Christmas at Last!

Christmas has come, and with it a renewed sense of inner joy. I always have a rough time between October and December, because that’s the part of 1985 that I was dealing with the visitors, but unable to consciously remember what was happening at night. When you see in Communion the scene of me prowling around with the shotgun, that’s when it happened. I also set up an alarm system I bought at Radio Shack.

Nobody knows anymore when Jesus was actually born, but his life is now a symbol of the greater life of man, so it is appropriate that we celebrate his birth at the same time that this ancient human festival takes place.

I’m a private person. Too private, actually, which is why I’m endeavoring this year to do more like my wife does with her diaries, and share feelings as well as ideas in my journal.

Starting on December 27 and running for two weeks, Dannion Brinkley and I are on Dreamland, talking together about our experiences and our faith in the human soul and its potential. I really enjoyed doing that interview, because Dannion has a very authentic story to tell, and his conviction about the afterlife I find quite reassuring.

This gets me to a question that returns to my mind practically every day of my life: what are the visitors? I started out thinking that I’d been attacked in some way, but I’m not so sure now that my rape was really that, any more than surgery on a little dog at the veterinary clinic is assault. I surely felt assaulted, and so must the little dog. But the anger and fear could come, in both cases not from understanding of what happened, but from ignorance about it. The dog has no idea that the man who inflicted pain on him actually prolonged his life, and I wonder if those of us who have had rough experiences with the visitors are not in the same boat?

Understand, I’m not drawing any conclusions here. But it’s a question worth keeping alive.

They were like some sort of tough military crew on that night in 1985, doing a hard job despite the fact that it caused pain and upset. It may be that this was the only way for them to get my notice. They had certainly been showing up since the previous October, and, I have a feeling, as early as August of 1985, but getting no conscious response from me.

Then there was this painful, humiliating and extremely stressful penetration that left physical injuries that I could not ignore.

They had gotten my attention, but at a cost: they had terrified me and enraged me.

At the time, two things happened that I did not report in Communion. The first one was the rape. It slips in during the hypnosis session as the “rectal probe” that has so amused so many testosterone soaked boys, whose own sexual ambiguity apparently frightens them. Since I’m not in the least sexually ambiguous, all it did was infuriate me.

Initially, it did not cross my mind that aliens might have been involved. In fact, a college friend who had entered the CIA was present during part of my abduction, and I thought I had been assaulted by government agents.

I had a very specific reason for this concern. I had previously published a book called Warday, which gave the lie to a favorite Reagan-era pipe dream, that limited nuclear war was “winnable and survivable.” In part because of the book, Congress denied funding to FEMA that was intended to “harden” US manufacturing facilities against nuclear attack. (But not our homes, of course.)

Ted Kennedy had endorsed the book, and someone on his staff had warned me that it had made Brent Scowcroft quite angry, and he was a vindictive sort.

I was already aware of such CIA abuses as MKULTRA, which had involved, specifically, methodically driving people crazy through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. There is no question at all about the reality of MKULTRA and its abuses. They are a matter of public record.

My personal doctor thought I had been the victim of a crime, which is why, when the matter of hypnosis arose, I demanded that a specialist in forensic hypnosis conduct the session.

I was hoping that I would be able to describe more people than just the one former classmate. I thought I had been assaulted in an attempt to drive me mad, frankly.

It certainly has marginalized me politically, and maybe I was “given up” to the visitors in part to get rid of me, either by driving me insane or by making me a spokesman for a hopeless cause.

However, I don’t think so. I think that, the moment I acknowledged them, I began living a destiny that is of extraordinary value to my fellow man, and I am glad and grateful to be doing it.

Back in January of 1986, I decided to get back in touch with my school friend and, if I was able to do so, file a criminal complaint. But when I tried to reach him by phone, I was shocked to discover that he had been dead since the previous March. In other words, when he was present on that night, big as life, and giving me elaborate warnings about some kind of technical problem with the stealth bomber, which was still at that time extremely secret, he was, in fact, stone cold dead.

Now, I might have thought that this was a lie, but subsequent events have proved the opposite: he was indeed dead when I saw him and talked to him as if he was a sold, normal living man.

It turns out that meetings with the dead are a commonplace of the close encounter experience. Happens all the time. In fact, it happened often at our old cabin when we had groups of people up to encounter the visitors. To their amazement, their dead friends and relatives would often show up, too.

So, here we are at another Christmas season, swimming ever more deeply into the mysteries of life and the questions it presents.

One of my neighbors probably saw my abduction, so it was no journey to the world of the dead. Or, it was, but not in any simple sort of a way. Coming home from a party, he saw what he thought was a blimp on the ground in a field near our houses at about three in the morning. When he got out of his car, he heard screaming from inside. Probably me. But then it turned on lights and came gliding toward him and he got scared and drove off.

So, there you have it, the whole mystery–a man is taken out of his home and has a discussion with an old friend who turns out to be dead. Then he’s taken up into a big object that looks like a tent inside, where he is raped by strange, insect-like beings who tell him that they have a right to do it, and then call him the “chosen one.” And he thinks, ‘yep, like the lucky little pig, chosen to help make the bacon.’

Now, all these years later, I look back on an incredibly complex life, a set of emotional experiences unlike any that can be generated by ordinary human interaction, and, in this season, despite all the storms of my soul, once again I find peace in the Christmas story, and joy in the ancient celebration of the return of the sun.

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