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MISSING TIME
lived only a half mile from the site of the McMahan-Federico encounter. (For better or for worse, coincidences abound within the UFO phenomenon.) One of my students at the Rockland Art Center told me about a friend of hers who had had, with her daughter, a strange UFO experience. The incident probably happened in August of 1965. The mother, whom I shall call Mrs. Bennett, was an astronomy buff, and liked to sleep outside occasionally with one of her chil dren to observe the summer sky. She and her daughter, whom I shall call Renata, were lying on cots side by side, locating various stars and constellations, when a light appeared traveling from the northeast. It was larger than a star, and it approached swiftly. When it was directly overhead, but apparently quite high, it stopped. A very bright beam of light shone down and illuminated the woman and roughly one-quarter acre of the surrounding ter rain. Mrs. Bennett, reconstructing the experience later for Harry Lynn's camera crew, said, "When this light came down and shone on us, I can only tell you the feeling that you get is that you really are . . . dead. " When I first interviewed the Bennetts, i t was thirteen years after the event. Renata is married and lives in New Jersey, so I spoke with each woman away from the presence of the other. Each made the same interesting point quite strongly. Immediately after their encounter they rushed into the house to tell the rest of the family what they had seen . Separately, they made drawings of the UFO. But at that moment they realized a peculiar fact: there were differences in what each had experienced only seconds be fore. Renata surprised her mother by claiming she n ever saw the huge beam of light, and her mother did not recall her daughter's sighting of two small obj ects which seemed to come out of the larger obj ect and then fly off in a different direction . When the women first entered the house, they found Mr. Bennett and anoth er child still awake, so we can assume the encounter did not end late at night. Neither woman, however, can recall what time they went outside at the beginning of the evening, so we cannot deter mine if their experience may not have lasted longer than they con sciously remember. The circumstances of this case, as I reviewed them for Harry Lynn, are quite interesting. The fact that mother and daughter recalled two dramatically different aspects of their encounter only moments after its end suggests two possibilities: first, that one or