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MISSING TIME
took of the picnic. Virginia's mother had seen the film a number of times, so the image of her daughter's blood�bespattered blouse would have burned into her memory. Virginia told me that she, herself, hated the movie because of the stains-again, the unnerv� ing vividness of blood. The physical reality of the film image was something she actively tried to put out of her mind. It was unpleas� antly graphic, and it had, after all, happened to her. For her moth er, however, the film record of the 1960 incident may have suc cessfully counteracted the memory control exerted that time by Virginia's abductors. Obviously, this is speculation, but it does present a plausible explanation of what seem to be arbitrary dif� ferences in the two women's degree of recall. Virginia and I met ten weeks after her first session for her second hypnotic session. Our main goal was to explore her 1960 experience in France, but there were also a number of loose ends left dangling from the 1957 abduction recall. Central was the issue of how she got inside the UFO in the first place. We talked about this problem before hypnosis began, and Virginia said she had a vague sense of having been physically picked up and carried by someone, though the details were unclear. "It was just as though somebody was carrying me over to the couch and setting me down. I don't think I was picked up by a machine . . . or by a vacuum . . . nothing like that. It was like a humanoid type person picking me up and carrying me. I haven't had any vivid memories about it." I brought the conversation around to the subj ect at hand.
BH:
That incident in France at the picnic. Have you thought much about it? Vll: Well, I j ust thought about it, but nothing came back to me, except to remember again the sense of wonder that I had at the time at the beautiful, beautiful deer that I saw. You know, it was as though I had walked out of the woods and claimed that I saw a unicorn. There was that sense of ex� citement and wonder. And when I think about the visual memories that I had, there wasn 't anything unusual about the deer, except that it was looking at me . . . and it was looking at me in a very conscious kind of way, but it could just as easily have been that I was hypnotized and thought I saw a deer to make it easy to have a story to tell. AC: Yes, it could have been suggested.