A Fine Birthday Present

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.

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