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telephone, Pat asked to meet me so that she could consider scheduling a hypnosis session. It seems that there was something really strange that had happened to her back in 1987, and it s¢i// bothered her and she wanted to know why, or at least get relief from the internal anxiety it had caused. The story was that she had been to the funeral of an aunt, accompanied by her 16-year-old son, and they were returning home to Maryland, driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It began to snow, and she saw a very bright light ahead, off to the side of the road, sort of bluish white, and she thought that it was a light that had come on to illuminate a billboard since the snow had made things a bit dark. She then said that what happened next was so strange that, even in remembering it, she felt strange and uneasy. She said that she felt a paralysis come over her hands and arms as though someone had taken control of the car. Having just read a grocery sack full of books on UFOs and “missing time” and all that, I immediately recognized the purported prodromal signs of a “missing time” experience as described by Budd Hopkins. It was rather creepy to be having this conversation right after having read those books. I managed to stay cool, however, and I casually asked “what happened next?" Pat said that this was the crazy part because she couldn’t remember! After seeing the light and feeling the paralysis, the next thing she remembered was sitting at a traffic light 50 or 60 miles down the road. She did not remember making the turn off the main highway, and her son had just cut his finger on a tin of cookies he was trying to open. He was bleeding, and she “came to herself” saying “there’s a towel in the back seat”. To further add to her dismay, she arrived home much later than she should have, but, at the same time, still had an almost full tank of gas. She was sure that it had been her aunt attempting to contact her psychically, and she really needed to have an answer. What had her aunt been trying to tell her? Well, the fact that she made no mention or claim about aliens made the whole thing far more interesting to me because if she had claimed to have been abducted by little green men, I would have ended the conversation. Of course, I did not want to even suggest anything about “aliens”, because I wanted to try to prove my theory about alien abductions being “psycho-dramas” in the same manner as past lives. I just told Pat that we could certainly clear the problem up quickly with hypnosis! She made an appointment. 69 High Strangeness — Part One