"Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and country simple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare see ... things. People see these things. Nothing's there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the score... .In your case, it's so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when "

"But it wasn't like that." "Of course not. It wasn't like that at all; it was 'in a setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and then there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren't even crazy. You know that, don't you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair.

"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted bya bar hade."

"A what?" "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears." He burped. -

"It assaulted her? How?" "You don't want to know; you're obviously impressionable.