The sighting
of the large, luminous “cloud” of plasma, or whatever it was, from 1981, has
stayed with me vividly for all of this time. I was fourteen then, I’m forty five
now. That’s thirty years plus one. When I was twenty one, I had the object’s
secondary shape – the “L” or boomerang shape it changed into when I wasn’t
looking – tattooed onto my right shoulder. At the time, I’d thought of it as a
mark by which to identify myself. I had some idea that there would be others
who’d seen the same thing, and that we were supposed to find each other. Though
the available lore of UFO sightings is full of boomerang- or triangle-shaped
craft, I’ve never heard of anyone else who’s seen this particular, two
dimensional shape. Maybe all sorts of people have, but I haven’t found or heard
from them. The Phoenix Lights come close, but there are essential differences.
A woman I dated for a while claimed to have seen the same thing exactly, but as
she proved to be a near-pathological liar, I’m not inclined to believe her
about this now. I instinctually didn’t believe her at the time. I think of it
now as a mark that, though its ink has faded, is mine alone; like a brand. Or
no – exactly that. It is a brand, in
every sense of the word.
I’ve often
wondered if there was anything more to the experience than what I remembered of
it. My strange-seeming reaction of so mild a curiosity, soon followed by easy
sleep, is consistent with so many abductees’ reports (though I really don’t think
that word – abductee – at all applies
to me) of relative disinterest and loss of consciousness under similar
conditions – which when examined through hypnosis or other means sometimes
reveals a much more extensive experience that had been, through trauma or
design, occluded. At the time that I tried this experiment, hypnosis had not
yet fallen into quite the current disfavor that it suffers among pundits as a
reliable tool for encounter recollection, though I had my own doubts because I
knew myself; I knew how badly I wanted to find something – some kernel of
significant meaning. I knew how empty I felt at the time, and how something
like this – an as-yet undiscovered encounter with living mystery in my past –
could lend a compensatory weight to what at the time seemed an otherwise bland
and disappointing life. Also I didn’t believe that I could be very deeply
hypnotized. Certainly not enough to uncover anything truly shocking. Yet I was
regularly seeing a psychologist at a nearby community center, for a vastly
reduced rate, throughout much of late 2004 and early 2005, mostly for issues of
depression and to deal with the series of significantly traumatic, though
entirely ordinary, events I’d recently been through. Having barely any income,
the arrangement was about as good as I could hope for, though I can’t say I
exactly had the greatest rapport with my therapist. He often stifled yawns
while we met, and we never much connected on any significant level. Apparently,
I was just boring. But I didn’t feel that I had many options and couldn’t do
much shopping around. Under these maybe less than dynamic circumstances I asked
him once if he could do a hypnosis session with me, such a thing being part of
his repertoire, specifically to see if there were anything more to be found within
the experience, which I had told him about. One thing very much in his favor,
and which I have to respect, was that he seemed unbiased toward the encounter
phenomenon in general, and to my request in particular.
I don’t
remember all the stages of the procedure, yet I do recall some of its results.
I can’t exactly trust that they are genuine memories of anything, but they are
at least in some regards interesting.
Put back into
the scene of the sighting, as a fourteen-year-old on Whidbey Island alone in
the night, I saw, and quite spontaneously, an image of something advancing
towards me across the floor from the wide windows through which I’d seen the
“cloud”, a shape like a shadow, a sharp-edged triangle shadow, its apex
stretching slowly over the orange shag carpet (which I had, up till then,
forgotten once covered the floor) but rather than dark, as a normal shadow
would be dark, this shadow was light. In recollection, the image gets jumbled,
and I don’t clearly recall if it was really a shadow made of light, or rather a
cast of illumination that was somehow, paradoxically dark. Either way, I know
that what I saw was the inverse of what it was supposed to be, like a
photographic negative, at least in the context of what I referred to it as. I’d
retreated deeper into the house and away from the windows, but the shadow/light
thing advanced so that it would inevitably, eventually reach me. There was
nothing more to the “memory” than this image, which as I say, I do not trust.
It could so very likely be my own invention.
The other
thing to come out of this hypnosis session was a sort of “summary of intent”, which
was basically a statement: the being or intelligence responsible for what I’d
seen that night had not physically done anything to me, it/I said, but it had
reached me at the level of the unconscious, where it connected with and had a
certain influence within my mind. In a sense, it had become me. This
explanation – which was only a thought, though one that appeared with a certain
propulsive force – satisfied me, at least in some degree, because I’d felt for
a long time that something like this was the case. Was I simply supplying
myself with the explanation that I needed, pretending it to be an “alien” voice
in my mind? Maybe. In a way, such a distinction didn’t matter, not to me. I’d long
felt myself to be a human with a partly not-human mind. If this were factually
true, to get confirmation from my own imagination would be logically
consistent, since that is where the other
resides. Of course, that is a long ways off from proving anything. Yet I can
say that if it is not valid as objective “fact”, it is true as an element of the myth of my life, in the shifty way a
dream is true, as unelaborated text, the story of which I’m constructed and am at
once constructing into. So long as the myth remains authentic at the level of
an inner truth (whatever that may be: an image, an impulse, a means by which to
relate to experience as empirically felt) and does not interfere too
drastically with my ability to function in the world, whose business is it
anyhow but mine?
