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As I lay on my bed, I suddenly became aware of a man sitting beside me in my chair. He had on a dark suit, I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. I couldn’t place him racially—other than I knew he was a non-European. I had no idea whatsoever who he was. He just sat there. Then, as suddenly as he hand nnn ba wenn nnn This type of vision is well known to students of psychic phenomena. The immobility or akinesia experienced by Malcolm X is especially common in the “‘bedroom visitant’”’ cases in which percipients awaken to sense or even see an intruder in their bedroom—an intruder who melts away after passing along a message or a warning. Psychiatrists tend to dismiss this type of phenomenon as hypnopompic; that is, the vision is thought to be a dream that overlaps into the waking state. Solitary witnesses to UFO landings and contacts frequently complain of akinesia. They find themselves completely paralyzed until the object takes off or disappears. In some cases, the UFO occupant allegedly aimed a tube or weapon of some sort at the percipient, leading ufologists to assume that a technological device was used to induce the paralytic state. Parapsychologists, on the other hand, have long concluded that akinesia is a contributing cause; that the entity materializes by utilizing energy from the percipient himself. If the UFO phenomenon is largely hallucinatory, and much of the evidence suggests that it is, then the parapsychological assumption may be more valid than the ufological speculation. Charles Bowen, editor of England’s Flying Saucer Review, the world’s most respected ufological journal, recently observed: ‘‘Did these witnesses, widely dispersed on earth, and in time, all have experiences with solid creatures from another world or from another dimension of reality? Or did they suffer hallucinations of a similar kind, where the dream creatures were strikingly similar in many respects?... I pondered over the idea that the frightening, spooky creatures described by some witnesses could be some sort of psychic projection. There are noticeable dreamlike qualities about the incidents described in these cases.” WL. -.22-4- 26 An nn. 2. na ee ne! a an enNat. Neate The records of demonology are filled with striking parallels. During the outbreak of vampirism in Europe during the Middle Ages, witnesses to vampires were often paralyzed, and the general descriptions of the The Cosmic Jokers / 195 had come, he was gone.