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43 Anita, then, admits that at least part of the alien programming has had an effect on her, but she doesn't let herself accept everything they tell her or show her. “I’m always amazed when | get any information from them at all,” she said. “I really don’t know if someone who would abduct a person could be trusted to give a truthful answer to any question.” She is aware of their possible deceptions, just as she realizes that the aliens are capable of creating unreal scenarios for humans during encounters. This awareness has served Anita well, for it has allowed her to push the alien activity away from her a little, as it were, in order to analyze and assess the events to which she has been subjected. And it also has kept her from jumping to conclusions about some of the things she has remembered. One recent possible event, for instance, Anita describes as a regular dream, in spite of the presence of UFOs in the scenario. “| dreamed last night that | was standing in my back yard and looking up into the night sky,” she told me. “I saw a rectangular UFO sitting poised about five hundred feet above the house. It had rockets on the side and started firing at a line of trees fairly close to the house. | ran inside, and my doorbell rang.” She said the next segment of the dream involved a scene in which she and | were together, discussing the book project, but after that a very different episode occurred. “Next,” she said, “I was visited by some military sorts who were trying to get me to tell them about the UFOs, and | refused. | kept saying, ‘| know nothing, | know nothing’.” Anita dismissed this scenario as a mundane dream, which it may well have been, probably in part because of my presence in one of the segments. What she didn’t know, however, was that | in fact had seen a rectangular UFO at very close range in the winter of 1992, so my own curiosity was aroused by her description. Even more interesting was the fact that several other people in this book project-Lisa, Angie, and a member of my family- have reported very similar situations to the military interrogation. And in these other cases, there was reason to believe they were not normal dreams at all. For Anita, however, the evidence of the dream’s reality was not very strong, which is indicative of her tendency not to overreact to possible or actual alien encounters. As a result, she has managed to keep a good sense of mental balance, neither overly exalting the creatures in her mind, making gods of them, nor being overwhelmed by terror as if they were demons. “Not all of the aliens are bad,” she believes, which is a reasonable point of view given the cumulative experiences she has had. Still, when they physically intrude into her normal reality, Anita is not happy about it, as her description of two typical episodes show. “When | went to bed,” she said, “I started feeling apprehensive. | couldn’t go to sleep. It got worse as the hours passed. Finally, | turned on the bedside lamp to read. | had not been reading long when | saw a flash of light in the den. | started thinking, Oh, geez, no. | told myself that maybe it was the light in one of my aquariums and tried to read some more. “| started hearing a clicking noise,” she continued, “and tried to figure out what it was. Then | saw, in my peripheral vision, a flash of brown go past my door toward the bathroom.” The “flash of brown” was recognizable to Anita, and she realized that at least one of the aliens was in the house. She fought to stay alert, hoping to fend off another abduction, but she couldn't do it. “Finally,” she concluded, “in sheer fatigue | gave up and fell asleep. They really are patient little critters.” If anything occurred after that, Anita couldn’t recall it. But she awoke with a possible sign that she had indeed been paid a visit. “On Saturday morning,” she said, “my knees and legs were in terrible pain. | have been checked for arthritis and don’t have it.” Four months later, in December 1993, a similar incident occurred, as fleeting and