SPf�CULATioNs BoTH GRIM AND HoPEFUL
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ing. It had. like, a black background with the stars and planets in reddish tones. There were white tones and green colors, too." The disembodied voice was so like Virginia's ''patient ex plainer," who spoke to her telepathically, that I asked Mary about the actual sound of the voice in her dream, and she gave the answer I expected: "I don't remember hearing it as an actual sound." I inquired about its effect. "Explanatory. Like a teacher, or a lecturer. The voice seemed like it was explaining things to me. Sometimes I didn't like what it was explaining, but it didn't seem malign. The voice was not at all threatening." In the specific details of the star map and the particular way she perceived the neutral, explaining, but soundless voice, Mary's dream parallels both Betty Hill's and Virginia Horton 's experi ences. Dr. Clamar has hypothesized that the mind generally re leases only those traumatic memories it can safely handle, and at a pace which also is manageable. It seems to me that fissures are appearing in the wall of Mary's amnesia, and that soon she-and we-will know more about how she received her scar, and what else occurred on that summer day in 1950. I suspect that Mary's beautiful hummingbird eventually will undergo the same trans formation as Virginia's soulful deer. If. as I have suggested, abductees have their memories blocked through a process not unlike our own method of post hypnotic suggestion,18 and their memories demonstrably can be "unblocked" by hypnosis, why do the UFO occupants bother to do it in the first place? And especially why if they know the authori ties have strong-perhaps absolute, physical-evidence that ex traterrestrials are operating in our atmosphere? Two related answers to these questions should be considered. First of a ll, there is the possibility that the abduction experience is blocked from conscious memory for the good of the abductee. Vir ginia Horton said that she felt the amnesia "was for our protection j ust in general. I probably would have told my friends in school and they probably would have given me a hard time." A rather immense understatement! One has only to read the account of Hickson 's and Parker's turmoil after their Pascagoula abduction to realize the advantages offered by not knowing. immediately after wards, what has j ust transpired. In fact, in the years after their abduction, these two men have had unusually difficult experi-