they started. They haven?t, in over thirty years, made
an iota of progress. How many sighting reports can they
publish. And as far as research into the close encounter
experience is concerned: unless witnesses come to them with
stories that fit their expectations about what close
encounter is, they throw them out with a flea in their ear.
Another courageous scientist who did wonders was Dr. John
Mack. Also, however, dead, and within just a few months of
Bill Mallow.
But neither they nor any other scientist of stature who has
addressed the issue has ever been taken seriously by the
rest of the scientific community or the intelligensia.
And yet, the visitors have still managed powerful
communications, as I discussed in my previous journal entry.
They are directly responsible for ?Superstorm? and ?The Day
After Tomorrow.? And a lot more. A whole lot more. And more
to come.
They have warned witness after witness of the peril to
earth?s environment, and created among these witnesses a
powerful environmental movement.
But ask virtually ANY member of the news media about them,
any intellectual, most scientists, most government personnel
who ought to be concerned, and you?ll get back a stupid,
incorrect and poorly considered tissue of the confused and
ill-informed misstatements that make a person like me think
that they must be suffering from collective insanity. They
are unable to face the fire: that we are not only not alone,
but who is here considers us either so insignificant or so
dangerous that they will not deal with us directly.
The visitors respond with their statement about what is on
offer: ?a new world, if you can take it.? This means that we
will both have to wrest it out of their hands and bear it
when we do. I have looked into their eyes and what I have
seen there of my own soul, my fears reflected back, my
anguish and confusion at being lost in all this dark
immensity that surrounds us, has shattered me, and in
October and November and December of 1985 was breaking me,
tearing me to pieces?
--and resulted in a scientific and intellectual response of
contempt laced with lies, a media response of more lies
laced with rectal probe jokes, and a government response of
terrifying bullying that included an article, in 1998, in
Parade Magazine falsely stating that I had confirmed that I
had temporal lobe epilepsy and had become a contributor to
the Epilepsy Foundation. It developed that the owner of
Parade was a general in the Air Force Reserve, and that the
Epilepsy Foundation had heard nothing of the story. I forced
Parade to print a retraction, but I was terrified at the
apparently official?and entirely illegal?bullying that was
involved.
Of course, the media never picked up on it. Why should they?
Who cares what happens to some stupid saucer nut?
And now, it turns out, I was not alone in 1985. During those
months in hell, others were seeing craft in the same area.
Not ultralights, not at night over dark and mountainous
terrain. They saw the visitors...and who knows, maybe in one
of those gliding lights there lay a terrified little man,
struggling with the unknown, the impossible and fear greater
than I can express.
BUT I DID NOT BREAK. On the contrary, once I realized what
was going on?that these bizarre people were real?I went out
into the woods alone to try to meet with them. I had to
literally force my legs to work. To walk at all, I had to
tell myself to put one foot in front of the other. You talk
about starting from scratch: when I first forced myself to
go out there, I was an animal, nothing more, with one little
spark of understanding: whatever they were, they were
something fantastic and valuable, and I was here and I had
to do this, because if this was real, then it was among the
most important things that had ever happened. So, it
happened to a novelist and an inveterate prankster. A happy
go lucky type. I was in the slot, for whatever reason. I had
to do the job.
I?ve been doing it ever since, and I am hoping that this
next movement with the Grays will amount to something. I
could not break the shell of denial with reason and logic
and my own abject sincerity. But there is a quality of the
real that creeps into the close encounter scenes in the
Grays that is a very tricky thing, speaking of pranks. It?s
a kind of ?real? prank, in the sense that nobody but a
person who?d had the experience could write about it like
this, from the heart and the blood.
So, I was given one hell of a good birthday present in that
kind reader's note. And, every day, I get one from all of
you who read this website, who have made it by far the
largest of its kind in the world. Because the idiots who run
this thing we call human society may be clueless and adrift,
but we the people are not. Far from it. THEY are scared.
THEY are confused. THEY are blinded by arrogance.
WE are not. We the people are competent. We're doing our end
of contact very well, thank you. Confused, afraid,
suspicious as hell about these weird and scary little
buggers that keep popping up in our bedrooms. Damn right.
But holding up our end of the bargain for the human race, by
God, out there in the dark, praying our hearts out and
spitting up our guts, but coming back and sitting down and
putting pen to paper and saying, this is what happened to
me, join my testament to the others, thank you.
Thank you.
