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the door, he turned and recieved a "terrible shock": the door was open, and a woman as naked as he was came in. Her hair was blonde, with a part in the center. She had blue eyes, rather longer than round, slanted outward. Her nose was straight, her cheekbones prominent. Her face looked very wide, "wider than that of an Indio native." It ended in a pointed chin. Her lips were very thin, nearly invisible. Her ears were small but ordinary. She was much shorter than he was, her head only reaching his shoulder. She quickly made clear to him what the purpose of her visit was. Soon after the sexual episode, a man came in and beckoned to the woman, who, pointing to her belly, smiled, pointed at the sky, and followed the man out. The men came back with Antonio's clothes, then took him to a room where the other crew members were sitting, growling among themselves. The witness, who felt sure no harm would come to him now, carefully observed his surroundings. Among other things — all his remarks here are of interest — he noticed a box with a glass top that had the appearance of an alarm clock. The "clock" had one hand and several marks that would correspond to the three, six, nine, and twelve of an ordinary clock. However, although time passed, the hand did not move, and Antonio concluded that it was no 14 clock. The symbolism in this remark by Villas-Boas is clear. We are reminded of the tales quoted above, of the country where time does not pass, and of that great poet who had in his room a huge white clock without hands, bearing the words "It is later than you think." Indeed, it is the poetic quality of such details in many UFO sightings that catches the attention — in spite of the irrational, or obviously absurd, character of the tale — and makes them so similar to a dream. Antonio must have though so, because he reflected that he must bring some evidence back and tried to steal the "clock." At once, one of the men shoved him to the side angrily. This attempt to secure evidence is a constant feature of fairy tales, and we are also reminded of the efforts by Betty Hill to convince her captors to let her take a peculiar "book" she saw inside their craft. As in the Villas-Boas incident, the men denied her the opportunity to convince the world that the experience had been real. (She also observed a strange map that we will discuss in a later chapter.) At last, one of the men motioned Antonio to follow him to a circular platform. He was then given a detailed tour of the machine, taken to a metal ladder, and signaled to go down. Antonio watched all the details of the preparation for takeoff and observed the craft as it rose and flew away in a matter of seconds. He noticed that the time was 5:30 A.M. He had spent over four hours inside the strange 1: machine. It must be noted that the witness volunteered information about the sighting in general terms when a notice appeared in a newspaper calling for UFO reports. He was extremely reluctant to discuss the more personal aspects of his experience and related them only when questioned with insistence by Fontes. Like Maurice Masse, Villas-Boas suffered from excessive sleepiness for about a month after a ta the incident. When folklore becomes degraded to a minor literary form, as the fairy-faith was degraded to the fairy tales we know today, it natualy loses much of its content: precisely those "adult" details that cannot be allowed to remain in children's books. The direct result of the censorship of spicy details in these marvelous stories is that they become mere occasions for amazement. The Villas-Boas case is hardly appropriate for nursery-school reading, but to eliminate the woman from the story would turn it into a tale without deep symbolic or psychological value. The sexual context is precisely what gives such accounts their significance and their impact. The sexual (and, in some cases mentioned by Budd Hopkins, the sadomasochistic) component of the abduction stories provides an emotional "encoding" that makes them unforgettable. Without the sexual context — without the stories of changelings, human midwives, intermarriage with the Gentry, of which we never hear in modern fairy tales — it is doubtful that the tradition about fairies would have survived through the ages. Nor is that true only of fairies: the most remarkable The Sexual Episodes