* Part 5 of a series of columns examining UFO encounters in Kansas and Missouri.

Recap: Mr. H, a construction worker, appears to be hypnotically reliving some events, filling in "missing time" he experienced after seeing unusual lights by the river.

Over the next five months, H returned to the clinic faithfully every week to continue the inquiry. His memories seemed to be buried in layers, and uncovering them was like peeling an onion -- except sometimes the deeper layers peeled off first. A segment would emerge out of order, and seemed to make no sense until the preceding events came out later to explain it. Remarkably, not once was there an unresolved contradiction; his story was totally consistent from start to finish -- no slip-ups.

Sometimes the events were so alarming to H that we had to switch tactics -- remove him from directly experiencing the trauma, and let him witness it as an outside observer, watching things happen to the man who was himself, as though seeing them on TV. This was less threatening. Once he had accepted the scene and the fact he clearly had come through without injury, we could shift him back to first-person experience and continue.

I will have to reconstruct the story in assembled order for brevity's sake.

Terrified by a "whirling disk" that hovered above him, H said the object had a diameter about the length of a semi-trailer, maybe 30 or 40 feet. The underneath was beveled downward from the rim, but there was a circular recess in the center. Abruptly, he was drawn up toward the disk until his back pressed against the bevel; dangling there, he stared at his pickup 30 feet below. He grew panicky again when a rectangular opening appeared beside him. At first the "door" was blank, but then a figure appeared, reaching out a slender arm to draw H inside. He was ushered to sit on a pedestal in the center of a room which was mostly round, except for two walls which partitioned two segments of the arc.

His host (to which we subsequently referred privately as "the critter") was short, 4 feet tall at most. It was humanoid, with very slender elongated arms, legs, hands and fingers. The head was oval, face visible in front of a helmet, which flared out slightly at the back of his neck. It wore a metallic suit. The eyes were huge, oval-shaped and completely black. Suspecting he was seeing wrap-around sunglasses, we questioned him carefully, but he was adamant. These were eyes. Two vertical slits occupied the nub of a nose. With minimal lips, the mouth was slightly rounded, the teeth irregular.

His host did not speak. After a time, it helped H to his feet and escorted him toward one of the walls, in which a door appeared. Intense light shone through the door, and H was briefly blinded. When they moved through the door, the light dimmed, and he could see better.

On his left, in the corner formed by the straight inner wall and the curved outer wall, he saw a triangular recess in the floor. In the middle of the recess were three vertical cylinders, seething and roiling with incandescent light, like "lava." From among these cylinders, a tubular conduit coursed upward, then curved over to link with some apparatus whose muted contours concealed its contents. From this apparatus, many other tubes and conduits arose, spreading out to link with various other objects in the room.

The host gestured some, but did not speak; nor did any words come unbidden into H's mind.

Abruptly, the host turned and left the room, and H followed, to sit again on his pedestal. A shallow recess in the outer wall contained some sort of horizontal "control panel," for want of a better term, and the host sat down there, but didn't appear to do anything.

H could see the panel, and he drew a detailed diagram of it. There were two bulbous levers, one black and one red. On the end of the black one was a white dot; the red one sported a zigzag line. There were oddly-shaped "gauges" on the top of the panel and around the sides. Some were round-cornered rectangles, others circular, others somewhat clover-leaf shaped. Each seemed to display two offsetting scales, lines with progressively-spaced marks. (These seemed familiar to me, and then I realized that his drawings looked very much like the opposed logarithmic scales of a slide-rule.)

After a while, a door appeared again in the outer wall, and the host ushered H to and through it. They seemed to be very high above the ground, and although it had been night, he glimpsed the sun over the horizon. It seemed to have unusually crisp edges, with a slight bluish tinge.

H descended to the ground, and he saw the disc shoot up into the night sky and streak out of sight. He seemed to be in a brushy ravine or gully, and he hurriedly scrambled along it until he found a rocky outcropping, under which he hid. He was afraid they'd come back for him. After about five minutes, he decided maybe they weren't coming back, and he didn't know "where the hell" he was.

Next: We're not in Kansas (or Missouri) any more; a new host conducts an examination.

Jon Hauxwell, MD, is a retired family physician who grew up in Stockton and now lives outside Hays.

hauxwell@ruraltel.net