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The story is fantastic. Yet it reminds us of the account Barney and Betty Hill gave under hypnosis of their alleged abduction in New Hampshire. On their way back from vacationing in Canada in September 1961, they had seen a strange light over the White Mountains. It came close to the road, and they next remember being in their car some sixty miles south, without any memory of the intervening travel time. Under hypnosis they remembered a long sequence of events involving abduction by small beings and a "medical" examination. The account included a description of an alien language, of entities whose expressions were almost human, of an overwhelming feeling of confidence, and of not the slightest indication that the incident had a meaningful purpose or followed an intelligent pattern. Of considerable interest to the psychologist is the fact that the entities are endowed with the same fugitiveness and behave with the same ignorance of logical or physical laws as the reflection of a dream, the monsters of our nightmares, the unpredictable witches of our childhood. Yet their craft do leave deep indentations in the ground, according to observers who were fully awake and absolutely competent at the time of sighting. These indentations have been photographed and measured in hundreds of cases. What does it all mean? How can one reconcile these apparently contradictory facts? Some, in a laudable attempt, question the classical search for patterns: "Is it necessarily true," they ask, "that we would detect meaningful patterns — in the same sense of our own intelligence level — in the behavior of a superior race? Is it not much more likely that we would find in their actions only random data and incoherent pictures, much as a dog would if confronted with a mathematician writing on a blackboard? If so, it is only after new concepts have emerged in our own consciousness that we could 'discover' the meaning of their presence in our environment. And, if a superior race does in fact generate what we are now observing as the UFO phenomenon, perhaps it is precisely with the purpose of changing the course of human destiny by presenting us with evidence of our limitations in the technical, as well as the mental, realm?" Children of the Unknown — if they are not real, should we see these rumors as a sign that something in human imagination has changed, bringing into a new light uncharted areas of our "collective unconscious?" They may be only children of our fancy, and our interest toward them akin to our love for Batman and Cinderella. But they may be real. Modern science rules over a narrow universe, one particular variation on an infinite theme. In any case, it is important to understand what need these images fulfill, why this knowledge is both so exciting and so distressing to us. Such is the subject of this book. We have just established that a close parallel exists between modern claims of UFO contact and age-old traditions that involved alien spiritual entities. But how closely are these stories related? Can we be sure that we are really witnessing the continuation of the same current, the reemergence of the same underground stream? roa 1 , “4 14 a c eu aout 1.4 : wat, a In this chapter we will go below the surface of the stories and draw precise parallels between the physical observations made in earlier times and those that characterize modern "close encounters." These physical manifestations include the shape of the flying objects, their representation as "winged disks," the beings associated with them, the beams of light they can manipulate, the alteration of the sense of time they produce, and the peculiar characteristics of the interaction between human witnesses and entities. Often the dialogue has an absurd quality that conveys not a literal fact but a higher, symbolic truth. And this absurdity carries over to the objects exchanged with the occupants and even the physical traces they leave: rings of flattened grass, burned ground, areas of extreme pressure. Until we have formed a clear understanding of these patterns and recognized that they were already found in the accounts of antiquity and medieval times, we cannot hope to make sense of the UFO phenomenon. 2. Winged Disks and Crispy Pancakes