Communion: A True Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

soon as I had them in focus, my memories became perfectly vivid-as vivid, say, as childhood memories become when one chooses to draw them out of the mental file where they are hidden. I sat at my desk, trying to make sense of what could not make sense.
    I thought, quietly and calmly, You may be going mad, or you may have o brain tumor.
    You've gut to find um which it is and take whatever steps are necessary . And then I rested my head on the desk, and, quite frankly, cried.
    For a couple of days I lived with it. Maybe the "symptoms" would subside.
    Then, quite suddenly one afternoon, I recalled the smell. Their smell. It came back to me as clearly as if I had inhaled it not a moment before. More than anything except discovering that I was not alone with my experience, that totally real memory saved me from going stark raving mad.
    In the first week of January, a local newspaper published accounts of an object or objects being sighted in our area. This story appeared m the January 3, 1986, issue of the Middletown. New York Record . The headline called the appearance a hoax but according to the story local people who had witnessed the event doubted that. One man, however claimed that he had seen the things fly over a brightly lit local prison, and in the light he saw planes.
    A follow-up story on January 12 expanded on the prank hypothesis.
    My wife showed me the article and told me. "You said this would happen. You were talking about this last week." I did not remember the conversation, but the article caused me to glance over a hook my brother had sent me for Christmas called Science and the UFOs by Jenny Randles and the astronomer Peter Warrington.
    Warrington is a respected scientist, and the book seemed well written. As a matter of fact, it does not make any claims about the reality of the phenomenon, but simply calls for more study and appeals to the scientific community to begin to accept it as a legitimate area of inquiry.
    I was surprised to find that Science and the UFOs frightened me. I put it aside with no more than the first fire or six pages read.
    Much later. after we had really begun to take this whole matter seriously. Anne and I did more research into UFO sightings in our area. We discovered that it is a hotbed of sightings, and has been for nearly half a century.
    As it happens, the eighteen-year-old son of one of our neighbors saw something hovering near a road not five miles from our cabin ac approximately nine-thirty on a night in late December. He described it to me as "huge and covered with lights," a typical description. He watched it for some time. Being the son of a former state trooper and pilot, he did not claim that it was a "UFO," but simply told the truth: He did not know what it was, but it appeared to be a solid structure, and as it hovered for a substantial period, more than fifteen minutes, it could not have been a flight of planes. I telephoned the Goodyear Corporation and found that their blimp was not in the area at the time.
    The only thing I thought it could have been was some unknown blimp, but even that appeared hard to believe in view of what snore I discovered about it.
    Just by talking with friends in April my wife uncovered a personal experience of an early area sighting, one that took place in the late fifties. One of her best friends is an artist and the wife of a well-known composer. In her childhood this woman used to at summer camp at a location not ten miles from where our log cabin now stands, a fact that we did not know when Anne asked her the question we had determined to put to as many people as we could, as part of our research effort.
    To at once gain valid information and prevent bias, we had simply been asking people,
    "What was your strangest experience?" None of the people we asked had any idea of what was happening to us.
    The woman's answer turned out to be highly revealing. She reported that she had seen a flying saucer in 1953, when she was nine. She proceeded to