The Anguish and Pain of My Rape

On December 26, 1985, I was raped, and yesterday I made yet another visit to the doctor to be treated for the consequences. The injury has long healed, but the body remembers, and every few years, the excruciating pain of it returns.

At the time, it was mentioned in passing in a hypnosis session with Dr. Donald Klein as a “rectal probe.” This sparked years and years of laughter, and I found myself to be the only publicly admitted rape victim in modern history whose suffering turned him into a laughingstock.

This added greatly to the anguish, I can assure you. It is devastating to a person’s well-being to suffer such a humiliation and then be laughed at for it.

When I went to the doctor and told him what had happened, he examined me rectally and immediately said, ‘you’ve been raped.’ That was in 1985. It was not until 2004, Almost twenty years later, that I was able to say these words to anybody: “I’ve been raped.” I said them to my wife, and now, four years later, I have said them a few times publicly. I am recording them again in this journal, largely because it’s therapeutic to do so, and I think that it will help others who have suffered similarly. Anne recorded my admission to her in her diary of August 30, 2008.

I do this even though I know that it will elicit another round of sneering and jeering from sexually insecure and incompetent males. Let them jeer. It hurt, once. Now it causes me to feel only contempt.

On that night in 1985, a device called an electroejaculator was forced into my rectum, tearing it on the left side.

At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me, or why, in the context of such a horrific experience, I would suddenly have an erection. I then experienced ejaculation and watched helplessly as what I can only describe as a monster collected my ejaculate and took it away.

When you listen to the recording of my hypnosis session, you can hear my perplexity at the fact that I was becoming sexually stimulated when there was absolutely no emotional context for it at all.

To this day, both the emotional anguish and the physical pain have stayed with me, and I think that it’s well past time for this to be known. After my experience, there was no question at all but that I was physically injured. How, and how badly, were matters I kept pretty much to myself, especially when I saw the laughter coming in cruel waves.

I have wondered what happened to my semen. In the spring of 1988, I have a hazy memory of being shown a baby by visitors who I came upon in the basement of the upstate New York cabin we had then. I have no way of knowing if the baby had anything to do with me, but I have felt a strange sense of loss ever since then.

This is also the first time I have ever mentioned this event. The reason is that it tears me to pieces every time I bring that little, sleeping face to mind. The baby was angelic, radiant, but being held by no human mother.

What has happened to that child? And what has happened to us, that people can have such experiences?

AND our only recourse is to be dismissed as lunatics, called liars and laughed at? Really? That’s the best response society is able to offer? Or to become the victims of officially orchestrated lies, as happened to me in 1998, when Parade Magazine published a false story about me right before my book Confirmation came out.

Parade’s story stated that I had discovered that I had temporal lobe epilepsy and become a contributor to the Epilepsy Foundation. When I called them, the editor cheerfully admitted that my “friends” in the Air Force had given them the story.

I got a retraction printed, but sales of the book were disastrous.

I will never forget the shock that went through me when Larry King laughed in my face. It was ghastly to be laughed at for something that terrible. Even now, I can remember the dense odor of his breath, and how I almost vomited in his face. To his credit, he had me on his program a number of times afterward, and he gradually came to realize that I am no liar, and to sense that there was more to my story–more pain to it–than I was revealing to him.

I also recall the horrific mental anguish that I felt when I began to see the rectal probe jokes on Southpark. Seeing “Catman Gets an Anal Probe” was like having acid poured down my throat. I relived the rape as I watched, horrified, at what was being done to me. And it was being done to me, specifically. The writers of the program were amusing themselves and their audience with my rape.

Prior to that, my book sales had been declining because of all the negative publicity, but after that program aired they literally plummeted, with the icing on the cake being the Parade story.

I found I could not get a publisher. I ended up in bankruptcy court. I lost all my books, a collection that it had taken my whole life to build. I lost the cabin. I lost everything.

And then, when I did go out to publicize my work, I had to face more X-Files music and more snickering. The last time I appeared on national television, it was the Craig Ferguson show, and here this man came, asking me about “Uranus.”

A male got raped, time to laugh!

The visitors brutalized me on that night. But they only raped my body. My heart and soul were raped by people like Matt Stone, Trey Parker and Craig Ferguson.

What did they get for it? A few moments of amusement for their audiences, a little money in their pockets–and the satisfaction of knowing that they had given somebody, in their willful ignorance, they can call a liar a kick in the butt.

The trouble is, I am no liar. I never lied about anything that happened to me, and I am not wrong, either. The visitors are real, they are incredibly powerful and tough, they are taking our sexual material and nobody can do a thing about it.

Hard as I try, I just can’t find anything funny about that.

However, it’s much more complicated. A relationship with them–and I had one for 11 years, a very deep one–is not all bad.

Far from it. Despite what had been done to me, I quickly realized that something completely incredible had happened: I had come into contact with intelligent creatures that were not human–at least, not as I define that term. What they were and are I still do not know.

In February of 1986, I started going out into the woods around my house at night, trying to confront them. And they did respond. I ended up in a sort of school, taught by masters and monsters, a dangerous, complicated, immeasurably fulfilling and terrifying school.

I am still in that school, still learning, and trying to bring to my apply my Christian belief in the sanctity of man and the promise of resurrection to my experience.

You come face to face with the visitors, and you immediately come also to know what incredible power there is in the gospels, and how the way of being that they propose is the ideal state in which to transform even the most vile bullies and rapists into sublime teachers. Because I did that. Despite appearances, I reached out to them and the gate was unlocked for me.

Normally, I keep all such matters to myself. I am not a particularly pious man. But I will say this, I try hard to live my very private faith, and it was the gospel that saw me through all the darkness and the pain and the fear, and my bitter disappointment in my fellow man.

Beyond that, I have nothing to say about my private struggle with this.

However, as I sit here suffering once again the pain I endured on that night almost twenty five years ago, I also reflect on the gigantic strides of understanding that I have made because I would not run away from the visitors or the experience.

They’re also suffering, some of them, but others are soaring like angels. They are incredibly advanced and capable in ways that it is almost impossible to imagine. There is pain among them and anger and desperation, but there is also joy and wisdom and surpassing grace of mind.

The visitors are the most complex manifestation that I have ever known, and I have barely even begun to address their meaning.

There was rape, anger, pain and the sense of being robbed of a child, there was all that. But there was also such wisdom, such profound decency, soaring emotions and love, unforgettable, dynamic, passionate, impossible not to embrace with one’s whole heart and soul.

In other words, they appear to be deeply contradictory, even more complicated, both as individuals and as a society, than we are.

Given all these different ways of approaching us, ranging from brutal rape to cherishing love, they must be living with profound moral and cultural fractures.

Understand, I am not apologizing for them. What they did to me and so many others was and is wrong. But that is not all they are capable of, and I sincerely hope that we are one day able to engage with them in such a way that enriches us. Right now, obviously, the opposite is true.

Human society is complex, but their society is even more complex. They know the truth about the world. They are not deceived. And yet, as individuals, they are fragile and scared and often seem quite desperate. Also, they do not seem like ‘other people.’ When you are with most of them, they seem like animals that are far more intelligent than you are.

I say most, because some of the ones I met–two, to be precise–had a startling humanity about them. One of them–the one who was in control of me during the rape, in fact–became the main character in a story I wrote shortly after the event, called “Pain.” In the story, this being is an angel who purifies the soul by inducing great suffering.

The visitors gave me little more than their attention. But I took from them whatever I could–knowledge, spiritual challenge, mind-opening, soul-opening.

So, here I am, finally admitting openly, with this latest bout of pain, that I am a rape victim. I suppose that this will encourage more laughter, but not in everybody. No longer. The number of people who respect those of us who have experienced–and suffered–close encounter is growing larger every day. As mankind gradually comes to face the reality of the visitors in a more mature manner, the laughter is dying away.

Hopefully soon the authorities that keep mankind’s side of the secret will give up or be overthrown, and we will begin to face this as a united community, and not as we are now, divided against ourselves on this issue.

There is so much to be learned, and never mind what the visitors do or don’t want. In fact, in the minds and bodies of the close encounter witnesses, they have deposited–along with the memories, the brain changes, the other physical changes, the psychological trauma and the implants–knowledge.

The witnesses are like a kind of mine. Dig, and gold will be found. What is within them is, in effect, a treasure trove of knowledge left behind by another world.

Surely that is worth more than official denial, media lies and rectal probe jokes.

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