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of white light underneath. After a time (the witness is unable to recall how long), the disk began
flipping from a horizontal to a vertical position, until it was seen as a circle standing on edge. The
shaft of light, which had been drawn by the rotation into a sweeping movement toward the house,
came to illuminate the entire front and shone straight into the doctor's face. At that instant a bang
was heard and the disk went away, leaving behind a whitish glow which was slowly blown away by
the wind.
After these events, the witness wrote a detailed account of his sighting, with sketches. He awoke his
wife and told her what had happened. At that point it was she who observed, with considerable
amazement, that the swelling and pain in his leg had completely disappeared. In the days that
followed, he became aware that all the after-effects of a wound he had recieved during the Algerian
war had also dissipated.
French science writer Aime Michel, a researcher with the French radio and television organization,
visited the witness on November 8, six days after the sighting, and found him tired; he had lost
weight since the observation and was very distressed by what had happened to him. That same day
he experienced cramps and pains in the abdomen, and a red pigmentation appeared around the
navel, forming a triangle. By November 17 this seemingly preposterous phenomenon was well
developed. Examinations by a dermatologist led to negative results, but the specialist was so
intrigued by this triangular pigmentation without a cause that he decided to document it as a report
to the French Academy of Medicine. The witness who had not told the specialist that everything
had started with his observation of a UFO requested that on the contrary he given the
phenomenon no publicity. During the night of November 13-14, the doctor had had a dream in
which a triangular pattern was seen connected with a flying disk. The same triangle appeared on the
baby's stomach a day or so after the witness's examination. The psychosomatic explanation first
proposed by Aime Michel had to be discarded.
When the investigator (who kept the witness under close observation) published the results of his
two-year follow-up of the case, he noted that there had been no recurrence of either the war
sequelae or the wound on the leg. The peculiar triangle, however, continued to come and go on both
the father and the son, and would stay visible for two or three days at a time, even when the child
was away and staying with his grandmother, who knew nothing of the sighting and was very much
alarmed when she saw the triangular pigmentation. The recurrence of the triangle was observed
every year and was again recorded on film in 1986.
Like the grandmother, friends of the family still know nothing, but they have noted a change in the
mental attitudes of the doctor and his wife: they seem to have acquired an almost mystical
acceptance of the events of life and death, which is puzzling to those who had known them
previously. Finally, there is the matter of the paranormal phenomena that now take place around
them. Coincidences of a telepathic nature are frequently reported, and the doctor has allegedly, on at
least one occasion, experienced levitation without being able to control it. Clocks and electrical
circuits have been affected, apparently without cause.
Such phenomena are not unprecedented. Cases of uncontrolled levitation or gravity effects have
been reported in connection with UFOs. In one case, which took place in 1954 in the French
countryside, a man who was coming back from the fields with his horse had to let go of the bridle
as the animal was lifted several feet into the air a dark, circular object was flying fast over the trail
they were following.
Neither is the change in life patterns an uncommon fact among witnesses of close encounters with
such objects. An awareness of the paranormal has been inspired by such sightings in men like Edgar
Cayce. As a child, Cayce met a woman who appeared out of a sphere of radiant light and told him
that he would be able to heal the sick when he grew up. In the words of Thomas Sugrue:
As soon as the weather was good he went back to his retreat in the woods. There, one
afternoon in May... he became aware of the presence of someone else. He looked up. A
woman was standing before him.... "Your prayers have been heard," she said, "tell me what
you would like most of all, so that I may give it to you." "Most of all I would like to be
helpful to others, and especially to children when they are sick." Suddenly she was no longer
there. He looked at the place where she had stood, trying to see her in the beams of light, but
she was gone.
Edgar Cayce's sighting is reminiscent of several cases that fall into the category of religious
experiences, although the initial observation is often linked to an unusual flying object, as in the
"miracles" of Lourdes and Fatima, which we will analyze in Chapter Seven, and in the visions that
led to the founding of the Mormon Church. Such miracles often give to the precipients healing or
prophetic powers.
Metalogic
What do we know of the nature of the communication that is reported to occur between human
witnesses and the occupants of the UFOs? I have earlier commented that, on the surface, such
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