About this time I heard a loud voice I presumed came from my CB, saying in an Arkansas twang, "Watch out for the smoke!" (or "Smokey," i.e., state trooper; I'm not sure which word was used). The voice seemed to come from behind my left ear. (Later, reflecting that my CB speaker was mounted below my dash in front of me slightly to the right, I realized it wasn't the CB talking.)
At first I figured that some trucker ahead of me was warning anyone about a State Trooper he had spotted. So I got on the CB and asked "Where is the Smokey?" I was surprised when I got no answer. This is the only time in my experience that a CB-er failed to provide location information to follow up on his State Trooper warning. The strangeness had only begun.
Almost at once I saw what looked like a huge luminous cloud of smoke stretched across the highway from the leftmost part of the rise to the rightmost part and up to the sky, a solid curtain across the highway. I presumed that it was my bad luck to be running across a forest fire. So I went back on the CB to ask anyone out there, "Where's the fire? Does anyone know about the fire on 180?" Again, it was spooky. No answer from Arkansas Twang or anyone else. I started to broadcast again, then gave up lamely, since I was just about upon the presumed smokecloud. I cursed my luck, and in a second calculated what a long detour I would have to drive if this fire blocked the highway, versus the risk of plowing through the smoke blind, hoping it was just a hundred feet thick or so and I could break through to the other side and complete my journey. I drove into the smoke, taking my foot off the gas to slow down in case I didn't pop through the other side quickly. I didn't. Not for an hour.
The smoke seemed to be coming off the hillside to the left of me. I couldn't see the road, the center line or anything. So I came to a stop. (Later, in hypnotic recall, I noted that there were no trees or brush burning, no blackened or charred chapparal, and that the "smoke" had no odor! Nor was this fog, not in the Springtime bone-dry Sonoran desert with the air temperature nowhere near any "dewpoint.") I sat defeated in my car, stopped in the right lane of U.S. 180 in the middle of nowhere. The grayish-white vapor did not dissipate. So I got out, walked across the road to the left shoulder, towards where the ground rose slightly up, disoriented in the vapor. I got the impression of low scrub pinon pines spaced apart in the vapor. I stepped across a little ditch at the edge of the road and walked towards these "pinon pines," then stopped, unable to see. (I presumed there were pinon pines there, but a friend who later re-drove that road in daylight told me there were none on that stretch.)
Then I went into a state of paralysis. I could not move my body. I sensed the approach of two persons, who got on either side of me. Each placed a firm grip on my forearms. I cannot recall viewing them. The funny thing about their hands was that theirs was a three-finger grip. Their fingers were long and didn't feel like human fingers. They did not have articulated bones, but felt like a continuous cartilage inside with a padded fleshy exterior. The grip consisted of two fingers on top of my forearm and one finger underneath. The fingers were not much wider than human ones but quite long. And their grip was like a vise. It was clear I was going with them. I had no better idea, anyway.
I was led forward and to the left, in the general direction of what I had presumed was the "snowpatch" gleaming in the moon- light. Soon we arrived at a landed metallic vehicle. I stopped about five feet in front of midpoint of its long side. It was shaped like a flattened arch, with rounded ends. The bottom seemed more flat, but that may be because it was partially sunk into the sand. It was a metallic color, about the color of Airstream trailers, only not so bright. The length I would estimate at 35-50 feet and the height at midpoint at 10-12 feet. A resource person I consult with remote viewing capability determined that the craft had been in distress and had made a hard landing, and that one of the three crewmen was hurt.
A rectangular opening appeared in the side of the craft. Next thing, I remember sitting back in a chair in a room inside the craft, feeling spacey and numb, and gradually realizing that I was alone; they had left. The lighting in there was subdued. The air inside was of sort of a neutral temperature, not sharply cold like the desert night air. It smelled stale, like the recycled air you encounter in an airliner during a trans-continental flight.
After awhile they came back. The one who had the stronger grip when we encountered, the one on my right, felt like a male. As he came back in, I had a quick glimpse of his face. He had a roundish oval face with two large horizontally ovoid black eyes that did not slant or wrap around the side. No irises or pupils, just black all the way across the eye. I did not notice a nose, and got more of an impression than a view of a mouth. I did not clearly see, but got the impression of, a thin torso and limbs. Height I would estimate at five feet. He seemed placid, matter-of-fact. He was definitely not human, but unmistakably intelligent life. The other extraterrestrial had had a gentler, yet firm, grip on my left forearm when we first had our encounter. The feeling was of a lighter, gentler persona, possibly a female.
I was escorted into another room, which was also dimly lit, and placed in a reclining position, something like the posture in a dentist's or astronaut's chair. I felt a buzzing, stimulating, resonating sensation in the triangular area defined by the tops of my eyebrows and the bridge of my nose, and focussed about a quarter-inch inward from skin surface. (This is a sensation I would become quite familiar with in the days and months ahead. It has heralded and accompanied subsequent ET contact, and anomalous occurrences that are presumably their handiwork.) I experienced a sense of pressure in my nose, as if a small object was being introduced into my nasal passages or even a little higher. (Afterwards for four or five days I had a sense of excessive pressure there, along with a feeling of buzzy resonance and pressure in my head that was almost like a headache, but not quite.)
Next I had a sensation of the release of restraints around my ankles; not physical restraints, but more of an immaterial, force-field kind. I understood that the ET's were done, and I was free to go. I got up. The next segment I remember is being outside the craft in the night floating horizontally towards my vehicle. After that, I became aware of being behind the wheel, driving below the speed limit, the "vapor" dissipating, and I'm breaking out of the "smokecloud". I'm resuming my drive up U.S. 180 towards the Gila National Forest campground, where I then camped for the rest of the night. . The next morning, when I woke up, I had no memory of my Close Encounter. But I did notice four odd things. I had a strange fullness and pressure feeling in my upper nasal passage area and a dull almost-headache: these are symptoms I had never had before. I wrote it off to fatigue. As I put on my socks I also noted that there were two tiny scoop marks side-by-side on top of my right great toe, each like a shallow crater that you could rest a BB in. I was startled, because I am no stranger to the body-marks literature of extraterrestrial encounters, which includes scoop marks from ETs'sampling of tissue. But denial set in, and I said to myself, "Nah, that can't be that!" Then I reflected that I had arrived at the campground at least an hour after my estimated time. And on the open roads of New Mexico, where a minute can equal a mile, I had become quite precise at calculating traveling time.
Lastly, I noticed, with curiosity, that overnight my attitude towards extraterrestrials had changed. Gone was the gripping fear that I had carried since reading Jacobs's lurid book. Instead I noticed that a gentle live-and-let-live attitude had settled in. And I began feeling sorry for the extraterrestrials, as I considered the monumental Star Wars weapons crash program aimed at them that I had just seen this trip. I also reflected on my own research. Cases I had interviewed found the extraterrestrials to be, after the human got over her/his initial fright, usually caring, gentle while firm, and concerned for such values as ecology, social justice, childhood education, consciousness advancement, and a spiritual/metaphysical focus.