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The Siege - Four jangled nerves. A nineteen-year-old man from a nearby community also phoned. He insisted that such a ball of light met him one night on the way home from a date. He said it was shortly after midnight when he came face to face with the light after his pickup suddenly stalled on a dark country road. The man got out of the truck to raise the hood, trying to determine why the vehicle died, when to his surprise a glowing, basket- ball-sized object, just as Ted had seen, suddenly came out of nowhere and hovered within arm’s reach. He said he felt and heard nothing. The ball of light seemed to float near him only a few seconds and then disap- peared as if it blinked away. He jumped back into the pickup to grab a flashlight, but he found that the truck was now working again. He drove at a high speed the rest of the two- mile trip home. He had no recall of missing time and claimed he had never seen a UFO but would like to see one, having become extremely interested in the subject since the encounter with the ball of light. Thinking about his own encounter with the monitoring sphere, Ted realized just how much the strange event had echoed the movie scene in Close Encounters, and he wondered if someone or something had been listening when he had made the remark about it to himself while watching the film. He also realized that if he had witnessed the light display at any time before 1988, he probably would have accepted it as a signal or a manifestation of some spiritual entity. But now Ted realized that the encounter, imitating the movie scene, was meant to direct his attention to a UFO- based explanation for many of his previous experiences. Was this event, he wondered, meant to give the objective confir- mation he’d been asking for? Maybe so, he mused, but that ball of light, in spite of its very real but brief appearance, was still not enough to convince Ted. Masquerade of Angels 32 Five God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face Browning Shortly after this episode, Marie Jackson phoned and invited Ted for a visit at her home in Florida. Eager to discuss his recent experiences with his old mentor, Ted accepted. He left in July, and as the plane carried him toward Florida he spent his time gazing out the window, wondering if a UFO would flit by, and reading a book on the subject. “I wonder if the ETs know I’m going to Marie’s,” he mused silently. “They seem to know a lot about me, so I guess it’s possible.” When he arrived, he found that another old friend, Amelia Reynolds, was also staying at Marie’s, and the three of them shared wonderful conversations, laughing and talk- ing late into the evenings. Ted told them all about the UFO study group and the many strange experiences he and the others had witnessed. Marie listened with great curiosity, but Amelia dismissed the whole phenomenon out of hand. No matter what Ted told her, she emphatically declared, ‘There is no such thing as UFOs. That’s the sort of stuff the National Enquirer prints, so how on earth can you take it seriously?” Just after midnight one evening, the three friends said good night and went off to prepare for bed. Ted’s room was at the far end of the house from the bedroom where Marie and Amelia occupied twin beds. The lights were out and the house was quiet, until Amelia suddenly awoke hearing a hel- icopter hovering noisily overhead.