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short perpendicular line on each end. This horizontal line would represent the lips without the muscle that we have. And it would part slightly as they made this mumumumming sound. The texture of the skin, as I remembered it from this quick glance, was grayish, almost metallic looking. I didn't notice any hair — or headgear for that matter. I didn't notice any proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils. There are some obvious contradictions between the two descriptions. Betty speaks of very dark hair; Barney did not notice any. The men described by Barney do not exactly evoke in my mind the picture of Jimmy Durante! On the other hand, the creatures are strikingly reminiscent of the UFO operators of a large number of stories unknown at the time outside a very small group specialists. Apart from disagreement on the nose and lips, Betty's statement matched the description made by Barney of the shape of the head and the color and appearance of the skin. Another remark by Betty is significant in this respect: "I got the impression that the leader and the examiner were different from the crew members. But this is hard to say, because I really didn't want to look at the men." Two other elements are outstanding in this case. One of them is the manner of communication with the strange beings. They communicated among themselves through an audible language, which was definitely not understandable to the witnesses. Yet when they communicated with the Hills, their thoughts came through in English. Betty thinks that they spoke English "with an accent," while Barney feels that the words and the presence of the entity were two separate things: I did not hear an actual voice. But in my mind, I knew what he was saying. It wasn't as if he were talking to me with my eyes open, and he was sitting across the room from me. It was more as if the words were there, a part of me, and he was outside the actual creation of the toa 1 This remarkable statement, an excellent description of the mechanism that triggered the communication, may well be a clue to the entire episode, and it certainly places the case in the domain of the Theory of Apparitions — as it is treated, for instance, by parapsychology pioneer G. N. M. Tyrrell in his celebrated 1942 Myers Lectures before the British Society for Psychical Research, of which he was president. Thus, it is noteworthy that the apparent absurdity of the sequence of actions constituting the episode should be reducible to the triggering of high-level perception patterns within the witness's brain and not necessarily through any normal physical process. And this characteristic, in its turn, is reminiscent both of neurophysiological experiments and of reports by the most reliable observers of "ghosts," although, of course, ghosts are distinguished from the class of phenomena we are studying here by the absence of material traces — which makes their interpretation a good deal simpler. And while it is possible that a complete theory of ghosts could confine the phenomena to parraments within the human nervous system, the same is not true of UFOs. For this reason, therefore, it is crucial to pursue the investigation of past apparitions in relation to reports such as that of the Hills. The "experiment" performed on Betty Hill by the entities is also remarkable. It will be recalled that while she was in the craft, Betty was submitted to a simulated medical test. Under hypnosis, she reported that a long needle was inserted into her navel, that she felt pain, and that the pain stopped when the leader made a certain gesture with his hand in front of her eyes. A fifteenth-century French calendar, the Kalendrier des Bergiers, shows the tortures inflicted by demons on the people they have taken: the demons are depicted piercing their victims' abdomens with long needles. In fact, the psychological invariant in all these stories is unmistakable. The problem, then, is not to identify it, but to relate it in a rational manner to the physical features encountered during the observations — for example, the tracking by military radar operators of the UFO seen by the Hills. Perhaps we should illustrate the difficulty of this problem by using a case less well known than the Hills' incident, though it is quite as dramatic. It has never appeared in English UFO literature and therefore cannot have influenced American UFO lore. Even in France it is practically unknown. The witness was a woman, and the incident took place on May 20, 1950, at about 4:00 P.M. in the words themselves.