Free Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber Page A

—'"
    "It was a big noise."
    Budd Hopkins: "And your Anne said it was like something hitting something. Almost like an explosion."
    "Yeah. Well for me it was more like a — I can't say it was like a balloon popping, because that's too innocuous a sound. It had a heavier quality to it than that, like some big energy had been released."
    Budd Hopkins: "Annie Gottlieb said it had a slapping sound —"
    "Not that crisp. More of a thud. It was a big noise. There was a slap, but there was a deeper resonance to it."
    Budd Hopkins: "That's what Annie said. We've got four different people to come up with a description of the sound."
    "Thunder?"
    "It wasn't like thunder, no. Not like thunder."
    "It had a clap in it?"
    "Well, no, because it didn't last after it. It would be like a clap that ended immediately. It had a deep undertone to it. But mostly riot.. Actually, a clap would be the best — like a deep clap of thunder that had no echo. Just a single noise. But it had a deep undertone to it. It had a very electrical quality to it. If you could make a tiny bolt of lightning in someone's face, you would create thunder right in their face. That's what was done."
    "I think we're about finished."
    "Yeah, I don't want to go into the twenty-sixth now!"
    "We might not be finished with the fourth."
    "Now that the fear is over. The turmoil. I feel I don't have a psychiatric disorder. I feel you're right about that. You know what I've got to do? I've got to figure out how I feel about this, because I don't think I'm intellectually going to be able to deny their existence much longer. And I have to understand how to feel about these beings who would come into my house and do something so strange and yet somehow or another so productive."
    "How productive?"
    "Well, in two ways. One is, they learned a lot about me, if they are interested in me, for whatever reason. This afternoon I just learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot. Things I didn't have any idea worried me. About my dad and mother."
    "The other fears —'
    "Well, fear of war, obviously . . . and of the death of my son. There is no such thing as a good father who doesn't worry about harm coming to his kid. But the other material is a great surprise. And that's as vivid as it can be. I loved my mom and dad so much. I love my mom, still, and I want to believe that at the end it was as gentle and loving a moment as Momma has always said."
    "That isn't an image of what really happened?"
    "No. I have no reason to believe that. Maybe something much more subtle is going on here. Maybe that image was created to see how I react to something that would be ultimately terrifying to me. Or maybe they were just trying to find out what kind of person I am."
    The session then ended with a decision to continue later in the week. The next night (Sunday. March 2) I called my mother in San Antonio, as I MY to do every week or two. I told her nothing about this matter. And how could I? I had not thought of a way to explain what was happening to us to my seventy-year-old mother on the telephone.
    We talked for a time about a friend who was in the hospital. Then, without warning, she suddenly described my father's death to me. I did not ask her to, nor was I even hoping that she would. In the past ten years I have heard this description only once before, the day after he died. She recounted how she had been sitting near him while he lay on the couch. He had spent a restless afternoon. The doctor believed that his heart would soon fail, and had told my mother this just a few days before. Still, they had been together for so long she could not imagine him dying.
    In the last years of their marriage they had become extremely close, often sitting hand in hand together, in the wordless communion that sometimes blesses very old relationships. I can hardly imagine a more gentle or loving end to their long time together than what happened at the last.
    Mother told me again how she had suddenly heard Dad call her