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5 | (continued) He then kindly lent me several books from his collection, just to reinforce his warnings. Combined with one I had read some years before—all of which are very convincingly written by True Believers—they had the effect of filling my mind with images of the most lurid sci-fi horror every time I gave thought to the matter, which was often. Perhaps too often—it occurs to me now that much of my initial night-fear had been fed by that reading. I’ve recently read two more—W.C. D. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, and John Mack’s Abduction—both excellently written, and the thought has since occurred to me that the incident described below is an example of being under a kind of cursory surveillance, merely because of my isolation. I find it amusing to think that despite Their legendary psychic powers, They would be unable to see me, or somehow judge my, ah, suitability, shall we say, through the fabric of a tent. With all this preparation, I suppose it was inevitable that something weird would happen out there. But of course I mean inexplicable, not like the “bats” in the garage. And what was it? One evening at dusk, in late summer, I was lying in the sleeping bag, calmly reading, when I had the feeling that something odd was happening just outside the tent. There were no strange sounds, no lights, no unusual movements— just an indefinable sense of something amiss. I quickly unzipped the mosquito netting, threw back the open flap of the tent and looked out. What I saw still seems to me so unaccountably improbable that I doubt that I’ll ever get a satisfactory explanation for it, regardless whom I consult. It was a firefly. Don’t be too quick to laugh—there were three things about that firefly that made it perhaps the rarest of its kind: first, I had somehow been prompted to sense its presence; second, it was completely alone, by which I mean that it was the one and only firefly that I saw in those woods in all the time I was there; third, and most interesting, its luminous organ was much brighter than that of any other firefly I’ve ever seen, and was flashing about two or three times as fast. To top it off, it was in level flight, about three feet off the ground, in a circular flight-path, the path being about fifteen feet across and centered on the tent. The resemblance of this sortie to a miniature reconnaissance flight was absolutely uncanny. And that was it. I had no further visitations that I know of, and certainly don’t remember being abducted…. When I told the “younger” brother about this experience, his response was, “Richard, I wouldn’t question any of their technology!”
One last anecdote pertaining to darkness. I mentioned above that the woods were at their darkest on clear summer nights, with no clouds to reflect the lights of the city, and maximum foliage on the trees. I found just how dark this could be one September evening. I had moved the tent to its new location, toward the center of the woods, about thirty yards west of the tractor lane. I thought I had the turn-off point on the lane well-memorized, and on this night, long after dark, had only my feeble minilight with me. When I reached what I thought was the turn-off, I entered the trees, holding the little light before me, and walked to where the tent should be. The ground looked familiar; the trees, well, they didn’t look different. But no tent. Naturally I scanned the area with the light in all directions from where I stood. No tent anywhere. No signs of habitation whatever. The slope of the land at that point was very slight, not really enough to let me judge direction, so of course by spinning completely around, I had even lost track of the direction from which I had come. I knew I couldn’t be very far from the campsite, but I had absolutely no idea which way it was. By then I couldn’t even point to the lane, or to the houses, which were below my horizon and obscured by a quarter-mile of scattered undergrowth. I knew Up from Down at that moment, and that’s all. |
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