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41 remember having gotten the day before.” The evidence for vigorous physical activity during the night, although unremembered, comes from more than just Anita’s sore or scarred body, however. In one incident, she woke up in the morning and felt an unfamiliar pain in her right hand. “| sat up in bed,” she explained, “and found that sometime during the night my ring had been squashed on my finger.” She managed with effort to remove the ring, but neither her husband nor a jeweler could completely restore its original shape. On another occasion, Anita got out of bed one morning and found the crucifix from her necklace lying on the floor. “It had been on my neck the night before,” she said, “and the chain was still on [me]. But the only way to remove the crucifix is to remove the necklace and take it off the chain.” She has also awakened several mornings to discover that something had happened to her clothing, a report frequently echoed by other abductees. In one instance, she woke up with her nightie on backward, although she was certain she had not taken it off, turned it around, and put it back on. And on a different occasion she found that the nightie was not only backward but had also been turned inside-out. In the night during one of these events, she had an altered-state experience in which she recalled a group of Tan aliens observing her as she was “free-falling,” an event which did not feel unduly upsetting for some reason. Anita had quite a severe reaction to another similar event, however, venting much more emotion than the situation seemed to call for. It was in the winter, during the Christmas holidays one night, and she had worn socks to bed for extra warmth. When she woke up the next day and found that one of her socks was missing, Anita became extremely upset and angry at her family. She said she was “very belligerent” toward them, even accused them of playing a practical joke on her, one which didn’t strike her as humorous. Anita was also physically upset that morning, suffering from a violent headache and nausea which caused her to vomit, yet there was no illness to account for the symptoms. Still, she might not have been overly concerned about the vanished sock and her physical problems, if her young granddaughter hadn’t made a disturbing comment. The seven-year-old child told her grandmother that some “mean men” had come in and taken her away during the night. When Anita asked her to describe the “mean men,” the little girl called them “the mushroom men.” “What are the mushroom men?” Anita asked, and her granddaughter then found the book MISSING TIME by Budd Hopkins and pointed to the drawing on the cover. Anita asked the girl to make a drawing of her own. It showed a long-necked humanoid being with a head shaped like an inverted light bulb. The eyes were black, large, and slanted, the nose had two nostril holes, the mouth was a straight thin line, and the chin was more rounded than in the drawing on the cover of MISSING TIME. The girl said the creatures were about a foot tall, gray-skinned and had four fingers rather than five-a detail not apparent in the cover picture. There were quite a few of these entities present, she said. Anita remembered nothing strange that night herself, but the physical symptoms, the missing sock, and her granddaughter’s story were indicative enough of an intrusive incident to be of great concern. She not only wanted to know what had gone on during the night, but she wanted to know more in general about these beings who had been a part of her life for so long, so she decided to try meditating and sending out messages to the