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lot about it, but nobody said 'Let's hide' or anything like that. George and Barbara were up front — George was driving — I was in the back behind him, and Dave was to my right. Dave and Barbara were afraid of it. George and I were encouraging the whole thing; we enjoyed this." All right, so they could have been watching a helicopter. "What did the object do?" "It came up over the car and in front of us, maybe 100 to 200 feet above ground, and it was, I would say, about six lanes of the freeway in width. It was white, and it showed a very beautiful kind of glow. I seem to remember some kind of windows, but I really couldn't be sure. It didn't make any noise. The thing was big. Four white lights, funnel-shaped, extended from the perimeter of the vehicle and down around each of our bodies." She looked up and shuddered as if it were there, still 1 wea hovering right above us. "What kind of feeling did you have then?" "I remember leaving my body on the seat of the car and being about three or four feet out of the car," she said in a matter-of-fact way. "All four of us did the same thing; off we went! At that point I don't remember anything else, and until fairly recently I didn't think there was anything else. Then I began to realize that something might have happened, because the next thing I remember I was coming back into the car. I looked around and saw the light shimmer around Barbara and Dave, and to4 aoaa 1 , toa " we were slowly dissipated back into our bodies." I had trouble visualizing the scene. Astral travel is nothing new. That's how witches allegedly went to the Sabbath and saints to heavenly communion. An American businessman and psychic experimenter, Robert Monroe, has set up learning centers complete with training tapes to help people leave their bodies. The psychedelic culture embraced the same concept enthusiastically in the sixties. Perhaps any living entity can transfer its consciousness outside its own body. But automobiles have no consciousness and are not capable of astral travel. weed oad aoa aur 4144 "What happened to the car?" I asked her. "The vehicle stayed with us at that time and then began to move off a little bit in the distance, and the car was just going on its own velocity. That was the initial experience of it." At her request I arranged for Helen to undergo a very mild form of hypnotic regression. During that session, she remembered going on board the "saucer" and observing its propulsion mechanism. She met a man dressed in white, who showed her the amazing motor she is now determined to build. I began checking her story. First, I had a lengthy telephone conversation with George, who hasn't seen Helen in several years but remembers the incident as "a turning point in [his] life." Dave has moved to another city, where I traced him. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, got in touch with him and obtained his statement. Like George, he vividly recalls the whole incident and describes it in ” similar terms. Ever since the sighting, Helen has felt the urge to build the machine whose principle was revealed to her by one of the saucer pilots. It has become a central point for her, the goal of her entire life. Yet the motor she wants to build could never run, physically, at least in the way she explains it. There are four witnesses to this UFO event, and everything seems to point to the reality of their experience. But this is precisely the place where many questions are raised in my mind. Consider the story from the point of view of the "spacecraft" theory. Should we agree with most UFO believers that what Helen saw was a vehicle from another planet, coming here for exploration? noua c rs a On the surface, this interpretation seems to fit the facts. But what about the paranormal effects? Can we ignore Helen's testimony that she was "teleported" into the UFO? Can we ignore the "absurdity" that characterized the entire episode? How does it fit with the spacecraft idea? The "meeting" aboard the craft makes no sense if we assume the man in white was a visitor from a distant star. Why would such visitors look like us? Why would they show us a motor that does not have an objective physical function, a motor we cannot build? These are some of the questions to which we will return again and again in the course of this book. Some abduction reports are even more extraordinary. In 1985 a woman named Kathy told researcher Budd Hopkins that she had found herself taken inside an object, in a place that was entirely white, with small gray beings who looked humanoid. Under hypnosis Kathy recalled