FAD: You said at one point in the conference that there was a kind of revival meeting fervor. C.D.B. Bryan: John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, is a mesmerizing speaker and I think Mack leant credence to the movement, that somebody - a Harvard professor said it's true - made it possible for all these other people to say, see, we're being taken seriously by somebody. Mack is now under investigation at Harvard. When John Mack stepped forward and said, "I'm the smasher or preconceptions," this is something that is universal. People are released and there is this sort of yes, praise God, religious fervor. FAD: Why were you chosen to be allowed in the MIT conference? C.D.B. Bryan: I wasn't chosen. I heard about it and I applied for it. I said, geez, this could be a terrific New Yorker piece, "MIT and Little Green Men." It would have been a terrific New Yorker piece were it not for the fact that the abductees themselves were so traumatized by the experiences.

FAD: Which theory appeals to you the most?

C.D.B. Bryan: The interdimensional theory appeals to me the most because it makes the most sense. I like the idea of the aliens sort of swimming in the rivers of time. If beings are from another dimension and can swim in the rivers of time, dive in on their Tuesday morning and come up from the dive and it's 15,000 years ago for us, then it is nothing for them to tinker with DNA and check in on the experiments. It is such a fascinating subject and so seductive, I'm getting out of it. I'm already working on books that have nothing to do with this phenomena because I don't want to jeopardize what reputation I have as a journalist by becoming a UFO freak.

FAD: Talk about your credibility a little bit. Has that been challenged after you've written this sort of book?

C.D.B. Bryan: I don't know. If I were to go on and do another UFO book, I'm lost. It is a risk, but a risk I was willing to take because the story is so compelling. What the hell if it's true?

FAD: I like the line brought up in the conference, "Do you trust the aliens more than the military?" There is this resounding "Yes!" You were an Army intelligence officer. How much do you trust the military?

C.D.B. Bryan: There is no proof that any of this is going on. I have never seen any proof of a crash at Roswell or a cover-up. On the other hand, if I were secretary of the Air Force and I was given the task of defending us from invasion from the sky and I was having metallic objects whizzing in and out of our airspace at speeds we cannot duplicate, performing acrobatics that would tear our crafts apart, and plucking people from their bedrooms and and doing unspeakable experiments on them, and I couldn't do anything about it, would I admit it? I don't know.

FAD: Why hasn't someone come forward?

C.D.B. Bryan: They have allegedly. You go to Albuquerque and you talk to the man whose uncle was out on that farm helping to clean up debris, and the Air Force comes in with the story that it was a weather balloon, and his friends all say, "What about those little green men, Charlie?" and all he says is, "They weren't green."

FAD: Is it the similarities of the stories that haunts you most?

C.D.B. Bryan: That and the method of telling it. The reluctance, the timidity with which they come forward, the fact that they are suffering from trauma, that there are no psychiatric explanations or physical explanations that hold up. They come back with scoop marks, cuts, and puncture wounds. The small children are intriguing. Why are these children recognizing the aliens in the Hopkins Image Recognition Test? It's not a face that's in the cartoons. It's not "E.T."

FAD: How did your family feel about your writing the book?

C.D.B. Bryan: My father was a fervent believer in UFOs, and that had always sort of embarrassed me, I went God, you're my father, I respect you! You're an intelligent man here. A fine writer and a fine editor, and you believe in UFOs? He had spent most of the time from the end of World War II until the Seventies in the C.I.A. For my father to say that he believed in UFOs was, to me, just crazy, it was like believing in the healing power of crystals, or because you're a Gemini you are a certain kind of person. He died while I was writing the book, but I'd sent a lot of it to him, and he was very pleased by the book, and felt in a funny way justified. Because there are mysteries, anomalies, it is the accretion of little details. Something as silly as the woman saying that the "Tall Being" wanted to try on her high heel shoes. Why would she make that up?