Here are the paintings, with their titles, and their very familiar Stresa locations:. Cupid is Struck by the Beauty of Psyche. I do believe that is the view of Lago Maggiore from Isola Bella, with the town and mountain of Laveno seen in the back right, and Pallanza Verbania in the back left.
The Vengeance of Venus. Look at those columns and the cherub statues atop them Zephyr Transports Psyche to the Island of Delight.
No explanation is necessary here; we all know that island of delight! This setting is an actual bedroom in the Palazzo Borromeo. Those obelisks, cypress trees, and urns are instantly recognizable features from the terraced gardens of Isola Bella. Cupid carrying Psyche up to Heaven.
No scenes of Stresa in this sixth painting of the series, but I wanted to include it as I find it so beautiful in its composition and color, and it's a stretch, but we've all seen blue skies like this in Stresa, si? This is a self-portrait of the artist, Maurice Denis. The Story of Psyche paintings are now housed in the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, Russia; a few years ago they traveled to the D'Orsay Museum in Paris as part of a large exhibition of Denis's works.
It seems fitting that he chose Isola Bella as his setting for a story of love and Cupid. He drove by a low drystone wall.
Nearby, some cows were grazing. At P. The building used to house New York , which had a billboard on the top, so the city had allowed Burberry to erect a sign of its own. When the sign lit up, the effect was almost colonial, the planting of a flag.
Across the street, on the roof of the Palace Hotel, which had a good view of the sign, Burberry was hosting a party. A rock band from Yorkshire was playing, amid such guests as Orlando Bloom, Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Blake Lively, and, evidently, a lot of British people—shortly before ten, the bar reportedly went dry. A Burberry spokesperson says this is an urban legend. Helpers trailed the celebrities with check-lined umbrellas.
Even the loudspeakers, wrapped in plastic, seemed to be wearing raincoats. After a while, the city itself, windowpanes and subway grates, started to appear tessellated—Burberry checks in steel and glass. The party was a homecoming for Bailey, who began his career as a womenswear designer at Donna Karan.
He showed her his portfolio. A year later, he was living in a sixth-floor walkup in Murray Hill. Pastrami on rye. I imagined, O. Weather is to Burberry as sex was to Gucci: the thing without which it would be impossible to imagine the other. From the beginning, Burberry dedicated himself to devising superior ways of protecting his clientele from the elements. The elements, in particular, posed a challenge—not only to the British psyche but also to its immune system.
People—and, with them, the empire—suffered when, in avoidance of the rain and cold, they wore poorly ventilated clothes and got overheated. Before the breathable waterproof coat became a fashion item, it was a medical and military imperative. He called the fabric gabardine. In , it outfitted the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen with windproof anoraks for his expedition to the South Pole. Burberry also equipped Robert Scott for his ill-fated Antarctic journey. Amundsen had beaten them by thirty-four days.
The men wear mufflers, and harnesses across their shoulders to support heavy mitts. Many of them had taken to tying gabardine bags around their fur boots, like gaiters. The temperature is twenty degrees below zero. A breeze ruffles the Union Jack, staked in the ice. Equestrians, country doctors, hot-air balloonists, sailors, golfers, cyclists, and vicars all loved their Burberrys. The Prince of Wales ordered one.
The Morning Post sponsored a limerick competition:. During the Boer War, British troops had taken to wearing a Burberry coat called the Tielocken, which fastened at the waist with a sash instead of buttons, providing wraparound coverage. During the Matabele campaign, cavalry officers reportedly carried Tielockens rolled up on the pommels of their saddles.
Burberry added to the Tielocken silhouette shoulder straps for epaulets and D-rings for satchels to hold hand grenades, compasses, canteens, or whatever else the subaltern required. From Somaliland, a Mr. In November, amid the institution of a hundred-million-dollar cost-efficiency plan, the company moved to Horseferry House, a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-foot former government building in Westminster.
You have to spend before you save, the thinking apparently went. The new building, designed by Bailey in collaboration with the architectural firm Gensler, houses eight floors of design studios, showrooms, and executive offices arranged around two light-filled atriums. One afternoon in July, Bailey greeted me in a reception room on the ground floor. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, green-and-black striped socks, and a tailored blazer. Rolling racks laden with selections from the Burberry archives lined the room.
I drove on in exasperation, sticking my head out the window and trying my best to follow the highway, then glancing back through the mist for the racing flatbed that was sure to run me down at any moment.
Near the old mining town of Superior, I pulled off the road and waited for the storm to abate. I took that as a good omen. In my preliminary talks with Travis, the answer became clear. The Travis Walton I knew only by voice seemed extremely suspicious of anyone from Hollywood. In fact, he seemed suspicious of anyone, period.
So I was journeying to Snowflake for two major reasons: to convince him that I was sincere in my pledge to make a him that told his story truthfully, and to see for myself if the case was a hoax. If the Walton incident. The storm never ended; I arrived in Snowflake three hours later, half amazed still to be in one piece.
I spoke with believers and disbelievers, well- wishers and scornmongers. In the end there was only one conclusion I could possibly reach. The woodsmen had been telling the truth. Something built by nonhuman hands really did appear on the mountain that night. Six and a half long years later, Fire in the Sky went into production. Why did it take so long? In the film business, things that should take a week take a month.
It was my sad duty to report to Travis all the roadblocks and false alarms we experienced during those years. I encouraged him to maintain the hope and expectation that our film would eventually be made. Travis hung in there with us until we finally hit pay dirt. As the film was produced, shot, and edited, I could sense his growing excitement, as well as the satisfaction he felt at finally having the opportunity to have a large, nationwide audience vicariously relive his experience.
I know this book will enlighten and amaze the reader, just as the story of the Walton Seven first captivated me, half my lifetime ago. His qualities of quiet truthfulness and deep introspective thinking are still the same, but the chip on his shoulder has evaporated. He holds his head high now, confronts his critics directly and readily accepts the fact that there are some who will always disbelieve. He is a family man of quality, at peace with himself and his experience. It was many years ago that I got out of a crew truck in the national forest and ran toward a large glowing object hovering in the darkening Arizona sky.
And with this new book I try to share those insights. My hope was that if people could vicariously live it—somehow actually experience it as if they were there in my stead—perhaps they could take a more open- minded and objective approach to their evaluation of it all.
I think most people knew better than to expect a documentary, and although some dramatic license was exercised, I believe that the movie succeeded in conveying the emotional essence of what we went through. Public response to the film fulfilled all reasonable expectations of all reasonable expectations of its makers. And it satisfied my goal of imparting my experience on the gut level, so I feel free now in this updating to emphasize other areas.
I provide an accurate, undramatized chronicle of events, and I account for the main departures that the film took from what actually happened. I try to satisfy the interest which so many people have expressed concerning why, after all this time, I finally consented to a movie being made, and what the process of its creation was like.
One of the most neglected areas in the earlier book was the controversy surrounding the whole episode, the attacks by people who for various reasons felt compelled to try to deny that it had ever really happened. Many of those attacks were so ridiculously baseless that I naively believed a cursory rebuttal would be sufficient. I thought those inclined to doubt could easily be pointed in a direction that would lead them to discover there was no truth in the alleged scenarios which had me or my coworkers hallucinating on drugs, creating a hoax, suddenly becoming psychotic, etc.
I wrote as if all these claims could be as easily refuted as the charge that the report was a cover story for a gory chainsaw murder. I could not have been more mistaken. The onslaught not only did not go away, it grew. Refuted claims were continuously.
Therefore I devote my greatest efforts here to critical analysis of the myriad attempts to explain away what was otherwise recognized as the most spectacular, best-documented UFO incident ever. Another emphasis in this book is the context in which this incredible event occurred. People need to know more about the prior lives of the people involved and the community in which it happened in order to understand its impact and aftermath. Take a sleepy little Western town steeped in conservative, traditional values.
Drop into its midst an event so shocking, so anomalous, that by its very nature it challenged conventional beliefs and attitudes, at the same time being impossible to dismiss, demanding to be confronted. That, pardner, was the makings of some serious turmoil. The UFO incident caused me to come in contact, directly or indirectly, with many people from all over the world whom I otherwise would never have known anything about. It so happened that most of them came from the larger cities.
In many of those people I detected the attitude that it was good that this event occurred in such a place. Admittedly, these mountain communities are somewhat more homogeneous in their views, but there is far more diversity here than metrophiles assume.
Granted, people here can be very certain of their truths, but no more so than elsewhere. A diversity of self-certitudes is still self-certitude.
The more I discover of the world, the more I see how fundamentally alike people everywhere actually are. In a broad sense we all share the same basic strengths and failings, although to varying degrees. People see what they expect to see.
Preconceptions seem to predetermine judgment of everything. These mountain communities are more a microcosm of the world than some would expect. To some people from out of state, these two words sound like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
Well, it does snow, quite enough, thanks. But Snowflake, ever since its founding in , has been a town that people have been forced to take seriously.
Rugged Mormon pioneers came into this area when it was virtually wilderness and founded a number of towns here on the mountain.
They hunted game, fought off wolves, bears, and lions, dammed streams, cut timber, quarried rock, and built homes for their families. They farmed the land and herded sheep, cattle, and horses over large tracts of the surrounding area. They tamed their piece of the American West at a cost of great hardship and loss of life.
Rogers and Eliza Snow Smith, were among the earliest settlers. Her grandfather Wilford was born in a log cabin here in Snow blew through cracks in the cabin onto the bed where he came into this world, as the seventh of fifteen children, four of whom died before reaching adulthood. He led a robust life full of hard work in the outdoors, but made time for music and theater. He survived being buffeted by the elements, sickened by diphtheria, rolled over by a horse, and run over by a bus.
The grand old man passed away a while back at the age of. Only the strongest survived. Snowflake has always held a disproportionate influence over larger towns in the region. A high percentage of Snowflake residents are descended from the original settlers.
There have been times when Flakes and other Snowflake founding-family names have filled nearly every position of power and status in the county. There was once talk of moving the county seat to Snowflake. For a very long time Snowflake Union High School was the only one, attended from nearly a dozen of the surrounding towns, some more than thirty miles away.
One by one the other towns are building their own high schools, but the SHS Lobos continue to win a larger portion of sports competitions, including the wolf's share of state championships. SHS has also had great success in orchestra, choir, marching-band competitions, spelling bees, and debate competitions.
The school places in the top three every time the academic decathlon team competes. Main Street is still basically about twelve blocks long; one whole block for the LDS Mormon church, one bank, a post office, a few small businesses.
All but one of the four service stations have been supplanted by quick-stop mini-marts. Snowflake has yet to get its first stoplight. The years have seen a slow waning of the old lines of power.
Outside influences continue to come in and take hold, some for the better, others not. The percentage of non-Mormon residents has continued to grow. Many of the traditional ways remain, however. When I first moved here, two lawmen—a resident county deputy and one town marshal—were all the law. A rash of broken windows can make the local newspaper. Although drug abuse used to be virtually nonexistent here, we still have the lowest incidence in the state.
The Santa Fe Railroad pulled up the tracks through town a while ago. Western-style dress, though still popular and in current revival, no longer completely dominates the fashion scene. The Homecoming Game Parade gets almost as big a turnout, since high-school football is taken very seriously here.
A number of athletes have left here for the pros. I think it was Robert Service who said that big spaces seem to produce big men. Arizona has always been a place of big. The rest is Indian reservations, state and federal land, and national forest.
Arizona has been called a land of contrasts, and many of the borders of those contrasts seem to fall in the area around Snowflake. It ranges south from the high desert near the lower boundaries of the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, and the Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations, continuing south to the still higher elevations of the wetter, alpine-forested Sunrise Ski Area up near the timberline on the Apache Indian Reservation.
Snowflake lies midway, in the scrub cedar and rolling prairie at the northern edge of the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world. Some speculate that the crack, as well as the big sinkholes just northwest of town, happened because of the meteor. The 7,foot-high ridge of the forested Mogollon Rim, twenty miles southwest of Snowflake, forms a long natural barrier to the prevailing winds.
This shields the town and the surrounding area from the brunt of storms, which makes for the milder, if dryer, high desert climate. Remote, yes. But loneliness is a subjective experience. A man working by himself in the forest, miles from anything human, can feel more at one with the world and far less lonely than another man sitting in his house in the middle of a community from which he feels set apart.
What is to one man a rich, expansive refuge of peaceful, reflective solitude, is to another man a bleak empty prison of drab isolated boredom.
Some men live in both. Pity the man of either perspective who is blind to the other. Whether you think of yourself, or those on the other side, as locked in or locked out, may be only a matter of perspective, with the one who seems to control the key being a minor irrelevance. The satisfied see themselves as either sheltered or liberated. The dissatisfied see themselves as either inmates or exiles.
To each his own. Fall, Sakharov had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. But the towering threat of instant nuclear annihilation by a monolithic Soviet Union was still a perpetual shadow over the world. More than one million died in the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act. My best friend, Mike Rogers, and I were very "into" martial arts and still pondering the mysteries of the recent death of Bruce Lee and the seeming invincibility of Muhammad Ali.
They were okay, but we preferred what might seem an unlikely mix of music which included the easy country of Don Williams, some classical, early Cat Stevens, and especially the Moody Blues. In Snowflake, social trends have a way of lagging behind the rest of the nation. Even here, however, by late the fashion of longer hair on men had lost much of its sixties countercultural statement, having become so mainstream that many country-western music stars were letting their hair grow.
As a result, many of the men on our woods crew, even Mike and me, had longer locks than some of the more traditional town fathers considered respectable for red-blooded American males, although it barely overhung our collars.
Only one of our crew, Ken Peterson, maintained the neatly cropped conventional haircut. We were red-blooded American males, but after the UFO incident, all it took were little signs such as these to confirm the notion for many locals that we were some living example of why the golden ways of the past seemed to them to be eroding.
Occasionally men new to such work came to us from the city or from less-demanding jobs. Then the outcome of the struggle between the demands of the job and the character with which they arrived would play itself out before us. The real struggle is with his inner self. Call it fiber, backbone, or grit: true toughness is internal. This can help give a man the power to say yes or no—in the right instances—to just about anything and to act consistently with what he says.
I was a little wild in my younger days. I pulled some risky stunts on my motorcycle that I cringe to look back on. I drove a number of very fast and unique cars in those days: a Pontiac Ventura that had a engine with a factory three These were cars I could have kept whose current worth would make collectors drool. I was no stranger to the quarter-mile strips earlier generations had marked off on the straight stretches of highway outside of town.
I had no dreams of being a rodeo star myself, but took a bovine beating every day for a week, just for the experience. We did pretty well, so I also went and competed the next two years. Karate schools came and went in the White Mountain area, and Mike and I signed up every chance we got, getting exposure to a variety of instructors, different martial-arts styles, and different classmates to spar with.
I hiked, fished, and hunted some pretty remote Arizona back country and I scaled some pretty dangerous rock walls in the canyons in the area. One night when our group challenged us, a friend and I went over the fence and climbed the Tower, all the way to the top of a microwave antenna so high you can see it from thirty miles away. Please, don't anyone else ever try this stupid stunt. I did some partying and acting out in ways I lived to regret.
Yeah, there were fights. Did I always win? Is anyone a winner in these kinds of things? Mike and I and another crew were on our way home from work one day. Suddenly a black bear ran across the road in front of the crew truck. Mike had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting it. The bear stopped on the other side and looked back.
I took advantage of the truck stopping to jump out and run straight toward the critter, roaring like I was an enraged grizzly. The bear fled as if its tail were on fire. The bear was already intimidated by its near miss with the truck, and by the way it only half turned around, I could tell it was already all set to hightail it.
Most of the foregoing was years before the UFO incident. I survived, surprisingly enough, without a single broken bone. I had a few isolated brushes with the law, mostly traffic offenses, but nothing that left me with any record. It was a small part of my life, a brief phase I went through, but I paid the prices and really learned my lesson, and had not received so much as a traffic ticket for a number of years before the UFO incident.
But I came to realize that, without the perspective provided by knowing these things about me, people will never understand the answer to what was for so many one of the more mystifying questions raised by my story: Why?
The other. Why was I the only one brazenly to get out of the crew truck and approach such a fearsome unknown? I kept getting this question, over and over again, for years. However, youthful bravado is only half the explanation for that apparent mystery.
The acute embarrassment I feel in reviewing that time period will also be better understood from knowing something else about me. Another side to my personality ran deeper, more true to my real nature. I was possessed by a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge, especially of a type others considered off limits—not bad things, just things hidden, regarded as best left for a few, or truths that many deny solely from bias or fear.
My all- consuming curiosity was more powerful than my own fear, and at its zenith in my life the evening of November 5, Many of those who disapproved of my ways were probably in the throes of backlash to the changes time had brought to their world, and needed a culprit, as if I were an agent of those changes.
How little they really knew about me. Small towns are always described as places where everyone knows everyone else. Actually, a small town is a place where people only think they know everyone. Getting the facts straight right off is so rare that it amazes me how many people are willing to jump prematurely to conclusions that so often prove false.
When I was in high school I took part in a protest of the high-school dress code. There was a greatly underestimated intellectual side to me. I think I caused a little dismay in some of those who rarely would see me take a textbook home, would see me cut class, then on Friday rumble up to the high school on my motorcycle, walk in, and ace the test. I actually dropped out of high school with only a year to go; but I came back, buckled down, graduated, and obtained grants to attend all three of the universities to which I applied.
I kept changing majors—electronic engineering, law, psychology, medicine, liberal studies—not because I lacked sufficient interest, but because I was so interested in everything. I really had no reason to expect to be seen as I truly was. But I only succeeded in getting myself into. Nevertheless I privately continued my intellectual inquiries into a wide variety of subjects such as philosophy, religion, art, languages, music, science, and literature including the works of Ayn Rand, beginning with Atlas Shrugged, but especially her nonfiction.
Many people avoid reading the works of those with whom they disagree, but I find these to be some of the most stimulating. There was tremendous suffering and death among those herded along by soldiers, on what became known as the Trail of Tears. My great- grandfather was a chief who escaped the procession and settled in Tennessee before later rejoining his people in Oklahoma.
I worked at the nearby Show Low airport to pay for my private-pilot ground school and flying lessons. I worked. When midwives I knew told me they had been taking the college licensing preparation course and studying for the state midwife licensing examination, I borrowed their textbooks a few days before the test and read them.
I received the second-highest score out of the entire group, just behind a lady who had actually taken the college course. I was a person who seemed to be from two worlds.
Adding to some of the friction between me and one or two guys on the crew was my attitude toward smoking and drinking. They seemed to miss the distinction between refusing to drink with them and simply refusing to drink. Snowflake residents, I think, viewed me as an outsider. My moving to town from elsewhere and my church inactivity contributed greatly to that impression. My great-great-grandfather, Joseph Walton, was among the pioneer families to settle the Utah Valley with Brigham Young.
He saw a lot of trouble with Indian raids, including the Walker War and the Black Hawk War, and endured the same hardships as the other pioneers in taming the Utah Valley.
The UFO incident was a sharp turning point for me. There were other reasons, too, though How could the shy person they met one time be the same grandstanding guy they would see at another time?
I used to kill rattlesnakes whenever I came across them, just like everyone else. Now I just let them go their way and I go mine. I still try to stay fit and live healthy. Vanity is a character flaw actually a cloak for low self-esteem , but ego is the wellspring of the psyche. I, however, am not taking pride in my good qualities; but that is good. We were always really competitive on the job—and about the job itself, too.
Who could cut the most trees, who could go the longest without dulling his chain on a rock, etc. We were very competitive concerning ideas, too. We would debate all kinds of things, not just philosophy. Current events, things going on in our lives and in the lives of those around us—even job-related subjects.
Logically proving our own position was the game, and the struggle brought us naturally to the rules of that game. The drives to and from work were always long, but we would fill the time with talk of many fascinating things.
Embryological neuro-artifacts of mathematical harmonics. Why do you guys have to pry into everything? All you guys ever do is argue. We would have challenges to see who could predict where a tree would fall without a nudge. Who could most closely estimate the distance between two trees, or how many man-hours it would take to complete a given acreage. As a ponderosa pine grows, its lower limbs die off and new ones are added to the top. Normally they get drier and drier until wind or snow breaks them off.
Being taller, I always won this one. We would take one of the round files we sharpened our chains with and see who could throw it and stick it closest to the center of the end of a log. Mike usually won this one. Mike usually won this one, too.
I guess Mike has more sawdust in his veins. When Mike was growing up, he helped his dad in the woods. Lyle has done tree thinning intermittently for the U. Forest Service since leaving the railroad, and is still doing it at the age of seventy-plus. After Grandpa George left the Forest Service, he was in timber- related work the rest of his life. She spent her girlhood living in various lumber camps.
Aside from being a born woodsman, all that competitiveness on the job probably helped Mike when he entered the big lumberjack contests, where he did well. Mike had been bidding U. Forest Service thinning contracts since he was only nineteen years old.
Now that was some job. We were above 10, feet. There were times there when we found ourselves looking down at the clouds! Heck, just carrying your saw back up the hill to the crew truck can make you gasp. No wonder. Most of the Candy Mountain crew had left for one reason or another, and so for Turkey Springs Mike had been adding some men. Including Mike, there was a total of seven of us working on that contract at the time of the incident. Mike had known him all his life, having grown up together.
Everyone always thought of Ken as a really decent guy. A former high-school athlete, he was a quiet, introspective sort, always polite, a real straight arrow. Very conventional in his dress, manner, and behavior, but also a deep thinker, and religiously a bit restless, a searcher. He was a steady worker and got along well with everyone, though he tended to talk more with Mike and me than the others. Except for me, Allen Dalis had been there longest, outlasting a number of other men who came and went over the summer.
There had been a few rough moments between Allen and others on the crew, including a fistfight with Mike a month or so earlier. My own troubles with him were forgotten as far as I was concerned.
His dark side notwithstanding, he was downright likable much of the time. Besides, he was a heck of a good sawyer. John Goulette was the closest thing to a sidekick for Allen in the crew.
John had worked for Mike before on a couple of occasions when Allen had also. Although he knew how to have a good time, he was quite a bit more easygoing. He got along well with the rest of the crew, but tended to pair off with Allen.
He brought back with him a gangly, six-foot-seven guy named Dwayne Smith, who was looking for a job. Steve had been with us for a few weeks.
He was. It looked as if he was going to work out okay. So there we were. A mixed group of personalities, with various friendships and antagonisms, all headed off toward work in the mountains of northern Arizona, and the experience of a lifetime.
By reason only can we attain to a correct knowledge of the world and a solution of its great problems. Before giving the eyewitness account of the sighting and subsequent events, I want to appeal to reason and briefly explain why I go into the matter once more, after so much time.
For a while it seemed that everyone wanted to know more about the UFO incident. They wanted to know if anything so incredibly bizarre could actually happen. Could it? Well, it did, but unfortunately, often it was the tendency of a great many people to consider only those facts which supported their preconceived beliefs—not only the lay public, but also scientists, lawmen, and newsmen.
Both the skeptics and even those who accepted the truth of our experience were often guilty of making up their minds on the basis of only part of the evidence. Scientific testing took time, and many people did not want to wait until all the facts were in before reaching a conclusion. A controversy raged that offered evidence to confirm any particular bias a person might choose, and offering food for thought for the unprejudiced and more logical individuals. Every time I read a newspaper or magazine article about my experience, it was with outraged exasperation.
Not one of the written accounts of my experience was entirely correct. However, in matters of fact we are not. Reports that repeated the vaguest rumors and even things which a simple check could have disproved before they were put before millions of people.
A number of so-called experts appeared very foolish by coming out in the media and speaking too soon. They made public statements as if from established fact, which were proven totally false when the real evidence was publicized. Seeing these things, I would tell the next interviewer how no one ever seemed to get it right. He would sympathize, assuring me that he would straighten things out.
But the errors continued. The difficulty was not lessened by the silence I maintained, at first, to the media. They printed what they could get, which was not much. So the problem was not entirely their fault, as the profession of journalism has its own built-in complications. An hour-long interview is condensed into a half page of shorthand notes. When those are expanded and organized into a. The contrast is like that between reconstituted orange juice and the freshly squeezed stuff. The general flavor is there, but something is missing.
The difficulties the interviewers had became even more understandable to me after I began this book. If it was only that their recall had faded, it would not be so bad. But people tend to remember things a little differently as time goes by. Even if they remember something exactly as they experienced it, they might not have perceived it correctly. A dozen people can witness the same automobile accident and all have a different recall of the event.
I dealt with this problem by eliminating versions that did not agree with the majority, and by checking with written records. I racked my brain for even the most insignificant detail about the sometimes enigmatic thing that had happened to me. The description of the incident and events immediately following it is as nearly accurate as I was able to make it, and it is repeated from an account that I wrote while the facts were fresh. There were reasons for my writing this book other than the need to set the record straight.
For one thing, my reserved nature made me want to avoid being eternally interviewed. But at the same time, I had experienced something that I felt should be shared and recorded. In this book I satisfy both those goals. When some people expressed so much intense curiosity, and others, out of fear, tried to explain away what had happened, I kept thinking, If only they could have been there! Therefore, I have tried to relate these experiences in a way that will allow you, the reader, to relive them and feel what we felt at the time it was all happening.
Even in parts where I was not on hand, I have attempted, from careful interviews with those who were. Mike Rogers was mysteriously inspired to paint better than he ever had before. This, after not having painted in over ten years! Mike had at first intended only to portray the original incident, but when I saw the precision of detail he expressed, I asked him to help me recreate my experience in art form. His most recent additions show how much his ability has grown. Mike knows me and he knows what I mean when I describe something.
Still, in the drawings of the beings I encountered, Mike drew over twenty representations, all of which fit the verbal description, before I picked out the one closest to what they had actually looked like. If only they could have been there! I thought. I hope that I have been successful in creating something that puts you where we were that November night. Circumstances at the time of the incident made it necessary to report it to law enforcement officials. The media picked it up and after that, it became simply a matter of defending ourselves against a wild variety of accusations.
This is not to say that all the reports in the media were negative. Most of the news reports were positive, or at least gave unbiased coverage of the overall account. But for the record, all the misinformation and mistaken conclusions need to be set straight. If they think they feel incredulous about it, then they should be able to appreciate how difficult it was for seven tree- cutters to adjust to.
We were the ones it happened to. Yet we had our own share of difficulty accepting what our own senses adamantly told us we had experienced. There were inevitably demands for proof.
With little or no remaining physical evidence, absolute proof was impossible to produce. However, as we shall see, the additional testimony by law enforcement officials and scientific researchers offered overwhelming evidence that it did indeed happen just as we reported it.
Imagine our dilemma. If we could have produced hard physical proof such as bringing in a crashed saucer on the back of a truck, or dragging in an alien being in chains, we might possibly have found ourselves in a more believable position. For example, there were many people who insisted that man would never make it to the moon. They swore that God would never allow it. Perhaps modern technology is frightening to them. If man were meant to go to the moon, he would have been put there, they said.
When man did set foot on the moon in , most of them conveniently forgot their previous predictions. But a few hardcore disbelievers insisted that man never did go to the moon and that it was all a television hoax on the part of the government!
Religious convictions are a considerable source of bias in the matter of extraterrestrial visitors. It is not necessarily a religious matter—no more than the question of simple life on Mars is a religious matter. Unless your particular religion denies that there are such things, it is an academic matter rather than a religious one.
Nevertheless, people made unnecessary. The average individual is going to believe what he wants to believe, regardless of evidence or facts. Those who believe we had a UFO experience are going to believe exactly that and those who scoff will continue to scoff. However, there is hope. There are alive today totally unbiased, rational individuals you? People who are actually capable of withholding judgment indefinitely if there is insufficient evidence for them to base a conclusion on. My six coworkers and I know that the incident did, in all reality, happen.
We have our memories to help us accept the truth of our incredible experience. You have only your powers of reason. The conclusion is yours.
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